Donal Lowry. Journal of Southern African Studies. Volume 23, Issue 2, June 1997.
Until recently, the role of European women in the expansion and consolidation of the British colonial empire has been largely ignored by both historians and women’s studies scholars. This is an analysis of one such woman who played a leading role in the development of the British Empire in south-central Africa, Ethel Tawse Jollie (1875-1950), formerly Ethel Colquhoun. In partnership with her first husband, Archibald Ross Colquhoun, explorer, writer and Cecil Rhodes’s first Administrator of Mashonaland, she became steeped in the philosophy of the Edwardian ‘Radical Right’, the post Anglo-Boer War reaction to imperial decline, and she played a prominent role in the opposition to the women’s suffrage campaign before the Great War. As a member of the Legislative Council of Southern Rhodesia, she became the first woman parliamentarian in the British overseas empire. She was a prolific writer on imperial affairs and a leading intellectual of her political generation and, as the founder and principal organiser of the Rhodesian Responsible Government Association (RGA) (1917-1922), she imported from Britain a singular political philosophy shaped by the Edwardian ideology of ‘National Efficiency’. She played a central role in the achievement of responsible government in Southern Rhodesia in 1923, which set the territory’s separate course outside the Union of South Africa. No other Rhodesian politician had achieved such prominence in the metropolis, or possessed such a thoroughly formed and comprehensive ideology, or the propaganda skills necessary for a simultaneous confrontation with the imperial and South African governments, local capital-isis and the ruling British South Africa Company. During her parliamentary career she sought to promote European settlement and improve the educational, health and communications infrastructure of Southern Rhodesia. She paid particular attention to the development of a strong local identity which would attach the settlers more closely to their community and to the British Empire at large.
Mrs Jollie brings Rhodesia home to us … You cherish the very ground that you tread on, warning the whole world off and taking a deep delight in the goodly heritage the Pioneers have handed on. That is what it is to be a Rhodesian … The only condition laid down beyond the Limpopo is that you are loyal.
Young as the colony is, it has a strong sense of nationality, and not merely of British but of Rhodesian identity. Probably to people [in Britain] all South Africans (Rhodesians included) are alike. We do not recognize this, and if you ask, ‘Where do you come from?’ the answer will be ‘From Natal’, ‘From Rhodesia’, never ‘From South Africa’ … We do not find Newfoundland accused of a ridiculous particularism [because of its refusal to join Canada] … We believe in Rhodesia, we believe that she enshrines something worth preserving, and we cling to our heritage not merely for its own sake but because of what it may mean to South Africa and the Empire later on.
In the 1990s we are so used to Zimbabwe’s position as an independent state outside the borders of the Republic of South Africa that it is easy to forget that the separate political identity of the country was by no means certain until the majority of the tiny and almost exclusively white settler electorate voted in a referendum in 1922 to reject its incorporation as a fifth province of the Union and in favour of responsible government, thus setting the territory’s autonomous course. Before this date, Southern Rhodesia was regarded as part of ‘South Africa’ in the geographical sense and the latest stage in the process of British colonisation begun by the arrival of settlers in the Eastern Cape in 1820. The territory’s entry into the Union was therefore widely believed to be inevitable. Its legal system was Roman-Dutch and its ‘colour-blind’ franchise was modelled on that of the Cape Colony. It sent observers to the National Convention which led to the formation of the Union and provision had been made in the South Africa Act of 1909 for its future admission. ‘Rhodesia with its British population may ultimately be the weight which swings the balance in South Africa decisively on the side of the British Crown’, Winston Churchill, parliamentary under-secretary at the Colonial Office, noted in 1906. Such a prospect depressed some imperialists, who feared that, in spite of their crashing defeat in 1902, the Boers would gain control of the whole of South Africa. ‘[The] handing over of a higher civilization to a lower is a heartbreaking job’, Rudyard Kipling confided to the journalist H. A. Gwynne in 1907:
When it comes to unifying South Africa, you’ll see things! I don’t mind betting [the Boers will] monkey with the franchise. Remember that Rhodesia must be kept out of the federation and our play must be to develop Rhodesia as well as we can. It’s the last loyal white colony.
A decade later Kipling’s fears appeared to be justified when the imperial government appeared to favour the territory’s early entry into the Union, where its largely British-descended white community might provide support to pro-imperial elements and deter Afrikaner republican secessionism. By 1921 advocates of responsible government in Southern Rhodesia faced a formidable pro-Union coalition consisting of the British South Africa Company (BSAC) and the Rhodesia Unionist Association (RUA), which was supported by powerful local and South African business interests. Moreover, General Smuts, now prime minister of the Union, was hero-worshipped for his war service by leading members of the imperial government, who now sought to ensure his political survival through Southern Rhodesia’s early entry into the Union. In the referendum held in October 1922, however, 8,774 voted for responsible government and 5,989 for union.
The campaign was presented in heroic terms to subsequent generations of settlers. J. P. R. Wallis’s biography of Sir Charles Coghlan, the first Rhodesian premier and leader of the Responsible Government Association (RGA), depicts a small but courageous people who were determined to achieve their British birthright of self-government in the face of blandishments from a corrupt Company and its Rhodesian toadies, Smuts’s sophistry, and treacherous persuasion from the imperial government. The role of the imperial government in these developments was much more complex, however, as the grant of responsible government still left its regional leverage intact.
Yet, in spite of the observations of contemporaries, little significance has been attached to the role of gender in the campaign. In a letter to Smuts shortly after the close of the campaign, Sir Francis Drummond Chaplin, Administrator of Southern Rhodesia, cited anti-Afrikaner feeling, ‘especially among the women’, as a major factor in the Unionist defeat, while the Unionists themselves deplored the RGA’s ‘pandering’ to the women’s vote in the campaign. In 1923, in a speech to the South African House of Assembly in support of a bill to grant white women the vote, Smuts argued that women were more politically cautious than men, as had been demonstrated in the referendum of 1922 in which their vote had been ‘the decisive factor’. An estimated 75% of Rhodesian women voted for responsible government, including some whose husbands had voted for Union. The women’s voting pattern was closely linked in the minds of contemporary observers to imperialist sentiment and ‘anti-Dutch’ feeling, and in particular to the efforts of one of the territory’s more remarkable political figures, Ethel Tawse Jollie. She had founded the RGA in 1917 and later, as a member of the Legislative Council for the Eastern Division (1920-1923) and the Legislative Assembly representing Umtali (1924-1928), she became the first woman parliamentarian in the British Empire.
