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| "lovely" virtue; and that with courage it is possible for people of
widely differing cultures to communicate with each other (despite what contemporary anthropologists tend to say): even a small red-haired Scot in white shorts with an Ashanti executioner or as Ashanti god speaking through the mouth of his spirit-possessed priest. I hope that the result will both have intrinsic interest as a study of an individual who played a significant part in the history of British Africa and the development of British anthropology, and also serve as a useful companion to those monumental but highly approachable volumes by Rattray on the Ashanti which still demand a place on the shelves of anyone who is interested in Africa or, one might even say, in mankind. |
| Noel Machin |
| 17 |
| Chapter 1. Anglo-Indians |
| If Rattray were still alive, he would be over a hundred. If his |
| grandfather were still alive, he would be over two hundred. The Rattray family was one of those, not so uncommon in the last century, which cross centuries in one or two generations. Rattray himself had a little of the eighteenth century about him, a freedom of thought which went out with the Victorians, which may have been because the eighteenth century was so close in family history. It meant that for most people is a question of ancestors was only yesterday for the Rattrays. |
| Their story, as it was told in the family, began where so many Scottish |
| colonial stories began, at Culloden.2 In 1745, Charles Rattray of Craighall-Rattray in Perthshire raised his own army in support of Bonnie Prince Charlie. At Culloden, it was wiped out and Charles was taken down to London to be hanged as a traitor. But "at the foot of the gallows" (as the family tradition had it) he was suddenly pardoned and sent back to Scotland |
| 2Much of the information given here on the Rattray family comes from two privately- |
| printed books: Robert Haldane Rattray: Personal and Family Events in My Life,
Calcutta 1859, and A. Rattray, Letters of Henrietta Rattray to her Sons in India, 1800-14, London 1878. For the loan of these, as for much other material, I am deeply indebted to Rattray's daughter and son-in-law, Mr. & Mrs. R. Rattray. |
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| to die in his bed in the early years of the new nineteenth century,
"like a gentleman". |
| This Charles Rattray had three sons. As in the fairy tales, each in turn |
| had to go out into the world and seek their fortunes - the family
estates had been confiscated. The eldest, David, got no farther than Coventry, where he set up as a doctor. The other two, James and William, were more enterprising. They signed on to the service of the East India Company, then in its boom-time as a money-making concern, and fast becoming a political force. William entered the Company's army and ended up as a Colonel. James, the second son, went into the navy. By 1783, he was in charge of his own ship, the Athol, which went down in a fire off Madras in 1783. His next ship was named (appropriately) the Phoenix. He did well with her, and eventually sold his share in her to a certain Captain Grey, making enough to retire on. He went back to his mother's family estates, which by now had reverted to him, in Strathmore, in the far northern Highlands. In 1809, he was killed by a fall from his horse. |
| Once again there were three sons, and this time all three went out to |
| India. The second son was Robert Haldane Rattray, our Robert Rattray"s grandfather, after whom he was named. |
| The story was quite typical of Scottish colonial families. Just as the |
| misery of Ireland in the mid-nineteenth century contributed so much towards making the United States, so the misery of Scotland in the eighteenth (and afterwards) made the so-called British empire almost predominantly Scots. Robert Haldane Rattray was quite typical of his class of pre-Mutiny Anglo-Indians. |
| He became a well-known figure in the pre-Mutiny establishment in |
| Bengal ending up as Chief Justice. He did not have genius, but a variety
of talents which fitted him well into that self-consciously cultured, almost effete society. He was not what we think of nowadays as an Empire- builder. He published an epic poem called "The Exile", and lyrics in the sentimental manner of Thomas Moore, painted in water-colours and designed buildings. La Martinière College in Calcutta was designed by him, one of those neo-classical piles which impressed Regency culture so firmly on the old Indian empire. He was also interested in what might almost be called anthropology. His closest friend was a man called James Prinsep, who is still remembered as a founding father of "native studies" and who passed on these interests, slightly diluted, to Rattray, who passed them down through his family. It is not too fanciful to give Prinsep some of the credit for tuning Rattray's grandson into an anthropologist. |
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| He married twice. His second wife was called Frances, and they too had |
| three sons. The eldest, Arthur, was "our" Rattray's father. By the
