The Empire Man

 A Three-Cornered Life: The Historian W.K. Hancock,

by Jim Davidson;
UNSW Press, 2010, 624 pages, $59.95.

The name W.K. Hancock continues to have a wide resonance throughout the English-speaking scholarly world, particularly among historians. His reputation has eluded the “pigeon-holers”; he was neither particularly right or left, terms he thought foreign and even pernicious, but he did seem to live the life of both a traditionalist and a radical, descriptive terms he favoured, at various stages of his long and illustrious career.

Clearly, he had a many-cornered life—taking in Britain (his second home), Italy, West Africa, South Africa (as reflected in his biography of Jan Christian Smuts), the British empire and its successor Commonwealth and, of course, his native Australia, which he never abandoned emotionally and with which he came to identify more intensely in his last three decades. That said, this most Anglo of Australians affirmed to the end “his love of two soils”.

Hancock’s biographer, Jim Davidson, has titled his full-dress biography “A Three-Cornered Life”, reducing, no doubt for the sake of comprehension, the many focal points of Hancock’s intellectual and emotional engagement with Australia, Britain and South Africa.

Taking the measure of the life of this singular historian offers a wonderfully stimulating and informative journey through the history (and historiography) of the twentieth century, from both a British and an Australian perspective. His biographer has made that journey especially memorable, thanks to his dedication and his obvious desire to see his subject’s life in the round. It is also clear this has involved a huge labour, which has consumed a good chunk of the author’s life (from internal evidence it would appear it has been on the boil for at least fifteen years). It has taken him to his subject’s many homes on three continents, the archives related to his major studies, and involved tracking down Hancock’s wide correspondence with what constitutes something of a “who’s who” of “the great and good” from the mid-1920s through to the late 1980s. It should also be noted that this is a most handsomely produced book, the cover particularly, and UNSW Press should be congratulated.

My introduction to Hancock’s work was in the mid-1960s, when I developed an interest in imperial history, with a particular focus on the inter-war period. While researching a paper, I was leafing through the contents pages of his multi-volume Survey of British Commonwealth Affairs, published by OUP for the Royal Institute of International Affairs (Chatham House). While the volumes looked pretty daunting, my eye was captured by an essay on Mary Kingsley, slipped in as an appendix to the second volume. I knew something about her already and thought it odd that she should be the subject of an essay in what I assumed was another of those bloodless Establishment tomes, invariably only slightly less sleep-inducing than the usual HMSO “blue book”. I started reading it before anything else and was quite surprised, even thrilled, to discover how interesting it was. It was obvious to me that the Survey’s author, All Souls Fellow or not, was a real human being with a spry sense of life’s possibilities and an endearing appreciation of the eccentric and the exceptional.

It was a good sign. I soon discovered that the Survey itself was quite as interesting and, not least, beautifully written. It was many years after that first exposure that I realised the centrality of Kingsley’s life for Hancock. Indeed, his admiration for her personal and intellectual qualities inspired his core scholarly values and, one suspects, fortified his determination to take on the big issues, a sensibility which distinguished his life as a teacher and scholar.

For those unfamiliar with Mary Kingsley (1862–1900) it is worth knowing that she was, and still is, something of a revered figure among Africanists. She was the greatly loved daughter of Charles Henry Kingsley, a physician, naturalist and notable traveller in his day, and brother of Henry who came out to the Australian goldfields as a young man and drew on these adventures in his novel Geoffry Hamlyn.

Mary, a self-educated polymath, obliged to stay at home to care for her ailing mother, had a restless yearning for exotic and challenging travel. At the age of thirty, on the death of her parents in 1893, she packed her bags and took a ship to West Africa. Her curiosity about the natural world and the people she met—she was an early practitioner of the new science of anthropology—enriched her travels, her books, her public lectures and her growing popular reputation. She died of fever while nursing Boer prisoners in South Africa in 1900, aged thirty-eight. Her kindness, her respect for all people, black and white, her gutsy fortitude, her selfless sacrifice in South Africa and, not least, her contribution to our understanding of African realities propelled her into that small pantheon of Victorian heroines. She was also the inspiration for the founding, shortly after her death, of what became known as the Royal African Society.