Early Life and Formative Ideological Influences 1875-1916
Born Ethel Maude Cookson into a large upper-middle class family in the town of Stafford in the English midlands in 1875, her father was a prominent surgeon and county infirmarian. She was educated privately by governesses and became fluent in French and German. In her early twenties, she attended the Slade School of Art, and studied sculpture under Anthony Ludovici, one-time secretary to Rodin, translator of Nietzsche and later a prominent apologist for conservatism. In the early 1890s, she trained as a secretary for the Charity Organisation Society (COS) and went to work in the slum areas of London, where she underwent courses in the operation of the Poor Law, sanitation, education, and staunchly anti-socialist theories of citizenship and the state. At this time, she was profoundly impressed by her encounters with ‘human suffering [and] people too often robbed by hard and uncongenial surroundings’. Her experiences did not, however, lead her to attribute these conditions to the economic structures of late Victorian England. She drew instead on a non-materialist philosophy, informed by the traditional doctrines of the established church, and a Disraelian Tory brand of paternalism.
In 1900 she married Archibald Ross Colquhoun (1848-1914), distinguished oriental explorer, first Administrator of Mashonaland and a prolific writer on geopolitics and ethnography. Over the following decade, she accompanied him on visits to Europe, Africa, the Far East and Russia, and the Americas, where they were guests of Colquhoun’s friends, President Theodore Roosevelt and Secretary of War William Taft. These expeditions provided the basis for a number of respected publications, including a history of Austria-Hungary. It seems clear from her writings that it was an intellectual love-match based on companionship and shared political convictions. Later, however, she became disappointed that the marriage did not provide her with children. Colquhoun introduced her to advanced imperialist circles in London, where she became prominent in the executives of a number of pressure groups which advocated ‘National Efficiency’ in every aspect of life so that the Empire could be strengthened. These included the National Service League, which campaigned for compulsory military service, and the Imperial Maritime League, Lord Willoughby de Broke’s hard-line Navy League breakaway. She became a leading member of the Royal Colonial Institute (RCI) and succeeded her husband to the editorship of its journal, United Empire, in 1914. She had a indirect link to the ‘House of Cecil, the powerful Conservative family headed by Lord Salisbury, through her step-sister, Agnes Hodgson, who was Arthur Balfour’s election agent. Tawse Jollie was also a member of the executive committee of the Women’s [Conservative and] Unionist Association, and she sat with Mrs Humphry Ward on the Local Government Advancement Committee. She was thus linked into a nexus of right wing pressure groups which preached the gospel of National Efficiency, and the radical reorganisation of British life, from concepts of motherhood, health and the declining birthrate, to technical education and the armed forces, to schemes for the federation of the white dominions and the role of British women in the development of the colonies of settlement. Not surprisingly, as a staunch Unionist she supported the Ulster loyalist revolt over Irish home rule in 1912-1914, that archetype of frontier direct action against the imperial metropolis.
Her distinctive ideology came to maturity against this background, and it was manifested in her activities and publications at this time. Her writings on central and eastern Europe and the Far East reveal her thought to be informed by a romantic Toryism which idealised customary, ‘legitimate’, indigenous structures of authority that had been formed by ‘historical experience’. She echoed the quasi-religious imperialism of Canadian Sir George Parkin, who was a close friend of the Colquhouns and a later secretary of the Rhodes Trust, who believed that the patriotic attachments of white settlers for their adopted lands was quite compatible with a wider imperial patriotism. As a convinced imperial federalist and member of the executive committee of the British Women’s Emigration Association, she campaigned for the emigration of British women to the colonies, emphasising the freedoms which colonies would afford, including electoral and property rights, improved educational facilities, and greater marriage opportunities for women, which would boost the birthrate at a critical time. She was thus typical of female emigration activists who, in the aftermath of the South African War, were imbued with ‘the concept of the Englishwoman as an invincible global civilizing agent’. Degrees She toured British schools, promoting imperial patriotism and ideas of race fitness, but, unlike many of her ideological fellow-travellers, she did not support a policy of eugenics, perhaps because of her Anglican background, preferring –in her words—’Athens [to] … Sparta’.
Closely allied to these concerns was her founding role in the Women’s Anti-Suffrage League in 1908 and the National League for Opposing Women’s Suffrage in 1911. Put briefly, these organizations argued that men and women occupied ‘separate spheres’, the women’s being the domestic sphere. It was legitimate, many female anti-suffragists claimed, for women to be involved in local government, where they could influence policy relating to housing, health, sanitation and education, while in the national political sphere men must predominate, since only they as a sex were obliged to protect and defend both hearth and homeland in time of war.22 She became one of the movement’s leading propagandists, and a popular speaker at its public meetings throughout Britain. She set out her ideas in a number of publications, the most important of which was The Vocation of Woman (1913), which might be described as a sophisticated apologia for a cause that was philosophically untenable. She echoed the anti-suffragist claim that chivalric codes and customs had been built up through the experience of centuries and the Judaeo-Christian tradition which, in ideal and often in practice, protected women from age-old ‘prejudices, and selfishness of men’. If ‘separate spheres’ were eliminated and the protective customs of the centuries destroyed, women could not hope to compete in a sex war based on material and physical strength. On the other hand she supported the enfranchisement of women in the colonies, probably because their cause had been couched in conservative, non-feminist and pro-imperial terms. Moreover, she held that women’s participation in dominion parliaments was related to the domestic rather than the imperial ‘sphere’, an argument that required more than a little sophistry.
One of the greatest ironies of the anti-suffrage movement was that it contained some of the most assertive and prominent career women of their time, including explorers Mary Kingsley and Gertrude Bell, Mary (Mrs Humphry) Ward, the novelist, and Flora Shaw (Lady Lugard), journalist and imperialist. Ironically, the more organised the female ‘antis’ became, the more they undermined their own case against the political competence of women. There also seems to have been more than a hint of Tory partisanship to Tawse Jollie’s stand at this time. Unlike many of the disciples of National Efficiency, she rejected cross-party approaches to national issues in favour of a Tory populist ‘return to first principles’. She feared—needlessly as it turned out—that the ‘swamping’ of the electorate by millions of female voters of uncertain party loyalty, at a time when all males had not yet been enfranchised, might end the Tories’ chances of ever returning to power?
Archibald Colquhoun died in 1914 and a year later Ethel married John Tawse Jollie, a Scots farmer from Melsetter in the Eastern Highlands of Southern Rhodesia, where they settled at the beginning of 1916. By this time, we can already discern characteristics that would later inform her political philosophy and strategy in Southern Rhodesia. She was a staunch, often uncompromising, Tory partisan, who condoned social and gender inequalities as ‘natural’, while accepting the need to ‘educate’ a widening electorate. In common with other disciples of National Efficiency, she accepted that state intervention would be necessary in order to improve health and educational conditions, and she believed in strengthening the Empire through emigration to the settler colonies which would take an increasing share of imperial defence. Most importantly, she was an experienced propagandist and party organiser, as well as an accomplished public speaker with an intimate knowledge of the inner workings of the BSAC, skills which she put used to the full on her arrival in Southern Rhodesia.
