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Among the frequent appeals for contributions, of one sort or
another, from members of OSPA towards an eventual history of the Colonial
Service (and just how rewardingly those calls have been heeded is manifest in the rich
resources of the Colonial Archive, still being added to, in the Rhodes House Library at
Oxford), one repeated aside, as it were, has crept in: true, there is as yet no adequate
history of the Colonial Service, with its tens of thousands of men and women, but
don't forget that so far there is not even a history of the Sudan Political Service, never
numbering more than 130 men on the ground and totalling fewer than four hundred in
the whole of its recruiting lifetime (1899-1953)!
"So far" . . . . but now,, with the appearance of Set Under Authority, this comment
at once becomes measurably less justified. For what K.D.D. Henderson - one-time
Governor of Darfur, author of several standard books on the Sudan including the
magisterial biography of Sir Douglas Newbold, Civil Secretary 1939-1945, The Making of the Modern Sudan (1953), and who was still writing into his eighties fluently and
accurately of the Service in which he himself spent twenty-seven-years - has done is to
give us a major, authoritative and invaluable contribution towards the definitive
history of what was arguably the most distinct and distinguished Service of them all.
This is not, nor does it set out to be, the history of the Sudan Political Service. But in
its acknowledged objective of "putting on record what it was like to work as a British
District Officer in the Sudan under the Anglo-Egyptian Condominium between 1898
and 1956", it amply and admirably achieves exactly that. Through a comfortable
blend of narrative, reflection and anecdote, drawing neatly from his own reminiscences
as well as effectively from the important unpublished memoirs of his colleagues
which were made available to him on their way to the Sudan Archive in the University
of Durham, and with a minimum of patriotic pomp and a maximum of modesty and
unobtrusive expertise, Henderson has done for the Sudan Political Service what
Mason did for the Indian Civil Service and what Heussler
did for the Malayan Civil Service. In short, he has put his Service
permanently on record. Only our turn is still to come.
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