Our noble selves
PAT BARR
The British in the Far East George Wood- cock (Weidenfeld and Nicolson 70s) The China Helpers Jonathan Spence (Bod- ley Head 45s) When Kipling first travelled to the East that was farther east than India, he noted that, though the inhabitants of the several oriental countries were very different from each other, the British who lived among them were dis- mayingly similar. 'It is just We Our Noble Selves', he wrote, comparing the memsahibs of Singapore with those of Calcutta. Mr Woodcock's theme is the prevalent charac- teristics of the social, cultural and working lives led by those of our countrymen who once stretched their noble selves (accord- ing to the blurb) 'from the Malayan penin- sula to the treaty ports of Japan'.
Faced with this formidable assignment, Mr Woodcock swings his wide-screen lens between 1604 and 1961, between Bencoolen and Bangkok, Peking and Penang, Kobe and Kuala Lumpur and has produced a 'lively, fact-packed, colourful panorama', as they say. He is nimble footed and well informed, focusing now upon the fortunes of Malayan rubber planting, now upon the administra- tion of treaty-port Shanghai, upon the influential careers of Francis Light of Penang, James Brooke of Sarawak, Robert Morrison of Canton, upon shipboard life on the early P and Os, the building of Hong Kong, Raffies's grand plans for Singapore, the hierarchies of the Overseas Clubs . . .
Wisely, Mr Woodcock has elected to clus- ter his material under subject headings— 'Men and the Land', 'The Adventurers', 'The Social World', etc—rather than pursue a chronological plod. It is a method that gives density and vigour to his story, but one that involves enormous problems of selection and organisation. Knowing this, one hesitates to fault find, but I must point out that only very cursory attention is paid to the British in Japan compared to their exploits in other areas and that there are one or two startling omissions—the British in Korea (one of whom, Mr M'Leavy Brown, organised a national Customs Service) are not mentioned, nor is the brilliant, adventurous, influential career of Sir Harry Parkes. In the last, and fortunately shortest, section—entitled, to nobody's surprise, 'Imperial Twilight'—the author's imaginative method dwindles to a colourless resume of British misfortunes dur- ing the Japanese occupation of Asia. Clearly his heart is not in this period, which he muffles with wads of Historians' Standard Verbiage, such as (of the internees in Changi jail), 'For more than three years they waited, a shadow guard for the empire that in the end would return to play its last act across the Far Eastern stage'.
The brightest and best parts of this book survey the foibles and fortunes of particu- lar occupational groups and there are per- ceptive, level-headed chapters on traders, - missionaries, administrators for instance: Of the latter, Woodcock truly comments, 'In all the memoirs of civil servants and judges "ho lived in the Far East one catches the unmis- takable tone of men convinced of the eNsen. tial rightness of their acts', men who felt 'part of an elite group, a dedicated caste'. Missionaries also saw themselves thus of course, and I suspect it is only because the spiritual and moral standards of the West have been called more thoroughly into ques- tion earlier than its secular and political stan- dards that accusations of short-sighted bigotry and priggishness have, to date, been heaped frequently upon missionaries, seldom upon administrators.
However, the public officials of the Far East, secure and often pompously ov er- stuffed with their sense of 'rightness', seldom asked this question. At least, they did not until quite recently, and one of the pleasures of Mr Spence's book, which is a valuable augmentation of Mr Woodcock's, is the man- ner in which he charts the growth of doubt and compromise among his collection of 'China Helpers'. The insolubly ambiguous situation of these westerners, who, from 1620 to the near present, thrust their technical skills, their hopes, frustrations and alien ideologies upon the Chinese is exemplified in the career of Dr Edward Hume of the 'Yale- in-China Mission'. That the very name of this organisation was a preposterous and unworkable hypothesis eventually struck Dr Hume himself for, Spence says, by 1924 he understood that 'the Chinese will no longer submit to the ethics or attitudes of "the invader" no matter what he comes to do'.
In fact, as the Chinese plunged further into their own brand of chaos, the 'helpers' felt increasingly inadequate and unhelpful, and this was so even of the truly dedicated, such as the Canadian Dr Norman Bethune who died in the service of the Communist Chinese Army during the Sino-Japanese wars of the 'thirties. Bethune, Spence concludes, 'went to China to expiate the sins of his generation, to purge himself of the apathy and callous- ness and pursuit of profit which he believed had rotted his civilisation . . . No less than other Western advisers, he used the Chinese for his own ends and was in turn used by them'. This is the central, dishearten- ing theme of Spence's thoughtful book—that, through the centuries of personal contact. the relationship between Chinese and Westerner has been principally one of user and used.
Spence sums up, `. . . the story of these men is more a cautionary tale than an in- spirational tract. There are not just the nega- tive personal attributes that offset the posi- tive ones—such as the arrogance, impatience, intolerance, tactlessness or stupidity that at different times turned the Chinese against the advisers. There are also broader problems that should be explored, problems relevant not only to the advisers who worked in China, but also to those who are still trying to carry out similar work in other parts of the world. What were the basic motives of these men, what did they hope to achieve? What was the personal cost of their type of service? and by what right did they Or It is proper that books like these tvin should raise such questions and suggest some answers ; it is proper also that we, their readers, should be provoked into making similar inquiries of today's advisers, enthu- siasts, technocrats, who, armed with their gospel-firm sense of rightness and bedecked with a few shreds from the former glory of our noble selves, still sally forth to bn change and 'progress' to people of 'lin developed' nations.
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