The Development of a Rhodesian Identity
By the time of her arrival in Rhodesia there was already evidence of the development of a discrete settler identity. The settlers, in common with British colonials elsewhere, soon developed a suspicion of the ‘imperial factor’, and in 1898 they gained a consultative voice in government through their representation on the Legislative Council. The territory inherited its legal system, franchise and civil service traditions from the Cape Colony and, to a lesser extent, from Natal, an association which was celebrated in the title of the territory’s ‘British South Africa Police’ (which it retained until 1980). These connections, together with the greater numbers of British South Africans over British-born immigrants, seemed to emphasise its ultimate destiny within the Union. Moreover, the settler population remained constantly shifting, with a high rate of migration between Rhodesia and South Africa. With a majority of settlers always born outside the country, the development of a discrete Rhodesian patriotism similar to the emerging identities of the white dominions seems remarkable. Nevertheless, in common with their Canadian, Australasian and South African ‘cousins’, they celebrated their claim to the territory in romantic ballads and novels. They were, moreover, able to draw on a number of imperialist allusions in Rhodesia. The country was celebrated as the fabled source of King Solomon’s Mines, and the Victoria Falls, named by Livingstone and regarded as one of the natural wonders of the Empire, was crossed in 1904 by a suspension bridge, posthumously carrying Cecil Rhodes’s ‘Cape-to-Cairo’ railway into the interior. Rhodesia also provided the poet Kingsley Fairbridge with inspiration for a child emigration scheme which claimed to offer orphaned denizens of British cities a new colonial life of freedom, opportunity and nation-building, and the territory came through its association with Baden-Powell to be popularly regarded as the birthplace of the boy scout movement.
Essential to the white Rhodeslan ethos, however, was the cult of Rhodes and his Pioneers, which was given peculiar expression in the appropriation of the Matobo Hills near Bulawayo as a ‘Rhodeslan Valhalla’. Rhodes himself had chosen to be entombed in this landscape, sacred to the Ndebele as the burial place of Mzilikazi, in an attempt to unite himself forever with the land that bore his name? Rhodes was, in Ranger’s words, ‘a dreamer with full pockets’ who profoundly influenced the character of BSAC role in the first decade of the occupation. While general forces were of course crucial in the exploitation of the territory, there has probably never been a conquest more dominated in popular memory by a single individual. His dealings with both the settlers and the Ndebele were deeply personal. He used his financial power to appease angry and potentially rebellious white adventurers, while leaders of the Ndebele looked to him for protection, particularly after the famous Matopos indaba of 1896, in spite of his ruthless crushing of their state three years earlier. The rising in Matabeleland gave him a new respect for the Ndebele, and he derived a ‘large romantic enjoyment’ from his relationship with them. South African Mfengu settlers also looked to him to reward their loyalty and safeguard their land rights. His death in 1902 brought the era of cheque-book government and quasi-feudal cattle feasts to an end, and the Company now seemed more remote and depersonalized.
Company failure to abide by his agreements led to Ndebele and settler nostalgia for a golden age of personal rule.
The social character of the white community did not lend itself to political moderation. Although there was a leavening of upper class Europeans, Rhodesia, in contrast to Kenya, was dominated by lower middle class settlers, skilled artisans, small farmers and small miners, classes which were vulnerable to economic depressions and which feared competition from Afrikaners, Asians and Africans. For many visitors to the territory, however, the community’s most striking feature was its Britishness. ‘A bit of England’, Lord Buxton, the British High Commissioner in South Africa, remarked during a visit in 1916, [t]hey are proud of being purely British, and that they form part of the Empire; and they crave for public recognition of the fact’. It was also, as Tawse Jollie later observed, a ‘very militant population’, a tendency which was often made more pronounced by the influence of frontier crises elsewhere in the Empire. The Ulster loyalist revolt against Home Rule in 1911-1914, and the Kenyan settlers’ threatened rebellion over Indian immigration in 1922, for example, were keenly watched by many settlers who drew parallels between themselves and other patriotic marcher communities of the Empire which believed themselves to be neglected or betrayed by a decadent metropolis. In 1911 the Colonial Office feared an Ulster-style uprising by white farmers against the ruling British South Africa Company’s monopoly control of African labour. There was much settler talk of liberty, a racial populism which the missionary Arthur Shearly Cripps satirized in his novel, Bay Tree Country (1913).
The Campaign for Responsible Government, 1916-1922
A further irony of the British anti-suffrage movement is that once its cause was lost several of its leading advocates embarked on prominent political careers, and Tawse Jollie provides an extraordinary example of such a conversion? Several factors pointed her towards a political career. Her second husband turned out to be a genial, if dissolute, alcoholic, and his farm in Melsetter was small, uneconomic and isolated. This marriage also provided no children. She feared the nationalism of Rhodesia’s growing Afrikaner population. The territory was still governed by the Company, with limited settler representation in the legislative council. In 1916, the Company’s plans for the amalgamation of Northern and Southern Rhodesia spurred her into action at a time when the settlers lacked effective leadership. The scheme threatened the prospects of responsible government, by increasing drastically the African population, but the Colonial Office forced the Company to abandon the project. Opposition to the plan had however given impetus to a new political movement. Through her campaign in the press, her broadside, The Future of Rhodesia (Bulawayo, 1917) and her links to the Rhodesian Agricultural Union, she founded the RGA and she became organizing secretary, with Jock McChlery, a popular if somewhat maverick member of the Legislative Council, as president. While the Company replaced their amalgamation plan with a proposal for union, Tawse Jollie set about organising the movement into an efficient party machine with appeal beyond the farmers to the wider white community, particularly the ‘small man’ and the women, whose campaign for the vote she championed. Wartime labour shortage and inflation had stimulated the growth of white trade unionism, and the recession which followed the war contributed to mine-workers’ antagonism towards local mining magnates, while many farmers, not least in those living in the Eastern Highlands where there was a serious outbreak of African Coast Fever, resented what they regarded as Company neglect. It was for such people as these that the RGA came to have a particular appeal, and she enjoyed campaigning in an atmosphere of frontier egalitarianism. She attacked the Company’s record and its arguments at eyeD turn, particularly the claim that the country could not afford to run itself, drawing on a detailed knowledge of conditions in the metropolis and citing constitutional precedents from other imperial territories, and she argued that responsible government was urgently needed if the territory was to gain settlers and investment after the war. She undertook extensive lecture tours of the country, setting the tone of the association and its argumentative, populist and democratic image, making the most of fashionable Wilsonlan talk about self-determination, and arguing that the settlers could expect support from growing numbers of Labour M.P.s at Westminster who could be relied on to be anti-capitalist and anti-Company. In May 1917 she wrote to the Rhodesian Advertiser under the heading, ‘Wanted—A Government’, in which she criticised the inefficiency of Company rule:
A government which is neither based on the will of the people, nor strong enough to govern without them is essentially feeble. A weak government is worse than tyranny. There is much to be said for autocratic government, much to be said for democratic government, nothing at all for weak and incompetent government.
