Counter Factual

Bruce Gilley on Alan Burns

The Last Imperialist by Bruce Gilley

Bruce Gilley’s biography of Sir Alan Burns is a little strange. Not because it is a poor biography, per se. Not because it misses out much of its protagonist’s life. But instead because it seems truncated in another way. It is only half of a vivid argument, an argument he author acknowledges in endless snide and sideways comments. But one that he never appears to get his arms around.

Sir Alan Burns was born in the middle of nowhere, metaphorically, in the British Caribbean. Born in Basseterre, Saint Kitts and Nevis. Part of a big and somewhat rackety family of many siblings. A Catholic family. One brother became a secularist intellectual. Another brother, Emile, became a communist, one of the leading British communists. But Alan, meanwhile, became a colonial civil servant, an official in many colonies and territories. A governor, in places dismal and great. And an unhappy feature of the early United Nations.

Biography can be boring. All lives begin the same way, as Martin Amis said, and they end the same way. What’s in the middle of those two things can be rendered uniform and bland. Or another problem can emerge: the author can so fall in love with his subject that he refers to the subject by his first name throughout. He can find no fault in the character he depicts and describes. And he can think it all worth description, from the simply banal to the tedious, despite the reader’s pounding on the table and shouting ‘hold, enough!’ like Macbeth.

Something might be needed to leaven the tedium. A little very fine writing; or some really startling facts, the kind of thing the reader would never have heard of before; or perhaps a little controversy. Readers tend to like controversy.

Gilley’s book is controversial, both for what it says and what it implies. It says that Alan Burns was a model administrator, whether he was in the Caribbean, or British Honduras (now Belieze), or in the Gold Coast (now Ghana), or in Nigeria. What the book sometimes says but more often implies is yet more controversial. It implies that Britain never did anything wrong in what was used to be called the third world. That all claimed British excesses — the killings carried out by Governor Eyre in Jamaica, for example, and Dyer’s firing at the crowds in the Golden Temple in Amritsar — were all justified, and that the critics of these actions were, at the time, pathetic liberals in London who did not understand that the colonies required the firm hand on occasion, or vengeful grievance-drunk foreigners who today want a quick buck from book sales or from reparations, and don’t care if getting the money requires them to scream and scream until they’re sick.

All of these might be arguable. It’s possible. But in this book, they are not well argued. Instead, they are simply asserted, critics essentially defamed (although some are quoted in ways which make them look at the very least a little shy of the mark, factually), and Gilley glides on, never seriously engaging with the fact that people of good faith who have mastered quite a lot of detail in their own right think he might be wrong.

It is simply stated, for instance, many times, that Burns’s philosophy of universal civilisation (into which the natives ought to be brought by what was termed ‘good government’ and European instruction) was a good one. It might have been better than the alternatives. But what Gilley never addresses, even once, was whether it was practical for a country in the economic shape Britain was in, never mind the ruinations of two world wars, to spend its limited and fleeing capital on statist projects intended to terraform the poor world. Burns believed it was possible; and although it didn’t quite happen, it was a good enough idea that it ought to have been done.

Gilley has no sense of state capacity. He appears to believe that nice things are nice and nasty things bad — as defined by him. He has no idea of opportunity cost. It never enters his calculations.

Some credit ought to go Burns’s way. By Gilley’s account — and my own researches have given me no reason to doubt him on this point — Burns was a competent man, very energetic, who had ideas and wanted to put them into practice. In our own day, it is impossible to build anything; and if you try to build something within your own lifetime in Britain, you are dragged through the courts for twenty years, bankrupted, defamed in the press, and finally forced to leave the country for another — possibly a Middle Eastern slave state, or a country of boundless ignorance and credulity — where by gum, they know how to treat you right.

So it is nice to know that Alan Burns in his early days proposed covering the sewers in an early posting — and was able to do it. And that he build some bridges and some libraries. Imagine a British man being able to build a library. Truly, they were halcyon days.

Personally, I also admire Burns’s literary work. If only because I find it amusing that he would write a sustained column about a card game in a newspaper, turn it into a book, and find that everyone he spoke to who learnt to play using his system lost more money than ever before. Playing the same game, apparently, gave Burns little pleasure. It was all business.

Burns also wrote histories of Nigeria (which went into many editions) and the West Indies, and widely circulated reports on Fiji and ‘colour prejudice,’ i.e. racism — Burns was against.

It was as governor — the post to which Burns eventually rose — that he was to do most, and to produce the most vivid stories. The most vivid of them all was the so-called juju murder case, the short history of which being that, after the death of the king, one of the nobles who was acting as priest was ambushed and tortured to death by eight men, so that his blood might be used in a ritual to propitiate the soul of the dead ruler.

Burns found himself in an awful mess. The men were, in Gilley’s telling, obviously guilty. Just as obviously, the penalty for murder was death. But the clever lawyers, both in Accra and in London at the privy council, were able to throw spanner after spanner in the gears. Many times, Burns had the convicted murderers trooped off to the condemned cells, had them on the steps of the gallows, before he was interrupted by a telegram from the colonial office, from the colonial secretary, from anyone — all to tell him that another appeal had been made, the House of Commons was in an uproar, public opinion was for clemency. (In the end some of the killers had their sentences commuted but not reprieved. Some of them were hanged. And one died awaiting his execution, an escape of sorts from justice.)

According even to Gilley, Burns permitted this bizarre episode to ruin his tenure as governor. He became irate and sad deep into senescence when the subject was brought up. And the other actors in the drama, they had their jobs to do. The killers’ lawyers were bound to give them every chance at survival. And the colonial secretary had the responsibility to ensure that justice was truly done before he handed the condemned men over to the governor and the hangman. It was Sir Alan who was most out of sorts.

Other chapters concern Burns’s time working in Whitehall, negotiating the strategically unimportant (but PR success) Destroyers for Bases scheme; and working in New York, at the United Nations, fighting a frustrating and tedious and mundane and monotonous, and most of all boring, rearguard action in defence of the colonial powers against bad faith (in Gilley’s view) sniping from some of the least democratic, least accountable and most arbitrarily ruled states in the world.

What do we learn from a book like this? That competent men are chewed up by bureaucracy? That history spares no one its indignities? That it’s possible for a biographer to admire his subject overmuch? Or nothing, nothing at all without good faith disagreement. There’s always the counterfactual, after all.