machin - Pages 61 thru 70

An Old Coaster Comes Home

field, kicking every black beggar I could see who was lying on (his) face
shooting at the moon.

It was quite warm in the corn, but heaven after the attention of a

machine gun all to one’s self.

I came back again to the Col., but all the blazing went on immediately

after, so I got permission to go out and take charge of ’em and round
’em up. As I went out the second time, I found the Col. Sergeant and our
machine gun lying in corn and got him to bring it along and as many
men as we could, and worked away to the enemy’s right till we came to
an old quarry. Here it (was) quite safe again. Here Capt. Potter and Lt.
Collins and Blakely joined us, and we determined to make a big detour
and try and come in on the enemy from the rear or flank. All my jumbo
bush lore came in well, Witch.⁴¹ I led ’em through a dense forest by a
big detour along a dry river bed, and Lt. Collins and I then (went) ahead
and scouted till we came in right behind the Germans, who were
entrenched in the village of the Chra. I climbed a big tree and looked
right down on ’em, but there was no cover and to open fire on ’em
would have been to be wiped out, so we moved along and eventually at
dark got a good position in a river bed on their right flanks.

Here we lay up for the night. About 10 p.m. the firing stopped and we

could hear hammering and tapping, and I said “I bet they are clearing
out.” About 4 a.m.[p.m. in M.S.] a German crept right up to us in the
dark (not having the least idea who we were) and shook Lt. Collins, who
was asleep beside a sentry. Collins woke up, when the German found his
mistake and fired at him, wounding him in the thigh. We gave him a
volley but he got away.

That was the last shot fired in this war.

In the night they evacuated the trenches, and 4 days later surrendered.

I’ve lots more I could tell you, but I can’t now, Witch.

Lt. McPherson, whose sister you met in Cairo, was grazed in the

cheek. Lt. Thompson was caught full by the machine gun and literally
riddled. A French officer killed, and about 60 more killed and wounded,

41Or Alternatively: ‘All my jumbo bush lore came in. Well, Witch.

An Old Coaster Comes Home

so it was quite a decent show — considering our numbers engaged.
Well, Witch, I can just manage to live now and show my face.

Everyone congratulated me and lots say I should get a D.S.O., but,

Witch, I’m not a regular soldier and little jealousies exist, though Col.
B(ryant) himself is one of the best. Anyhow, I got a letter from the
Chief Intelligence Officer in whose staff I worked, and he says — I
quote verbatim — “I cannot tell you how invaluable you were to me as
Intelligence Officer, and the force could never have got on as well as it
did without you .... Lt. Col. Rose is perfectly aware of the use you have
been in actually seizing this country, so he will agree that you be one of
the first selected for its administration, .... etc. etc.”

I had a private letter from the Officer Commanding today, saying I

would probably be appointed P.O. of Misahoe, and if so, Connie could
join me.

I hate the d- country, though.

I am at present administering the district between Chra and Davis (?)

under martial law. Very dull now and very fed up. I have my private
telephone and ... [illegible]

The Col. sent you a cable when it was all over. Did ye guess the twin⁴²

was in it a little bit?

The French were fighting with us, so we’ll get two medals for the

show, the Eng. and French.

I don’t know if I’m in despatches. Someone who saw ’em said I was. if

I am, send my new photo up, Witch — “judicious self-advertisement”!!!
Don’t say anything, though, till I make sure I am.

Goodbye, twin dear. I’m restless and would give worlds to be home,

but now I can just have a right to show my face, can’t I?

Connie is in Coomassie, staying with the Officer Commanding and his

wife, and they like her awfully. She nearly kept me from going on the
show. I’d have hated her forever if she had. I would be off now to the
Cameroons, but I can’t leave her any longer with the O.C., however
decent he is.

42I.e. Rattray.

An Old Coaster Comes Home

Love to the .... [illegible] and Fan.

I’m loaded with trophies: German eagles (flags), an officer’s sword,

beautiful automatic pistols, etc. etc.

I have something for you too, darling. I have the wee bit of sweet pea

you gave me the evening I left you to catch the train in the side-car. I’ll
always remember that. I just loved it. Good-bye, dear wee Boo. Guid
luck to ye.

Yes, you must go to the front as a nurse or I’ll be shamed of ye.

Love to dear old (?) Uncle,

Bobby and squaw

[added in pencil]: I’m fit. Was a haggard wreck when it ended —

sleeping out soaked, — but O.K. now.

