machin - Pages 21 thru 30

An Old Coaster Comes Home

Rattray's early years in Africa are the most obscure period of his life,

certainly as far as written records are concerned. While he was in South
Africa, he was on bad terms with his family, and in any case it was
difficult to send back more than superficial messages from the war. All
we know for certain of it can be told in a few sentences. He signed on
with the 6th Imperial Yeomanry, and was trained at Aldershot. He had his
photograph taken at Aldershot in his new uniform looking very much like
a schoolboy and possibly a little scared at what he was letting himself in
for. He went out with one of the first contingents of volunteers. (Like
most wars until the last one, in its earlier stages the South African war
was fought almost entirely by professionals.) He became a scout, in the
heroic days of scouting, dashing about on a Basuto pony carrying his rifle
in a ‘bucket’ by the saddle, like the Boers. He took part in five
engagements, for which he was duly awarded the Queen's Medal with five
bars. He ended up in Pilcher's column at Kimberly, having seen the war
through its full four years — counting both the first ‘official’ phase and
the two years’ guerrilla war which followed. It seems he was not
wounded — certainly not seriously. He was, however, shot through the
hat (one of the broad-brimmed scout's hats which Baden-Powell adopted
for the Boy Scouts). It was the only story to be told of his South African

An Old Coaster Comes Home

career. He said that he was in a trench and lifted his head over the top to
see what was going on in the trench opposite, and he saw Aunt Elizabeth
Campbell's hand rising out of the trench. He ducked, and was shot
through the hat — presumably, instead of through the head. He did not
explain how he know that it was Aunt Elizabeth Campbell's hand rather
than someone else's, but he brought the hat with the hole in it to prove it.

We can assume that he enjoyed his time in South Africa because he

showed signs of wanting to go back into the army at other times in his
career. It gave him a taste for real-life adventure and proved to his own
satisfaction that he was right to leave school. While many boys of his age
were still reading the Boy's Own Paper, he was playing out the role of the
boy-hero in one of their stories. This early fulfilment of boyhood
ambition brought out in him, paradoxically, a reticence about the exciting
parts of his life. He had a strong streak of exhibitionism but he also
behaved as if the only audience he needed to please was himself. It may
have had to do with his rejection — as he felt it — by his parents and,
even more, by the ‘establishment’ at Gatehouse and Stirling. It may even
have had something to do with the fact that he was taken away from his
mother as a baby. For whatever reason, he adopted an ‘I care for nobody,
no not I, for nobody cares for me', attitude towards authority; and he
kept quiet about his achievements as if they were something precious to be
withheld from prying eyes. (Of course, one might just call it modesty).

The South African War introduced him to Africa, and like so many

people he was unable to leave it again for good. No doubt, he saw more
of the British army than of Africans, or even white colonial life; but
army life itself in that landscape, with its distances and wildness and the
freedom from conventional social restraints — from the need to find a
job, amongst other things — must have been attractive enough to him. He
took well to army discipline (he would probably not have taken so well to
it in peacetime), and being amongst the ‘other ranks’ he was probably
happy to live with people who were interested in making themselves
comfortable in camp rather than proving themselves intellectually or
carving out a career for themselves.⁴ He saw something of Africans —

4In 1902, on his discharge, his commanding officer Lt. Col. W.K. Hamilton wrote:

'He proved himself to be active, willing and intelligent and for this reason he was specially
selected to do service with the Scouts and Intelligence Department of Col. Pilcher's column
which has now been broken up. The officers commanding Co. Pilcher's Intelligence Dept.
both spoke very highly of Trooper Rattray's ability while he was serving with them.'
(Foreign Office file).

An Old Coaster Comes Home

he certainly worked with Zulu guides — but it is fairly certain that at this
stage the ‘African way of life’ did not play any significant part in the
attraction he felt for Africa.

While he was at Kimberly, he had heard the story of the young English

immigrant farmer who had trekked up-country from Natal thirty years
before with a handful of books and some mining tools, and ended by
having a country, Rhodesia, named after him. As the war drew to a close,
many of Rattray's companions must have started making plans for what
they would do when the war was over, and no doubt a number of them
decided to stay on in Africa. It was still not entirely ridiculous to imagine
that you would end up as governor of a country half the size of Europe,
though the heroic days of white expansion in Africa were nearly over.
Before he left South Africa, he probably decided that he would come back
again. He may have hoped that his father would be able to get him a job in
the colonial service. But in any case, he ‘demobbed’ and went home to
Gatehouse in time to celebrate his twenty-first birthday in the September
of that year, 1902.

