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Catching Them Young vol.2

Political Ideas in Children's Fiction

Bob Dixon

Chapter 3.  Empire Follows the Flag

References and Notes for Chapter 3

British colonialism is, typically, capitalism exported. The use of the words `colony' and `colonise' in English, date from the period when capitalism was taking over from feudalism, that is, mainly in the second half of the sixteenth century and the first half of the seventeenth. Before then, and even during this time, the word `plantation' was in use for the settlement abroad of a group of people from Britain. It gradually gave way, used in this sense, to `colony' and, as colonies were collected, the empire came into being. It's the development of a whole tradition of children's literature which grew out of this that I now wish to examine. Connections with other aspects of this study, particularly with those dealing with class, racism, sex stereotypes and religious and moral teaching will be obvious at almost every point while there's a special sense in which the ideology of empire can be seen as the public school ethos carried overseas. So, first we have colonial exploitation and then its ideological `justification'.

Before literature aimed especially at children began to be written in any quantity - towards the middle of the eighteenth century - they had to make do with what they could find to their taste from literature written for adults. (We shouldn't forget that most children couldn't read, anyway, in those days.)

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One of the first of such books, which they took over for themselves, happens to be a blue-print for colonisation. It's Defoe's The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe. Of course, it isn't hard to see the attractions such a work had, and still has, for children - with their desire for privacy, their love of hideouts and their wish to organise and control their lives - especially when all this is told with Defoe's careful attention to the most minute details. In fact, such is the strength of this aspect of the book that we are apt to forget its whole framework, and equally, perhaps, the class of children - the aspiring bourgeoisie - to whom it first made its appeal. The first part was published in 1719

About half-way through, there's a typical insight into the way Crusoe thinks : `how like a king I looked. First of all, the whole country was my own mere property, so that I had an undoubted right of dominion. Secondly, my people were perfectly subjected - I was absolute Lord and lawgiver.'

At this point, of his `three subjects', Friday has already been converted to Protestantism, his social and cultural destruction having been begun by Crusoe with no loss of time. Friday was renamed and Crusoe was to be known as `Master'. The instruction of Friday in English language and customs is soon started. He's clothed, trained as a gun-dog and cured of cannibalism. Crusoe begins to instruct him in `the knowledge of the true God' although it's clear that Friday already has a religion, his god being 'Benamuckee' and his priests the 'Oowookakee'. Defoe's cheap disparagement here needs no further comment. However, it's amusing to note how sorely tried Crusoe is by some of Friday's innocent questions about Christianity.

Crusoe sets up the rescued Spaniard as the overseer of Friday and his father in the cutting down of trees to make a boat. Later, Friday, having no option on whether to join his `nation' or even stay with his father, whom he loves, goes to England with Crusoe.

Then, great details are given of the finances of Crusoe's plantation in Brazil. Finally, he sells it and is rich, now referring to the island as `my colony'. Certainly, he's come a long way

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from his first exploration of the island as `King and lord' with `a right of possession' and his later development of `plantations' and a `country seat'.

Now, we can turn to look at racism, a constant and, I'd think, inevitable feature of empire-building, since it seems im

possible to subject people to an alien rule without believing in their inferiority. We have it in Robinson Crusoe, at the begin

ning of the literary tradition. After the cannibals have visited the island, Crusoe resolves `to get one of those savages into [his]

hands' as a `servant' to help him, Crusoe, to escape. Before, when a large and obviously white man's ship had been wrecked on the island, Crusoe had longed for a `companion' and `fellow creature' but the idea of a `servant' had not struck him.

His chance comes. He rescues Friday, being `called plainly by Providence to save this poor creature's life' and Friday gradually approaches him. Then, we read `he kneeled down again, kissed the ground, and laid his head upon the ground, and, taking me by the foot, set my foot upon his head : this, it seems, was in token of swearing to be my slave for ever.'

There are degrees in racism in British literature, other races becoming more acceptable in so far as they approach the north-west European type. In the first book of empire, Friday `had all the sweetness and softness of an European in his countenance ... especially when he smiled. His hair was long and black, not curled like wool ... his nose small, not flat like the Negroes; a very good mouth, thin lips.' Finally, as far as Friday's concerned, this devoted servant, who'd been reduced to a mere extension of the will of his master, is killed carrying out Crusoe's wishes. (See illustration.)

I've already mentioned a religious streak in Robinson Crusoe. It continues, in strong measure, throughout the book and almost throughout the tradition. Crusoe's first thought after seeing, and being revolted by, the remains of the cannibal feast has a Pharisaical tone about it :`I looked up with the utmost affection of my soul, and, with a flood of tears in my eyes, gave God thanks, that had cast my first lot in a part of the world where I was distinguished from such dreadful creatures

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as these.' Crusoe has several religious debates with himself as to whether it's right to kill cannibals. However, when they are about to eat a white man, the matter is decided at once - a fine blend of religion and racism.

Killing, in fact, is an important and clearly unavoidable part of the tradition and, towards the end of the edition I'm using, which includes The Further Adventures of Robinson

 

Crusoe, the killing increases. In a type of scene which will be repeated again and again, enormous slaughter is carried out between rival groups of `savages' and, later still, terrible havoc is wreaked upon the Madagascans when the trouble had been originally started by an English sailor. Crusoe professes horror at the massacre but we are treated to a description of it nevertheless, a type of hypocrisy, or of having it both ways, which, again, is common to this type of literature. Violence and sadism of all kinds, as a matter of fact, are rife in imperialist literature for children and usually it's cloaked in religion, racism, or patriotism, or combinations of these.

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Slavery plays a big part in the book. Robinson Crusoe, very early in his adventures, is, as he puts it, a `miserable slave', kept by a Turkish ship's captain. However, he's by no means ill-used and the experience doesn't prevent him, very soon after his escape, from setting up as a plantation-owner (which meant, in effect, the same thing as a slave-owner) in Brazil :`the first thing I did,' he tells us, `I bought me a negro slave' and, very soon, `for trifles', he buys blacks from the Guinea coast `in great numbers'.

For the most part, women don't appear at all in imperialist literature. It's a man's world - that is, if you consider murder, brutality, enslavement and the collecting of as much wealth as possible as quickly as possible to be manly attributes. Women can't be kept out entirely, however, and apart from that, the views that emerge about them, whether consciously or unconsciously held, are very interesting. Towards the end of Robinson Crusoe's adventures, the five Englishmen who have become part of his ever-growing `colony' draw lots to choose five native wives. The women don't have a say in the matter. On Crusoe's return to the island, arrangements are made for the Christian marriage of these couples and for the Christianising of the wives (as well as of the 37 subjected `heathens' on the island). Fortunately, a priest happens to be around. Obviously, racism enters into the proceedings here but white women fare little better. `For my Spaniards' Crusoe tells us a little later `I engaged three Portugal women to go; and recommended it to them to marry them, and use them kindly. I could have procured more women,' he goes on, but `there were but five of the Spaniards that wanted' and he remembers that a Brazilian planter, fleeing to the island from the Inquisition, has two daughters. No doubt they'll do.

So almost all of the main elements of the tradition are here, in Robinson Crusoe, at the beginning. It remains for us, now, to see what different forms they take as the years go by and the empire grows.

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We can see the way things were going in a speech made by Burke on 22 March 1775 in the year of the outbreak of the American War of Independence :

Magnanimity in politics is not seldom the truest wisdom; and a great empire and little minds go ill together. We ought to elevate our minds to the greatness of that trust to which the order of Providence has called us. By adverting to the dignity of this high calling, our ancestors have turned a savage wilderness into a glorious empire; and have made the most extensive, and the only honourable conquests; not by destroying, but by promoting, the wealth, the number and happiness of the human race.'

This mixture of self-righteousness and lies, or parts of it, we'll see taken up again and again in the years that follow

Robinson Crusoe was so popular and gave rise to so many similar works that the Germans invented a name for the genre - Robinsonaden. The next work we have to consider is one of these and brings us to the nineteenth century and the heyday of the imperial tradition in children's literature. Frederick Marryat, requested by his children to write something on the lines of The Swiss Family Robinson, couldn't bring himself to commit the gross improbabilities he found in the popular Swiss book, and considered that the author of a work of fiction for children `should be particular in what may appear to be trifles, but which really are not, when it is remembered how strong the impressions are upon the juvenile mind[2] Again, as with Robinson Crusoe, Masterman Ready shows, in little, the features of colonialism. Particularly noticeable here is the glamorised hierarchical theme where `inferiors' are ready to risk, or give, their lives for supposed `superiors' out of devotion. In Masterman Ready, the ship-wrecked Seagrove family already have Juno, a black nurse, with them and, fulfilling what will become an increasingly familiar role, she risks her life to save their baby during a gale. Much later in the book, there's an overlap with the class system when Masterman Ready risks

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being eaten by sharks, to save Tommy, another of the Seagroves' children, who's adrift in a boat. Towards the end, when the Seagroves with their servants, black and white, are besieged within their stockade by `savages', he risks his life again to bring water and dies from spear-wounds.

As in Robinson Crusoe, a racial hierarchy is assumed without question. Seagrove describes the natives of Van Diemen's _{_}Land and Australia as `little better than the beasts of the field' and goes on :`I believe them to be the lowest in the scale of all the human race.' Ready, however, says that the natives of the Andaman Islands are even lower and that they are supposed to be descended from negroes.