As Hancock put it in a later semi-autobiographical book, Professing History:

I found inspiration in the words and deeds of a great Englishwoman … She had died when I was two years old, but for me it was love at first sight when my mind met hers in two exhilarating books, Travels in West Africa and West Africa Studies … Imagination has its deepest roots in the lust for life. Mary Kingsley understood this basic truth.

At the time, Hancock was working on volume two of the Survey, it was early 1940, and he decided to go out to West Africa by ship, to see for himself the reality of colonial Africa before writing about it. It was a seminal time in his wandering life. The journey and the destination provided him with his enduring credo, his first experience of sociological inquiry with a colourful mix (in every sense) of real people and, as he enthusiastically joined the ship’s gun crew (the convoy was subject to U-boat attack), his first direct exposure to war.

In that original essay on Kingsley, he developed his idea of the purpose and ideals of scholarship, as exemplified in her life:

She wrote very little history; yet she possessed the three cardinal virtues which distinguish the great historian from the crowd of journeymen. These virtues are attachment, justice, and span. Attachment means self-implication in the thought and emotions and action of the life being studied; it is that capacity for self-forgetfulness and sympathetic insight which enables the historian to handle the actual stuff of the lives which others lead, and to share their experiences from the inside … Attachment is a virtue which must not be eradicated; the cure for its perverseness and excesses is justice … By direct experience or imaginative understanding she implicated herself in the society which surrounded her and made herself a partner in its way of life … Her road to scientific knowledge was sociological research illuminated by human understanding. Span was my name for these qualities of the questing intellect. Span reveals itself in historical or sociological work as an awareness of background. Attachment is to the particular thing, span is a consciousness of the relation of things … Perspective is an alternative name for span.

So far I have spoken to Hancock’s quality of mind, his values, but what of his writing, his “span”, his life’s run, his influence, his legacy? His CV is a good start; it reads like the quintessential catalogue of achievement of a top-drawer “colonial” British historian of his time, not that it’s easy to find a comparison. And it’s worth noting that Hancock, being very much a man of his time, described himself for most of his life as an “independent Australian Briton” or “British with a small ‘b’”. His formal accomplishments were crisply summarised by another distinguished imperial historian and his close friend, Anthony Low, in the introduction to a collection of essays he edited, Keith Hancock: The Legacies of an Historian (2001):

Keith Hancock was the most distinguished scholar in the humanities and the social sciences to have been born and to have worked in Australia. His formal record runs as follows: First Class Honours degrees in History from both Melbourne and Oxford Universities, Rhodes Scholar, the first Australian to be elected a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, Professor of History successively at the Universities of Adelaide, Birmingham, Oxford, London and the Australian National University, general editor of the British Civil Histories of World War II, founding Director of the Institute of Commonwealth Studies in the University of London, founding Director of the Research School of Social Sciences at the ANU, founding President of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, inaugural Chairman of the Australian Dictionary of Biography, knighted in 1953, knighted again (at Menzies’s insistence) in 1965, Fellow of the British Academy, Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, recipient of nine honorary degrees, author of twenty books.

One could be forgiven for concluding, after absorbing this almost absurdly worthy life, that Hancock was some kind of disembodied heroic construct, a man of superb qualities except for any apparent exposure to failure, least of all tragedy—the response to which arguably presents the true test of character. It is a mark of Davidson’s scholarship and sensitivity that Hancock’s doubts, setbacks and sadnesses are unearthed, ventilated and presented in such a way as to enable the reader to pause and empathise with a fine and kind flesh-and-blood human being. The chapter on Hancock’s marriage to his first wife, the beautiful but often troubled Theaden (nee Brocklebank), is a fine piece of emotional archaeology distinguished by its fair-mindedness and sympathy.

Hancock was born in Melbourne in 1898, all his grandparents having come to Victoria from Britain in the 1850s. His father William, after a difficult and unhappy youth, struggled to get himself through Melbourne University, became a clergyman and rose to become the Anglican Archdeacon of Melbourne (the other two most prominent Australian historians of our time, Geoffrey Blainey and Manning Clark, were also sons of the vicarage).

After providing a detailed commentary on Hancock’s early life in country Victoria, specifically the Gippsland town of Bairnsdale (his childhood Arcadia), and the Melbourne suburb of Moonee Ponds, and the bitter blow of his brother’s death on the Somme, the biography offers up a vivid sense of the intensity of Hancock’s student days at Melbourne University and the influence of his mentor, Professor Ernest Scott. His first teaching post was at the then newly founded University of Western Australia in Perth where he came under the wing of Professor E.O.G. Shann, who prompted him to apply for a Rhodes Scholarship. He did, somewhat reluctantly it appears, and he got it.

