The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 by William Manchester, Paul Reid

blade-straight.” You were interviewed by the colonial secretary’s assistant private secretary, who never saw a British colony in his life. The atmosphere in his homey office was convivial, clublike, manly. One talked of mutual acquaintances, friends, headmasters, tutors, and engaged in similar rituals of self-reference. In this crucial stage it was important to have the backing of someone whom the interviewer considered a keen judge of men—someone like Benjamin Jowett, the cherubic master of Balliol College, Oxford. Jowett’s maxims tell us much about his protégés. He said: “Never retract. Never explain. Get it done and let them howl.” And: “We are all dishonest together, and therefore we are all honest.” And, on Darwin’s
Descent of Man:
“I don’t believe a word of it.” He was partial to peers and noble families on the ground that “social eminence is an instrument wherewith, even at the present day, the masses may be moved.” If Jowett or his sort approved, a stripling just out of the university might find himself ruling a territory twice the size of Great Britain, acting as magistrate, veterinarian, physician, resolver of family quarrels, and local expert on crop blight. The similarity of officials’ backgrounds gave the realm a certain cohesiveness. Morris observed: “All over the Empire these administrators, like members of some scattered club, shared the same values, were likely to laugh at the same jokes, very probably shared acquaintances at home…. Place them all at a dinner table, and they would not feel altogether strangers to each other.” 11
    It was collusion, of course, and it could lead to highly unsuitable appointments, particularly when a great family wanted to rid itself of a black sheep. But most of the youths grew into shrewd men; the level of performance was very high. And many of them could scarcely be envied. Often they started out living in leaky mud huts, rarely seeing anything of their countrymen except for an occasional trader or missionary with whom, under other circumstances, they would have had nothing in common. They often had only the vaguest idea of the boundaries defining their territories, or the size of the populations for which they were responsible. In Uganda, six months was added to home leave because an Englishman had to walk eight hundred miles to reach civilization. While on leave he had to choose an English wife in a hurry, because it might be years before he saw another white woman. With grit, that quality much prized among the Victorians, he stuck it out, sometimes leaving a benign stamp on his tract of the wild. In Nyasaland, England’s deepest penetration into Africa, you can still find natives who, because their overlord was Scottish, recite Christian prayers with a Scot’s burr: “The Lor-r-r-d is my shepherd…” 12 It is difficult to condemn men who followed their star when the temptation to slacken was immense, who daily wore their quaint little uniform of white shorts and white stockings into which the traditional pipe was stuffed, but dressed for dinner whenever possible, to keep a sense of order, and carried collapsible little flagpoles wherever they went, so that the fluttering Union Jack would always remind their wards of their distant Queen.
    Uganda and Nyasaland were hardship posts. Elsewhere life was more agreeable. In Kenya, British residents stocked streams with trout, and all the great imperial cities had racecourses and polo fields. John Stuart Mill called the whole Empire “a vast system of outdoor relief for the British upper classes.” 13 That was misleading—by their sheer numbers, non-U voices were more audible than the accents of the U—but it was the highborn British who set the tone, which, by the time young Winston Churchill reached India, had become disturbingly insular. In the beginning white men had adopted local ways, learning that in Kerala, for example, it was polite to cover one’s mouth when talking to an