by R.E.N. Smith
|
As a humble Probationer Cadet I attended the First Devonshire Course at Oxford
and London in 1948-49. This, the last of the long courses, was intended to prepare
me and other hopefuls in all the essentials of a District Officer's life and works, and
on the whole it succeeded quite well. It was perhaps rather biased towards West
Africa in general and Nigeria in particular (one lonely unfortunate rose to his feet
and cheered on the only occasion the Gilbert and Ellice Islands were mentioned), but
the content was on the whole sufficiently catholic to suit most tastes. Many grey-haired
veterans will remember with affection the lively and hilarious lectures in
criminal law from that ace of dais performers. Professor Davidge, and Mr
Longland's detailed and solid lectures on simple engineering, illustrated by almost
incomprehensible sketches drawn on newsprint. Looking at the lecture list I see that
we studied Colonial Government, Religion and Administration, the Law of Evidence
and Tort, Land Utilization, Problems of the British Empire, Land Tenure and Native
Law, Imperial Economic History, Geography, Social Anthropology, Forestry, and
the other two already mentioned, Criminal Law and Field Engineering. After Oxford
we went on (with the Cambridge course members) to a joint five-month course at
SOAS and LSE (where we were known derisively and unlovingly as the "White
Masters") and here we studied not only the language of the territory for which we
were destined, but also its geography, history, agriculture and economics. The eighteen
month course covered a formidable breadth of study but the one thing missing was
training in the most practical and vital basic subject that would bedevil us all from
the moment of our arrival in any district in any colony.
I am referring to simple book-keeping; from my earliest days as a very junior
ADC at Port Herald in Nyasaland to my more mature years as Senior District
Commissioner in the Gilbert and Ellice Islands, I had ample opportunity to bemoan
my lack of basic book-keeping skills. In 1950 there I was, green but keen, foot-slogging
from one Native Authority Headquarters to the next, followed by an impressive train
of porters carrying my tent and baggage in the most romantic Sanders of the River
style, but coming face to face with reality on arrival at the chief's court, where I
found myself struggling to check the Court Clerk's accounts for both the court and
the Native Authority itself. Twenty years and more later, there I still was, sailing the
wide Pacific in the best Grimble manner, from one Island Council office to the next,
endeavouring to make sense of their receipts and expenditure and trying to produce
annual budgets. In the interim I had perforce learned a great deal, but it would have
helped if I had been trained in book-keeping to begin with.
I suppose that basic accounting is really very simple, but as the years have gone
by, colonial accounting seems to have become more abstruse and complicated. I
came across an ancient and long superceded system in Nyasaland that I still feel has
much to commend it in unsophisticated societies. On the upper back verandah of
the four roomed Boma in Port Herald, an appallingly hot building stinking of old
and new bat droppings and plagued with the largest mosquitoes in Africa, was a
stack of abandoned ancient court records. As the DC (himself new to the job) tried
to keep all the reins in his own hands and gave me far too little to do (a kindness bad
for both my education and my reputation), I found myself studying not only the
obligatory volumes of the Colony's Laws but also the old records.
These were fascinating in the insight they gave to the administration of the district
in the days when district officers were often locally recruited; not that these officers were necessarily inferior to their successors, but they were often men of strong character,
with a chequered history and highly individualistic habits. From the court books it
seemed that the bane of their workaday lives was the ineradicable habit of the local
African of picking up his spear and going walkabout - usually down to South Africa
or Rhodesia for work. There was no official disapproval of this practice (except
insofar as it deprived the country of the man's "hut" tax), but the travellers were
supposed to obtain a pass to leave the country. Never greatly impressed by the magic
of Western legal thinking, the requirement was generally ignored by Africans, and
the DCs of old appear to have spent much time in court fining the offenders ten
shillings or a pound for their delinquency.
Now this is where the accounting was solved by a stroke of genius. In my time
there would have to have been a clerk or three, receipt books in triplicate or quadruplicate,
and pages of accounts, the money then paid into the treasury and yet more accounting
carried out and columns of figures balanced and reconciled with the receipts, with
many possibilities (too often seized upon) for chicanery. In the bad old days the DC
as District Magistrate heard the case in his court room (another name for his office),
entered it in his court case book in longhand, and then sent the offender down to the
Post Office, which, together with an enormous and steadily growing termite mound,
occupied one of the Boma's other three rooms. There he would buy a stamp for the
amount of his fine, take it back to the DC, who would then ceremonially stick it
alongside the court record, obliterate it with his office "District Magistrate" stamp
and that was that. The only actual accounting was done by the Post Office clerk,
who had to balance his own accounts however many or how few stamps he sold,
and, even if so inclined, he could not pass off a ten-bob stamp as a pound one, as it
had to go back to the court record. The process was simplicity itself, and I still cannot
see any flaw in it. The court record said "Fined 1 Pound", there was the 1 pound stamp, duly
cancelled, alongside it - and no mass of receipt books to be checked - the court
record said it all. The only document the auditor needed was the court record, and he
merely checked that each "fine" entry had the appropriate cancelled stamp alongside
it, as an army of green ink ticks testified. Perhaps the system was too simple and too
foolproof, for any self-respecting and ambitious assistant financial secretary could
easily dream up a more complicated one, and be on his way to great heights in the
colonial hierarchy. Innovation, however unnecessary, can be sold to one's superiors
if you wear the right air of modest omniscience, infer that the inspiration came from
them in the first place, and promotion is yours!