The unconscious irony of the story is that `Ready', as he's called by the Seagroves, being an old seaman who's had to work his way in the world, knows everything necessary for survival on a tropical island. Without him, and without Juno, the Seagroves would have been helpless. Ready is the man of real worth. However, the usual social hierarchy is observed, even on the island, and Ready calls the Seagroves' two boys, `Master'. It's interesting to note, however, that Ready is called 'Massa' by Juno to whom everyone is 'Massa' or `Missy' as appropriate. Revealing terms like this are transposed to other languages, so, throughout the genre, we have, for instance: `bwana' (Swahili for `master'); 'tuan' (Malay for `lord'); and sahib (Urdu for `sir'). Juno, like Friday, left home and family to serve her `superiors'.

The religious element is very strong in Masterman Ready, most chapters ending with a prayer, or thanks to God. The greater the danger they've been in, the more fervent the thanks, again a very common attitude and one which always strikes me as being odd. The old, and original, sin rears its head in the words of Ready :`The heart is deceitful and desperately wicked' while later, he tells us that in this world we are to live so as to prepare ourselves for another. Both views are convenient when held by the lower classes.

Marryat's views about colonies and empires (presumably expressed through Seagrove) are very interesting and they

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certainly prevail to the present day. Seagrove draws an analogy between a child and its mother and a colony and the mothercountry. William Seagrove is told by his father that there's no reason why the 'negroes' of Africa, which at that time, we learn, was populated by `barbarians and savages' may not one day become `a great nation'. The Romans, Seagrove says, might well have regarded the British in the same way. Here we have an early statement of the cyclical view of history - nations rise and fall, empires come and go - a view comforting to those who don't wish to do anything about improving the lot of humankind. In a later, very unusual, and, I think, insufficiently known Robinsonade which was actually finished by Marryat's son after his death - The Little Savage - we have a really amazing description of the colonisation of North and South America. A great difference is drawn between the Spanish and English approaches, the former practising unutterable cruelties upon a peaceful people and the latter purchasing land from `savages' of `a barbarous race' until the `savages' became `jealous'. Then their land was taken from them, as the settlers `required more land'. A panegyric upon the British Empire follows ending with, `the sun never sets upon this immense empire'. It's about time we realised that, for its subjects, the sun never rose, either. We now leave Marryat with a last, ironical comment from Ready: `A savage is a savage, and, like a child, wishes to obtain whatever he sees' - unlike the colony-grabbers, of course ! We'll return to these Robinsonades, or a variety of them, in a more modern, political context.

W.H.G.Kingston comes next and the full, blooming tradition. He wrote more than one hundred and fifty adventure stories for boys and even a consideration of the titles of some of his literary work can give us a good idea of what he was about. He edited periodicals such as The Colonist, The Colonial

Magazine and East India Review and The Union Jack. Here are a few of the titles of his books : The Frontier Fort: or, Stirring Times in the Northwest Territory of British America; The Grateful Indian: A Tale of Rupert's Land; Half-hours with the Kings and Queens o f England; In the Wilds o f Africa:

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A Tale for Boys; Norman Vallery: or How to Overcome Evil with Good; and True Blue: or the life and adventures of a British Seaman of the Old School. Many of his books were published by the Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge.

He was a member of the committee of the Society for Promoting Colonisation, the main aim of which - quite frankly expressed - was to relieve unemployment at home. We have a neat summary of his views on colonisation in his public lecture on the subject at Halstead, Essex, on 1 January 1849. The local branch of the Society had the speech printed :

As far as it is permitted to man to comprehend the decrees of the Almighty, we have reason to believe that to the Anglo-Saxon race has been awarded the office of peopling the yet uninhabited portions of the globe, of spreading the arts of civilisation, and more than all, of promulgating the true faith of Christ among the lands of the heathen. We must accept it as a high and noble privilege, but at the same time we must feel with awe-stricken minds, the deep responsibility entailed on us.^[3]

After quoting Dr Arnold, he goes on to say that, if the government exerts itself `we may so hope to thin our numbers that every honest man may find what the Chartist leaders would endeavour to persuade their misguided followers their Charter would give them - "a fair day's wages for a fair day's labour." ' He then takes the major areas of colonisation in turn, explaining their suitability and the attitudes of the natives or `aboriginal inhabitants'. It doesn't seem to be made quite clear whether these people actually live in the `uninhabited portions' or not.

The new element, though, is the link with events at home. Here's a move on the part of the British upper classes to export their social problems to the colonies. Transportation, of course, was the extreme measure - and the logical conclusion.

As far as his fiction goes, and anyone might well include in this the lecture quoted above, we are left with only Peter the

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Whaler in print. Slaughter we've had already, both in Defoe and Marryat. Here, it's of animals other than human and the very noticeable joy in killing is a rather new feature, along with a rather uneasy awareness of the moral censure it might provoke. Kingston makes excuses to avoid this. Later, the very important strand of an interest in natural history is developed through In the Wilds of Africa: A Tale for Boys: `"Ah, that fellow is the fishing-eagle of Africa - the Halioetus vocif er," said David.' Now, we have a condemnation of slavery when, as usual, most damage has been done. Racism, however, continues. The background to much of Adventures in India is what British historians have constantly referred to as `The Indian Mutiny', and what Indian historians have called, variously, `The Rising', `The Indian Struggle', `The Great Uprising' and, as early as 1909, `The Indian War of Independence'. Here we have the very strange example of an ungrateful people rebelling against the benefits of colonisation, on a scale too large to be kept out of even British history books (unlike the West Indian slave revolts). In Kingston's book, the `cause' of The Great Uprising is given as the Sepoy objection to using cartridges greased with bullocks' fat. This is the usual silly reason given in school history text-books in Britain. The `loyal native' theme is trebly reinforced in Adventures in India and is to be seen in contrast to the `rebels', `miscreants' and `howling natives' of the `Mutiny'.

Charles Kingsley, a Christian Socialist like Thomas Hughes and an ordained clergyman like Dr Arnold - notice how the public schools are making their presence felt round about the middle of the nineteenth century - must have a mention here, if only because he embodies so much of the ideology of empire while adding a few touches of his own. Kingsley was rabidly patriotic, religious in the extreme as well as being anti-Roman Catholic and materialistic, a racist, a supporter of the class structure and a royalist, and he virtually couldn't write a page without any, or all of them, showing. He never doubted for a moment and his sense of imperial and divine mission is breathtaking.

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In his Westward Ho!, another feature of colonialism comes to the fore - that of clashes with other colonial powers. The whole framework here is of competition with the Spaniards, of chivalry, vows, cutting Spanish throats and derring-do on the Spanish Main in Elizabethan times. The most interesting part, however, from the point of view of colonial attitudes is the characterisation of Ayacanora. Our first meeting with her is when she's a young woman and this is about two-thirds of the way through an extremely long story. We learn that she was found wandering in the forest, somewhere in South America, by a tribe of Indians. She was then about seven years old and was adopted and worshipped by them as the Daughter of the Sun because of her fair skin. She falls for Amyas Leigh, the hero, and secretly follows his party, eventually revealing herself when `she fawned round Amyas, like a dog who had found his master'. He tries to get rid of her but she sticks, doggedly, to him and becomes something of a temptress. Another very strong feature of colonial ideology begins here. In accordance with tradition, she saves the life of Amyas in a battle with the Spaniards. After that, he can scarcely forbear to take her on board ship with him, bound for England. She implores to be taught to become `English girl', despising other racist nations. But Amyas restrains himself. After all, he can't possibly marry this `savage' can he? So what happens? It's discovered that Ayacanora is, in fact, `an Englishwoman . . . one of the great white people whom she had learned to worship'. She's the daughter of an English seaman by a Spanish woman (who doesn't seem to count). She becomes a kind of servant to Amyas Leigh's mother while Amyas goes off to fight against the Armada, during which he's blinded. He returns home for the last time to the continued adoration of Ayacanora (whose transformation is now complete). She tells him, "'I will get you all you want ! Only let me fetch and carry for you, tend you, feed you, lead you, like your slave, your dog ! Say that I may be your slave!" and falling on her knees at his feet, she seized both his hands, and covered them with kisses.' We take it, at the end, that they'll get married. It should come as no surprise that Amyas Leigh ends up very rich.

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What struck me most on a reading, or re-reading, of Ballantyne, including his most popular work still in print, was the sheer bloodthirstiness. The slaughter is still mainly carried out on non-human animals or, if human, they tend, on the whole, to be black cannibals killing one another as in Robinson Crusoe. The worst is yet to come. It isn't until later that human slaughter, in the tradition, moves to the centre of the picture. However, in Ballantyne, there's enough killing to be going on with and the general maxim that emerges from his work seems to be, `If it moves, shoot it.' After early years of godlessness, Ballantyne became a fervent believer and this appears in his numerous stories set in `savage' or `uncivilised' lands in a missionising way. In Coral Island, still his most popular work, we have, for instance, a lot about the work of the London Missionary Society, together with white supremacism. Peterkin says, `We've got an island all to ourselves. We'll take possession in the name of the king; we'll go and enter the service of its black inhabitants. Of course, we'll rise, naturally, to the top of affairs. White men always do in savage countries.'