So it was that Rattray became, according to his own account, the first

British soldier to fire a shot ‘in anger’ in the First World War, and in the
episode of the ‘unconditional surrender’, responsible for what was
probably the first breach of the Geneva Convention on our side. There was
a characteristic postscript to the first engagement with the train, which a
telephone engineer, J.A. Symonds on his way to Misahoe a month later, to
fit the Rattrays’ bungalow with a telephone, passed the site of the battle and
the grave of Captain Phäler, the German officer who had been killed and
buried by Rattray and another British officer. Symonds copied down the
following epitaph which he saw on Phäler’s grave:

The end must come, and what better fate

Than to fall by the gun, be laid so straight.

So Hoch! to Herr Phaeler, who put up a show

And a d...d good scrap at Agbeluhoe.

An Old Coaster Comes Home

(A good machine-gun and man behind it)

R.S.R. Sept 5th 43

It is the first, and not I am afraid the worst, surviving example of

Rattray’s verse.

After the Togo campaign, which lasted slightly less than a fortnight, the

rest of the war, so far as Rattray was concerned, was an anticlimax. He
wanted desperately to move on to the next scene of action, which was the
Cameroons, but nothing would persuade the government to let him go.
They had just acquired a new territory the size of one of the existing
divisions of the Gold Coast (the other half of Togoland having gone to the
French), and were unlikely to be given any new civilian staff to run it. So
while he received postcards from army friends in the Cameroons, telling
of a much rougher and less boy-scoutish campaign, he was stuck in his
bungalow at Misahoe, exchanging polite visits with his French equivalent
just over the border and trying to make something of a life with his new
bride.

Not that Misahoe is as bleak as he made it out to be. It is in one of the

most glamorous parts of the country, surrounded by steep wooded hills
hiding waterfalls and rocky creeks. Its climate is often cool enough to suit
any European. Physically, it was as suitable a place as anywhere for Connie
to acclimatise. Their bungalow was perched on one of the hills, a clean,
roomy building, newly built, surrounded by flowering shrubs and a well-
kept lawn. There were, of course, plenty of servants. Socially, it was less
exciting. Apart from the French resident and his wife, and a few Germans,
they had to rely on occasional visitors for European company. But perhaps
the worst feature, from Rattray’s point of view, was that it was outside
Ashanti territory. It is significant that he never learned any of the forms of
Ewe, and the only works he produced while in Togoland were an
archaeological article for the Journal of the Royal Anthropological

43J.E. Symonds: Gold Coast Diaries 1909-24, Rhodes House MSS Afr.

An Old Coaster Comes Home

Institute on ‘The Iron Workers of Akpafu’,⁴⁴ and a revision of his 1912
Mole handbook. Instead, he concentrated his energies on work for the Bar
exams and on trying to get into the War.

He fulfilled his duties as a D.C. conscientiously but without enthusiasm.

He seems to have got on well with the locals, especially a Chief Dagadu of
Kpandu, who was responsible for his getting into the papers again. Chief
Dagadu had long been a British supporter, and had been exiled to Douala
(in the Cameroons) at the beginning of the War. After the Cameroon
campaign, the British brought him back to Kpandu, and in gratitude he
collected £100 2s. 3d. from his people, on his own initiative, towards the
National Relief Fund. ‘It was my willing’, he said, ‘to give more than what
I had done above, but on account of the Germans, and owing to their bad
treatment giving, most of my village youngmen have removed from this
land and entered into another Colony for their daily bread; and also land is
very poor to say. May God the Almighty bless the great Britain to master
the victory. I congratulate the local and the Imperial Government, and the
District Political Officer, Mr. R.S. Rattray, who is treating us here very
well and gentle; may he live long.’ Needless to say, the British papers were
happy to print the story.

There were no dangerous tensions, so far as one can gather, in the

Rattray marriage at this stage. When, over twenty years later, he described
Mrs. Allen in Missie-Anna as, on the whole, ‘a capable and efficient help-
mate, an attractive mistress and a wonderfully good manageress of his
household’, there is no reason to think that he was not taking Connie as his
model. But they were hardly given a chance to ‘make a life together’. His
leave came up in August of 1915. He spent it preparing for the Bar exams
in Roman Law in December, trying again to get into active service, and
learning to fly. Learning to fly was part of the campaign to see active
service. His brother had just been taken on by the Royal Flying Corps, and
he thought he might be able to join him if he got a certificate, so he signed
on at the Hall School, Hendon. On 13th December he sat for the Roman
Law exam, which he passed in the 3rd Class; and on the next day he took
his Royal Aero Club certificate, (this being described in the magazine
Flight as a ‘very good certificate’).

