Ghosts of Empire (39 page)

In addition to the Blue, preferably in a manly sport like rugby or boxing, as opposed to hockey or soccer, a degree in Classics or History from either Oxford or Cambridge was highly valued. In the early days, before 1914, the average man in the service could be said to have a ‘2nd in History from Oxford' and a rugby Blue. In an analysis of the 500 or so men who made up the service between 1902 and 1956, it was found that over 70 per cent were from Oxford and Cambridge.
²⁰
Even in 1952, in the final year of recruitment, every successful candidate was a graduate of Cambridge University. One entrant from the 1907 intake remembered his colleagues fondly: ‘We were athletes . . . [there was] a former Rugby captain of Oxford and Scotland, an ex captain of the Cambridge cricket XI, a member
of the Oxford soccer team, a member of the Oxford cricket XI and a Middlesex county rugby player.'
²¹
Interestingly Winchester College, an English school traditionally known for its intellectual, rather than sporting, prowess, proved to be the school with the most members in the service, a total of thirty, or about 6 per cent of the entire intake. Eton and Rugby were second and third with twenty-one and twenty members of the service respectively.
²²
As one former member revealed, ‘the really important thing about a public school background was that you virtually couldn't get into the SPS without it. I can't think of any of my SPS colleagues who didn't have one.'
²³

Analysis of the backgrounds of members of the Sudan Political Service modifies and deepens notions of class in imperial Britain. A staggering one-third of all the men who joined the SPS were the sons of clergymen. This shows that the imperial elite was certainly not, as has been true of some other imperial cultures, an elite of money or social status; rather it formed a clerisy, noted for its education and cultural values.
²⁴
The clergyman's son would have been educated at an independent, or public, school, but did not expect to inherit much money or even land. This needs to be remembered as a corrective to the simplistic popular idea that the British Empire was run by the upper classes. Empire was largely a preserve of a tiny elite, but that elite was middle class and professional; it was not particularly aristocratic, in the sense of a landed, hereditary caste who enjoyed wealth and power in Britain.

The recruitment of public school sportsmen left very little room for people who did not at least outwardly conform to the behaviour expected of the ruling class. Once selected, however, recruits were given considerable freedom. Again, it was individualism and character that were prized above all else. The greatest attraction of the service was the reputation it acquired for placing new recruits in positions of responsibility ‘with little interference from above'. The job was physically demanding, as the young district commissioner would spend much of his time trekking on foot. Sudan itself covered a vast area, there were poor communications and the young recruit was spared the reams of paperwork with which other civil servants had to grapple.
²⁵
The ‘Information for Candidates', reprinted in January 1933, offers a clear indication of the official mentality of the
period. It stated that only candidates ‘over 21 and under 25 years of age on October 1st of the year in which they stand for selection' would be considered. Voluntary retirement would be allowed at the age of forty-eight, provided the official had completed fifteen years' service. This allowed some to start other careers in teaching or even academia, if they were so inclined. ‘General character' would be given a prominent role in assessing the suitability of candidates.
²⁶

Once chosen, the successful candidate would be on probation for two years, until examinations in Arabic and Law were passed. These exams were not generally very demanding, but they did require some private study. During the probationary period, the government could give the probationer three months' notice before discharging him. In the ‘Information for Candidates', it was specifically stated that district commissioners and assistant district commissioners would sit as ‘Magistrates to deal with criminal and civil cases'. They would be expected to ‘lead an active life' and much of their time would be ‘spent in travelling'. Service in the Sudan came with its own perks and privileges; a very generous annual leave of ninety days a year was granted, and because no leave was granted to first-year probationers, recruits could enjoy 122 days' leave in their second year.
²⁷
Distances across the Sudan were notoriously vast, but when, at the beginning of the twentieth century, a young officer on leave in England complained to Lord Kitchener that it had taken him three weeks to get from Cairo to Khartoum, he got little sympathy from the great man. ‘I don't think you have much to complain about,' said Kitchener. ‘It took me three years!'
²⁸

The first year's study would have to be paid for by the probationer out of his own salary, and would take place at Oxford or Cambridge. A special course of Anthropology was added in 1908. Later, training would take place in the field. Wilfred Thesiger, an Eton-educated Oxford boxing Blue, joined the service in the summer of 1934 and went almost immediately to the Sudan, and though he passed the initial Arabic exam after two years, he ‘always regretted' that he had not become ‘proficient in Classical Arabic'.
²⁹
A repressed homosexual, Thesiger spent time in the south of the Sudan, which was distinctly more African and less Arab than the north.