In Martin Rattler, slaves are mentioned in a very matterof-fact way and we get the black stereotype of `merry negroes, who seemed to enjoy life most thoroughly'. This, along with more open contempt for the blacks is, largely, typical of the book. About 187o, however, like Kingston, Ballantyne seems to have woken up to the fact that there was something wrong about slavery and wrote Black Ivory with `the total abolition of the African slave-trade' in mind. (Slavery, which was ceasing to be economic, anyway, had been prohibited by Britain in the West Indies in 1807 and throughout the Empire in i834.) In The Gorilla Hunters - A Tale of the Wilds of Africa, Ballantyne found a scientific excuse for the slaughter he loved so much to indulge in. The characters are the same as in Coral Island, only rather older. Ralph is a natural scientist who, during the story, has doubts, which he communicates to the reader from time to time, about the amount of killing which is going on. Not so Peterkin, however, who appears to make no distinction between humans or beasts in the account he gives to Ralph

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of his activities during their rather long separation :

I've been fighting with the Caffirs, and the Chinamen, and been punishing the rascally sepoys in India, and been hunting elephants in Ceylon and tiger shooting in the jungles, harpooning whales in the polar seas, and shooting lions at the Cape ... but there's one beast I've not yet seen, and I'm resolved to see him and shoot him too -'°

It's a gorilla, of course. A little later in the story, an interesting difference between `savage' and `civilised man' emerges, as a trader interprets the black king to Peterkin :

`He is surprised, indeed, at your taking so much trouble and coming so far merely to kill wild animals,

for he cannot understand the idea of sporting. He himself hunts for the sake of procuring meat.'

`Can he not understand,' said Peterkin, `that we hunt for fun?'

No, he don't quite see through that.'

Numerous blacks get killed on the expedition and were more than 38 specimens of gorilla skins really necessary, even in the interests of science? As in Coral Island, the last part of this novel is concerned with the uniting of two black lovers, to be married as Christians.

With G.A.Henty, historical adventure comes to the fore, but it's history seen as military power and expressed, typically, in military battles. Historical outlines provide a framework into which some slight fictional element (usually of bravado, and improbable) is inserted. The rights and wrongs, questions of justice and ideology, why so many hundreds of thousands of human beings are slaughtered in Henty's many books never seem to occur to him. The ideology of empire, far from being emphasised or `justified', is here simply taken for granted.

What Henty really likes is playing soldiers and there are many detailed accounts of battles, giving the numbers and kind of troops on each side, their weapons together with the specific type and number of each, the terrain and deployment of forces

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(often maps are provided) and all the accompanying paraphernalia of war. Of course, all this is seen from the British point of view to which the sympathies of the reader are aligned. In Henty's story In Times of Peril set within The Great Uprising in India, as in Kingston's novel, Adventures in India, grease on the cartridges seems to be the only cause of such anger as led to the `Massacre of Cawnpore' which is described in ghastly and horrible detail and which has always been used as an excuse for British atrocities, though it actually followed long after many of these. The barbarities of British retribution, however, which included tying Indians over the muzzles of cannons and blowing them to pieces, lies outside the scope of the book and even outside the scope of The Queen's Cup the story of which starts later in the Uprising. Henty's titles speak for themselves - such as Won by the Sword and By Right of Conquest: or, with Cortez in Mexico. In the latter book, Henty was presumably lured to Spanish empire-building by the greater prospects of slaughter. The lowest estimate of deaths in the conquest of Mexico (overwhelmingly of Aztecs, of course) is, according to Henty, 120,000. (It's the Indians of The Great Uprising, however, who are described as `bloodthirsty scoundrels'.) For the fictional element in this book Henty provides Roger, an English boy, who gets mixed up with it all. Henty's acting constantly as apologist for Cortez reaches the ludicrous with: `The massacres was a terrible one, and is a stain upon the memory of Cortez who otherwise [my emphasis] throughout the campaign acted mercifully.' Anyway, the last comment's a lie. Roger gives the game away as he explains his allegiance to the Spaniards by saying he is `white like them'. The message is clear : might is not only right, but white.

Roger marries an Aztec princess and returns home rich. In the preface to With Clive in India: or the Beginnings of an Empire Henty addresses himself to his `Dear Lads' and assures them that `historical details are ... strictly accurate'. However, Hossein, the `loyal native' (remember him?) and the `slave' of Charlie, the hero, is driven away by guards when attempting to give water to Charlie and his associates suffering in the Black Hole of Calcutta.

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There's no need to excuse this atrocity (though it should be seen in historical context) but it needs to be pointed out that eye-witness accounts from survivors tell us that the guards themselves did their best to bring water to the prisoners. These accounts must have been available to Henty. He has, therefore, deliberately falsified or, at least, ignored the historical record and his claim in the preface is untrue. Charlie, at the end, reveals the interesting detail that he has `earned in [his] way close upon a hundred thousand pounds'. This is what empire-building is really about. Henty's The Young Colonists. A story o f the Zulu and Boer Wars keeps in the forefront for us the vital question of language. The Zulus `yell', `plunder' and commit a `massacre'. The English don't plunder. After a skirmish, a thousand cattle were `brought in' and on another occasion, five hundred and fifty were `captured'. Consider the contrast and the emotive use of language in `the yells of the savages ... mingled with the loud cheers of Buller's men'.

In Through the Fray: a Tale of the Luddite Riots and A March on London Being a Story of Wat Tyler's Insurrection, Henty shows the same bias towards the British working class as he displays towards foreigners. There's nothing surprising about this, of course. The Luddite movement, in particular, is a good illustration of internal imperialism. At one time, there were more troops deployed against the Luddites than there were with Wellington in the Peninsula. In the long class struggle, Henty conducted a fictional offensive.

Slowly, a change in imperial attitudes begins to take place in the second half of the nineteenth century. Religion, for instance, played little part in Henty's work though women did show a tendency to pray while battles were surging about them. From now on (Darwin's Origin of Species had been published in t 859) and especially in the twentieth century, aggression will be less cloaked in religion. Patriotism and racism, however, will be even more marked and, as the end of the British Empire draws near, frustration and fear will produce their ugliest offspring, fascism. The Berlin Conference on

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African Affairs was held between November `884. and January 1 885. Attending were all the European states, except Switzerland, and the USA. Its purpose was to settle European quarrels over the annexation of land in Africa, and a term new to diplomacy, `spheres of influence', was used and defined. Thus, at international level, the end of British supremacy was signalled.

A certain change takes place in writing for children at this stage. If religion failed, and if ever patriotism should waver, how were people to be persuaded to fight for causes not in their own interests? After 1870, education took over the task of indoctrinating the general mass of the population with appropriate values and attitudes. Other indoctrinating agencies were the mass media. Alfred Harmsworth, head of another kind of empire, launched the Daily Mail in 1896. It was only one, but a very popular one, of many newspapers and magazines including several for children. Comic-Cuts appeared in 1890, followed by several magazines for boys. The Wonder appeared in 1892 and, later, The Marvel and (another) Union Jack which continued until 1933. Patrick Howarth has an interesting comment on the Harmsworth Amalgamated Press publications for boys :

In all of them patriotism and belief in the imperial mission were unvarying features of editorial policy. Indeed in an expression of editorial satisfaction it was stated that the boys' papers of the Amalgamated Press not only encouraged physical strength, patriotism,

interest in travel and exploration, and pride in the empire, but that they had in effect served as useful recruiting agencies for the armed forces.[6]

The fact that the imperialist attitudes noted here didn't correspond to the realities of history, that the gap got wider and wider and that the process has by no means finished yet is something which will help to account for the changes to be noted in fiction for children. Some new notes are struck in the work of W.E.Henley who, in The Song o f the Sword, a poem published in 1892 and dedicated to Kipling, wrote about :

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Sifting the nations,

The slag from the metal,

The waste and the weak

From the fit and the strong.

Again, writing about an anthology of poems he edited, Henley insists, `The book is nothing if not a fighting book. It is designed to bring out such old, elementary virtues as the dignity of patriotism, the beauty of battle, the heroic quality of death.' Then, when Queen Victoria died, Henley's obituary in the Morning Post tells of how `the old irresistible call [of empire] ... makes men in love with toil for the race, and pain, and peril, and death'.^[7]

The weak, the strong, `the beauty of battle' and the love of death - we'll find them all in the novels of H.Rider Haggard, as well as several other notes to swell the imperial theme. From now, for instance, there's less of a distinction made, in fiction of this type, between adults and children, a fact which tends to confuse librarians, who don't know whether to put Haggard in the junior or senior departments and frequently put him in both. Of course, Haggard didn't help by dedicating King Solomon's Mines `to all the big and little boys who read it'. It was only two years before, that the much older Henty was addressing himself to his `Dear Lads'. Haggard also added a great deal in the way of romance and we have `lost' cities and tribes; underground rivers, passages and tunnels; caves; legend and mysticism mixed; the eternal and immortal, prophecies, visions and unbelievably beautiful women. There's also a line in the gruesome and grisly which Haggard makes peculiarly his own. These are new notes, but Haggard adds to the old themes, too.

The idea of actually accumulating wealth during the story now recedes a little and the hero often starts off rich, having, like Allan Quatermain, the `narrator' of King Solomon's Mines, already made a `pile'. Early on in this story, Khiva, the Zulu, gives his life for Good, in what has by now become a race ritual. In one respect, Haggard must take first place in the genre.

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Killing people is pre-eminent. In his books, countless thousands of human lives, usually black, are taken and the reader wallows in rivers of blood. In King Solomon's Mines, there's a long, lingering description of the massive slaughter of twelve thousand men in a bloody battle between rival black kings and their troops. Haggard also adds his own special bit to the tradition as far as women are concerned, though this element is often inextricably mixed up with racism. Quatermain's comment, when the white party are offered black girls by King Twala, is, `women bring trouble so surely as the night follows the day' and, he adds, furthermore, `we white men wed only with white women like ourselves'. Foulata, the saved beauty who in turn saves her beloved Good from fever, confirms Quatermain's view with her dying words :`I am glad to die because I know that he [Good] cannot cumber his life with such as I am, for the sun may not mate with the moon, nor the white with the black.' Quatermain was glad of what he called `her removal'.