He was given a mixed reception. His father was not vindictive about his

earlier behaviour, but he was in no position to set him up in a job. Rattray
also sensed that his brother ‘Tubs’, now aged eleven, was taking his own
place as the bearer of the family's hopes. ‘Tubs’ was showing signs of
wanting to go into the navy, and his father — in this way breaking with
family tradition — was doing everything he could to encourage him. The
father probably pointed out with a certain amount of emphasis that if
Bobby had finished his schooling, he would be in a much better position
to earn his own living.

In the end, Bobby went to the village tailor, who gave him a letter of

introduction to a cousin of his who worked for the African lakes
Corporation, a trading business which operated around Lake Nyasa (now
Lake Malawi), in the area north of Rhodesia which was just being ‘opened
up’. By December, he was on the R.P.D. Kronprinz passing through Suez
on his way to British Central Africa (now Malawi) and the service of the
African Lakes Corporation.

The African Lakes Corporation was started by two brothers named

Moir who had answered Livingstone's call to come out and introduce
legitimate commerce in Central Africa in the place of the slave trade.
They had established their headquarters just outside Blantyre, and called it
Mandala, the Swahili word for a flash of light, by which the natives
referred to the younger Moir brother, who wore glasses. The central
trading policy of the Moir brothers was to short-circuit the Arab slave

An Old Coaster Comes Home

trade, which involved using slaves to carry ivory to the coast and then
selling both ivory and slaves in Zanzibar, by persuading the Arabs to sell
the ivory to them instead. The Company had had its ups and downs, one
of the downs being when a native was flogged to death with a
hippopotamus hide for stealing beads which — it turned out — had really
been taken out (without signing for them) by the younger Moir brother.
There was a Commission of Enquiry from England and almost the entire
staff of the company was recalled. However, by the time Rattray joined it,
it was a large and prosperous trading-company, with posts throughout the
Lake area.

Rattray would have gone south past the Mozambique coast to Durban,

where a smaller boat took passengers bound for British Central Africa up
the coast again to the Zambezi mouth. Here, at Chinde, he would have
changed again to an African Lakes Company steamship for the tedious
five-day journey up the wide Zambezi and Shire rivers to Blantyre.
Blantyre was still a pioneer town, hardly more than a scattering of houses
around by the red-brick ‘cathedral’ with its white domes, and the Mission
Station. It was named after Livingstone's birthplace on the Clyde, and was
still very much a missionary settlement. It was the headquarters of the
Church of Scotland mission while the ‘Wee Free's’ territory was further
north, beside the Lake, in ‘Livingstonia’. Rattray probably stayed for a
time at the company headquarters of Mandala, across the bridge over the
Mudi River, while he was inducted into the methods of the Company
before being sent on up-country, to the newest and wildest part of the
Company's territory: to ‘Angoniland’, to work in a small trading outpost
at Lilongwe.

‘The physical features of Ngoniland’, W.A. Elmslie wrote in his

Among the Wild Ngoni,⁵ ‘may be denoted in a few words.’

‘Situated at about 4,000 feet above sea level it has little or nothing to

suggest its being in the tropics, save the daily course of the sun and the
periodic rains. Leaving (Lake) Nyasa at an altitude of 1,500 feet we
have to cross the broken mountain ranges, rising in some cases to 7,000
feet, which form the eastern boundary of Ngoniland. From the heights
we behold hundreds of square miles of open undulating country, whose
low wooded hills run north and south for the most part, the broad

5W.A. Elmslie, Among the Wild Ngoni, 1899, pp. 31, 32.

An Old Coaster Comes Home

valleys being traversed by streams which become roaring torrents
during the brief rainy season, but at other times are small and easily
forded. Looking over the country at our feet, we are struck by its
treelessness, save on the crowns of the low hills.’