The tribal, and less urbanized, south of Sudan was, in many ways, a more challenging district in which to serve as assistant district commissioner and it tended to attract more eccentric, solitary types. Generally, the quality of the Sudan Political Service was praised even by people who were not naturally well disposed to the British or their empire. One journalist, the Frenchwoman Odette Keun, a former lover of H. G. Wells, remarked on how absurdly foolish the young university-educated Englishman generally was in the 1920s. ‘Most of us Continentals, at one time or another, have met the young Englishman abroad–on his holidays in Switzerland or on the Riviera; tramping in Italy and Spain.' The impression she formed of this creature was not exactly favourable. The Englishman on holiday in Europe was ‘an exceedingly silly, rowdy and obnoxious young animal. He is carelessly dressed. His manners are loutish or intolerably casual. His recreations are purely sportive or childish . . . He drinks too freely and smokes endless vile pipes . . .'
³⁰

The sort of Englishman who ‘tramped' around Italy and Spain in the 1920s would invariably have been drawn from the class of people who ran the empire, because travel on the continent of Europe before the Second World War was the preserve of a small minority of the population. Odette Keun never hid her contempt for this type of English upper-middle-class young man: ‘after you have listened to his conversation, you go about in a state of hyper-amazement, asking yourself what the English Universities imagine they are doing in the manner of educating English youth'. She added, ‘Whatever it is they have implanted in his brain, he conceals it with utmost success.' But when it came to the officials in the Sudan, the French journalist had nothing but praise. The same Englishman who drank too much on the Riviera or showed himself grossly ignorant of literature or philosophy to his more sophisticated continental counterparts became transformed in the Sudan. There the British official had ‘to be well-groomed and dignified in his person'. He was invariably ‘unselfish professionally', a stoical individualist, who could also be a team player. The ‘youth we know in Europe as a Nuisance and a Stupid had to become one of an order of Samurai'. One feature of the young ‘Samurai' which seems to have impressed Keun was the ‘sexual austerity' of the young members of the SPS. She describes how the ‘English social code . . . vetoes liaisons with
native women pitilessly'.
³¹
This was not strictly true; like many other foreigners, Keun was fooled by outward show and missed much of the hypocrisy which prevailed in this area. In the more remote districts, British officers were known to take mistresses and wives from among the local women.
³²

Odette Keun's reference to the ‘sexual austerity' of British officers reveals the masculine nature of the service. Wives were regarded as an encumbrance at best, or a nuisance at worst. Sir John Maffey remarked on the appointment of a governor of the western province of Darfur in 1927 that he ‘was a bit perturbed at the idea of a newly married man going to Darfur', as it was ‘a land for energetic bachelors'. The lady concerned, however, was ‘of a suitable age and of considerable medical attainments'.
³³
She could be useful. The rules were quite simple: ‘no member of the Political Service may bring a wife out to the Sudan until he has completed five years' service or reached the age of 28, whichever happens first'. As a consequence of this edict, married men were not selected for the SPS, and ‘the Government [would] probably dispense with the services of a probationer who gets married during his period of probation'.
³⁴
The shortage of European women in Khartoum, the capital, which itself was not as inhospitable as some of the more remote areas, was often remarked in the early years of British rule. One early probationer who went to the Sudan in 1907 remembered the dances at the Grand Hotel in Khartoum, to which everyone went in full evening dress, or what would be termed white tie, at which most of the men ‘had to dance together as there were few women in Khartoum in 1907'.
³⁵

For women who did finally accompany their husbands to Sudan, the conditions could be tough. There were the diseases, such as malaria and black-water fever, and their husbands were often not very tolerant of their wives' complaints. One bride, when she remarked on the heat, was told by her husband, ‘If you want to enjoy this country, never, ever mention the heat.'
³⁶
Wives commented on the degree of exclusiveness the service fostered, talking about its elitism and its remarkably close-knit structure. Rules seemed absurdly petty and restrictive; the service seemed, to one young woman, to have a ‘definite preoccupation with seniority'. Another young wife remembered a journey from Port Sudan to Khartoum by train
in 1927, in which she found herself sharing a sleeper with another wife who was unknown to her. The younger woman was told in no uncertain terms, ‘My husband is senior to yours, so you will have the top bunk.'