She ushered in a new style of politics reminiscent of the pre-war British right. She organised and maintained close links with local branches and advised on funding and the most effective targeting of propaganda. She gave a structured direction to popular settler sentiment and introduced the kind of tactics and organisation which had been used effectively on a far larger scale to reconstruct the Tory party machine before the Great War. She later justified her entry into politics on the grounds of ‘exceptional circumstances’; in particular the crucial need for political leadership which she felt was not being provided by settler representatives in the Legislative Council.
Her key objective was the creation of a popular party which transcended sectional interests and seemed to speak for the nascent Rhodesian ‘nation’. Her emphasis on imperial issues found a popular audience, not least among the large numbers of ex-servicemen who were now returning to the country. By 1919 the RGA had outgrown its ‘farmers’ party’ origins and now appealed to the wider community, including the most jingoistic elements in settler society, and White Rhodesia was fertile ground for such patriotic propaganda. With the colonial secretary Lord Milner apparently hostile to responsible government and supportive of the BSAC and the South African government, the Gwelo Times argued that King George was ‘far too enlightened to wish to coerce any part of the British Empire into a course repugnant to them, and [they could not] be treated as pawns in a game of which [they knew] nothing’. The Sons of England Patriotic and Benevolent Society based in Rhodesia lamented that:
The Imperial Government, as indicated in the case of Ulster, seems rather to enjoy putting pressure on a small loyal English community to surrender its inheritance and its liberties to … a much bigger [community of disloyalists and republicans].
In Britain, similar connections were made. When George V met the Rhodesian self-government delegates in London in 1921, he remarked to Sir Charles Coghlan, the settler leader, that Rhodesia, in objecting to union, appeared to be ‘the Ulster of South Africa’. Coghlan replied –ominously, in the light of events in both territories half a century later—that Rhodesia would prove just as loyal as Ulster: ‘We will not part from the British flag without fighting’.
The RGA also attempted to woo the women’s vote. Women who were married monogamously and qualified on their own or their husbands’ property—effectively European women—achieved the vote in 1919, and their crucial position in pioneer society gave them a powerful degree of political leverage, in common with their sisters elsewhere in the Empire. The prominence of Tawse Jollie as well as Gertrude Page, the popular novelist, added to the party’s appeal to female voters. Tawse Jollie’s authority was acknowledged in 1920 when she was elected to the Legislative Council for the Eastern Division and her leading position was recognised in her maiden speech seconding Coghlan’s call for the grant of responsible government. The RUA attempted to counter this ‘feminine’ influence with a tour of the country by a Mrs Ruxton who was an experienced South African speaker. She was assaulted at a public meeting, however, when she declared, no doubt with some justification, that she had heard more anti-Boer ‘racialism’ in forty-eight hours in Salisbury than in fifteen years living in the Union, and after she had accused the Rhodesians of being ‘Sinn Feiners’, which was viewed as a particular insult to an avowedly loyalist and monarchist community.42 The RUA had a difficult battle in any case, as women were not yet enfranchised in the Union, and white Rhodesinn women, most of whom were of British descent, were particularly associated with antipathy to Afrikaners, both those in the Union, and those within Southern Rhodesia. Afrikaners were commonly despised by English-speaking settlers on a number of grounds. British Rhodesians disliked the official bilingualism of the Union, and many believed that Afrikaners were irreconcilable republicans. Moreover, they feared that union would bring the dumping of large numbers of land-hungry and semi-literate poor whites and that Rhodesia might therefore be sucked into the Union’s immense labour troubles of which the white miners’ revolt on the Witwatersrand in 1922 was a dramatic symptom. The building up of a loyal British population was commonly regarded as a matter of urgency, and Tawse Jollie noted that the rate of increase of the Afrikaner minority was higher than any other section of the white community. According to Mrs. Boddington, an advocate of responsible government speaking in 1922, poor whites were ‘neither black nor white’ but ‘mentally deficient’ and ‘really worse than animals’.44 Tawse Jollie’s propaganda was never so crude, but she was widely credited with being behind a ‘Boerhaat’ campaign and she never disassociated herself from it. She also warned against Afrikaner nationalist sedition in the territory:
The force behind the bastard Dutch which is now the national language of the Afrikander is the same as that which preserved Magyar, Czech and Polish and has even forced the Imperial Government to bestow a national language on Ireland.
This ‘racial’ aspect of the campaign even pervaded the school yard, as Jeanne Boggle, another prominent woman activist, recalled:
One bright lad asked me for a R[esponsible] G[overnment] badge. ‘Certainly. But first tell me your reasons for being in favour of RG’.
‘Well’, he replied, holding his Rhodesian-born head high with a spirit of sturdy independence, ‘all the boys in my class think we are jolly well able to manage our own affairs in Southern Rhodesia without any interference from the Union. And, what’s more, we don’t want to have to learn to write and speak Dutch before we get a civil service or other government job. We want only Cecil Rhodes’s tongue in Cecil Rhodes’s country’.
On another occasion a visiting South African politician tried to emphasise the importance of creating a fusion of the two ‘white races’ in southern Africa, telling the settlers that they were ‘South Africans first, Rhodesians second, and British subjects last’: to which a schoolchild was said to have replied: ‘I’m not! I’m a Rhodesian’.
Resentment of Tawse Jollie’s influence, however, as well as fear of her ‘extremism’, prevented her being chosen as a cross-party delegate to London in 1921 to ascertain self government terms, although she was included in a similar delegation to Cape Town in April 1922. ‘I think there is some jealousy of Mrs Tawse Jollie’, the Resident Commissioner observed:
I gather that she is inclined to be a little intolerant. She has, of course, more ability than most of them and more political experience, but [the RGA] appear to resent her treatment of them in Caucus.
Her lack of moderation, however, was one of the RGA’s best assets. Economic and regional interests, class, ethnicity and gender played significant roles in the settlers vote againts union in the referendum of 1922, but it is more difficult to weigh the electoral importance of imperial allegiance which ran throughout the campaign. She encouraged the RGA to appeal to settler prejudice, aligning it with such issues as women’s suffrage and land settlement, as well as with the interests of artisans, small miners and lower civil servants.
Under her direction the RGA set the tone of the campaign and largely dictated which issues would be debated; the Unionist effort lacked the common touch. Sensing the importance of patriotic issues to many voters the Unionists marshalled Smuts’s reputation as a great imperial statesman in order to appeal to and convert the more xenophobic members of the white community. He undertook a tour of the territory in 1922, but she had already used the recent Irish settlement to embarrass him, as he had played a key role in bringing about the Irish Truce in 1921. He was now at the height of his influence and was and was revered by the British as a philosopher-king, but she had been following his definitions of dominion status carefully and particularly his correspondence with Eamon de Valera in which he put forward very liberal interpretations. It was a case of guilt by association. Dominion status as set out in the Irish Free State constitution was, for her, as for many old school imperialists in Rhodesia, the thin end of a wedge, which would, in their view, lead to a sham Empire. She took Smuts to task for his approval of it and she received great applause at a public meeting in Salisbury where she repeated that ‘… so far as loyalty to the throne is concerned we are in no way different to Ulster’. The achievement of self-government would, she argued, enable the country to become a mighty fortress beyond the Limpopo:
The average British-born Rhodesian feels that this is essentially a British country, pioneered, bought and developed by British people, and he wants to keep it so … Rhodesians, as a rule, are intensely imperialistic ..