She takes the woman theme further against a background of the type of romantic mish-mash I've already noted as typical of Haggard which, although present in King Solomon's Mines, was under some form of control. In She, it simply runs riot. As far as the imperial tradition is concerned, She links racist with anti-woman strands. The quest here (there's often a quest) is to find a white goddess, apparently of Egyptian descent, in Africa. They find her, or, rather, She - in full, She-who-must-beobeyed, alias Ayesha - and we can begin to see how Haggard's hatred for, and also attraction towards, women lies, ultirnately, in Victorian double standards of morality towards sex. (Beyond this, however, is the incest taboo which dictates that male children should suppress sexual feelings for the mother as `bad'. Such feelings can be turned towards other women but they keep the `bad' label. Feelings allowable as `good' are non-sexual. Hence the good/bad women notion, common in literature and sometimes expressed as mother/whore.) Ayesha is virtually immortal, and her beauty imperishable, `only this beauty, with all its awful loveliness and purity, was evil'. The fatal woman has entered the tradition.

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In Allan Quatermain the quest is to find a legendary white race in the interior of Africa. (You can't say they're not trying.) Hopelessness and fatalism, always reactionary characteristics, now begin very strongly to cast a general gloom over both the overall picture and the work of Haggard. At the outset here, Quatermain, again the narrator of the story, tells us that `Civilisation is only savagery silver-gilt' and that `human nature ... is the one fixed unchangeable thing'. This links with a common feature of the tradition - the black person as child - which now becomes more overt. `It is a depressing conclusion,' Quatermain depresses us, at the start, `but in all essentials the savage and the child of civilisation are identical.' Here, Umslopogaas takes the role of loyal native and also takes a gloomy view of humankind giving it as his opinion that `Man is born to kill.' Certainly, reading Haggard's bloody books anyone might well come to the same conclusion. When the white race is found, a war breaks out because of the jealous rivalry between two beautiful queens for the love of Curtis. Another long and bloody battle ensues and is described in detail. Where there's women there's trouble.

In Nada the Lily a lot of strands are brought together. The African Nada has, it's suspected, some `white' blood in her and is described by Dingaan, the Zulu King, as `a girl of the most wonderful beauty, who was named the Lily, and whose skin was whiter than are the skins of our people'. It's worth noting that the whole story is told, for the first and last time, by Mopo to a `White Man', a stranger, whom the ancient Mopo addresses as `father'. Thus, the whole book has, so to speak, a 'white' framework. However, it's the mystical vision of Mopo and its symbolism which, I feel, is central for an understanding of all the fiction of empire set amongst non-white peoples. Mopo's vision is of the Zulu day of judgement :

 

Now I turned in my vision, and looked at that bank of the river on which I stood. Then I saw that behind the bank was a cliff, mighty and black, and in the cliff were doors of ivory, and through them came light and the

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sound of laughter; there were other doors also, black as though fashioned of coal, and through them came darkness and the sounds of groans. I saw also that in front of the doors was set a seat, and on the seat was the figure of a glorious woman. She was tall, and she alone was white, and clad in robes of white, and her hair was like gold which is molten in the fire, and her face shone like the midday sun.. .

Now the figure of the glorious woman held a rod in either hand, and the rod in her right hand was white and of ivory, and the rod in her left hand was black and of ebony. And as those who came up before her throne greeted her, so she pointed now with the wand of ivory in her right hand, and now with the wand of ebony in her left hand. And as she pointed, so those who greeted her turned, and went, some through the gates of light and some through the gates of blackness.^[8]

The fact that there's a goddess here, and not a god, is perhaps the only element peculiar to Haggard. More and more strands are drawn together in this novel, many of them centring upon, or being connected with, women. A link with Ayesha can be seen in a weird image: `this beauty of Nada's was a dreadful thing, and the mother of much death'. Finally, at the end of the novel and before the last battle the so-called Wolf-Brethren were to fight together, Umslopogaas expresses to Galazi his hope: `May we one day find a land where there are no women, and war only, for in that land we shall grow great.' Even earlier, Umslopogaas, with his fatalism, had taken Quatermain's despair over humanity to its logical end :`victory is good,' he says, `but death ends all and is best of all'.

Haggard was co-director of The African Review, was made a Knight of the British Empire for his work on the Dominions Commission and the Empire Settlement Committee and was chairman of the Anglo-African Writers' Club (which didn't, I believe, include any Africans). It was in this last capacity that he introduced the speaker at a dinner on 2o May 1 898. The speaker was his close friend, Rudyard Kipling. Haggard said :

I do not believe in the divine right of kings, but I do believe ... in a divine right of a great civilising people - that is, in their divine mission ...[Kipling] has communed with the very spirit of our race ... Sir, we welcome in you one who has used the great gifts given to you for no small or mean or unworthy purpose, but rather to advance the interests of your country, and to stir your fellows to a truer and loftier patriotism.'

Kipling had, by then, already written his jungle books. In these, there's a return, but in a different form, to the Robinsonades where figures battled for survival against the environment. Now in the jungle books and as we can see in Tarzan of the Apes, survival is less of a problem since the superiority of man is soon established. It's a question of the exercise of power. Kipling might have been prompted by the 'Wolf-Brethren' of Nada the Lily but there are other examples in fiction and legend, back to Romulus and Remus, of wolves bringing up human children. However, Kipling must have been attracted by the pack, leadership and hierarchical habits amongst wolves and also by their fierceness and rapacity. From the beginning in The Jungle Book, `the Law of the jungle', a simple question of might, is emphasised. Mowgli is beaten for misbehaviour : `One of the beauties of jungle Law', we are told, `is that punishment settles all scores. There is no nagging afterward.' Compare the public school belief. Kipling's hatred and sadism has to find a greater outlet somewhere, so here we have `the Monkey-People - the grey apes - the people without a Law', recalling the `lesser breeds without the law' of Kipling's poem, Recessional. A little later they are described by Baloo, the brown bear, as 'out-casts ... Their way is not our way. They are without leaders.' So - to Kipling - it seems quite in order for Kaa, the python, to mesmerise them, slowly, into his jaws. There are numerous other examples of sadism and violence in the two jungle books.

Kipling's Stalky & Co, which appeared in 1899, is a reveal

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ing book in many ways. Really, it belongs to the now dying public school genre of fiction but it shows how attitudes in the public school stories were carried over into the ideology of empire. The book's set in the United Services College in Devon, which Kipling himself attended, and is dedicated to his headmaster. As 75 per cent of the boys were the sons of officers, it's not surprising that the school had a strong empire-based, military bias. A high point in the story is reached when Crandall, an `old boy', after being wounded on the battlefield and having been distinguished in action, returns to visit the school, the adoration of every pupil. There's a breathless scene when, in his old dormitory, he says his prayers, `a ceremony he had neglected for some years', and then, after lights out, tells the story of his exploits to the awe-stricken boys gathered around. His former fellow schoolboy had died on the battlefield, his head on Crandall's knees. We learn that Crandall got his `cuts' in `a bit of a scrimmage'. Then follows, "'Did you kill anyone?" "Yes. Shouldn't wonder. Good night".' Another interesting episode occurs towards the end of the book when an MP comes to speak to the boys on `Patriotism'. They are embarrassed, especially at the end of his talk when he unfolds a Union Jack. To them, it's vulgarising something sacred but significantly, Foxy, the lower-class school sergeant, was `touched to the quick'. In the latter part of the book, military glory comes very strongly to the fore and, in a kind of epilogue, we learn something of Stalky's later fortunes as a soldier: `Stalky got embroiled with Fuzzies five miles in the interior. He conducted a masterly retreat and wiped up eight of 'em.' Though Stalky isn't a model of obedience (nor was Nelson) his heart's obviously in the right place. The book in which he figures shows the public school ethos exported and we see some of its forms developing : the sentimentality under a hard exterior, the stress on bravery, the understatement and the stiff upper lip. That isn't all we see developing. Sadism plays quite a large part in most public school fiction and often finds its way into the fiction of empire. Here, in Stalky & Co, there's the worst example I know of. A master suggests to Stalky and his two friends that

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they should put down a case of bullying he's come across. They trick the two culprits into getting trussed up, as for `cockfighting'. Then Kipling, having manufactured a literary excuse, indulges his fantasies in ten pages of tortures which he evidently enjoys as much as his three schoolboy characters who end up `dripping with excitement and exertion'.

The first verse of Kipling's Recessional is a good summary of this writer's imperial sentiments :

God of our fathers, known of old, Lord of our far-flung battle line, Beneath whose awful hand we hold Dominion over palm and pine - Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet, Lest we forget - lest we forget !

The sense of burden, `the white man's burden' - an expression first used by Kipling - is here, together with the `battle line'. Stalky & Co, with its increasing stress on militarism towards the end, provides a very obvious link between the public school and the imperial creeds. It isn't any accident that these two superficially different books are by the same author.

In The Second Jungle Book Hathi, the old elephant, tells of the development of the `Law of the jungle' in a kind of jungle genesis. However, a new element enters - fear - and we learn that fear is man :`he is your master, and the rest shall follow.' Obedience, in fact, is heavily stressed and it inevitably follows that, finally, Mowgli is acknowledged `Master of the Jungle'.