But it was already too late for his plans for joining up. He had already

got a letter from Downing Street in October, telling him that Sir Hugh
Clifford could not spare him, either for service with the R.F.C. or in the

44Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Vol.XLVI (1916), pp.431-5.

An Old Coaster Comes Home

Cameroons. What was worse, it was now considered undesirably for wives
to go out to the African Colonies with their husbands, because of the War,
and especially the threat of U-boat action on the way. He embarked on a
long correspondence with the Colonial Office about it, but they were
intransigent. It was little compensation that he was now, finally, appointed
a full D.C.

There is nowhere like the remoted inland areas of an African country

for making you feel that the world is passing you by. With Connie at
home, and even the minor excitements of ‘pacifying’ a new territory
having subsided by now, he had to try and interest himself in surveying the
new boundary between British and French territory. His paper on ‘The
Iron Workers of Akpafu’ is one of his drier pieces, but it contains a cri de
coeur about his normal day’s work:

‘The time at the writer’s disposal was brief, and these researches

were sandwiched in at the end of long days of tramping over hills and
valleys in the thankless task of demarcating a long and bitterly contested
boundary. Land disputes are the bugbear of all officials in these parts,
where real property is generally no man’s land till some native, more
astute than his neighbour, sees in the mountains and valleys potential
agricultural wealth, and straightway produces his title deeds, generally
in the form of a tradition that would strive to prove that his remote
progenitors were seized in the fee simple by the creator, who, possibly
in the form of a great spider, then walked the earth.’45

It has the wary sarcasm typical of fever-ridden D.C.s in remote areas,

and untypical of Rattray. The part about the great spider is even inaccurate
— imported from Ashanti theology and applied to the Ewe, whose beliefs
he could not rouse himself to investigate.

The Ashanti Proverbs came out in 1916, its publication delayed by the

War. It was well enough received in the learned journals, but not much
space was given to the reviews. In the Gold Coast, attention was
concentrated on keeping the country working with many of the officers

45Ibid. p.431

An Old Coaster Comes Home

away on active service, rather than extending the Europeans’ knowledge of
native psychology.

When he came back on leave in 1915, one of the officials at the Colonial

Office described him as ‘a fine example of a courageous spirit in a weak
body.... a small bag of bones weighing barely 8 stone.’⁴⁶ Perhaps it was his
physical condition as well as his state of mind which in the next few years
made him lose interest in administration, and even in anthropology. From
this time, even those superior officers who had thought most highly of him
began to sound critical. ‘Wants ballast’, Phillbrick said in his annual report
for 1916. ‘I had expected he would have shown great keenness to explore
an interesting district’, Harper said, ‘but found he was hard to move from
his headquarters: eventually he did some travelling in a Ford lorry.’ And
Governor Clifford: ‘Mr Rattray is so busy dressing the shop-window,
looking at himself in an imaginary mirror and trying by hook or by crook
to attract attention to himself and to his great deeds and qualities that he is
apt to neglect the dull, daily drudging work which is the warp and woof
from which good administrative work is woven by a District Officer.’
Major H.W. Leigh, Officer Commanding British Togoland, was kinder. He
pointed out that Rattray, with one clerk and half-a-dozen police, was doing
work which under the German regime kept 6 Europeans, 76 police and 9
clerks employed; though, as Harper said in reply, it was much easier to
make the natives carry out instructions under martial law. And even Leigh
added, a little wryly, that Rattray ‘has a good opinion of his attainments
and plenty of self-confidence.’ He had become a problem.

The problem became a crisis when Major E.D.O. Rew took over from

Leigh in 1917 as Officer Commanding. He was just the sort of stolid
military man Rattray most despised, and almost the first thing he did was
to put in a military officer as District Officer over Rattray’s head. He felt
that Rattray had allowed the natives to misbehave. Then, in the Spring of
1919, he heard a rumour that Rattray had dishonestly disposed of a stock
of firearms which had been confiscated from the Germans. It took Rattray
half a year to prove his innocence, by which time he had had six months’
promotion docked. On leave in England (the first weeks spent, as usual, in
hospital), he was told that finally his name was cleared and the promotion
restored. Rattray, of course, insisted that he be sent back to Togoland, but
since that would hardly be possible without getting rid of Rew, the
Government declined.

46Foreign Office file: the source also of the reports which follow.