Tawse Jollie wanted the settler community to be in effect a loyal imperial barracks in south-central Africa which could intervene to contain nationalist and socialist sedition on its southern flank. Coinciding with a bloody uprising of ‘Bolshevik’ white miners on the Rand, this was presented to the Rhodesian electorate as nothing less than a historic mission of immense proportions:
Leave us alone for a generation, let us forge ahead on our own lines and then indeed we shall realise Rhodes’s dream. We shall dominate South African politics to the extent that no rebellion by [Afrikaner] Nationalists, even if their party were greatly increased in numbers, could hope to be successful. Give us a population of 200,000 Europeans of our present type, with control of our own Defence Force, and secession as an issue is dead. Our fellow citizens in the Union of like mind will then look to us as being just that solidly loyal nation which, though smaller than the Union, will yet be able by virtue of its solidarity to give them assured victory over the forces of disruption … A powerful and independent, a predominantly British Rhodesia, will exert an enormous influence in Africa for the good of Africa.
The RGA manifesto, which was largely her creation, argued that what it called the ‘English party politician’ was not the sole inheritor of the spirit of Empire. Indeed, the pamphlet traced Whitehall’s historic disdain for colonies and argued that the ‘party politician who happened to be the colonial secretary [was] the last person who should, as a matter of course, be allowed to interpret [the] imperial trust’. It was the ‘height of folly’ to look to Whitehall for ‘the true spirit of the Empire’s traditions’:
Of the interests of the Empire, in Rhodesia and for Rhodesia, Rhodesians are the best judges … [The spirit of Empire] is to be found in the instinct and heart of the people … sufficiently enlightened as a democracy.
The RGA also made skilful use of powerful imperial images which appealed to the large proportion of ex-servicemen in the electorate:
The British Empire does, however imperfectly in performance, stand for certain higher ideals of human relationships and human progress than other races. For these ideals of liberty for ourselves and justice for all, thousand laid down their lives in the world war. The unity of the Empire has been cemented with their blood. And if we forget our heritage [and] disregard the call of the Empire’s need, their very blood should call our to us from the ground. We should have prostituted our heritage for … thirty pieces of silver.
Tawse Jollie was relentlessly active throughout the referendum campaign, making an extensive tour of the country and party branches, countering RUA arguments about the territory’s lack of financial strength, and giving detailed advice to local activists about the targeting of hitherto undecided voters with appropriate propaganda, as well as ensuring the provision of transport to supporters on the day of the poll. She regularly emphasised the development of a ‘rapidly ripening national spirit’ which was utterly opposed to that of the Union. By the early 1920s, it was said of the settlers that they were not only ‘intensely British’ but quite ‘intolerably Rhodesian’, with their tendency to congregate together when outside their territory. This, she believed, was a vital factor in the referendum campaign:
Rhodesians put forward their freedom from racial [i.e. Boer-British], Asiatic, colour and industrial problems which could not be shut out under Union [with South Africa] … and finally their desire to keep the essential quality conveyed in the word Rhodesian—a sort of super-British Imperialism, a loyalty to the Flag and Empire which appears to be old-fashioned in Great Britain to-day, combined with the conviction that Rhodesia is the finest spot in the Empire or under the Flag—in short, a local patriotism so strong and so disinterested as to merit the title of National. All arguments, however, cogent, were swallowed up by this one.
Certainly, the RUA could marshall powerful economic arguments against responsible government, and for material reasons the railway workers of Bulawayo defected to them at the last moment, along with senior members of the RGA. Nevertheless, as Lee points out. patriotic factors were not insignificant in the referendum result. Anti-Afrikaner feeling, in particular, remained a prominent feature of Rhodesian political culture for decades. Thus, in spite of Rhodes’s ambition to create a Rhodesian province of a greater South Africa built on British-Boer reconciliation, Southern Rhodesia became, ironically, a monument to British South African sectarianism and the rejection of his vision. The Afrikaner Nationalist election victory in the Union almost certainly contributed to the landslide victory of Sir Godfrey Huggins’s ruling United Party in 1948. Only in the 1960s, when the threat of African nationalism forced a wider ethnic and regional realignment, was the Afrikaner minority in Rhodesia able to return from the political wilderness to bolster the Rhodesian Front?
The Quest for Social Efficiency 1920-1939
Once responsible government had been achieved Tawse Jollie found herself increasingly isolated among the front ranks of the RGA, now rechristened the Rhodesian Party. Sir rancis Newton, a former Company Treasurer and convert to the RGA felt that she had been badly treated. In late 1922 he wrote to Coghlan suggesting that she be considered for the post of Southern Rhodesian Agent-General to London where her contacts might bring much needed investment and immigration—Coghlan did not refer to this in his reply, so Newton pressed him again: ‘What do you mean to do about Mrs T.J. who is reliable but violent, indispensable but unpopular [in the party]’. Coghlan, however, would neither tolerate her in London nor in his cabinet:
She is I fear impossible as a minister and this is the opinion of the one or two other members I have spoken to. No doubt she would be troublesome if left out but I am afraid that will have to be faced?
He later suggested that she be dropped from the party executive on the grounds of her flirtation with the Rhodesian Labour Party which might hamper the new government’s reconciliation with the local business establishment. He did not succeed in removing her, but the RGA ditched its erstwhile Labour Party allies in spite of her opposition. ‘We have still got the lady member and she is, between ourselves, a bit of a nuisance, as she thinks she knows everything’, he later confided to his sister. Tawse Jollie wanted the party caucus to have greater access to government though not to dominate it, but she later became disappointed with Coghlan’s unwillingness to consult them. ‘It is rather humiliating to some of us … because we all started out on an equal footing a few years ago’, she later told the Assembly.
Responsible government had always been for her merely a prerequisite for a larger purpose. As a member of both the Legislative Council (1920-1923) and Legislative Assembly (1924-1928), she set about applying the principles of National Efficiency to settler society:
Not for Gold, nor for Trade, nor for Strategy, nor for Pride of Dominion only has this work been done, but because the Briton … knows that his children must have wider horizons if they are to breed true to type, that the path of adventure must ever be trailed anew for the race, and that they will never be more true to type and more worthy of their race than when they are making fresh Britains across the seas.