It is not generally known, although recently revealed by a television-don version of Hancock, the wunderkind Niall Ferguson (in Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World), that Cecil Rhodes entrusted the execution of his will to his friend and financier Lord Rothschild, specifying that his “estate should be used to fund an imperialist equivalent of the Jesuit order … a society of the elect for the good of the Empire”. Rhodes’s will carries a scribble from him to Rothschild: “In considering question suggested take Constitution Jesuits if obtainable and insert English Empire for Roman Catholic Religion.” One can only presume that the better angels of Rhodes’s nature, assuming he had any, would be particularly cheered by the prospect that a former Rhodes Scholar, who also happens to be a Jesuit-educated anglophile, will most probably be Australia’s next prime minister.

Hancock arrived in Oxford, aged twenty-four, in January 1922 when it was, as Davidson puts it, “still haunted by the Great War, together with more piquant memories of life before the deluge”. It is a mark of how deceptive our sense of historical time can be when we consider the extent and range of Hancock’s life in relation to the great dramatic moments of the last century. The diminutive white-haired gentleman who could fluently hold forth on Leonardo at an ANU seminar as recently as 1988—the year he died, aged ninety—is the same man who had conversations and friendships with many of the greatest world figures of the first half of the twentieth century, was privy to many of the momentous events and decisions of that time and, somehow, with a most uncommon presence of mind, and aplomb, managed for some seventy years to personify the gold standard of historical scholarship. In the words of the historian A.D. Harvey, writing in 2005 about the war books:

[Hancock’s] comments are as pertinent today in their discussion of the scope, objects and methodology of historical writing, as when they were written during the Second World War—and indicate the continuing relevance of rigorous historical scholarship in difficult times.

In 1922 he was a Rhodes Scholar at Balliol, the Oxford college of the legendary Benjamin Jowett who, as Master, once remarked, “I should like to govern the world through my pupils.” As Davidson observes:

Looking at the list of honorary fellows when he went up, Hancock might have thought he had. Balliol had produced three Viceroys of India in succession, one of whom, Curzon, was now Chancellor of the university; [as well as] leading politicians such as H.H. Asquith, Edward Grey, L.S. Amery … and Lord Milner, the architect of the Boer War (and the Rhodes Trust).

It was the place to which Prime Minister Asquith memorably attributed, only half-jokingly, the style of “effortless superiority”, a demeanour which it was thought Lord Curzon personified most thoroughly (and painfully).

In 1923, when he took a First in Modern History, Hancock was informed by one of his tutors, Kenneth Bell, that he should apply for a fellowship at All Souls, on the very day registration closed. Davidson tells us, “as with the Rhodes, so with an All Souls Fellowship: a mentor had to prod him into applying”. He got on his bike, took the exams and emerged “an easy winner”.

After less than two years at Oxford, this twenty-five-year-old Melburnian was ushered into what was effectively the inner sanctum of the largest, and many would argue, reservations or not, the greatest empire in history. These were heady times. The war had left huge scars and, following the Paris Peace Conference, the challenges of that peace involved a return to the business of running an empire considerably larger than its pre-war incarnation. It had absorbed, one must remember, most of Germany’s old colonies, which now became League of Nations Mandates although effectively ruled by Britain as colonies. Many of the bitterest crises of the contemporary world can be traced back to these years, forged in decisions made in Paris between 1919 and 1921, as my old Toronto friend Margaret Macmillan, now Warden of St Antony’s College, Oxford, has so brilliantly recounted in her book Paris 1919 (2002).

Hancock was quickly taken up by Lionel Curtis, a most curious figure who was something of the eminence grise of the later empire, although his name is largely unknown today. A fellow resident of All Souls with Hancock, Curtis was referred to in his circle as “the prophet” and had a finger in a wide range of political and intellectual pies. He had been the most active organiser for what became known as “Milner’s Kindergarten”, the sobriquet given to the group of young Oxonians who had gone out to South Africa during or after the Boer War, inspired by Lord Alfred Milner, the British High Commissioner in the Cape. They were motivated by an almost evangelical zeal to “do good”—they could be thought of as the equivalent of today’s “policy wonks” with a taste for “humanitarian intervention”—except that their mental world was wholly defined in terms of Rhodes’s ambitions for the empire.