It isn't, perhaps, too difficult to see why Baden-Powell, for the militaristic organisation he founded, drew so largely upon the jungle books. The Wolf-Cub's Handbook is dedicated to Kipling who, Baden-Powell writes, `has done so much to put the right spirit into our rising manhood'. He expresses his gratitude to be permitted to quote `as [his] text' the `inimitable Jungle Book' and recommends cub-masters to read the book to cubs.

In Kim, the very efficient British Secret Service in India

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is known as `the Game'. Later authors in the genre have much to say about `the Game' which tends to mean different things to different writers, the only common factor being that it involves killing people. However, the use of the term recalls Hughes' remarks in Tom Brown's Schooldays, when he compares a game of rugby to a battle.^[10] Especially towards the end of Kim, and based on the doings of the Lama, there's a good deal of the kind of mystic nonsense Haggard delighted in. Also, like Haggard, Kipling was able to turn on the pseudo-biblical style, especially when dealing with assumptions he thought beyond question and feelings too lofty and sacred (to him) to be put into ordinary words. (Compare the lecture on patriotism in Stalky & Co.) My own belief is that Kipling couldn't put such things into words or that he suspected they would look rather silly if he did so.

In the early years of this century, Kipling's hatred found a new focus - a new threat to the empire was emerging. `Remember', he wrote to Haggard on 3 March 1913, `the more advanced forms of Radicalism are a disease - not a set of ideas.' We can get further, and later, information, about both men, from Haggard's diary: `Kipling ... is of opinion that we owe all our Russian troubles, and many others, to the machinations of the Jews ... For my own part I should be inclined to read Trade Unions instead of Jews, for surely they are the root of most of our embarrassments and perplexities.' He suggested to Kipling a joint letter (with W.R.Inge) to The Times `setting out this Bolshevist business clearly and trying to arouse the country to a sense of all its horror'. Kipling and Haggard were also instrumental in setting up the Liberty League to combat this new threat and stem its advance `in the United Kingdom and throughout the Empire'. It collapsed after one of the founders mishandled the funds.

Taking into account Kipling's racism, hatred and sadism, his belief in hierarchy, leadership and power, all bound up in a mystical sense of destiny, it's difficult to acquit him of the charge of fascism, in spite of such diverse apologists as Orwell and Eliot. As I've noted here and there in this study, he's had

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and still has a widespread influence on children's writers.

Before moving on, and with Stalky & Co in mind, I'd just like to glance back to an earlier period of the public school story to emphasise the link with imperialist fiction. There were certainly public school stories before t857, when Tom Brown's Schooldays was published but Thomas Hughes's book may be said to have established the genre. Largely autobiographical, the novel was in part a celebration of the author's beloved headmaster Dr Thomas Arnold who'd attracted attention to his influence and methods through the later fortunes of his former pupils at the universities and in the army. Tom Brown's Schooldays itself, in turn, had a great influence on the public schools, as well as on other literature. Hughes obviously achieved his aim, as stated in his preface to the sixth edition of the book: `My whole object in writing at all was to get the chance of preaching. When a man comes to my time of life and has his bread to make and very little time to spare, is it likely that he will spend almost the whole of his yearly vacation in writing a story just to amuse people?'

Fighting, or rather aggression, on a wide scale and in a patriotic and imperialist cause is brought out strongly in the early pages of the book. First, we have, `Wherever the fleets and armies of England have won renown, there stalwart sons of the Browns have done yeomen's work.' A long account of military glory follows, after which it seems rather unnecessary to be told, `In the first place, the Browns are a fighting family.' We next see this militarism in a more specifically imperial context with Hughes' reference to `the great army of Browns, who are scattered over the whole empire on which the sun never sets, and whose general diffusion [he takes] to be the chief cause of that empire's stability'. The attitude towards fighting in the book is the same as in most imperialist fiction. It's all fun, really, and a bit of a game. Of a game of rugby at the school, Hughes says `a battle would look much the same ... except that the boys would be men, and the balls iron.' Tom Brown's Schooldays is still popular though maybe its long life is drawing to an

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end as it suffers more and more from frequent abridgements and adaptations (the literary equivalent of heart attacks).

This little excursion into public school fiction will, I hope, show how imperialism received backing from another area of children's fiction. Now, it's time to return to the imperialist tradition itself, and carry the story into the twentieth century.

After _1914, the empire was never the same again and the note of bitterness and frustration which we can see creeping into Kipling's letters to Haggard and into Haggard's diary now reaches the surface and was never to leave later writers in the tradition. All the old confidence had gone, even if the old attitudes lingered, growing ever more remote from reality.

Edgar Wallace, in his autobiography, People, writes that he `soaked' himself in Kipling. Furthermore, he refers to `the true-born Englishman with his inalienable right to do as he damn pleased in any country at any time. Could there be the slightest doubt', he asks us, `in what direction my sentiments leant?' Well, no - we recognise his leanings. The Sanders stories, the part of his work that concerns us here, take us back to Africa again. The old idea of divide and rule upon which, very largely, the empire had been built up, is much in evidence. A rather new element in the genre is the stress on `the law', in this case brought by a big white chief in a `solar helmet'. In Keepers of the King's Peace, Sanders explains to Wafa, `In this land I govern millions of men . . . I and two white lords, I govern by fear, Wafa, because there is no love in simple native men; save a love for their own and their bellies.' What is to become a stereotyped characteristic within this, and the ideologically allied detective fiction, really begins here. It is of the man-on-the-spot or the man-who-knows versus interfering politicians and hampering regulations and laws. Thus, when the `western'-educated Tobolaka who is the governmentappointed chief of a federation of tribes reminds Sanders that he, Sanders, is not behaving lawfully, the answer is, `My custom is the law', in a very soft voice. Soft voices and clenched teeth become more usual now. Sanders refers to `his' country and

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thinks of the inhabitants as `these children of his'.

Wallace, desperately and against all the evidence, wants to believe in white racial superiority. Therefore Sanders hates any pretensions to education - even though on `western' lines - amongst black people, because, it seems to me, he sees it as a threat, so much so that - against the whole run of the tradition - he refuses to speak English with those blacks who know the language. In Sanders of the River Wallace is concerned to establish, very early in the book, the impossibility of humanitarian methods when dealing with black people. The question is one of educating a local boy king, Peter, so we get several incidents which, apart from, their implicit message, form an excuse for Wallace to gratify his sadism. He does this in Sanders' savage caning of Peter (Sanders knew `the native mind much better than any man living') which ends `thus was he taught obedience'. It worked, though, and later the king even gave his life to save that of Sanders. A pity ! Still on the racist theme and in the same book, we have Wallace's cheap method of putting down the Republic of Liberia. For instance, `the President . . . was sitting on the edge of his desk at Government House, eating sardines with his fingers', while `two ex-admirals ... were selling fish on the foreshore'. `The Monrovians are naturally liars and thieves', we are informed - just by the way. Sanders insists on the terms `Lord' and `Master' (or the equivalents in the native languages, presumably) when black people address white. He explains, in Sandi, the King-Maker that `in this country. .. all white men are lords, and all black men are the servants of those lords'. In Keepers of the King's Peace, we are offered the opinion :`Native folk ... are but children of a larger growth', while in Bosambo of the River, Sanders is again freely offering his opinion :`Nothing tires me quite so much as a Europeanised-Americanised native. It is as indecent a spectacle as a niggerised white man.' In `The Ki-Chu' in the same book - Wallace's books on Sanders are collections of closely-related short stories rather than novels - we have a pygmy treated as a rare species of monkey, and taken for one, by a United States' citizen. It's all meant to be funny. I'll let Wallace sum this part

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up in a passage from Sandi, the King-Maker after Sanders has claimed that the inhabitants of Rimi-Rimi are descended from `a Roman civilisation' :

It was a depressing picture Sanders had drawn. For hundreds of years these masterful aliens must have toiled, drilling the raw savages into a semblance of Rome's invincible soldiers. There must have been a dynasty of sorts, quarrels, intrigues, jealousies, rebellions and battles, and all the time the wild was working into their blood, and the barbarism of their environment overgrowing them until the tan and olive of Rome became browner and browner and then - black."

As far as `loyal natives' go, we've already noted the unfortunate death of King Peter. The complete tool of Sanders is, however, Bosambo (though you can call him Uncle Tom if you like). Like his `Master', and to emphasise a continuing strand of the tradition, 'Bosambo . . . had no faith whatever in humanity.' So much is Bosambo taken over, that he uses `nigger' as a term of abuse just as Wallace used `white man' as praise. This latter isn't peculiar to Wallace but quite common in the later stages of the tradition. Thus, Baden-Powell said of Jan, a Matabele killed by a lion while defending his master, `Jan had proved himself a white man - if in a black skin.' ¹² (Yes, it happened in reality, too, though not racially the other way round, either in life or fiction, as far as I know.)

The attitude to religion in Wallace is interesting. In Sanders of the River, during the early stages when Wallace is disposing of all humanitarian values so that he can get down to lessons in racism and violence, we learn that black United States' missionaries enter the territory and preach, amongst other things, that `A black man is as good as a white man.' Sanders accuses them of `sedition' and `of overstepping the creed of Equality and encroaching upon the borderland of political agitation'. Later in the book, Sanders hears about the arrival of another black missionary :

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`White missionaries, yes,' he said wrathfully, 'but black missionaries I will not endure.'

`Get out of that chair,' said Sanders, who had no small talk worth mentioning, `and stand up when I come out to you ! What do you want?'