time he was born, Robert Haldane was well into middle age and he died while they were still children. But he had managed in this time to pass on to Arthur has own love of the sea, and perhaps also a "pre-Mutiny" attitude towards India. The attitude towards natives which we associate with the heyday of empire arose in the sour atmosphere which followed the Mutiny in 1857, when Anglo-Indians began to feel quite literally that "you can't trust a native". Before the Mutiny, things were much more easy-going, and many British residents - like Prinsep and Robert Haldane Rattray - took a genuine polite interest in Indian culture, and even thought of themselves - as the term Anglo-Indian suggests - as partly acculturated. |
| Arthur Rattray's career in many ways repeated his father's but in a |
| minor key. After school, he went into the navy but was soon diverted,
like his father, into the Indian Civil Service. In later life, he had his fortune told, and the clairvoyant told him: "I see you wandering on a shore with great breakers." It was how he saw himself. He hankered after the sea, and thought of it as the real life, not administering the law in an up-country province. His career was not as distinguished as his father's. He ended up as a Provincial Commissioner and retired as soon as he could. He had what was called in those days the Anglo-Indian figure, tall, tapering, elegant, with extended hands and feet. He inherited many of his father's talents, in a rather less forceful way, and the Rattray mixture of practicality and almost genteel artiness. Like his father, he was good at drawing, and liked drawing ships. He suffered from asthma, which the Indian climate aggravated but which disappeared when he was at sea. He had a talent for languages and an interest in Indian culture, was fluent in Urdu and Hindustani and had a fund of Hindustani proverbs, his favourite being "The test of gold is fire, and the test of friendship is the time of calamity." His children grew used to hearing it when the housekeeping money ran out. |
| He married Mary Sutherland, who also came from an Anglo-Indian |
| family. Most of them were doctors. A Sutherland was supposed to have tried to avert the incident which sparked off the Mutiny, by pointing out the folly of forcing Hindus to bite the fat in the cartridges issued to them, and Mary's father reformed the treatment of mental illness in India to an extent which would have been considered revolutionary at home. Mary was another typical Anglo-Indian. She was tiny, vivacious and attractive, but so used to being surrounded by servants that she was almost incapable of doing anything for herself. She had an aristocratic disdain for the mechanics of life, and concentrated on improving her soul. She prayed, contemplated and wrote devotional poetry. Rhyme, she said, came to her as |
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| easily as normal speech, and that is exactly the impression her poetry
gives: completely lacking in originality, thoroughly competent, depicting a life spent in a steady glow of devotional ardour. If the Rattray motto "Super Sidera Votum" ("My hope lies above the stars") applied to anyone, it was to her. Most people found her delightful, but as so often with people whose minds are on higher things, her abstractedness sometimes amounted to the same thing as selfishness. It was said that she never bent down to pick up a handkerchief she had dropped. |
| Earlier Rattrays had made sure that their children were born at home, |
| but by the 1880's it was considered safe to have them in India. Three children were born before Arthur retired: a boy who died while hardly more than a baby, a girl called Henrietta, and another boy, who was christened Robert, after his grandfather Robert Haldane Rattray, and Sutherland, after his mother's family. He was born in Bahr, Bengal, on the 5th September, 1881. |
| India was not even a memory for Bobby Rattray. As soon as could be, |
| with the memory of the first child's death fresh in their minds, his
parents shipped him and his sister back to Britain, to be looked after by a great- aunt. India meant only family history and stories - many of which, as is usual with stories of the tropics, were about snakes. One was of the time when Mama was playing the harmonium and Papa came in to see a large cobra swinging from the Venetian blinds, drawn by the music. Mama went on playing while Papa shot the snake dead. In another, the little punkah wallah who was working the fan over the bed where little Henrietta lay asleep saw a cobra climb up the bed's leg into the space between the mattress and the lower framework. When Papa arrived to deal with it he found a nest of five baby cobras under the mattress. |
| Bobby was brought up in a much less exotic environment, the little |
| lowland village of Gatehouse-of-Fleet, towards the end of the southern coast of Scotland, where it sticks out into the sea towards Ireland. It was a cosy, uneventful place, within sight and smell of the sea, backed inland by hills which rise to the scale of Highland mountains, with a bare main street presided over by a Victorian pantomime-castle clock-tower. He was a funny-looking little boy, tiny and pinched, with red hair and big flapping ears. He looked like an imp and behaved like an imp. In later life, he remembered how he reacted indignantly against the heavy moralising of nursery stories: his disgust at the smugness of the coachman in "The Fairchild Family" who gives away Master Henry when he steals the apple, and his "rebellion at the fate of Little Emily who died of pneumonia contracted by sponging out the bosom of her frock to remove the tell-tale |
