Raffles, a modern hero

Brian Inglis

Centenaries are often milked for far more than they deserve; but surely Thomas Stamford Raffles received less than his deserts when the bi-centenary of his birth came up last month? In any order of precedence among the men who put so much red on the map in the 200 years of imperial growth, he should rate a place very close to the top; not so much for What he did, as for how he did it.

I first became interested in his career While researching into the origins of the Opium wars. At school we were taught to revere Clive and Warren Hastings: the only reference I can recall to Raffles was the injunction not to confuse him with the better-known amateur cracksman. Yet Clive as an empire. builder was a disaster. According to Macaulay, Bengal tinder the Mogul emperors had been known throughout the East as a Garden of Eden; Clive left it despoliated; 'an exhausted country', according to Warren Hastings — who thereupon proceeded to destroy its chances of recovery by compelling the peasants to plough up their Crops to make way for poppies, and to sell the opium only to the East India Company, at prices it dictated. I was impressed to find that Raffles, by contrast, had so far forgotten to kow-tow to the Company — his employers — that he had denounced the effects of the opium traffic in Java, his first major post. There, he set about encouraging indigenous agriculture and industry, arts and crafts, so that when he left the island, it Was in a far more prosperous condition than he had found it.

My interest waned, however, because. I read the wrong biographers: the turgid Demetrius Boulger, from whom praise W. as suspect because he had also lavished It on that monster, Leopold II of the Belgians; the conventional Coupland; and surprisingly, a lack-lustre Maurice Collis. It was only a renewal of interest this summer that sent me back to Emily Hahn's perceptive portrait. Maddening though it often is, with her coy 'Yes, Puzzled reader, let me explain' interjecI_Mns and her tedious interpositions of nerse if between reader and subject it remains the best introduction, before Proceeding to C. E. Wurtzburg's Monumental Raffles of the Eastern Isles. Raffles emerges as something of a para$0n. Self-made, he never bore a social chip on his shoulder; self-educated, he continued that process throughout his life. He took the trouble, as so few of the rimriPany's men did, to learn Malay; and h' ue learned it not just for administrative convenience, but the better to understand the history, the literature, the culture. the whole background. Wherever he went he studied the customs of the people, the flora and the fauna, and the archaeological remains, keeping careful records for the benefit of those interested in the subjects back in England.

Yet he was no dilettante. Taking on the administration of Java in 1811, when he was barely 30, he managed to reStore a stable currency, do away with the slave traffic and forced labour, and establish an administration respected by the Javanese and, more remarkably, the Dutch. Far from becoming an autocrat, he remained unassuming, approachable, revered by those who worked for him. 'In good disposition, amiability and gracefulness,' one of his clerks was to recall, 'Mr Raffles had not his equal, and were I to die and live again, such a man I could never meet again, my love of him is so great.'

Inevitably, however, the reforming Raffles made enemies among those whose pride or whose purse were endangered; among them the army commander in Java, the unbalanced General Gillespie, who resented being under a civilian whipper-snapper. As the East India Company, concerned for its dividends, had no time for any servant who did not put them top of his priorities. Gillespie's charges provided an excuse; in 1816 Raffles was peremptorily sacked, without a hearing. It happened that his beloved wife Olivia — so universally popular that his second wife, in her biography of him, could not bring herself to mention her, except in a footnote — had died shortly before he heard he had been dismissed. It was the first of two occasions when he must have felt that Fate had its knife into him.

On his return to England, however (via St Helena, where he met Napoleon, whom he had formerly admired: `this man', he now wrote, 'is a monster'), Fate relented. Reports of his work in Java had made him influential admirers, among them Princess Charlotte, who lionised him; he became an FRS; he was knighted by the Regent. And when, following an inquiry, it became embarrassingly clear to the Directors of the Company that Gillespie's accusations had been unfounded, they had no option but to offer him back his job — though not in Java, which had been handed back to the Dutch. In 1819 they sent him to Bencoolen. From their point of view Bencoolen, on the Indian Ocean coast of Sumatra, must have seemed an inspired choice. Not merely did it down-grade Raffles; there could be little he could do there, for the Company's good or ill, before he was carried off either by an earthquake (one destroyed much of the town the day before he arrived) or by any of the tropical diseases for which the region was notorious.

