A dozen or more years ago, in an article on "The Colonial Governor in the
Literature" I lamented the general paucity of biographical studies of colonial
governors and in particular of the more eminent of their breed during the last Colonial
Service generation or two. Rereading now what I wrote then (never a sensible thing to do and always a salutary lesson), it is comforting to see how, through no effort of mine,
a number of hopes have come to fruition. Today we have, as yesterday we did not,
(auto)biographical studies or memoirs of, to name my modern African first XI, Sir
Charles Arden-Clark, Sir Evelyn Baring, Sir Donald Cameron, Sir Geoffrey Colby,
Sir Philip Mitchell, Sir Gerald Reece, Sir Arthur Richards, Sir James Robertson, Sir
Bryan Sharwood-Smith, Sir Shenton Thomas and Sir Edward Twining, Of those no
longer living, only Sir Arthur Benson, Sir Andrew Cohen and Sir Percy Wyn-Morris
still lurk in the pavilion. Others, still living, have yet to take their guard, notably (for
me) Sir Maurice Dorman and Sir Richard Turnbull. Now it is the turn of the twelfth
man to bat. Sir Bernard Bourdillon. If the biographies vary in quality, with some being
markedly better than others, then that is no more than a reflection of those governors
themselves: even at the top there can be good, bad and indifferent among the
incumbents of Government House, as any ex-Private Secretary will fervently confirm.
Bourdillon was one of the few colonial governors, certainly of an African territory,
to have come in from the Indian Civil Service (Evelyn Baring was another, so was Lord
Rugby though not of a Colonial Office territory). He went to Ceylon as Colonial
Secretary in 1929, after ten years' secondment to the new, post-war Iraq Political
Service. His first governorship came when he was almost fifty, that of Uganda. Then
came the Class 1 governorship of Nigeria, in 1935. Bourdillon was actually nominated
as Governor-General of the Sudan in 1940 but at nearly 60 the Cabinet thought him
too old for such a critical 'war-front' post. Instead he had his term of office renewed in
Nigeria, where he remained till 1943. His three sons and one daughter-in-law all
followed him into a colonial career, and his wife, Violet, played a unique role in
colonial life (Pearce's complementary "partnership") - Dr. Pearce not only wrote a
notable article about Lady Bourdillon in African Affairs some years ago but now
dedicates his 400 page biography to her memory.
This is a very worthwhile book, fact-brimming, scholarly and detailed, a little too
long but only occasionally tedious. For a young scholar like Pearce, who was born
after Bourdillon had died and when Nigeria was well on its way to independence,
Bourdillon represents "the human, the acceptable face of modern British colonialism".
After all, he was also a fine sportsman, a recognised ornithologist and a brilliant
bridge-player, while a "Bourdillon" is still, many years on, an identifiable kind of trilby
in Nigeria - "nobody should be seen without one", ran the advertisement in pre-war
Lagos.
A good colonial governor is remembered by much more than good governing.
Pearce has made skilled use of official archives and of the privileged access to
Bourdillon private papers granted him by the family. His publishers have done him
something of a disservice by printing the index (a rather inadequate one, into the
bargain) before the bibliography. On the other hand, they have done him proud in the
quality of paper and typeface and at its modest price they put
many another press to shame. For my part I could have done without the qualifying
sub-title "A Twentieth-Century Colonialist", with its misleading modern undertones,
and those who do not share my enthusiasm for Colonial Service biography and
memoirs will have a point if they could have wished for a shorter book, possibly
leaving just a few t's uncrossed or i's undotted - or even leaving some out altogether!
But I am a specialist and am more delighted than I can say to have Dr. Pearce's
authoritative and valuable biography available. As he says, there was no such
composite creature as the colonial governor; "If we are to grasp them fully, we must
grasp them in their individuality". Thanks to the efforts of Robert Pearce, Bourdillon
can at last begin to receive publicly the credit long overdue to him: "He was", in Sir
Charles Wooley's estimation, "one of the great ones (colonial governors) and one of
the ablest of them all".
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