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| stains of forbidden raspberry jam."3 The Rattrays came fairly high up in the small scale of Gatehouse society, but there was so little to choose from that there were few restraints. They were sometimes invited to play with Lord Ardwell, the local laird's children, but at other times they played with the children of the butcher, the baker and the tailor. |
| Three more children joined the first two: Elizabeth, Arthur and Frances, |
| making five in all - the "Five Mad Rats" as they came to be called
in the village. By the time the last one arrived, the parents had also come back to live in Gatehouse, though Aunt Elizabeth Campbell stayed on to help. As might have been expected, the parent "Rats" took well to retirement. "Papa Rat" expanded what had been hobbies into full-time work. He set up a carpentry shop at the back of the house and tinkered in it, making "improvements" to the house, painting, woodcarving and even designing wallpaper which visitors considered a little outré. Mama Rat continued her Indian style of life almost as if there had been no change of continent. She spent much of the day on the sofa in the long drawing room, resting her slender Anglo-Indian feet adorned by shoes which Papa Rat had designed himself and had made up in the village. Papa Rat's pension was reasonable, but even in those days servants cost more in Scotland than in India, and they had had no practice in saving money. "Roseville" was famous in the village as a "guid meat house": none but the best cuts would do, and they would have to have the butcher's biggest turkey even when he was owed £80 - as he was one year. Every so often a tradesman would refuse to make allowances and the atmosphere would be doom-laden until he was paid off or the credit extended, but the servants would go on using butter to light the fires and the best cuts would still be ordered. |
| Nor had the Rattray parents much experience of bringing up children. In |
| some ways Papa Rat was a disciplinarian. He expected punctuality at
meals and consideration for staff. But it did not occur either to him or to Mama Rat that the children might need constant care and attention. As a result, they were left to Aunt Elizabeth Campbell, who was no more commanding as she got older, and to themselves. And as a result of that, they had an almost ideal childhood. From May to October they were sent off to stay with an elderly governess at a rented cottage at Carrick on the Solway Firth. They ran completely wild, hardly wearing any clothes, running barefoot on the pebbles until their feet were like leather. In winter, there was skating on the frozen Calley Lake and "bonspiels" on the ice. Bobby, |
| 3 R.S. Rattray, “The African Child in Proverb, Folk-lore and Fact”, Africa, vol. 6, 4. |
| p. 462. |
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| perhaps typically, saved up until he could order a nickel-plated pair
of skates from Gorringes in London, the usual wooden ones not being good enough for him. |
| There were some constraints on their lives. Every Sunday there was |
| church. Mama Rat was fond of saying that you should go to the English church for singing and the Scottish church for sermons. The Rattray family pew was in the Scottish church, and the sermons put Bobby off church religion for life, thought one of his prayers was answered. For some time after he left Gatehouse two inscriptions remained scratched in the wood of the Rattray pew wall: "Bobby Rattray without bicycle", and then below it: "Bobby Rattray with bicycle". |
| There was school. The village school was in the care of the lairds of |
| Kelly, and the Laird's wife took personal charge of it. She had old- fashioned ideas about education, and employed a "dominie" who was fierce even by Scottish standards. Far from beating Bobby Rattray into submission, Mr. Phillips brought out all his rebelliousness, of which there was plenty, and just as the sermons put him off church so did the lessons put him off book-learning. His mother was moved into verse by his reports: |
| To the four winds of heaven lesson books I fling, He errs who says that school life is a happy thing. I thought I knew my task, that I could say it pat, But I made one mistake, and got the taws for that. I like the game of cricket, football I adore, And other games we play at, but lessons I deplore. Yet I must plod away till I become a man, And work day after day, and do the best I can. I find mathematics very hard to learn, Yet they say for classics I have a decided turn. It seems that all through life it's work and little play, |
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| And only those who work hard get on in life they say. Yet "nil desperandum" has for some laurels won, I shall strive to do my best, and never duty shun. It was not one of her best efforts and the resolve to do better was her |
| wishful thinking rather than a reflection of his attitude. He showed
no signs of becoming a scholar and his parents came to feel that he would never be able to take up the family tradition of service in India. His father made some effort to take him in hand, but it did little more than show that stubbornness was a Rattray trait which they both shared. It was not made any better when Arthur was born, when Bobby was ten, and the parents began rather obviously to transfer their ambitions to the new son. |
| As he grew up, birdnesting gave way to boat-building, steam engines and |