The Reverend Kenneth rose quickly, and accepted the situation with a rapidity which will be incomprehensible to any who do not know how thumbnail deep is the cultivation of the cultured savage.[13]

You see? Later, we learn that the Reverend Kenneth has managed to instil `into the heathen mind' some notion of `the Brotherhood of Man'. Sanders has to sort out this `mischief' and an opportunity is not long in coming when a man in a canoe fails to get out of the way of Sanders' steamer. The man is brought on board :

`Lord, it is written in the books of your gods,' said the man, `that the river is for us all, black and white, each being equal in the eyes of the white gods.'

 

Sanders checked his lips impatiently.

`When you and I are dead,' he said, `we shall be equal,

but since I am quick and you are quick, I shall give you

ten strokes with a whip to correct the evil teaching

that is within you.'

He made a convert.^[14]

Sanders does, however, say his prayers before going to bed.

We've already seen quite a lot of sadism and violence in Wallace in connection with other aspects of his work. In fact, it's virtually impossible to avoid it. However, there's quite a lot more of it than anyone might have thought, up to now. Although, in Sandi, the King-Maker, Sanders claims to have returned `to bring the law', there's the wanton thrashing of a man who asked a riddle at a court session (an `uppity nigger' obviously). In the same book, Kabalaka says to Sanders,

`you we do not know - white man.'

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The words were hardly out of his lips before Sanders's

whip fell across his face. Three times he lashed, and the man fell back with a cry, covering his face.

`How do they call me?' asked Sanders, in so low a voice that the final 'K'saso' sounded like a hiss.

`Lord,' said the man sullenly.

`That is well.'^[15]

In the same book again, Sanders blows up a village with a bomb. There are perpetual hangings - Sanders is always stringing up

somebody from a nearby tree - and sundry violence of all kinds. In ten pages chosen arbitrarily from Sanders o f the River, we

have: a flogging; the attempted burial alive of a first-born child; the death of the child followed by a hanging; a drowning; a

poisoning; reference to a stoning to death and to many unaccountable deaths plus a threatened hanging; a feigned hanging

to terrorise the victim, two leopards fighting and, just for variety, an incident in which a madman, holding a 'clinic', is about to demonstrate on an anaesthetised girl. (On one of the ten pages there wasn't anything violent or sadistic.)

As far as women are concerned, it's the usual treatment, within the tradition, often mixed with racism. In Sanders of the River, we read that `Sanders . . . had no use for women' and later, he sends Ludley, his assistant, home because the latter is having a sexual relationship with a black woman. Sanders says, `It's the morals of my cannibals that worry me.' Bosambo of the River introduces Millie Tavish, a United States' citizen of Scottish descent who arrives to marry Tobolaka. She met him in her own country. Sanders refuses to permit `what he regarded as an outrage'. Although she eludes Sanders, Wallace would have us believe that the Commissioner is requested by the Colonial Office, at the request, in turn, of the US government, to stop the marriage. The blacks won't have it, either, apparently, and it's prevented through Bosambo who opines that, `Black is black and white is white, and all that is between is foul and horrible.' When the episode is over, it's thrown in that Millie Tavish, unknown to her, would have been sharing with half-adozen other wives. Significantly, Sanders had not explained this

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to her at the outset and we are given unsatisfactory reasons why he didn't. After all, he wanted to stop the marriage and we are given to understand that Millie wouldn't have accepted those conditions. A more believable story-line, however, would clearly have deprived Wallace of the chance of putting forward his sexist and racist message. Later in the book, we are told, as if we didn't know, `that women have an evil effect upon warriors'.

With the possible exception of The Black Gang by `Sapper' (Cyril McNeile), Sanders o f the River is the most odious fictional work I've ever read (though it's difficult to choose between the Sanders stories).

In Volume t we've come across Lofting in a racist context. It's now time to see him in a context more specifically colonial. His work, unlike that of Wallace which would be read by adolescents of all ages, is meant predominantly for a younger age group. The fact that Dolittle can communicate with almost all animals must be very attractive to children. Lofting was moved in this direction by seeing the sufferings o f horses during the first world war.

In The Voyages of Dr Dolittle, Bumpo is now at Oxford University and soon appears, dressed outlandishly and speaking peculiar English. Though a prince, he addresses Dolittle as `Sir' while on the voyage to Spidermonkey Island he does the cooking and is treated as a kind of general servant. Dolittle wants to meet `the greatest naturalist of them all', Long Arrow, the Red Indian who, however, can't read or write and is trapped inside a mountain when Dolittle arrives. Dolittle releases him, upon which he says, `Mighty White Man, I owe my life to you. For the remainder of my days, I am your servant to command.' Something we've heard before, a few times. Although a great naturalist, Long Arrow's methods are not as up to date as Dolittle's, it should be noted. The Indians of Spidermonkey Island haven't discovered fire -`Poor perishing heathens!' Bumpo calls them (Bosambo would have called them `dam' niggers') - so, one of the first things Dolittle does is give them fire and they're all for worshipping it at first. He intervenes in a native dispute when the two Indian tribes on the island go to

¹⁰⁵

war - an activity which recalls many examples of white interference in foreign disputes, usually to the whites' advantage. Here, Dolittle becomes King of the Island, the defeated baddies, the Bag-jagderags, wanting to join with the Popsipetels as one people under this `King of Kings'. Dolittle shows them how to build a proper town and how to smelt iron and copper. He also teaches them in the afternoons. `You see,' he explains, `these Indians were ignorant of many of the things that quite small white children know - though it is also true', he adds, `that they knew a lot that white grown-ups never dreamed of.' These things, however, are not specified. When his crew ask him when they are going home, Dolittle says, `These people have come to rely on me for a great number of things. We found them ignorant of much that white people enjoy. And we have, one might say, changed the current of their lives quite considerably.' Quite like the white man's burden, we might say. `They are, as it were, my children' he explains. However, Polynesia's view of `these greasy natives', as well as a comment about `niggers', go unreproved, as usual.

The book, in fact, can stand as a second blueprint of colonialism, for the period after about 1880. It first came out in ¹923 and has been in print ever since, being known as a children's `classic'.

The palmy days of dominion were over by this time but there were still those who pined for them. If, in many cases, empire settings were no longer possible, the ideology of empire still lingered on. W.E. Johns stated his views on why he wrote for children in a letter to Geoffrey Trease :

First of all, for the entertainment of my reader. That is, • I give boys what they want, not what their elders and betters think they ought to read. I teach at the same time, under a camouflage. Juveniles are keen to learn, but the educational aspect must not be too obvious or they become suspicious of its intention. I teach sportsmanship according to the British idea ... I teach that decent behaviour wins in the end as a natural order of things.

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I teach the spirit of team-work, loyalty to the Crown, the Empire, and to rightful authority."^,[16]

(Religion now drops out of the picture.) Johns was not the only one who thought his work carried influence. He'd already written a number of his enormously popular Biggles series of novels (there are thirty titles currently in print) when, during the last war, he began his Worrals series at the suggestion of the Air Ministry and his Gimlet series at the suggestion of the War Office. Others also thought that Johns's work influenced his readers, though not in the same way. T.R.Barnes, in his essay, `Captain Johns and the adult world' wrote, `Captain Johns's socio-political attitudes are those one would associate with a not unduly intelligent Empire builder of the late Victorian "white man's burden" period' and, to keep up our connection with public school fiction, we should note that the same author adds, `He [Biggles] represents the values of the prep-school applied to the sphere of adult action.[17]

The characters are wretched stereotypes : Biggles (the racist whom the reader's meant to identify with, let it be noted) is the calm, unruffled hero joking grimly in the face of danger; Bertie is one of the 'monocled ass' variety; while the others are caricatures who signal their predictable behaviour by having red faces and white moustaches which `bristle' or eyes too close together, a sure sign of criminality. Biggles tends to `knit brows', `breathe', `growl' or speak `dryly' as the occasion demands. All that I can agree with is a note commonly seen at the beginning of a story :`The characters in this book are entirely imaginary and bear no relation to any living person.' Naturally, the plots are determined in the same way, though the early ones are better. Fossilisation takes place in the later stages, when a typical story opens with an interview between Air Commodore Raymond and Biggles, who's asked, as like as not, to `take a pew' and is offered a cigarette. Then, the problem is introduced, and the villain is ritually reduced to sub-human status. This process nearly always includes racial elements and has the purpose of making it easier for the reader to accept whatever happens to

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him. In Biggles and the Black Raider we learn of the latter that : he has `several peculiar things about him and none of them is nice'; `this heavyweight has ... been making a nuisance of himself'; `he's a menace, and ... an extremely dangerous one'; he's `an agitator determined to stir up strife with the workers'; he's a `scoundrel'; a `rascal'; one of a group of `black fanatics'; a `villain'; a `black devil'; a `fiend'; a 'self-appointed Lord of Africa'; one of a `gang' of `murderers' and a member of a `bunch of savages'. This is all in the first chapter. Of course, it points up the world of right and wrong Johns lived in which usually turned out to be the same as British or, at a stretch, `Western European' and the rest. During a typical plot, the four - Algy, Bertie, `Ginger' and Biggles - normally get separated, one or more being in danger at any given point. Then, the final crunch comes but is usually organised so that the four either kill the crooks in self-defence or the crooks get caught in their own trap and the hands of the four are left clean.