In these years, she took a prominent part in virtually every debate, with little verbal competition. She was the colony’s most prolific political contributor to newspapers and scholarly journals, often drawing on her extensive knowledge of other imperial territories. She influenced the Southern Rhodesia’s new immigration policy in 1924, designed to attract ‘better class’ farming families from the United Kingdom, and argued for land taxes to unlock speculators’ land for settlement. She also met, successfully, the Rhodesian government’s agreement, the Society for the Oversea Settlement of British Women, which granted free passage to ‘suitable’ single women to rectify one of the highest disproportions [between men and women] in the empire’. As bearers of children and primary transmitters of values white women were crucial to her goal of creating and populating a loyal British enclave in Rhodesia, which would counter-balance the increasingly anti-imperialist Union. She wanted the colony to bring in settlers from middle to upper-middle class backgrounds, since Africans rather than Europeans would perform unskilled work. Nevertheless she retained her links to and popularity with white workers. In 1920, she introduced the territory’s first comprehensive Workmen’s Compensation Ordinance which brought Rhodesia into line with Britain and the white dominions. However, she opposed unsuccessfully the Married Women’s Property Act (1929), which enabled women to marry out of community of property, on the grounds that the act would weaken the marriage bond and therefore the family, and leave the woman of no property with no protection following a divorce. On the other hand, she also opposed the African custom of lobola, arguing that ‘the standard of the native’ would not be raised as long as African women were reckoned to be the ‘equivalent of so many head of cattle’
Keenly interested in education, she played a major role in the campaign for free. compulsory education for European children and for the provision of technical education and domestic science, two of the requirements of National Efficiency. Many of her ideas were embodied in the Report of the Education Commission of 1929, which laid great emphasis on the fostering of a Rhodesian identity.64 She was consulted on the writing of the standard Rhodesian history school textbook which was intended to foster local patriotism? As a member of the Commission on [European] Destitution (1926), she led a crusade for improved maternity care, the medical inspection of schoolchildren and the provision of orphanages. She campaigned perennially, and eventually with some success, for the provision of a road network and telephones in the Eastern Highlands. She opposed state intervention in agriculture which favoured large cattle farmers, and supported on imperial grounds the purchase of British goods. In parliament, as the new Rhodesian government was forced to compromise with local mining houses, she abandoned much of the populism that had characterised her earlier career. Big mining operations with scientific methods, not picturesque prospectors with donkeys, were needed in the interests of efficiency. She played a leading role in debates on defence policy, and the Defence Act of 1926 embodied many of the principles she had promoted in the NSL in England before 1914.
Tawse Jollie played an equally influential role outside of parliament as a leading, member of the Guild of Loyal Women and the Rhodesian Women’s League, successor to the Women’s Enfranchisement League, which sought to remove the remaining civil disabilities placed upon women in municipal councils and sanitary boards. She helped to found the Salisbury Repertory Players, and in 1926-1927, keenly aware of the need for women’s networks in many parts of the colony, she helped to establish the Federation of Women’s Institutes (FWI) and branches were soon founded all over the colony. The FWI played a central role in the social life and permanence of the colony and in the development of its distinctive identity.
Racial Views
The Great War had sharpened African political consciousness and African political leaders highlighted their war service in an attempt to claim some benefit and protection through emphasizing their imperial citizenship. During the conflict declarations of loyalty were sent to the Administrator by the Union Native Vigilance Organization and the Loyal Amandabele Patriotic Society, and the Ndebele leaders hoped that their enthusiastic support for recruiting would be repaid after the war, as they told the High Commissioner in 1918:
We wish to say that when the king called upon us for help, we sent our young men who fought and died beside the English, and we claim that our blood and that of the English are one.
In 1922 some educated Africans had voted for responsible government in the belief that their white compatriots would deliver Rhodes’s famous dictum, ‘equal fights for every civilized man’, and that they would gain first-class citizenship and equal pay for equal work, and ironically, the missionary and humanitarian lobbies were initially in favour of responsible government as a way of halting the northward expansion of South African segregationism. Among a tiny band of Europeans who foresaw the dangers of unfettered settler power were the missionaries Arthur Shearly Cripps and John White of the Wesleyan Methodists, whose warnings were widely dismissed by the settlers as eccentric.
In contrast to Cripps and White, Tawse Jollie failed to grasp the inevitability of African political aspiration, preferring to believe, like most settlers, that Africans readily submitted to white rule. She projected on to the social structure of Rhodesia all the hierarchical assumptions of her class and ethnic background, dividing Africans into ‘conquered’ Shona, ‘noble, warlike’ Ndebele, ‘gentle Shangaans’, and so forth, but she rejected the common European exclusion of the African majority from discussions of the territory as being as ridiculous as excluding all people below a certain income or education in the British census. She also derided the widespread European adoption of ‘kitchen kafir’ in their dealings with African labour, and she regretted that the police and native departments did not lay greater stress on a knowledge of African languages and dialects which were necessary to ‘get inside the minds of the people’. She wanted to know more about ‘the affinities, traditions and migrations’ of African tribes which she thought could best be studied through the medium of African languages?
She did not always sound such an enlightened note, however. In 1921, for example, she refused to present a Rhodesian Women’s League petition which requested the Legislative Council to pass legislation prohibiting white men from sexual intercourse with black women, thus equalising the law relating to white women and black men. This issue reflected the taboos of colonial society, but she affirmed that she did not believe in either equality of the sexes or, in this context, that of races before the law. She believed that ‘black peril’ had been exaggerated and proposed the employment of female servants in order to eliminate it altogether. She argued that the problem of miscegenous white men would have to be handled without legislation by white women’s moral influence, ‘that admirable movement for the purifying of social life’. She thought that the security of the white family was ‘the most important factor in the State’, and she proposed the establishment of a commission to enquire into the effects of ‘illicit’ intercourse, including venereal disease which threatened the health of the community. The proposal was accepted. She supported the Land Apportionment Act of 1931, while deriding it as a ‘holus bolus partition’ of the country If the European was to retain his position in Rhodesia she believed it would have to be by ‘the superiority of his attainments … [not] by keeping the natives at a low level’. On the other hand, Tawse Jollie claimed to oppose any rigid system of racial segregation. Justice and common sense dictated that the European had to retain his position by ‘the superiority of his attainments … not merely by keeping the natives at a low level’. In the 1930s, even though she herself had been ruined by the Depression, she was opposed in principle to both the Maize Control Act and the Industrial Conciliation Act, which restricted black competition in agriculture and trades. To some extent she moved away from notions of innate racial differences, but her thinking on the issue became increasingly muddled as she attempted to reconcile ideas of justice with opposing settler and imperial priorities. Increasingly, Africans reminded her of ‘a superior race whose education and surroundings [had] left them unsophisticated’. In 1935, by now a member of Godfrey Huggins’s ruling United Party, she presented land segregation as a ‘modus vivehdi’ in an address to the Royal Society of Arts and the Royal African Society. She declared that her government would not attempt to build up native states in Southern Rhodesia, or try to preserve ‘obsolete and inefficient’ social systems, and she rejected South African approaches to segregation:
Our design is to make our native people an integral, locally autonomous part of our body politic but beyond that at present we cannot go, and, be it remembered, it is only twelve years since we began to govern ourselves.