| photography. Photography became a passion which never left him. He persuaded his father to give him a room at the top of the house as a darkroom where he disappeared for hours. He learned to shoot and he went off for long fishing expeditions in the boat which he built himself, though he showed no sign of having inherited the family sea-fever, which was to come out in his brother. However, he did inherit the family asthma, in a comparatively mild form. It may have had a psychological link, because it disappeared when he went abroad and reappeared only when he boarded the ship for home. |
| Despite his unsatisfactory progress at the local school, he would |
| probably have been sent on to a public school but the time coincided
with a low point in the family finances. Instead of going to Marlborough or Cheltenham, he was sent to Stirling High School. Stirling High School was, and no doubt is still, an excellent example of Scottish public education. Moreover, it was a boarding school and so in keeping with Victorian middle-class ideas of bringing up sons. But Rattray felt - and no doubt his parents felt in their heart of hearts - that it was second best. The grandson of the Chief Justice of Bengal was going to an ordinary grammar school. He always pretended in later life that he had had no proper education at all. This was not true. Stirling was probably more academic than most rugger- worshipping public schools. He would probably have got on better at a public school just because he was better at playing games than Latin syntax. Stirling was simply a continuation of the miserable book-slogging of the Gatehouse school, without the after-hours freedom of boating on Calley Lake. There was no flinging of lesson books to the four winds. |
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| Another factor may have strengthened his feeling of inadequacy. He |
| never learned to spell properly, which is surprising in someone who
had an unquestionable gift for languages and became almost pernickety about grammatical correctness. Nowadays, he would almost certainly have been classified as dyslexic. In those days, he was called stupid. It was probably a constant hindrance to his progress at Stirling and a constant cause of embarrassment and distress. It probably also gave him, later on, his special interest in the mechanics of language - like the polio victim who trains himself to become a tennis star. |
| As he grew towards adolescence, his impishness developed into a more |
| serious spirit of rebellion. Not that he was sullen or excessively introspective. To most outward appearances he was cheerful, not to say exuberant. But he became even wilder. And he quarrelled more with his father (of course, most adolescent boys quarrel with their fathers). Quite early on, he developed a reputation as a "ladies" man". He was beginning to realise that he would always be small, which made him the keener to prove that he was a man. He also, quite simply, liked girls; his sisters had always adored him and he soon found that vivacity and charm more than made up for his lack of height. His new boat on Calley Lake was named for one girl-friend on one side and for another on the other side. It was probably all innocent enough, but it caused his mother some worry. He showed no signs of sharing her interest in piety and morality and he sometimes went out of his way to shock her and his sisters. |
| During one of the holidays from Stirling, an event occurred which stuck |
| deep in his mind, and which he put in the novel Missianna which
he was working on when he died. He overheard a conversation between his father and the Presbyterian "bishop" of Brechin, Dr. Coats, a very grand man whom they sometimes visited. They started discussing him and Dr. Coats said that he would either become "a very great and good, or a very bad, man". It must have struck an echo in his own thoughts: he felt he had a demon which he could not control but he was even more afraid of turning out neither a saint nor a sinner but an ordinary person. |
| Things got no better at Stirling as time went on and as soon as he |
| reached the lowest possible leaving age, which was fifteen, he began
an almost continuous dialogue with his father, trying to persuade him to take him away. The father quite reasonably pointed out that since they did not have the money to start him off in business or the army, he would have to take some exams. This went on for two more years, until an escape-route suddenly showed itself. In October 1899, war broke out in South Africa. |
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| The government was bitterly attacked later for being so slow in calling |
| for volunteers and Bobby Rattray was not responding to an urgent summons when he decided immediately to sign himself up. It was simply an escape to the kind of life which he felt was his. He did not exactly run away, although it happened at the beginning of a new academic year. He just told the headmaster that he was going and there was very little the headmaster could do to stop him. "Papa Rat" was, of course, furious. They were not taking recruits under nineteen and anyway it was no way to start a career even if he did want to go into the army. Bobby's answer was that if he was sent back to Stirling he would run away. His father had to give up the struggle and Bobby went down to London and joined up with the Imperial Yeomanry, giving his age as nineteen. |
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