It was treeless because the local inhabitants had followed the usual

pattern of African cultivation, burning the bush every year until only the
strongest trees disappeared. As almost everywhere around Lake Nyasa,
there was a mixture of peoples. The most conspicuous were the Ngoni
after whom the district was named. They were relics of migrations from
the south in the wake of Shaka Zulu's conquests, and themselves
conquerors, forcibly absorbing the local people by making them either
wives or slaves, and in turn being absorbed into the local system of
language and society. The Europeans thought of them as Zulus — an
implied compliment because Europeans usually admired warrior peoples
and despised peasant farmers like the Cewa or Cipeta, whom the Ngoni
had overrun. (Sir Richard Burton used to say that it was always a
pleasure, after travelling through the democratic tribes, to arrive at the
headquarters of ‘a strong and sanguinary despotism’).

The Ngoni were cattle-farmers, and part of Rattray's job was to buy

animals from them and herd them down to Blantyre. For the rest of the
time, he kept store at Lilongwe, selling chamber-pots (which they used as
soup-tureens) and general mass-produced rubbish to the natives; and
tinned food and medicines to the European planters. A contemporary
visitor was struck by the disagreeable smell of these stores, from the size
in the new calico they stocked: ‘The stores contained quantities of calico
of every description, piled in bales from the cement floor to the
corrugated-iron roof. Then mounds of cheap blankets. Along one side,
shelves contrived in the walls contained unattractive articles of delf and
glassware, whitish opaline glass lamps, terribly thick tea-cups and
tumblers unattractive to a degree... Quantities of cheap American
cigarettes, some doubtful-looking bottles of perfumery, some hard,
unpleasant-smelling toilet soap, a few cases of whisky and beer, and pile
of packages of rather mildewed fly-blown stationery and patent
medicines.’⁶

6R.C.F. Maugham: Africa as I have Known It (1929) p.78.

An Old Coaster Comes Home

Life in Lilongwe was a good deal less exciting than he had hoped. At

the other end of his life, he said that boredom destroys a white man's
morale in Africa more than anything else. During his first months in
Lilongwe he learned to beat boredom by breaking his day into regular
sections so that he always had something to look forward to, and setting
himself specific, even pointless, jobs to do. He got into the habit of
changing for dinner, even on hunting expeditions in the farthest bush, not
because he wanted to ‘keep up standards’, but because it gave more shape
to his life. He did not have many European friends — there were not
many to choose from. He came across other fortune-hunters of different
nationalities (mainly Portuguese and British), but the only Europeans he
spoke of afterwards were Hetherwick (of whom more later) and the local
District Officer, Kirby-Green, whom he was to meet again thirty years
later in Rabat, during his solo flight to West Africa. Two photographs
from these early days give an idea of what he was like. One shows him in
his best tropical suit and hat, still looking like a child, nursing an antelope
fawn. He is trying to look man-of-the-world, but is obviously playing a
part. On the back of the photograph he wrote ‘From Bobby Rattray,
future H.M. Commissioner of B.C.A. (if he does not peg out).’ The other,
taken some months later, shows him with a group of fellow-pioneers. He
already looks older, but still boyish compared with the others. He is
playing at climbing up a tree, and typically he is rather detached from the
group.

There was one great compensation for all the boredom and loneliness.

Angoniland was the richest hunting country in the Protectorate. He may
have shot the odd antelope in South Africa, but in Central Africa he
became a shikari — a big-game hunter. He had brought his camera out
with him, and instead of writing home he sent back photographs with
messages on the back. By far the greatest number are of himself sitting on
the back of some dead animal: zebra, hippopotamus, kudu, sable,
rhinoceros, wart-hog, buffalo, any number of crocodile and, above all,
elephant. He acquired an elderly, gangling Ngoni elephant hunter called
Perete as his guide, and apprenticed himself to him. It was some time
before he could afford a licence (even in those days, you could not go out
and shoot the first animal you saw) which cost twenty-five pounds; so at
first he had to content himself with shooting crocodiles, which were
considered vermin. In April of his first year in Central Africa, he shot six
crocodiles in as many minutes in the Lintipi River. He did not get his first
elephant until the following year.