As far as law and order are concerned, Biggles, like Sanders, doesn't mind operating on the outside as police, judge and jury combined, if official means get in his way. There's a direct line here (though, strictly, it leads out of our focus) to politicaldetection characters such as Bulldog Drummond. The latter's Black Gang, in fact, recalls the political private armies of today : Colonel Stirling's late and unlamented `Great Britain '75' and General Sir Walter Walker's private enterprise army, now called the Civil Assistance Movement. Ideologically, there's no difference and either of these real-life characters would, I'm sure, subscribe readily to Johns's creed as stated above. Of course, Biggles dislikes a `political angle' and confesses `he never could make much sense out of foreign politics'. It's the old British story : politics only happen on the left. Hence, Biggles' decision at the end of the first chapter of Biggles and the Black Raider:

I'll take on the job on the understanding that there's no interference by bureaucrats at home. I want no bleating in the House of Commons about a poor innocent native

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being shot. .. I'm not being made a scapegoat for a political racket. Oh - oh yes, I know all about that. Nobody says a word if fifty British tommies are bumped off; but let one poor benighted heathen get the works and the balloon goes up. Then people wonder why things are going to pot_.[19]

Johns's fixation on race is quite abnormal. In Biggles Flies West we have `An Ugly Customer' (the title of chapter 1) with eyes slanting upwards at the ends which `suggested remote oriental ancestry'. He had arms that `hung nearly down to his knees, like those of a gorilla. Indeed, he was not unlike a great ape.' Just to make sure, he has a scar at the corner of his mouth and we learn he is `that drunken villain Dooch, or Deutch, however he spells his name'. Another villain, in Biggles in the Orient is `as cunning as only an Oriental can be'. There are still `savages' in Africa in Worrals in the Wilds. (Indeed there are, as Angela Davis, in December r974, pointed out to a British audience. She meant white South Africans.) In the same book, we meet 'bushmen, who were little better than animals', while in Biggles in the Blue there's a stage, or early Hollywood film, 'negress' who calls Biggles 'suh' and `master'. The only villain in this book who seems to do actual damage and the only one left dead at the end is Morgan who's of `the deep chocolate brown of a mixed breed, mostly negro'. Matters of racial purity, breeding and `blood' (whatever Johns means by these things) obsess him endlessly. Biggles meets an official at a South American port and tells Dick, his young friend :

`the more native blood white people get into their systems the more they delight in letting people like ourselves see that they are as good as we are.'

`Aren't these people white?' asked Dick, in a rather surprised tone.

`About one in a hundred are pure white,' returned Biggles ...`After the great days [sic] of Spanish colonisation were over in these parts the settlers seemed to go to pieces, and now they are so mixed up ... that it's hard to tell

Empire: Fiction Follows the Flag 109 which are white, which are half and half, and which are

natives. '^[19]

This is a very worrying problem and gets even nearer home in some of the books. For instance, in Worrals in the Wilds, someone is so dark and swarthy `that he was obviously not entirely European'. Worrals was perplexed as she wasn't `able to decide exactly what was wrong with him'. Again, in Biggles in the Underworld, the villain `did not look truly Western European' and, in fact, `might be one of these queer crossbreed types that can be thrown up almost anywhere between Liverpool and the Middle East'. My god, they're all around us !

We don't usually have wholesale killing in Johns. Apart from early books such as Biggles o f the Camel Squadron in which Biggles, in a cold fury, wreaks carnage on `the Huns' because they've killed Tommy, his friend, strife in the Johns books is usually at the level of gang warfare. In the book just mentioned, which looks back to the first world war, we find that war is still a `game' with Biggles and a German air ace each refusing to take what was considered an unfair advantage of the other. Even so, things aren't what they used to be and `a bit of fun' with the 'Boche' seems harder to come by.

Women, generally, are absent from Johns's books, except, of course, the Worrals series. Worrals is a kind of female Biggles, though she's woman enough to faint, briefly, at the end of Worrals of the WAAF. Inter-sexual relationships, if they occur, are at adolescent level and a lot of boyish chaffing goes on.

The idea of menace to the Empire or, in the later books, to what's left of it, now comes to the fore. The lords-of-the-earth mentality still, and strangely, persists as at the beginning of Biggles and the Black Raider when Air Commodore Raymond tells Biggles he's having `a spot of bother'. When Biggles asks him, `Where is the shoe pinching this time?' the answer is `Africa'. However, things are changing. In Biggles Flies Again, we are told, by someone in `intelligence', that, `Since the British bulldog lost his teeth or forgot how to bite . . . it's the Great White Bear that worries us.' Quick as a flash, Biggles queries,

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`Russia?' But it's Biggles in the Blue which really gives the game away, as far as Johns is concerned. The villain, technically, is von Stalheim, once a Nazi secret agent but now `with headquarters behind the Iron Curtain', the stooge of one `reptile' and `stinker', Zorotov. Biggles puts his bafflement to von Stalheim and wonders: `why you, once an officer and still sometimes a gentleman, associate with people who behave as if they were brought up in a sewer.' The only way Biggles can explain it, and it pinpoints for us John's attitudes towards communism and fascism is as the `difference between a bad man and a good man gone wrong'. By implication, and astonishingly, von Stalheim, former Nazi, is only held to have `gone wrong' since the war.

No book has really been as complete as a paradigm of imperialism and, of course, capitalism as Robinson Crusoe. We've seen, though, that The Voyages o f Dr Dolittle contained many features and was, in fact, a fairly complete blueprint as well, though centred on the great white chief element. Now, we have, thirdly, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory an even more upto-date model. (Here, food and more especially sweets are the mainspring, as animals are in the Dolittle books. These are certain winners with children.) Thus, there are three books that can be singled out as showing the basic patterns of the imperial tradition in literature for children. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, like The Voyages of Dr Dolittle, is meant for an age range of about eight to ten and, before the first British paperback edition, it had sold about half a million copies. In fact, the vast and continuing popularity of these three books is worth noting.

Roald Dahl, the author of the most recent one, was, according to his own account, `nurtured' on Kipling, read Haggard and Marryat and `all Henty'.

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory centres first on an incredibly poor family, the Buckets, whose diet consisted entirely of bread, margarine, boiled potatoes and cabbage. Sundays were special because they had a second helping. Charlie, the young lad, longed for chocolate more than anything else and, once a year, the whole family saved up and bought him a

I I I

small bar of chocolate for his birthday. To make matters worse, they lived within sight of Mr Willy Wonka's chocolate factory, the biggest in the world. They are all taken in by this great capitalist who announces a massive advertising and promotion scheme, whereby five golden tickets are to be hidden under the wrappings of five bars of chocolate. The five lucky children who find the tickets are to be shown around the factory and given enough chocolates and sweets to last them for the rest of their lives. This is more special than it might seem as no one has been allowed inside the factory for some years and no one knows who works there. The ordinary workers were dispensed with because industrial spies used to mingle with them to learn the secrets of confectionery-making. Charlie gets one of the golden tickets, of course, and, on the appointed day, turns up with his Grandpa Joe. Conducted by Wonka, plus gold-topped cane, the children start their tour of the factory. The secret of the workers is revealed when, first, one `little person' is spotted and then more. Wonka assures his party that these are real people - in fact, Oompa-Loompas, `Imported direct from Loompaland'. When Wonka went out there, he explains, the Oompa-Loompas, because they were terrified of the fierce beasts in their land, were living in tree-houses and eating little except mashed-up green caterpillars, which they hated, while they craved for cacao beans (an interesting parallel with Charlie's situation, of having cabbage and longing for chocolate, at the beginning of the book). The `golden' ticket, in the case of the Oompa-Loompas, was a one-way ticket to go and work in Wonka's factory in exchange for all the cacao beans they wanted and chocolate as well. They were delighted, of course, and now are wonderful workers. They speak English, they love dancing and music and are very merry, always making up jokes. Wonka calls them `delightful' and `charming'. They appear when Wonka clicks his fingers and a hundred of them row his private yacht. Their skin is 'rosy-white'.

Rather horrible things happen to the children (apart from Charlie, the hero) to the accompaniment of moralistic songs from the Oompa-Loompas. For instance, Violet Beauregarde,

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who chews gum all the time, swells up to look like an enormous bilberry when she tries some chewing-gum still in its experimental stage :`"It always happens like that," sighed Mr Wonka. "I've tried it twenty times in the Testing Room on twenty Oompa-Loompas, and everyone of them finished up as a blueberry. It's most annoying. I just can't understand it." ' So the Oompa-Loompas have other uses, too. Apart, perhaps, from Veruca Salt, the spoilt girl, the other three children remain, apparently, permanently deformed by their experiences in the factory. Charlie, because he was a good boy and, I suspect, because neither he nor his family ever complained in spite of their extreme poverty, is the winner. Bingo ! It was a competition and the prize, Wonka having no family, is the chocolate factory which he hands over to Charlie (not to any, or all, of the Oompa-Loompas).

In the above I've been referring to the Penguin edition in which significant changes were made from both the original United States edition of 1964. and the first British edition of z g67. In those earlier editions, the children exclaim, on first seeing the Oompa-Loompas, `Their skin is almost black !' (not rosy-white') and Wonka explains, `Right !... Pygmies they are ! Imported direct from Africa !' Now, neither `Africa' nor `Pygmies' are mentioned in the Penguin edition and nor are Wonka's original details of the immigrant or guest-workers given :`I brought them over from Africa myself - the whole tribe of them, three thousand in all. I found them in the very deepest and darkest part of the African jungle where no white man had ever been before.' In the original edition, the OompaLoompas are illustrated as being black, unlike either of the other editions. We see Wonka as a benevolent capitalist to his compatriots and a benevolent imperialist towards another race. In each role, and interestingly, he displays more than a touch of sadism.

