Colonial Service

and Old School Tie

( Contributed ) ENGLAND’S Foreign Office has been criticised as being still manned by diplomats of the old school. Her Colonial Office has been under fire for not tackling quickly enough much-needed reforms in our wide Colonial Empire.

It is suggested that, while Tory diplo mats are half-heartedly carrying out Mr.

Bevin’s directions in foreign affairs, the Colonies still are being administered by officials unsympathetic to Socialistic ideals. No doubt it is just as easy to find a Tory diplomat as it is to discover an upper-grade non-socialistic clerk in the Colonial Office; but such a one should, at least, not be allowed to be even the oc casional mouthpiece of his department.

In the BBC’s “Calling the Islands” pro gramme last May a Mr. Trafford Smith,a young gentleman* from the Colonial Office, after indulging himself in some biographical detail which showed that he began life in what, to quote him, “you might call the lower middle class,” his parents having been, “frankly working class and made their way up a little,” stated that, being good at “exams,” he was grist to his elementary school’s mill, and that, in 1935 he finally graduated from the “real life” of selling dress materials, and store-guiding, at Harrods, into the Civil Service.

He went on to say that “now-a-days the jobs (in the Civil Service), both here and overseas, go to the people with the

right qualifications, whoever they are, and quite irrespective of origin or social position.”

At this point he said he imagined he saw “some wry smiles” on his listeners’ faces, and had he been able to listen he might have heard it said that Australians and New Zealanders are the logical people for the acquisition of the “right quali fications” to enable them to fill admini strative posts in the Pacific.

But the old, offensive, stodgy, Tory mentality of Mr. Trafford-Smith was re vealed when he continued: “. . . but surely, when you come to think about it, it is clear that to draw your colonial administrators from a more highly-de veloped country overseas ,and to let them maintain their contacts with it by peri odical visits on leave, it is in the long run an .advantage, and not a disadvantage, to the less-developed colonial territories they serve. Such territories have much to gain from the man whose mind and outlook have been formed at a centre of civilisation (Harrods?), always provided that he has the ability to adapt himself successfully to local conditions.”

NO British Government expects its officials to change their policies with their bosses, but their public utter ances should coincide with Government policy and not appear to support a policy which, having borne some inefficiency and much disaffection, has been aband oned.

If Mr. Trafford Smith had been pre sent when his new boss, Mr. George Hall, Secretary of State for the Colonies, opened the Colonial debate in the House of Commons on July 10, only 2 months after this self-revealing Pacific broad

cast, he would not have heard it said that our colonial administrators should be recruited only from among Englishmen with the right qualifications, but among “selected candidates —whether from the Colonies or the United Kingdom or the Dominions.”

IT is not suggested that all English officers are to be disparaged, or that our Pacific colonial service is grossly in efficient. But if there is to be the pro mised “revolution” in the Colonies, the first evidence of it should be almost total recruitment of senior Colonial officers from neighbouring Dominions and the Colonies themselves.

Take Fiji, for example. Is there any reason why that Colony, so distant from Whitehall, should be staffed according to the present system? Why should not the Governor, the Chief Justice and the Colonial Sectary only be appointed from the United Kingdom; and other posts be filled as suggested above by officers prepared to spend their admini strative lives, and holidays, in the Paci fic, without being shuffled around the Colonial Empire or having public moneys wasted on them in the form of expensive passage grants to the United Kingdom?

The American steamer “Flyaway” from San Francisco recently called in at Apia, W. Samoa, with 100 tons of general cargo and 300 tons of Canadian lumber. She lifted 5,000 cases of bananas, 200 tons of cocoa beans and 200 tons of copra for Auckland, New Zealand. The Apia call had been arranged by the New Zealand Government to replace the usual monthly trip of the “Matua” which had been laid up for her annual August overhaul.

Mr. G. E. L. Lord, from Somaliland, has been appointed Government Auditor, Fiji.

Mr. Ragnar Hyne, formerly of the British Solomon Islands Protectorate, and for a time a resident of Fiji, has been appointed Attorney General, Sierra Leone.

Major F. G. L. Holland, of the Western Pacific High Commission, has been ap pointed District Officer at Rabi (the new settlement of Ocean Islanders in the Fiji Group) in succession to Major D. G.

Kennedy who is returning to Suva.