Not surprising, really. After all, Rhodes had a vision that made sense in that world at that time. He was the man with the money, he was also the political leader in the Cape and, probably most important of all, he had the will, in both senses. His death in 1902 provided the fortune and the inspiration behind the scholarships, Rhodes House at Oxford, the journal Round Table, academic chairs in imperial studies, Chatham House (with sister institutes throughout the empire), imperial conferences and many other activities. A number of these institutions were set up by Curtis and are still going concerns to this day. One might even imagine it being something of a Buchanesque congress for cultural freedom for the Edwardian empire; at the time, this movement, or at least what it believed in (an Anglo-centric version of liberal interventionism), was seen by many as man’s best hope, and it almost certainly was, compared with the choices on offer—Prussian militarism, Tsarist authoritarianism soon to become the Leninist nightmare, a rich variety of oriental despotisms and, not least, a choice of African kingdoms which Africanists today, and many good-hearted multiculturalists, claim we should admire, but would definitely not want to live in, for the simple reason they wouldn’t live for long (one example: Chaka’s Zulu empire, when all is said, had more in common with Pol Pot’s vision than with Obama’s or Mandela’s).

The Round Table, a group as well as a journal, permeated All Souls, and the fellowship took in Geoffrey Dawson, the editor of the Times; Robert (later Lord) Brand, international banker; Leo Amery, shortly to become Colonial Secretary, and India Secretary after that; Phillip Kerr, later British Ambassador to the United States. More colourful fellows in the twenties included T.E. Lawrence, brought in by Curtis, and the inimitable A.L. Rowse, who became a close friend of Hancock’s.

This was the world that Hancock entered as a young man, a world that is almost totally unknown to even the most informed inhabitants of what today we might call the Anglosphere. It was the world that nonetheless defined much of our contemporary geopolitical reality and, not surprisingly, generated many of the ideas that emerge in Hancock’s landmark book Australia, an anti-heroic version of our national self-regard written by a patriot, and arguably his two most impressive projects, The Survey of Commonwealth Affairs and his two-volume biography of Smuts.

While All Souls provided him with a scholarly refuge and point of reference for the next fifty years, he was never attracted to the pro-appeasement sentiment that infused some of the grander Fellows from the early 1930s through to 1940, as chronicled in Rowse’s book Appeasement at All Souls. Throughout his life Hancock was a firm anti-totalitarian, be it in relation to Mussolini’s Italy, Hitler’s Germany or Stalin’s Russia (contrary to the somewhat snide swipe by Gareth Evans in his comments launching this book at the ANU).

While Hancock made many other contributions, such as his editorship of the mammoth Civil Series of the official British War History, he also wrote books on war and peace, collected essays on a wide range of ideas and events that have had a profound effect on later history and, of particular interest to those of a more contemporary frame of mind, books on the environment and our obligations to nature. But if there is one subject which Hancock made his own, and for which he is honoured above everything else, it is the history (and politics and economics) of the British empire, with an emphasis on its dying days. He made the best case for what my old teacher Lewis Feuer, that most fascinating sociologist of ideas, referred to as “progressive imperialism” in his seminal if under-rated book Imperialism and the Anti-Imperial Mind (1986): as he wrote, “Anti-imperialist literature has perhaps beclouded the great fact that the world’s advances have been associated with the eras of progressive imperialism”, and for Feuer the British empire was the most progressive of all.

The distinguished American imperial scholar William Roger Louis, of the University of Texas and St Antony’s College, and editor in chief of the Oxford History of the British Empire, says of Hancock: “there would probably be a consensus among the [some 125] historians involved in the Oxford History of the British Empire that he was far and away the greatest historian of the Empire and Commonwealth”.

In his last decade, the years when I got to know him, he felt a growing disdain for what passed for the American empire; it was a sentiment which I felt owed more to his very British irritation with American anti-imperialist conceits than anything to do with fashionable left-wing enthusiasms. He was always very British in his amiable Australian way, and above all he was a man of his times, particularly the years 1925 to 1945, arguably the most thrilling and demanding of times in the last century, or any century.

Anthony McAdam studied imperial history at Edinburgh and St Antony’s College, Oxford, and is the author of a textbook on African politics. He is currently writing a book on Rwanda’s history.