Darfur province was a particularly feudal jurisdiction in the 1920s and 1930s, where the Governor enjoyed almost despotic power. His palace in El Fasher, the provincial capital, was an ‘imposing white-washed, castellated building, approached up wide steps, at the foot of which on either side were two small cannons'. There the Governor imposed rigid protocol, and guests were told, on arrival, that no one, however senior, could ‘wear a blue shirt until he had been in the Province for two years', as blue shirts were deemed to be more casual than white ones; ‘our reaction', said one of the wives, was ‘unprintable'. The Governor showed similar arrogance towards the US Army Air Force, during the Second World War, when he wired a message to the effect that the Americans could not land at the time they requested because he would be playing polo on the landing strip that afternoon. Indeed, the ability to play polo became so important in Darfur that it often dictated who was to be transferred there.
³⁷
In Khartoum, there were the balls at the Grand Hotel and the garden parties at the Governor's palace, and there were two clubs, the Sudan Club and the Khartoum Club, membership of which was determined by income and status. Higher earners were invited to join the Sudan Club, while the Khartoum Club was reserved for people of lower rank and income. Needless to say, the most junior Political Service official, ‘however poor, always belonged to the top club without question'.
³⁸

During most of the time this regime continued, British rule was hardly ever disputed. Sir Stewart Symes, the Governor General, in a report on the situation in the Sudan in 1935 could remark with some complacency that no one had ‘seriously challenged' British rule since 1898.
³⁹
That is how the scene looked in 1930s, but, behind the façade of tranquil, unquestioned British supremacy, there lurked the menace of religious fanaticism. The British always had the Sudan Defence Force in the background, a highly mobile and well-equipped force for ‘frontier protection and military operations'.
⁴⁰
Through much of its history, the Sudan had been a turbulent place. Arab tribesmen had engaged in the lucrative slave trade, which the British had suppressed in the early twentieth century. There was always the
threat that another holy man, like the Mahdi, could inspire the masses to topple the rule of the English infidels and return the Sudan to the path of pure Islam.

This danger of religious fanaticism and insurgency is often faintly alluded to in the memoirs and even in the official documents relating to British rule in the Sudan. To the journalist G. W. Steevens at the end of the nineteenth century, the Sudan was the ‘home of fanaticism' and had always been called the ‘Land of the Dervishes'.
⁴¹
Sudanese religious enthusiasm had been particularly vexing to Wingate at the beginning of the twentieth century, and he had done all he could to assuage the religious sensitivities of the Muslim population. In 1901, in one of his first actions as governor general, he appointed a council of twelve ulema–doctors of Islamic law –to advise him on religious matters. To appease the Muslims of the north, Christian missionaries had been forbidden in that region, while the government had itself undertaken the building of mosques. ‘The policy of the Sudan Government', boasted the official Foreign Office handbook of 1919, had always been, ‘and remains, that of encouraging Islam in all its legitimate modes of expression'.
⁴²
The British knew, from the experience of confronting the Mahdi, the havoc which could be caused by a charismatic, religiously inspired political leader. The catalogue of Sudanese who tried to imitate the Mahdi's success was long, and many of these aspiring prophets are recorded in the handbook, which told of various abortive insurrections with almost tedious exactitude: ‘In February 1901, Ali Abdul Karim claimed to be the Mahdi; he was arrested and imprisoned'; ‘In the autumn of 1902 Mohammed el-Amin . . . declared himself the Mahdi in Kordofan . . . He was captured at Dar Gimma and executed at El Obeid'; ‘In 1904 Mohammed Adam declared himself the prophet Isa [that is, Jesus] . . . He was killed in a skirmish.'
⁴³