An Old Coaster Comes Home

A year earlier, he had sent the longest and most pressing of all his letters

to the Colonial Office begging for promotion, ending ‘in the same period
under review I have passed all the tests for an air pilot and have shot 16
elephants .... I am prepared to go anywhere and do anything.’ But he was
still 25th in the list of Class 2 political officers ‘of which seven or eight are
distinctly more efficient, while of the remaining 15 or 16 only a very few
are so inefficient that they should be passed over in favour of Rattray.’ In
the end, they found a solution which they half-knew at the time would be
unsatisfactory. On the strength of this new status as a barrister (he had
been called to the Bar in 1918), he was appointed Senior Assistant Colonial
Secretary and Clerk to the Legislative Council in Accra. In this way, the
Rattray’s arrived in Accra at the same time as the new Governor, Sir Hugh
Clifford’s successor on his retirement, Sir Gordon Guggisberg.

An Old Coaster Comes Home

Chapter 6. Government Anthropologist

The arrival of Sir Gordon Guggisberg as Governor in October 1919

used to be regarded as the beginning of a golden age in the Gold Coast.
This was rather unfair to Clifford, who shepherded the country through
the War and laid the foundation of many of the developments which
Guggisberg carried through and even more to the Gold Coasters — the
Ashanti cocoa farmers in particular — who gave Guggisberg a gigantic
revenue surplus to spend on his enlightened experiments. But certainly
there was a feeling amongst colonial officers, if not amongst the natives,
from the moment Guggisberg clambered off the boat in Accra harbour,
that things were moving forward.

For one thing, Guggisberg looked like a successful governor. One of the

least qualified men in fact, in orthodox terms, ever to be given charge of a
colony, he was a film-maker’s model of a viceroy: tall, aquiline, athletic,
with an air of command and the easy manners of an aristocrat (which he
was not). He was exactly the kind of governor which, in his fantasy,
Rattray felt he should have been himself. Under the circumstances, it is
natural that Rattray never felt warmly towards him. He had got on well
with Clifford because Clifford regarded him as rather a young dog,
interested in the same things which had interested himself as a young man.
But Guggisberg was high-minded, unintellectual and not at all attracted to
‘young dogs’ — especially if they were approaching forty.

An Old Coaster Comes Home

Everyone, including Rattray, soon realised that his appointment to the

secretariat was a mistake. If he was not everything that could be desired as
a District Commissioner, he was even less suited to the Secretariat. It
meant working almost exclusively with other colonial officials, who
disliked his individualism and his irreverent attitude towards higher
officialdom, and indeed towards government itself. It meant paperwork, in
stuffy offices and law-courts. It meant dealing with educated or semi-
educated Africans who he (like most of his British contemporaries) felt had
picked up the vices of European culture while losing the virtues of their
own. Perhaps worst of all, it meant becoming a part of Accra social life;
dropping in at the club and playing tennis with the same officials who had
exasperated him (and he them) during the day.

Connie, on the other hand, found Accra a great improvement on

Misahoe. She was as popular as any reasonably attractive woman could
expect to be with so few rivals. She liked the tennis, the bridge and mah-
jong parties and receptions at the Castle. Lady Guggisberg, to her credit,
did all she could to open up Accra socially. She was appalled at the
apartheid which existed, not only between black and white but, in a
European population of four hundred, also between ‘1st class’ and ‘2nd
class’ Europeans (i.e. the officer/commissioner class and technicians and
traders), and cleverly broke it down, as far as the women were concerned,
by allowing the ‘2nd class’ club to invite ‘1st class’ women to their ‘do’s’,
writing on the invitations: ‘Lady Guggisberg has kindly agreed to be
present’, and then declining to ask the ‘1st class’ ladies who refused to her
own ‘do’s’ at the Castle. She also encouraged English women to join
African women as Red Cross health visitors, weighing babies and advising
on diet, to break down the other apartheid. Connie fitted in well with all
this activity.

But Connie had her greatest success at the mixed tennis parties and the

dances, and this inevitably roused Rattray’s lightly-sleeping jealousy. It is
impossible, at this distance, to know the true story. A jealous man is easily
teased. Several (male) members of Accra society felt resentful enough of
his ‘judicious self-advertisement’ to want to provoke him, and Rattray
could be provoked by somebody asking Connie too many times for a waltz
— as one Irish doctor in particular made a habit of doing. It was made
worse by the fact that he did not enjoy dances in the first place.

From this time, he began to suspect that Connie either had been or might

be unfaithful, and it made life in Accra intolerable for him. Luckily, he
was not asked to stay on in Accra. Unknown to him, the Chief
Commissioner of Ashanti, Charles Harper (Sir Charles Harper, as he later

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