ABSTRACT
Rudyard Kipling provided a memorable summary of idealized qualities for those destined for positions of military or civil leadership in the far-flung British Empire. The poem ‘If-’ is fluid, rhythmic and neatly rhymed, easy for schoolboys to commit to memory. Such idealized notions of masculinity were inculcated during the imperial period not only through formal education and training, but also through reading and leisure activities. My focus in this chapter is the entertaining light literature to be found in such annuals as the Empire Annual for Boys 1909-19 and story collections of the same genre. These were published at Christmas and intended as lively, but morally instructive, reading for boys attending public schools, where ‘manliness’, sportsmanship and the team spirit, upright conduct and a horror of effeminate behaviour were lauded. Many of these young men were destined for service in the Empire as army officers or government administrators; numbers of them already had fathers or uncles serving abroad. There are many tales which have as heroes young men holidaying with relatives in various parts of the Empire before going up to Oxford or Cambridge. The clubbable, ‘old-school-tie’, Officers’ Mess world is the background for many stories in these annuals and adventure tales; it is definitely the ethos of the genre. In these tales, the emphasis is on the masculine values of the late Victorian period and the early years of the twentieth century; a time when, as Gilmore has put it, ‘manhood was an artificial product coaxed by austere training and testing’ (1990:18). As elsewhere, ‘manhood’ was defined in terms of the received notions of the social environment and the age. To achieve it boys underwent rites of passage which separated them from home and the familiar, most particularly from their mothers’ care and influence. They passed into the charge of men unrelated to them, and were to suffer the dominance of older boys with authority over them. They were expected to stand on their own feet until the time came for them to exercise authority and power in their turn. The aim was to make ‘big
men of little boys’, as the Boy Scout manuals of the day put it. Often actual tests of courage, judgement and initiative were included in these rituals; similar trials appear in Empire Annual stories: a boy may have to stand up to the school bully, or, better still, rescue that unpleasant character from a dangerous situation, the boy thus proving not only his bravery but his mature generosity of spirit as well.