Stuffed animals gather dust and look seedy after a few years. They

seem hardly worth the effort and danger involved in shooting them. But

An Old Coaster Comes Home

that is only if you are not a hunter — and nowadays when the rarity of so
many animals makes hunting seem a crime. Rattray had no reason to feel
guilty about reducing the game-population. He sustained excitement in the
hunt and triumph at the kill radiate from his hunting-photographs, as he
rests on the kudu or hippopotamus he has just shot, still looking like a
schoolboy. ‘There is a thrill that repetition never seems to dull’, he wrote
later, ‘about following the red-hot spoor of a bull elephant’.⁷ Elephant
was the greatest prize, not only because it was the largest but because of
the tusks, which were worth thirteen shillings a pound — though only two
animals (male) were allowed on one licence. He left only a photo as a
record of his first ‘jumbo’ (as he called them), but he wrote a little more
about the second. It was a few weeks after the first. Perete was ill and he
had to use another guide, a Cipeta who, compared to Perete, was almost a
dwarf. They were camped in the bush not far from Lilongwe and had
been out all day hunting, without much success. When they came into
camp they were told that elephant had been sighted twenty-five miles
away at ‘Chibundas’. They went straight off, walked all night by the light
of a full moon, and arrived at ‘Chibundas’ in the middle of the morning.
They found the trail, and eventually caught up with the group, one male
and a harem of females. Rattray dropped the bull with one shot behind the
eye (‘my favourite shot’, he called it) and it dropped to its knees against a
tree, looking as if it was kneeling to be mounted.

Rattray told John Scragg, who was his closest confidant on the Gold

Coast, that in Central Africa he had killed a male elephant by creeping up
on it and hamstringing it with a native axe. Although he seems not to have
told anyone else the story, I am inclined to believe it. Scragg is an entirely
reliable witness, and it was like Rattray to keep quiet about the most
sensational episodes in his life. Hamstringing an elephant with an axe is
the traditional form of initiation for Ngoni elephant-hunters. In his novel,
‘The Leopard Prestess’, for no very good reason Rattray made his hero
Opoku kill an elephant in this way. The description is good enough to
have been done from memory.

At last! staccato rumblings, gargantuan gurglings, ominous sounds

to the uninitiated, but in reality have no sinister import, and
betokening nothing more deadly than wind in a gigantic stomach.

7R.S. Rattray: 'My Last Tour' in Blackwood's Magazine Sept. 1932 p. 430.

An Old Coaster Comes Home

These sounds came from a dense thicket some fifteen paces from
where he crouched. He advanced nearer, until, through the dense
undergrowth, he caught a glimpse of yellow tusk. He . . . crept still
nearer, gripping his axe. Now, four paces away, he could see the
loose skin on its legs like baggy trousers, and its little tail twitching
just above his head. Now he could touch it. He swung his axe, once,
twice, lightning strokes, then it was jerked from his grasp and he
threw himself backwards, regaining his feet like a cat and flinging
himself headlong into the undergrowth, squirming through it for his
very life. What pandemonium! The stillness of the forest was rent
with terrible trumpetings, squealings, screams . . . Then all at once
silence, save for a faint sound like the blowing of a man who has lost
his wind, and the pattering of the rain. The elephant had recovered
its senses, and was now with a dreadful methodical calmness testing
the wind that it might scent out its tormentor .... Then it scented
Opoku . . . With a shrill squeal the elephant commenced its charge.
The next moment there was a great crash and the earth trembled
where Opoku lay; the elephant had fallen forward and rolled over
..... The elephant now saw its tormentor for the first time. Its ears
flapped forward like a tent about to be blown away in a tornado; it
staggered on its legs with mighty heaves and jerkings and raised its
feet one after another as if dancing, but seemed fearful to advance
them; it trumpeted and its little slits of eyes glared in bloodshot rage
..... Opoku ..... experienced a strange sense of possessing some magic
power by which he kept the elephant transfixed to one spot. At length
he seemed satisfied .....’⁸

Opoku finished the elephant off with a poisoned arrow. Rattray, one

supposes, used a gun.

He told another hunting story more freely, no doubt because it was

against himself. He had been hunting by himself throughout a very hot
day, and he came to a little pool. Answering the invitation, he took off his
clothes and started wallowing about in it. Then he lay on his back and
closed his eyes. When he opened them again, he saw that a family of lions
had come to the pool to drink. He floated, hoping they would not see him
and that they would go away soon. When they finished drinking, they lay
down and went to sleep. The day got cooler, night fell, and he could not

8R.S. Rattray, The Leopard Princess, 1935.