Raffles survived. In fact he was in his element. His' second wife, Sophia, bore him a succession of children, whom he adored. He was able to indulge in his favourite pursuits: anthropology (his account of the customs of a local cannibal tribe is gruesomely delightful); botany (he discovered the world's biggest flower: Rafflesia Arnoldi); and zoology. The Company reprimanded him for wasting his time and their money. He ignored them.

With uncanny foresight, Raffles had come to realise that the key to the region lay in the island of Singapore; he contrived to acquire it, on a lease; and the constitution he provided for it showed just how far ahead he was of his time, with its emphasis on equality before the law for all races, and its sound administrative principles (it was to last, in essentials, until the Japanese came in). Provision was made for education — and even for prostitution: 'The unfortunate prostititute should be treated with compassion, and every obstacle should be thrown in the way of her services being a profit to anybody but herself.

But now, Fate struck for the second time. Within a few months, three of his four children died. Soon afterwards Sophia lost another baby, and came near to death herself — as did Raffles, more than once. His botanist Arnold had died, as had his doctor and his chaplain. And when in despair he took ship for home, in 1824, the Fame caught fire; he and his wife escaped only with what they stood up in — their night-clothes — losing all the animals and birds, the plants and pottery, and the graphic accounts which he had been writing over the years.

His reception in London, too, was cooler. Princess Charlotte was dead; the Regent, now on the throne, less approachable. This might have mattered little, as Raffles had saved £16,000; a meagre enough sum by the standards of the Company's 'Nabobs', but enough to retire on, and devote what remained of his life to his varied interests — it was in this period that he founded the London Zoo. But in 1826 the merchant bank to which he had entrusted his capital closed its doors; and he received an itemised bill from his former employers, claiming he owed them over £20,000.

It was a staggering blow. He had expected a pension — though he had surmised it might be a mean one. Now, he was being dunned for expenses, most of which he had incurred in the course of his duties; some going back ten years, which the Company had not thought to ask him for previously, and which he assumed had been written off. Had they no gratitude, for what he had done?

They had none. It is tempting to assume they were acting from malice afterthought, from resentment at Raffies's determination to go his own way. Yet it may have been simply emptymindedness; the Company's destinies were guided by the likes of Sir George Robinson, a man who raised the combination of crass incompetence with complacency to the level of a psychoneurotic syndrome. Raffles settled down to write a detailed memorial, showing how and why the moneys had been spent. A few days later his wife found him at the foot of the stairs of their new home, struck down by a stroke. He was only 46.

Raffles would now be better remembered had Java remained British; as it is, only the hotel and other reminders in Singapore keep his name alive (how many people realise he founded the Zoo?). And even Singapore, monument to his far-sightedness though it remains, embodies an irony his biographers have missed. It owed its rapid rise chiefly to the opium traffic. Opium, he had written in his History of Java, has struck deep into the habits and extended its malign influence to the morals of the people and is likely to perpetuate its power in degrading their character and enervating their energies, as long as the European governments, overlooking every consideration of policy and humanity, should allow a paltry addition to their finances to outweigh all regard to the ultimate happiness and prosperity of the country.

By the 1820s, the financial benefits from the traffic were far from paltry. Opium, in fact, alone stood between the Company and ruin. It rapidly became the most lucrative commodity in Singapore's lists of imports and exports, as supplies could conveniently be distributed around the East Indies, when they were not earmarked for China. The smugglers of opium into China used Singapore as their depot and their staging post; and, final irony, when they needed the support of the fleet to break the ban on opium which the Chinese authorities were trying to enforce, the port was a vital link.

Notable though Ratfles's career had been, he had left one element out of calculations. His great services to a com pany, whose directors he had every reason to despise, were not merely facili tating the spread of opium's malign influ ence; they were causing the British Treasury, as well as the Company's di vidends, to become dependent upon the proceeds of the traffic, and thereby making inevitable what Shaftesbury was to describe, with every justification, as 'one of the most lawless, unnecessary and unfair struggles in the records of history': the first of the opium wars.