Abstract
Of Britain’s three principal overseas civil services considered here, the Sudan Political Service — the key provincial administration — was at once the youngest and the smallest of them all. Established in 1899, forty years after the Indian Civil Service (ICS), and abolished in 1955 (indeed, no British officers were recruited after 1952), forty years before the one-time Colonial Service (later HMOCS) approached the end of its time in Hong Kong, and never numbering more than 150 on duty in any one year and with less than 500 members in the whole of its existence,1 the Sudan Political Service (SPS) was characterized by a certain sui generis character in the history of Britain’s overseas civil services.
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Notes
These are the figures which have, by convention, grown up with the SPS literature and were crystallized in the basic Register of its officers compiled by Sir Harold MacMichael, Sudan Political Service, n.d., (1958?), known externally as ‘The Blue Book’ and internally as ‘The Book of Snobs’. D. H. Johnson, in a personal note derived from his research on the career of P. Coriat for his Governing the Nuer, 1993, suggests that there are so many omissions from the Register, especially among contract officers, that the total could be nearer 600.
For a detailed breakdown of ‘Blues’ and Firsts, see A. H. M. Kirk-Greene, The Sudan Political Service: A Preliminary Profile, 1982, tables I and II.
J. P. S. Daniell, quoted in J. A. Mangan, ‘The Education of an Elite Imperial Administration: the Sudan Political Service and the British Public School System’, International Journal of African Historical Studies, 15, 4, 1982, 671, note 2.
K. D. D. Henderson, Set Under Authority, 1987, 9.
Sir James Robertson, Transition in Africa: from Direct Rule to Independence, 1974, 252.
For the Colonial Secretary’s lament on the ‘tragedy’ that the Sudan was the responsibility of an uninterested Foreign Office and not of the Colonial Office, see J. A. Cross, Lord Swinton, 1982, 130.
J. S. R. Duncan, The Sudan: a Record of Achievement, 1952, xi.
‘For this nomenclature I do not think there was ever any formal sanction’ — MacMichael, Sudan Political Service, 3. MacMichael was Civil Secretary from 1926 to 1934.
Lord Cromer, Political and Literary Essays, 1914, 4.
Quoted in M. W. Daly, Empire on the Nile: the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, 1898–1934, 1986, 82.
See also H. Keown-Boyd, Soldiers of the Nile: a Biographical History of the British Officers of the Egyptian Army, 1882–1925, 1996
Cromer, Introduction to Sir Sidney Low, Egypt in Transition, 1913, vii.
R. Collins, ‘The Sudan Political Service: a Portrait of the “Imperialists”’, African Affairs, 71, 284, 1972.
K. D. D. Henderson, The Making of the Modem Sudan: the Life and Letters of Sir Douglas Newbold, 1953, 557.
M. W. Daly, Imperial Sudan: the Anglo-Egyptian Condominium, 1934–1956, 1991, 256–7.
R. O. Collins, Shadows in the Grass, 1983, ch. 4. The former source informs the following pages. It is the outcome of a retrieval project organized by P. P. Howell among SPS officers in the 1980s and then written up by K. D. D. Henderson as ‘a portrait of the life of … [and] what it was like to work as a British District Officer in the Sudan between 1898 and 1955’ (Set Under Authority, title page and p. 9). The original papers are deposited in the Sudan Archive, University of Durham.
This was the Service nickname of W. A. L. Cockburn, a DO in Eastern Nigeria: see A.F.B. Bridges, So We Used To Do, 1990, 152–3.
Adapted from Kirk-Greene, Sudan Political Service, 1982.
Cromer, Modern Egypt, 1908, II, 548.
See list in Donald Hawley, Sandtracks in the Sudan, 1995, 149.
Colonel Sir Hugh Boustead, The Wind of Morning, 1972
Wilfred Thesiger, The Life of My Choice, 1987.
H. C. Jackson, Sudan Days and Ways, 1954, 15.
E. G. Sarsfield-Hall, From Cork to Khartoum, 1975, 17.
J. R. Honey, Tom Brown’s Universe: the Development of the Public School in the 19th Century, 1977; Mangan, op. cit.
M. A. Nigumi, A Great Trusteeship, 1958, 60.
R. Davies, The Camel’s Back, 1957, 13, from where the following quotations are taken.
H. C. Jackson, Sudan Days and Ways, 1954. Dedication.
See also John Kenrick, in Deborah Lavin, ed., The Condominium Remembered (Proceedings of the Durham Sudan Historical Conference, 1982), 1991, 181.
L. Grafftey-Smith, Hands To Play, 1975, 163. See also PRO, FO 371/113586-88, 1955, File 1017, for the activities of the Sudanization Committee.
British Information Service, The Sudan, 1899–1953, 1954, table I.
G. W. Bell, quoted in D. Lavin, ed., The Making of the Sudanese State, 1991. Part IV represents an important contribution to the study of the transfer of power. The original Conference papers have been deposited in the Sudan Archive, University of Durham.
K. D. D. Henderson, Sudan Republic, 1965, 103
G. Balfour-Paul, The End of Empire in the Middle East, 1991, 38.
Durham Sudan Historical Records Conference, Durham University, 14–16 April 1982. The Proceedings appeared ten years later, in two volumes, ed. D. Lavin, The Condominium Remembered, 1991 and 1993.
K. D. D. Henderson and T. R. H. Owen, Sudan Verse, 1963, 66.
For a preliminary inquiry into verse compiled by overseas civil servants, see A. H. M. Kirk-Greene, ‘For Better or for Verse?’ Overseas Pensioner 72, 1996, 47–50 and 75, 1998, 33–8.
Odette Keun, A Foreigner Looks at the British Sudan, 1930, 5; 49–52.
Pierr Crabites, The Winning of the Sudan, 1934, 178.
John Gunther, Inside Africa, 1954, 234–5.
Robert O. Collins, Shadows in the Grass: Britain in the Southern Sudan, 1918–1956, 1983, 460.
See also the essays in R. O. Collins and F. M. Deng, eds, The British in the Sudan, 1898–1956: the Sweetness and the Sorrow, 1984.
M. W. Daly, Empire on the Nile, 1986, 452–3.
M. W. Daly, Imperial Sudan, 1991, 399.
Rameses [C. S. Jarvis], Oriental Spotlight, 1937, 118.
A. H. M. Kirk-Greene, Nationalism and Arcadianism in the Sudan: the Janus Factor in the Political Service Memoirs, 1993.
D. Sconyers, ‘Servant or Saboteur?: the Sudan Political Service during the Critical Decade, 1946–1956’, Bulletin of the British Society for Middle Eastern Studies, 14, 1, 1988, drawing on critical quotations from within the Service.
M. A. Nigumi, A Great Trusteeship, 1957, xi.
Francis M. Deng, ‘In the Eyes of the Ruled’ in Collins and Deng, ed., The British in the Sudan, 1984, 216ff.
Francis M. Deng and M. W. Daly, Bonds of Silk, 1989, Pt I.
E. Atiyah, An Arab Tells His Story, 1946, 164. Cf. Da’ud Abd Al-Latif’s comment about DCs ‘who loved the camels and the nomads and didn’t like the town people at all’ — quoted in Collins and Deng, British in the Sudan, 232.
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Kirk-Greene, A. (2000). The Sudan Political Service, 1899–1955. In: Britain’s Imperial Administrators, 1858–1966. St. Antony’s series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230286320_7
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