An Old Coaster Comes Home

see or hear whether the lions were still there. After several hours in the
now freezing water, he crept out of the pond on all fours. Luckily the
lions had gone, he was able to put on the clothes and find his way back to
the camp (he said) by instinct.

As time went by, he went on longer and longer expeditions into the

bush, carried by African porters in a ‘maquilla’ or palenquin; down to the
marshes by the Lake, with their fifteen to twenty foot high reeds — good
elephant country. Or into the highlands around to the south around
Dedza, where the temperature sometimes went down to six degrees below
freezing at night. Eventually he collected one hundred pounds worth of
ivory, not counting what he had sold to buy new licences, and trophies —
with some additions from West Africa — to fill the ‘Rattray Room’ in the
New York Natural History Museum.

Big-Game hunting was one way into the reality of African life.

Another was through a Scottish missionary, the Reverend Alexander
Hetherwick, who was in charge of the Church of Scotland mission at
Blantyre. He had played a leading part in the establishment of the British
protectorate ten years earlier. He was an intellectual with a bright career
as a scientist behind him at Aberdeen University, where his main interest,
apart from missionary work, was in African languages, and he had
written a paper on ‘Some Animistic Beliefs among the Yaos’ for the
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute. By the time Rattray met
him he was well into middle-age, working on his translation of the Bible
into Chinyanja. Rattray met him because recruits to the A.L.C. were sent
across to his ‘Manse’ for lessons in the language of the country where
they would be working. Hetherwick used it as a chance to put across his
ideas of what the Europeans should be doing in Central Africa: he was
worried by the growing tide of materialistic young adventurers like
Rattray.

When Rattray went through the doorway of the Manse, into

Hetherwick's study with its portraits of Dante, Tennyson, Kingsley and
(oddly) Newman, his heart must have sunk. Hetherwick must have
reminded him of the ‘dominies’ he had run away from at home.⁹ But

9This is how is biographer describes him in situ at Blantyre: ‘Within his study he sits, a

solitary white man, at a rough table on which lie piles of small slips of paper to which he
refers again and again. Round him are squatted half a dozen natives in garments of various
hue and odour with whom he is talking, asking them questions in turn, now referring to
his slips, now to the human figures before him, sometimes getting an answer, sometimes

An Old Coaster Comes Home

learning live languages in Africa was quite different from being taught
dead languages in Scotland. Hetherwick was a good teacher, and he soon
found that Rattray had an almost freakish ability to pick up spoken
languages. He was also delighted to find someone who responded to his
own curiosity about ‘the native mind’. Years later, after his retirement, he
told the students at Aberdeen the story of how he and Professor Henry
Drummond had staggered all day through the debilitating heat, following
an African porter with a full load who had sung and danced all the way.
Drummond had stopped and said desperately to Hetherwick: ‘I would give
all I possess to get inside that fellow for just half an hour.’¹⁰ That was
how Hetherwick felt himself, and he had the objectivity to realise that
someone like Rattray would have a better chance than a missionary with a
‘theological bias.’

Rattray on his side saw that he was being given the chance to make up

for his missing university education. If he was going to end up as H.M.
Commissioner, he would have to do more than sell chamber-pots.
Hetherwick taught him that the best way of learning a native language was
by collecting folk-stories and accounts of customs, and that the S.P.C.K.
was keen to publish text-books on all the languages which had not been
covered. There was another advantage in African languages: they had not
had time to develop the perversity of English spelling.

In camp on his hunting expeditions, at home in Lilongwe or in the new

house he built for himself at Dowa, he spent the evenings talking to his
Chinyanja guides and house-servants, writing up the story of the tortoise
and the antelope (the one in which the tortoise places his relatives at
intervals along the race-track so that the antelope thinks he has lost), or
getting his cook to clear up a point about the particles ka and dza. His
main source was the old paramount chief of the Dowa district,
Sakambewa, veteran of the days of Ngoni conquest who spoke only Ngoni
— a branch of Zulu. Sakambewa was the first of a series of old African
aristocrats who made Rattray feel he was being put in touch with a heroic
past, before things started to fall apart; as when Sakambewa described
how the Ngoni chiefs were sent to the next world:

meeting with silence, for the head of the questioned has sunk lower and lower till chin rests
on chest — the owner being overpowered by the noontide heat.’ (W.P Livingstone, A
Prince of Missionaries., 1931.

10Ibid. p. 29.

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