Abstract
The Colonial Service is not only the longest-lived of Britain’s three pre-eminent overseas civil services under examination here, it is also by far the largest. On the other hand, while there is no room for argument over the exact dates of the life of the ICS, 1858–1947 (allowing for historians of bureaucracy to trace the pre-Crown continuities in administrative structure and system from the East India Company’s Civil Service), and a largely academic question mark of no more than a matter of months hangs over the exact calendar of the Sudan Political Service, 1899–1955, both the beginning and the end of the Colonial Service are shrouded in indeterminacy.
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Notes
Quoted, with further sources, in Sir Austin Bertram, The Colonial Service, 1930, 16–17.
Lord Hailey, An African Survey, 1938, table III, 226
C. Jeffries, Whitehall and the Colonial Service, 1972, table 1, 48.
A full-length history of the Colonial Service, the first to be published for sixty years, has been undertaken by A.H.M. Kirk-Greene in his On Crown Service (1999), commissioned to mark the ending of HMOCS at a special commemoration in Westminster Abbey in May 1999.
The opinion is that of Sir Charles Jeffries, The Colonial Empire and its Civil Service, 1938, 11.
See also Sir Ralph Furse, Aucuparius: Recollections of a Recruiting Officer, 1962, 17ff. Some of the Patronage desk diaries have been deposited in Rhodes House Library.
The System of Appointment to the Colonial Office and the Colonial Service (Warren Fisher). Cmd. 3554, 1930.
On Colonial Service recruitment, see Robert Heussler, Yesterday’s Rulers: the Making of the British Colonial Service, 1963.
R. E. Wraith, Guggisberg, 1967, 18 note.
William Golant, Image of Empire: the Early History of the Imperial Institute, 1887–1925, 1984, 14–15.
A. H. M. Kirk-Greene, ‘The Committee for Colonial Studies: the Minute Books of the First Quinquennium, 1943–48’, Oxford, XL, 1, 1988.
A. H. M. Kirk-Greene, Diplomatic Initiative: The Oxford Foreign Service Programme, 1969–94, 1994, 5.
See the strong criticism in Sir Charles Johnston (Governor of Aden), The View from Steamer Point, 1964, 13.
Kenneth Bradley, Once a District Officer, 1966, 4 and ch. 1.
See also the personal data gathered from files in Accra by Henrika Kuklick for her sociological study The Imperial Bureaucrat, 1979.
C. P. Snow, The Masters, 1951, 28.
A. H. M. Kirk-Greene, ‘A Tale of Two Universities’, Oxford, XLVI, 2, 1994, 73.
Cf. A. H. M. Kirk-Greene, Introduction to Charles Allen, Tales from the Dark Continent, 1976, xiv–xv.
Cf. W. R. Crocker, Nigeria: a Critique of British Colonial Administration, 1936, 200.
C. Jeffries, Partners for Progress: the Men and Women of the Colonial Service, 1949, 17.
P. Stigger, ‘The District Commissioner as the Man in the Middle: East Africa’, in A. H. M. Kirk-Greene, ed., The Transfer of Power: the Colonial Administration in the Age of Decolonization, 1978, 155–6.
Colonial Office, Her Majesty’s Oversea Civil Service: the Administrative Branch, 1954, 3.
Letter home, 19 Oct. 1914, quoted in Alan Bishop, Gentleman Rider, 1988, 115.
Sir Frederick Lugard, Political Memoranda, 1919, Memo I, ‘Duties of Political Officers’, para. 4.
Secretary Northern Provinces [Nigeria] circular, 1 July 1928, reproduced in A. H. M. Kirk-Greene, Principles of Native Administration in Nigeria, 1965, 191.
Cf. M. W. Daly, Empire on the Nile: The Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, 1898–1934, 1986, 360 ff.
Sir Arthur Grimble, A Pattern of Islands, 1952, 40–1.
June Knox-Mawer’s equally evocative A Gift of Islands, 1965, and Tales from Paradise, 1986, came too late to exercise an influence on CAS recruitment.
A. H. M. Kirk-Greene, ‘The British Colonial Service and the Dominions Selection Scheme of 1923’, Canadian Journal of African Studies, 15, 1, 1981, 33–54; ‘District Officers from Down Under: Australian Recruitment into the British Colonial Service’, paper presented to the African Studies of Australia Bicentenary Conference, Melbourne, 1988 (unpublished).
Elizabeth Watkins, Oscar from Africa: the Biography of O. F. Watkins, 1995, 135, 144.
Pat Holden, Women Administrative Officers in Colonial Africa, ODRP Report 5, Rhodes House Library, Oxford, 1985.
See also A. R. Thomas, ‘The Development of the Overseas Civil Service’, Public Administration, 35, 1958.
Sir Andrew Caldecott, ‘Staffing the Colonies: Self-Government and After — a Central Pool’, letter to The Times, 27 June 1947, quoted in John O’Regan, From Empire to Commonwealth, 1994, 184–6.