I haven't dealt with all the writers within this tradition. That would be impossible. It was even impossible to deal with all the works of each writer mentioned. Kingston wrote over

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150 adventure stories for boys, Ballantyne wrote over 80, Henty wrote about 8o historical adventure stories for boys, and Johns wrote about z 20. Westerman, a sort of earlier Johns but with rather more sea than air in his work, wrote about z 75 boys' stories. They were very prolific, these empire-builders and the influence they have for long maintained over the people of this country is incalculable. I've dealt with the main writers and most of the books referred to (and many not referred to) are in print.

Of all the writers dealt with here, only Defoe and, perhaps, Marryat show any skill in literary craftsmanship. Lofting and Dahl, undeniably, have gifts of inventiveness and creativity especially likely to appeal to young children, but the content of their work includes large and important elements which are ethically unacceptable. Haggard and Kipling, it must be admitted, have a certain literary ability when they are not carried off on the wings of their own rhetoric.

The song is over, but the malady lingers on. Two developments, however, have happened over the past few years. In one, the ideology that has been outlined in this chapter is taken into space and in the second the tradition recoils upon itself.

Johns launched out into space in the historically-interesting year of z954. (when the empire was finally crumbling), with The Quest for the Perfect Planet, but the inability to escape from the confines of an outmoded ideology can be seen clearly in much science fiction written for children. An examination of Star Rangers (an interesting title) by Andre Norton shows this : `In 8054, A.D. history repeated itself - as it always does. The First Galactic Empire was breaking up.' Some of the starrangers `a law-enforcement body' and advanced descendants of bird-, reptile- and human-types from several different worlds, refuse to abandon belief in `Central Control' and are sent off on a bogus mission - the intention is to get rid of them - and crash on what turns out to be earth. An evil, humanoid dictator tries to take over a long-abandoned but technologically once highly-developed earth city and tries to lure the humanoid

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rangers into an 'anti-Bemmy' pact. The Bemmies are nonhumanoid and therefore this must be seen as a development of racism, though here, we might note, it's suggested by a baddy. However, the rangers stick together to enforce law. Eventually, Cummi, the evil one, is killed, the rangers are joined by another fleeing Patrol group and they all decide to stay on Terra from which the original emigration and colonisation of other planets took place. At the end, Kartr, a humanoid ranger wonders : `Shall we rise again to be the Lords of space and the rangers of the star lanes? ... Do we begin this day a second cycle leading to another empire?' In this book, there's a hierarchy of `civilised' planets, `barbarians' and so on, while on earth, or `Terra', there are the `primitive natives', descendants of those who never left. Catseye by the same author shows similar features.

Robert A. Heinlein's very popular glorification of war, Starship Troopers, is another space-imperial. In it, we have planets colonised from `Terra', an inter-planetary war against the `Bugs' ('they are communal entities, the ultimate dictatorship of the hive'), and, quite explicitly, just about every kind of reactionary idea imaginable. One of these ideas, typical of much US fiction, is the very strange one that being a `man' involves fighting and killing other people. As usual with such books, the only impression left is of overgrown boys playing vicious games. All this is merely projected into a future of barbarism plus modern technology. Nothing has changed, essentially, from nineteenth century imperialist fiction. It's just that, instead of nations, we have planets.

It's too soon for a proper analysis of this trend and these illustrations must serve to show where it seems to be heading, as far as attitudes are concerned.

Of more importance, because healthier, is the recoil, the counter-attack now being waged in literature by the third world against the first. There are already a few books.

Benjie's Portion by Martin Ballard is about a settlement on the Sierra Leone river and the transporting of black Nova Scotians back to Africa to found a colony (ruled, however, by

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whites). It's a very sympathetic and humane book, centred upon black people but not shirking evils such as the selling of blacks by blacks as slaves. It's also about how the philanthropic ideals of those who conceived the idea of the colony were betrayed by the businessmen who were appointed to carry them out.

The Jungle Hunters by Jorgen Birch comes from Scandinavia, as a lot of children's fiction with civilised values tends to do. Here, we have good and accurate descriptions of the lives of the Congo Pygmies by someone who lived with them and who shows respect for them and their culture - a happy one - though they are dependent on a white missionary for penicillin so that Ghoul, the boy hunter and hero, can make his mother well again. There's no axe to grind, however, and unpleasantnesses such as the unequal trade terms exacted from the pygmies by the `Big People' (other blacks living nearby) are reported because it's reality and a part of the pygmies' lives. Unlike in most of the other stories we've been considering, a culture isn't seen as inferior merely because it's different: `On the whole the Pygmies do not have the same fear of death as civilised people. They regard it as something natural, and sorrow is generally forgotten the day after the death.' Here, it would only be possible to quibble with the use of the word `civilised'.

However, the counter-attack, as I've called it, comes most obviously from the West Indies, presumably because we have many people of West Indian origin living here and because their language is English.

We see the other side of things in V.S.Reid's excellentlywritten Sixty-Five. The framework of the story is the uprising in Jamaica led by the black Deacon, Paul Bogle, in 1865, and its brutal suppression. Within this historical framework, the reader is closely identified with Japheth, the boy who spends most of the book with his grandfather, an old soldier of the West India army who is loyal to the queen, proud of his soldiering days and full of scorn for what he considers to be the incompetently-led rabble army of Paul Bogle. Neither is Paul Bogle against the queen but against the injustice of an ad- 

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ministration which has allotted the best land to former slaveowners. Three years of drought have brought matters to a head. When Japheth's much-revered Grandpa sees the savagery of the British soldiers, he tries, in spite of his reservations, to help in the uprising and, towards the end, he shoots two or three redcoats with his old army musket. Here, without heroics or exaggeration, is the story of a changing political consciousness.

A later book by the same author, not written with such verve, I think, but certainly fine on local atmosphere, detail and authenticity is The Young Warriors. It tells of the initiation of a group of Maroon boys as young warriors and then of the large part they play in a victorious ambush of British troops. Charlie is the weak one who cheats at one of the initiation tasks and who, threatened with torture, betrays his village but he redeems himself by his brave conduct at the end. Both of Reid's stories were published in association with the Jamaican Ministry of Education.

The pigeons are certainly coming home to roost ! Nor does the recoil come only from former colonial peoples. Robert

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Leeson, in Maroon Boy, sets his story in Elizabethan times with Matthew, a rigidly religious boy, as hero. The novel is a fine

I answer to those who think that it's necessary to have Haggard,

Johns and the like to grip the imagination of children. Here's

excitement and adventure enough within a civilised system of values. In the book, we meet the crippled 'blackamoor', Satan, so nicknamed because of the ugly scar on his face. Here, however, and interestingly, neither the scar nor his colour signals evil or inferiority. Taunted by the crowd, he defends himself with consummate grace (and a long curved knife) on the quay at Plymouth and later sails with Matthew as a member of a slave-ship crew. Tied to the mainmast after being savagely lashed for assisting the slaves under the hatches, Satan spits full in Matthew's face when the boy goes to put oil on the black man's wounds. After evening prayers, Matthew falls to wondering about what seems to him a strange reaction :

The shock he had received had passed, and he began to ponder soberly why the black man's hate had sought him - who had wished Satan no harm. Then, in a flash, he recalled the day when the slaves were loaded. Satan had stood in the crowd and watched him - Matthew - number his own people like cattle, shove them, force them to rise, even beating their children. His heart grew sick at the thought, but sicker still to think that all this had gone by and he had given it no thought until tonight.^[20]

He's growing up - and this very growth, a mark of good literature, has been conspicuously absent from the main tradition we've been examining.

In this development, and at last, shining amidst the great mire we have been picking our way across, is hope for the future. Let us encourage this literature - not because it shows `the other side' but because it is, morally, better and better written, too - which is no accident. And let us all, with J.K.Stephen in his poem, To R.K., look forward to that season

When the Rudyards cease from kipling

And the Haggards Ride no more.

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References and Notes for Chapter 3

I. Quoted from Valerie E. Chancellor, History for their Masters, Bath, Adams & Dart 1970, ^p. 125^.

2. For other writers' views on their work, compare PP-57, 57-58,58,98,105- 106,133.

3. W.H.G.Kingston, A Lecture on Colonisation, London, Trelawney Saunders 1849, p.6.

4. R.M.Ballantyne, The Gorilla Hunters, London, Dean & Son 1934, PP- 12.

5. Of about six thousand people.

6. Patrick Howarth, Play Up and Play the Game, London, Eyre Methuen I973, p.89.

7. I'm indebted, for these remarks on Henley, to Patrick Howarth, op. cit.

8. H.Rider Haggard, Nada the Lily, London, Collins 1957, p. 109.

9. Morton Cohen (ed.), Rudyard Kipling to Rider Haggard, Cranbury, New Jersey, Associated University Presses, Inc. 1965, P•35•

10. See p.g8 below.

11. Edgar Wallace, Sandi, the King-Maker, London, Ward Lock undated, p.62.

12. Quoted from Patrick Howarth, op. cit.

13. Edgar Wallace, Sanders o f the River, London, Tom Stacey I972, p.84.

14- ibid. p.88.

15. Edgar Wallace, Sandi, the King-Maker, London, Ward Lock undated, P-5⁸

16. Quoted from Geoffrey Trease, Tales out of School, London, Heinemann 1964, p.8o.

17. Boris Ford (ed.), Young Writers, Young Readers, London, Hutchinson 1960, pp. 118,120.

Empire: Fiction Follows the Flag I19 18. W.E.Johns, Biggles and the Black Raider, London,

Hodder & Stoughton ¹953, PP•²3^-24•