She did not, however, make clear what she meant by ‘autonomy’ and how this differed from segregation. By 1937, she had come to recognise that Africans were proving to be the equals of many European workmen and farmers, and that she now rejected ‘the theory of a child race, of a brain capacity essentially inferior to Europeans, and of a literal interpretation of the biblical curse on the sons of Ham’. Africans had to be fitted into a ‘composite civilisation’ and further changes were possible, although there is no hint that she might ever accept a fully integrated society:
So far as political evolution goes, we may not be at the end of our own history. Under present conditions political or social equality would not be accepted by the white race and could not be exercised by the black one with any degree of advantage to themselves, but permutations and combinations may open out a compromise as yet unforeseen.
Political Decline
In 1926, Tawse Jollie undertook an official tour of Australia as a member of the Empire Parliamentary Association where she became a political celebrity for local women. ‘[The] woman who would go into politics must forget that she is a woman, and . . . be prepared to take the same knocks as a man …. although in the end she had no hope of getting any of the “loaves and fishes” ‘, she argued: ‘Men did not appreciate the work that women did.’ For white women, it seemed, ‘separate spheres’ had become obsolete, as she told an audience in Perth:
British women proved themselves [in the Great War]. The right to vote followed naturally. I think that women are quite as fit mentally as men to deal with political problems … Now that women [have] the franchise, it is incumbent upon them to keep in touch with politics in order to use their votes to the best advantage for their own and the general good of their community.
In 1927 she was elected a vice-president of the ruling Rhodesian Party and party organiser. She played a valuable role in revitalising the party, but the chief impediment to her work was Sir Charles Coghlan who, like many parliamentarians, was a veteran social drinker. When he died in the same year she was the only giant left from the responsible government campaign. She irritated many with her supercilious and officious manner, but she was also a victim of male jealousy and prejudices. In spite of a by-election success in 1928. she was discarded as organising secretary and lost her seat in the general election of the same year. She remained a party vice-president until 1930, when she was awarded an OBE by George V on the advice of the Southern Rhodesian government. She stood for the last time (unsuccessfully) in the general election of 1933. Thereafter she threw in her lot with the new United Party, led by Godfrey Huggins, who became a generous friend. Her electoral failures after 1928, however, mirrored the decline in her personal fortunes. Her husband died in financial difficulties in 1932 and she attempted to run their small farm and postal agency. In 1934 she moved to a small flat in Salisbury and now resembled the ‘distressed gentlewomen’ whose cause she had espoused for so long. She continued to write scholarly articles on Rhodesian and imperial affairs to supplement her meagre income.
At the end of the 1920s Tawse Jollie was already aware of Rhodesia’s growing alienation from Britain. ‘[Cecil Rhodes’s] philosophy … was becoming out-of-date before the Great War shattered our self-complacency and made an ever-changing kaleidoscope of our moral values’, she recalled in 1930, ‘his ideas are superseded; only in his country of Southern Rhodesia there still lingers a little of the old faith; the old religious sentiment about the Flag, the Empire and the Traditions of our Race’. In the same year settler ambitions received a major setback from Whitehall. The discovery of mineral wealth in Northern Rhodesia now made amalgamation attractive to many Southern Rhodesians, but the new Colonial Secretary, Lord Passfield (formerly Sidney Webb) the Fabian socialist, had shed his earlier concern with the breeding of ‘an Imperial Race’ and had become a champion of imperial trusteeship. He made it clear that he would only consider amalgamation if the settlers were willing to concede greater imperial control over native affairs. As the settlers were loath to accept any diminution of their self-governing powers, the Passfield message was a dead letter. In 1930 he followed it with the Passfield Memorandum which effectively extended the Devonshire Declaration of 1923 to Northern Rhodesia where native interests would now be paramount.
Many Rhodesian settlers were incensed by these developments, detecting in them a deeper malaise: the betrayal of kith and kin by an imperial government which stretched their loyalty to the point of threatening a rebellion. She discerned in the Hilton Young Commission Report a threat to the very existence of the Empire in Africa:
[In the] belief that their race and nation has a distinctive contribution to make in Central Africa, the Rhodesias desire to control their destiny, and if one-half of them only achieves this object, they will be crippled … There will be neither rest nor satisfaction until they attain what, after all, is their birthright—self-control … It is the Rhodesian ideal to establish on either side of the Zambezi, a British Dominion which will, in time, be a fresh source of strength and stability to the Empire and the African continent. They believe this can best be done by a policy of settlement and development by Europeans … without dispossessing the natives of any land they can usefully occupy and without cramping their development.
Tawse Jollie argued that no European would ever live in Africa on the terms laid down by the Commission. Eastern and part of central Africa had been developing on different lines to West Africa as lands where Europeans could make a permanent home and ‘build up a real civilization’, not the type of colony which is presided over by a few white administrators. She upheld Whitehall’s retention of reserve powers over African affairs, but she felt that the Southern Rhodesian settlers had been fortunate in gaining responsible government when they did, thus escaping rule by the Colonial Office. Northern Rhodesian opinion on the question of African paramountcy was even more acute, and she felt that the Colonial Office was throwing away an opportunity to create a great new British dominion in central Africa. She claimed, moreover, that the rise of fascism in Europe meant that there was more at stake than economic advantage:
The collapse, under the stress of economic disaster, of democratic institutions in so many European countries … brings into high relief the success of the British race in every part of the world in operating their own particular system … The British peoples still maintain their faith in individualism as the servant of the people. If, as we believe, this is the true and civilized view and enshrines our most cherished ideals of liberty, then … our imperial heritage, which is so much wider and deeper than our purely territorial possessions, is in danger of being lost sight of—and, once lost, can never be fully recovered.
Nevertheless, the perceived differences between the native policies operating in Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland under Colonial Office authority and those in self-governing Southern Rhodesia continued to undermine attempts to amalgamate the Rhodesias, and the Bledisloe Commission which convened in 1938 failed to reconcile settler and Colonial Office positions. The end of the war marked the return of settler schemes for a ‘Greater Rhodesia’. The growing secessionist tendencies of Afrikaner Nationalists made Sir Godfrey Huggins the epitome of loyalty, particularly after his staunch support of Britain in the Second World War. In the late 1940s a resurgent Affikaner nationalism was still widely regarded by many white Rhodesians as a greater immediate threat to imperial interests than African politic movements. In 1947 her last published article warned of the renewed menace in the south:
As Britain moves out of Africa to the north, and as other possessions are lost to her, the African continent becomes of increased importance to the Empire, and with the political tendencies in the Union … making the future of that country as a Dominion within the Commonwealth uncertain, Central Africa is the only part of that continent which offers the possibility of building up a strong new British Dominion closely allied with the Empire and Commonwealth.
Tawse Jollie was still respected for her organisational skills, even in old age and, on the outbreak of war in 1939, she was appointed by Huggins as Women’s Employment Officer in the colony, a post she retained until 1945. By 1946, however, she was virtually destitute and slowly dying of cancer of the spine. She returned to an old people’s home in England, but, due to the intervention of Huggins and Bishop Paget of Mashonaland, she was provided with a small flat and pension in Salisbury, where she died in 1950. The Rhodesia Herald marked her passing with an editorial, ‘Parliament and Women’, which highlighted her distinction as the Empire’s first woman parliamentarian, and expressed regret that no woman had yet followed her lead and entered parliament.
