The Colonial Office and Nigeria, 1898-1914

John M. Carland

• Publisher: Hoover Institution Press
• Year: 1985
• eBook ISBN: 9780817981433
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: African History
• Index: History

A study in the relationship between one department of the Colonial Office and the colonies in which it had responsibility.

1

The Colonial Office and Nigeria, 1898-1914

To fully explain what the Colonial Office did for Nigeria it is necessary to know both the workers and the context of their work. Therefore this chapter describes and explains the Colonial Office its organisation, its purpose, and its procedures - and its personnel. This chapter also points out the similarity of the Colonial Office to other Whitehall departments, and emphasises the fact that the Upper Division clerks at the Colonial Office who handled Nigerian business were typical of Upper Division clerks throughout the Civil Service.¹ Once this is made clear, it is equally clear that Colonial Office officials operated essentially according to an administrative ethos, though their work was on imperial affairs.

OFFICE ORGANISATION AND WORK PROCEDURES AT THE COLONIAL OFFICE

The work of the Colonial Office was based on the written word - correspondence to and from colonial governors, other government offices, non-governmental organisations, and individuals. Thus the bulk of the work came from 'a despatch, a petition, a complaint, a request for instructions, or a communication'.² In as much as the Colonial Office's clerks, i.e. permanent officials, had any contact with the public, it was with those belonging to their natural constituencies - financial, commercial, scientific, and humanitarian organisations that had a specific interest in some part of the Empire. Members of these groups formed deputations that frequently met with the Secretary of State to make representations on some aspect of colonial policy. On a more informal basis, representatives of these groups might regularly visit and confer with permanent officials or the responsible Assistant Under Secretary. But outside of these occasions the permanent officials saw more paper in the Colonial Office than people.

The basic administrative unit in the Colonial Office was the Department, composed of four Upper Division clerks: the Head of the Department, a Senior and two Junior Clerks. The Department head was always a Principal Clerk. Senior and Junior Clerks were also known as, respectively, First Class and Second Class Clerks. With the exception of a General Department, the departments were organised geographically. Thus the business of the colonies and protectorates of Lagos, Southern Nigeria, and Northern Nigeria was handled by the Nigeria Department.^* It was set up in 1898 in anticipation of the Colonial Office taking over from the Foreign Office the Niger Coast Protectorate and the Royal Niger Company's territory. These territories would become Southern Nigeria and Northern Nigeria in 1900. (Lagos had been under the Colonial Office since 1861.) The Colonial Office Permanent Under Secretary and the Assistant Under Secretary in charge of West African business supervised the Nigeria Department. These officials, as a group, were charged with the 'consultative and deliberative' (i.e. the policy-advising and intellectual) work of the Office.³ Above them was the political head of the Colonial Office, the Secretary of State for the Colonies, and his Parliamentary Under Secretary of State (who existed outside the functional administrative chain). The mechanical work of the Office - filing, registering, copying, and typing - were done by Lower, or Second, Division clerks who were separated from the first division by an 'impassable gulf.⁴

What was expected of the members of a Department? Junior Clerks were required to ensure that all relevant papers were attached to a file under consideration.⁵ They were also permitted - and this was the intellectual attraction of the job - to read, research, and minute despatches and letters, and to draft replies. However, this aspect of the system did not meet with universal approbation. In 1888 Sir Robert Herbert, Permanent Under Secretary at the Colonial Office, suggested that Junior Clerks had abused this privilege by minuting 'too much'. He reluctantly admitted, however, that they did good work even though it was 'excessively laboured, as in India'.⁶ In 1912 a member of the Royal Commission on the Civil Service asked Sir John Anderson, then Permanent Under Secretary at the Colonial Office: 'Is a young man of 23 who comes fresh from the university, who has never had any work to do, and no business experience whatever, competent at once to advise the secretary of state on matters of policy?' Anderson: 'He is allowed to try.' The questioner followed this up by asking, 'That may account then for some of the official answers which we get in the House of Commons sometimes?' Anderson: 'Possibly.'⁷ In fact, Junior Clerks substantively minuted only two sorts of files: those which could be disposed of departmentally and those which were in their area of expertise.⁸

^* For the sake of convenience, the term 'Nigeria Department' will be used throughout this book, although it was not in use at the Colonial Office until 1918. One may construct the complete story of the Nigeria Department's organisational development by consulting the Colonial Office List, an annual publication, for the years 1898 to 1918.

All work done by Junior Clerks was seen by the Senior or Principal Clerk. The Senior Clerk in a Department was more experienced, but his routine duties might differ little from those of the Junior Clerks he supervised.⁹ He could, however, dispose of certain matters without reference to the Principal Clerk, in whose absence he acted as Head of Department. The Principal Clerk, as Head of the Department, had absolute discretion.¹⁰ It was of course understood that he would send on to his superiors files that involved important questions of principle or policy, as well as any files he thought the Assistant Under Secretary ought to see.11

The Assistant Under Secretary and Permanent Under Secretary, both appointed by the Secretary of State, were officials who, in the Treasury's words:

must always be present as responsible advisers and executive officers of the parliamentary chiefs, and . . . become more and more necessary as the growth of the country and the increasing demands of legislation add to the duties of the Ministers.¹²

In 1898 there were four Assistant Under Secretaries - after 1911, two.¹³ Individual Assistant Under Secretaries minuted files concerning matters beyond the official competence of Department Heads, and were responsible for securing 'uniformity of policy and continuity of procedure'.¹⁴ Their experience enabled them to form 'an intimate knowledge of the secretary of state's policy' and to 'anticipate' his decisions.¹⁵ They were crucial to the decision-making process, in part because they were the highest administrative officials who still had intimate knowledge of a specific geographical area.

The Permanent Under Secretary was the highest non-political official at the Colonial Office. His special function, said Lord Crewe, was to 'advise and inform' the Secretary of State on matters of policy.¹⁶ As administrative head of the Office he was also responsible for the smooth running of the Colonial Office. Personal conferences were important adjuncts to his work. For example, in 1906 Lord Elgin noted that Permanent Under Secretary Sir Montagu Ommanney could come freely and frequently into his office; Elgin was convinced that this helped the work get done.¹⁷ Although personalities, outside events, and other factors influenced the Secretary of State in his decision-making, the Permanent Under Secretary's institutional position dictated that the Secretary of State turn to him for advice on colonial policy. The Permanent Under Secretary was also expected to negotiate for his department in government circles, and, within the Colonial Office, to 'compose matters of difference which naturally arise between co-equal heads of departments'¹⁸ as well as between the Secretary of State and his Assistant Under Secretaries.¹⁹

A typical work-day at the Colonial Office in the late nineteenth century would start at 11 a.m. At that time at least one Upper Division Junior Clerk was expected to be in attendance in each department. He usually had nothing to do in the morning, but business picked up later in the day and gene...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Acknowledgements
• List of Tables
• List of Maps
• Cast of Characters
• Introduction
• 1: The Colonial Office and Nigeria, 1898-1914
• 2: Crown Colony Government in Nigeria, 1897-1914
• 3: Public Expenditure and Development in Southern Nigeria, 1900-12
• 4: Budgetary Conflict over Revenue Estimates in Northern Nigeria, 1899-1913
• 5: The Creation of the Lagos Railway, 1895-1911
• 6: The Creation of the Baro-Kano Railway, 1897-1911
• 7: The Search for Petroleum in Southern Nigeria, 1906-14
• Conclusion
• Notes and References
• Bibliography
• Index