There are extensive discussions of the proposals for a British Commonwealth Service and its variants in Jeffries, Whitehall and the Colonial Service, chs 5–8, and in Joe Garner, The Commonwealth Office, 1925–1968, 1978, part IV, ch. 5. See also PRO, CO 537 7768, 1952, File 21203/6, on proposals for a British Overseas Service.
For a later interpretation, see M. Crowder, West Africa under Colonial Rule, 1968, pt. III.
See also his ‘Indirect Rule — French and British style’, Africa XXXIV, 2, 1964, 197–205, in response to H. Deschamps, ‘Et maintenant, Lord Lugard?’, ibid, XXXIII, 4, 1963, 293–305.
W. B. Cohen, ‘The Lure of Empire: Why Frenchmen entered the Colonial Service’, Journal of Contemporary History, 3, 1968, 104.
W. B. Cohen, Rulers of Empire: the French Colonial Service in Africa, 1971, ch. 1.
See also his ‘The French Colonial Service in West Africa’, in P. Gifford and W. R. Louis, eds, France and Britain in Africa: Imperial Rivalry and Colonial Rule, 1971, ch. 14. An important contribution is the unpublished Grenoble (IEP) thesis by Veronique Dimier, 1999, on a comparative study of the training of French and British colonial administrators.
J. Suret-Canale, French Colonialism in Tropical Africa, 1900–1945, 1971, 311
R. Delavignette, Freedom and Authority in French West Africa, 1950, 71.
W. B. Cohen, Robert Delavignette on the French Empire, 1977, 21.
P. Alexandre, in M. Crowder and O. Ikime, eds, West African Chiefs: Their Changing Status under Colonial Rule and Independence, 1970, 5.
See also Béatrice Grand, Le 2 avenue de l’Observatoire: de VEcole cambodgienne à l’Institut international d’administration publique, Paris 1996.
P. Gentil, Ecole Nationale de la France d’Outre-Mer, 1986, 4.
However, Amadou Hampaté Bâ’s semi-biographical L’Etrange destin de Vangrin, 1976, suggests that aristocratic families were still sending their sons into the colonial service in the early years of this century.
See Cohen, Rulers, Tables 7 and 10. According to H. B. Goodall in his new biography of Sir Gordon Guggisberg, the Gold Coast government at one time considered making its appointment to District Commissioner dependent on gaining a recognized legal qualification — Beloved Imperialist, 1998, 158 note.
G. Gorer, Africa Dances, 1949, 87ff.
B. Weinstein, Eboué, 1972.
Ministère des Colonies, Conférence africaine-française-Brazzaville, 1945, 37.
A. H. M. Kirk-Greene, ‘From Brazzaville to Boston’, West Africa, 31 October 1994, 1866.
W. S. Miles, ‘Partitioned Royalty: the Evolution of Hausa Chiefs in Nigeria and Niger’, Journal of Modern African Studies, 25, 2, 1987
A. H. M. Kirk-Greene, ‘Le Roi est mort! Vive le Roi!: the Comparative Legacy of Chiefs after the Transfer of Power in British and French West Africa’, in A. Kirk-Greene and D. Bach, State and Society in Francophone Africa since Independence, 1995, ch.2.
Sir Frederick Lugard, Political Memoranda, 1919, Memo. IX, para. 3.
R. Delavignette, ‘Lord Lugard et la politique africaine’, Africa, XXI, 3, 1951.
A. H. M. Kirk-Greene, ‘Imperial Administration and the Athletic Imperative: the Case of the District Officer in Africa’, in W. J. Baker and J. D. Mangan, eds, Sport in Africa: Essays in Social History, 1987, 107.
Barot, Guide pratique de l’Européen dans l’AOF, quoted at length in J. D. Hargreaves, ‘Colonization through the Bed’, in France and West Africa, 1969, 206–9
R. Hyam, ‘Concubinage and the Colonial Service: the Crewe Circular (1909)’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, XIV, 3, 1986, 182–4.
See also Owen White, Children of Colonialism: Miscegenation and Colonial Society in French West Africa, 1895–1960 (1999).
Anton Gill, Ruling Passions, 1995
R. Hyam, Empire and Sexuality: the British Experience, 1991
F. M. Deng and M. W. Daly, Bonds of Silk: the Human Factor in the British Administration of the Sudan, 1989.
Cf. Anthony Clayton, The Wars of French Decolonization, 1994.
Cf. T. Hayter, French Aid, 1966, 160ff.
For an analysis of what African experience the FCO deployed in its staff, see A. H. M. Kirk-Greene, ‘Accredited to Africa: British Diplomatic Representation and African Experience’, Diplomacy and Statecraft, Summer 1999.
C. Allen, Plain Tales from the Raj, 1975, 18–19.
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Kirk-Greene, A. (2000). The Colonial Administrative Service, 1895–1966. In: Britain’s Imperial Administrators, 1858–1966. St. Antony’s series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230286320_6
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