Conclusion
Until recently, the role of European women in the expansion and consolidation of the British colonial empire was largely ignored by historians and women’s studies scholars, perhaps because, as Nupur Chaudhuri and Margaret Strobel suggest, ‘imperial historians have preferred male actors, while feminist women’s studies scholars have chosen to resurrect more “politically correct” women with whom they feel greater affinity’. Ample evidence of white women’s complicity in imperialism in southern Africa has been provided by the work of such scholars as Cherryl Walker, Helen Callaway, Dorothy Helly, Peter Merrington, Julia Bush and Deborah Gaitskell. Tawse Jollie provides us with a striking example of a woman who succeeded in carving out a career of major importance in the peculiar circumstances of a settler colony, where male prejudice doubly limited the options open to women. She was by all accounts a powerful personality and the Empire and seems to have offered her an outlet and a public sphere for her political and scholarly energies, as it did for other dominant women such as Mary Kingsley and Gertrude Bell who sought fulfilment in exploration and anthropology, but who did not wish to challenge patriarchal power structures in the metropolis.
Tawse Jollie played a pivotal role in informing and marshalling Rhodesian opinion behind responsible government in 1919-1923 and reinforced populist tendencies in settler political culture which would later find fateful echoes in the Rhodesian Front’s Unilateral Declaration of Independence in 1965. As an author of four books and nearly sixty scholarly articles, she became one of white Rhodesia’s major publicists and, despite her anti-suffragist background, her political pursuits challenged traditional male notions of women’s roles throughout the Empire. Moreover, she promoted land settlement, influenced the building up of the colony’s infrastructure, described and contributed to the development of its distinctive identity and helped in the establishment of women’s organisations which were essential to white settlement.
Shortly after UDI, when white Rhodesians were searching for precedents to bolster the identity of Kipling’s ‘last loyal white colony’, her writings came to be appropriated by advocates of UDI to justify their actions. Her Real Rhodesia (1924) was republished in Bulawayo in 1971 ‘at a time’, according to the editor, ‘of grave transition for the people of Rhodesia’. Her approach was ‘as valid and relevant today as it was [in 1923] … The Real Rhodesia performed a valuable service in interpreting to outsiders the peculiar characteristics of Rhodesia and the Rhodesians, and in crystallizing and giving expression to the political aspirations at that time’. In 1973 Mrs Paddy Vickery, a popular Rhodesian writer. argued that:
If it hadn’t been for her forceful personality and passionate conviction about the worth of Rhodesia and Rhodesians we might today have been a province of South Africa with all the problems which that implies, instead of the Independent Republic of Rhodesia—with all the problems which that implies! But I can only hope that we shall all live to see the day when Ethel Tawse Jollie’s faith in our future will be amply and honourably justified.
Tawse Jollie’s most partisan conjurer at the time of UDI, however, was Philippa Berlyn, a prominent white Rhodesian apologist, philanthropist, broadcaster and later biographer Ian Smith, who discovered her The Future of Rhodesia (1917) and thought its sentiments were strangely prophetic. Indeed, she thought it would not have been incongruous if ‘her words had appeared in print recently’. Three years later Berlyn was again struck by the topical and didactic aspects of Tawse Jollie’s writings, and she concluded:
[W]ith her dramatically accurate political instincts she stands high on the list of people to whom the Rhodesia of today owes a debt … It seems that the problems of Rhodesia over forty years ago had much in common with those [it] faces today. We could do with Mrs Tawse Jollie’s help once again.
Thus, to some white Rhodesian sympathisers at least, if death had precluded her from upholding UDI in the fact, she certainly supported it in the imagination; indeed, her political ghost was not an inconsiderable factor, if there is any validity in the assertion that ‘the life of nations no less than that of men is lived largely in the imagination’. For all her populism, it is difficult to imagine her fitting into the latent anglophobia, anti-intellectualism and vulgar racism of the Rhodesian Front, then allied to an Afrikaner Nationalist-dominated South African republic. Huggins, her contemporary who shared much of her outlook on Empire and who in the mid-1950s warned that the settlers might one day declare independence to secure their position against metropolitan interference, lived long enough to witness UDI. Yet he disassociated himself from it. On the other hand, she might well have come to see Ian Smith as the defender of true Britishness against a treacherous metropolis. After all, he had been careful in his independence broadcast to present Rhodesia’s constitutional breach with Britain as an assertion of continued loyalty to the imperial idea which successive British governments had apparently betrayed:
I wish to make it quite clear … that we in this country have no quarrel whatsoever with the people of Great Britain … [who] are the kith and kin of many Rhodesians and the people with whom we have the closest affinity, both in our way of life and in our conception of justice and civilization … Let there be no doubt that we in this country stand second to none in our loyalty to the Queen, and whatever other countries may have done or may yet do, it is our intention that the Union Jack will continue to fly in Rhodesia and the National Anthem continue to be sung. How can anyone suggest that we would harbour hostile sentiments against those with whom we fought shoulder to shoulder against the common enemy in two world wars? Our admiration and friendship for the people of Great Britain is real and enduring.
By the 1960s many white Rhodesians felt abandoned by a country which they believed had so recently applauded their loyalty but now seemed to treat them like vulgar relatives they would rather forget. Sir Robert Tredgold, an old-fashioned liberal, represented a minority of settlers who believed that UDI was both unworkable and a negation of nobler imperial traditions of trusteeship, but he conceded that the Rhodesian Front government was more effective in kindling atavistic settler emotions:
The white people are told, and many of them seem to believe, incredible things. They are told that it is right in all things to place the interests of Rhodesia above every other consideration … They are told and they believe that the people of England, in a short generation from ‘their finest hour’, have lost the qualities that made them great … They are told and believe that this little pool of white people in the heart of Africa has become the repository of these qualities; as if a small branch of a great tree can live on when the roots have been destroyed.
These were familiar sentiments. Tawse Jollie had also believed that Britishhess was represented most authentically by those whom Kipling had described as the ‘Wards of the Outer Marches’. She had once quoted Rhodes as saying of the British that ‘they are the greatest [people] the world has ever seen but they do not know their greatness, their strength or their destiny’, and she had been confident that the Rhodesians would always remain faithful to his reputed wish that Rhodesia should ‘remember the rock from which she was hewn and the Empire of which she is one of the outposts’. In the death-throes of white rule she thus made a fitting icon for such patriotic organisations as Women For Rhodesia, which believed that Rhodesians were the sort of people which ‘had put “Great” into “Britain” ‘; perhaps even for the wives of the Rhodesian Front cabinet whose influence was popularly believed to be crucial in moments of crisis, as well as for ordinary white Rhodesian women whose presence on farms and in isolated settlements was often a decisive factor in the maintenance of government authority during the Zimbabwean liberation war.