|
A Course of Fun
by B. D. Wilson (Hong Kong 1948-83)
|
The article "Checking the Books" by R. E. N. Smith,
wherein he bemoaned the failure of the First Devonshire Course in 1948-9 to
include book-keeping, put me in mind of my time on the previous Devonshire
Course in 1948. We were a relaxed group of over 100 lads, mostly wartime ex-
Service, impatient to be done with lectures and to get on with the job in our
respective territories. At Oxford one of our number, a humourless young man who tried to press his Communist views on lecturers, ceased to appear one day and was
presumed to have been quietly sacked. An amiable African on the course said he
found the content unappealing and dropped out.
The vast majority of us were destined for African territories and this was
reflected in the content of the lectures. One man named Coffin was going to a
Pacific territory, giving rise to a string of jokes about cannibals, big cooking pots,
and deadly diseases. Donald Luddington (later Sir Donald and Governor of the
Solomon Islands) and I were due to go to Hong Kong. For me, this choice of
destination was somewhat round-about. Having been born in Penang, I had opted
for the Malayan Civil Service, but was instead offered Uganda. Finding that Uganda
was well inland and far from the coast, I asked the Colonial Office to reconsider.
They offered Hong Kong. I looked it up on the map, thought it sounded all right,
and said "yes".
At the London School of Economics, Donald and I grew increasingly bored with
the continual stream of lectures on Africa. Its colonial history, anthropology,
economics, and geography were of little interest to us. We complained, and were
told that special arrangements would be made for us to learn about the
administration of a comparable waterfront community. This consisted of attending a
meeting of the Stepney Borough Council which turned out to be a splendid slanging
match between Councillors, vying with each other in invective and insults. The
politest Councillor present was a West Indian.
The other students at the USE were almost all younger than ourselves, perhaps
less mature and certainly more prone to silly ideas. Notice-boards and corridors
were plastered with posters on the lines of Hands off Malaya, Down with
Colonialism, Freedom for All. The Devonshire men felt themselves a cut above this
nonsense, believing that our job in our posted territory was to educate its people to
their own eventual self-government. Needless to say, we made little contact with the
remainder of the LSE, although out of curiosity I did attend a lecture by Harold
Laski, a well-known leftwinger to the point of communist. To my disappointment,
he stuck strictly to the lecture's stated title.
The frustration of the Devonshire men at being back at school when they wanted
to get on with the real work in their territory led to increasing bolshiness. One lad
who had served in the Coldstream Guards always appeared in a blue suit and a
bowler hat. Another was a racing fan and spent his time at lectures reading
Raceform over the Sticks. Having made his daily selection, he would discreetly slip
out, ostensibly to go to the toilet, in reality to the nearest telephone to place his bets.
A group of crossword devotees, with heads down, would get on with the puzzle as if
making notes, calling perhaps to neighbours "Have you got 5 across?" "No, but I
can help with 10 down if you're stuck". Tired of this lack of attention, one lecturer
actually asked us to get our newspapers turned to the right page before the lecture
started, as the rustling was too distracting for him. When the lecturer on colonial
history described the establishment of African colonial territories as a disgraceful
episode, he was roundly booed, much to his surprise. He kept a more discreet
tongue thereafter. When the time came for an examination at the end of the course,
no one had any worries. We were not competing with each other. We simply passed
notes round and whispered answers to those who had paid even less attention than
ourselves. One young man felt the need to be fortified during the long hours of the
examinations, so he armed himself with numerous bottles of ink (only fountain pens
in those days; no ballpoints). But they contained sherry which he was kind enough
to share with neighbours.
The one really useful piece of information came from a visiting Colonial official
who said that, if you find yourself in some distant posting and you tear off a strip of
black velvet, for God's sake send her elsewhere when your DC comes to visit.
Otherwise you may be in real trouble.
All this sounds as if we were the most useless bunch of larrikins about to be let
loose on an unsuspecting colonial public. In reality, it was nothing of the sort. These
were serious young men, but tired of academic study and anxious to get on with the
practical side of their chosen profession. The real learning probably came overseas
on the job. It's a sad reflection that few of us actually served our full time in
HMOCS. The majority probably became redundant in mid-career as their territory
reached independence, forcing them to seek other employment, often in a quite
different field.
Were we better administrators after completing the Devonshire Course? I doubt
it, but ever since I've always enjoyed crossword puzzles.
|
|
|
|