COLONIAL DEVELOPMENT AND WELFARE BILL. (Hansard, 24 April 1945)

§ THE PARLIAMENTARY UNDERSECRETARY OF STATE FOR THE COLONIES (THE DUKE OF DEVONSHIRE)
My Lords, I beg to move that the House do resolve itself into Committee on this Bill. I am sure that your Lordships will think it proper that I should take this occasion to pay a few words of tribute to the memory of one, recently passed from us, who was a member of your Lordships' House and a very great Colonial administrator. Lord Lugard holds a position in our Colonial story which has scarcely ever been equalled, and has certainly never been surpassed. It may not yet be possible to view his work in its full perspective: but I think there can be no doubt that the historian will find very few individual lives of such significance in the development of the Colonial Empire and of Colonial policy. I suppose it is certainly not an exaggeration to say that but for his life and work a Bill such as that which we are considering this afternoon would not have been before your Lordships' House for many, many years to come.
During the span of his life, the comparatively short period in which the dashing young captain who conducted a campaign against the slave traders of Lake Nyasa finally emerged as the wise old statesman that we knew in this House, Africa moved with incredible speed. It moved from a remote period of feudalism—even worse, of bloodstained savagery and human sacrifice—into the twentieth century and there were compressed into two or three generations profound changes which in other societies have taken whole centuries to achieve. It was indeed fortunate for this country that while the destinies of these vast territories in tropical Africa were being moulded in this fluid and formative period we possessed in Lord Lugard a man who had the gifts required to impose upon them a decisive shape. It is no exaggeration to say that in the nineties of the last century Lord Lugard, both in East and West Africa, was by his own individual decision able to determine the future issue in a way that was to the great advantage not only of the Empire but of the African peoples themselves. It was also a great fortune that this man who guided the work of territorial expansion brought such a large and liberal outlook to all questions of native welfare. Indirect rule, trusteeship, administration directed primarily to native interests—all these are now the commonplaces of our Colonial doctrine. But it was Lord 11 Lugard to whom is largely due the first impetus given to these ideas, which half a century ago were new and rather formidable conceptions.
History may, I think, show that Lord Lugard's greatness lay in a rare combination of the gifts of the man of action and the thinker. When he was a very young man he took decisive action on more than one occasion; he also had the gifts of the great administrator. But the shell of the administrator never closed over his mind. His book The Dual Mandate, in which with ripe experience he elaborated the general principles of British rule in tropical Africa, was a tremendous contribution to the literature of Colonial administration. In his later years Lord Lugard was much hampered by deafness and this disability no doubt prevented him from taking so full a part in the debates of our House as he might otherwise have done. He made nine speeches, all of which were important contributions and will remain documents of value to those concerned in Colonial administration. To the end of his life he retained a wonderful youthfulness and freshness of mind, and he was ever eager in pursuing his beneficent and yet always practical conceptions for the advancement and increased enlightenment of our Colonial ideas. We shall remember the occasions when he spoke in this House and the wise counsel which he brought to our discussions on Colonial affairs. There have been many spontaneous expressions of tribute to his memory which have shown how greatly his loss has been felt in the Colonies—I have been very much impressed by that—and in the world at large. In this House we should be no less sensible of our bereavement in the passing of a noted public servant whose name has won renown and devotion in his own country and among the people of far off lands. Lord Lugard, whose death we all lament, passed full of years, full of honours and full of achievements. Our sorrow at his passing is tempered, quite naturally and properly, by the thought that he had had a full span of life and that his life's work was done.
Our House and the Colonial Empire have suffered another and very grievous loss by the death in battle of Lord Dufferin, a young man who seemed to have most of his work in life still before 12 him. I am aware of the fact that a formal reference has been made to his death—the reference that is made whenever a member of your Lordships' House is killed in action—but I think something more is due to the memory of the member we have lost. He was singularly gifted, a man of the most exceptional and outstanding brilliance. His political work had been done almost entirely in one or other of the Empire Departments. He was Parliamentary Private Secretary to the Secretary of State for India and he filled the post which I now hold of Under-Secretary of State for the Colonies, so perhaps I am better fitted than anyone else, having followed him in this office, to assess the value of his work. It still falls to my lot occasionally to read papers on which he had minuted, and I have always been impressed by three things about anything he ever wrote: his clear and comprehensive understanding—he had a most remarkable grasp of the bones of a subject—his keen and incisive wit, and, emerging most clearly of all, his wide and comprehensive human sympathy. Much of the work of the Parliamentary Under-Secretary deals with difficult border-line cases where perhaps an officer may have failed but consideration ought to be given to the question whether his failure may not have been due to his having been a long time without leave, to his having served under difficult tropical conditions, and so on. Always Lord Dufferin was tolerant, always sympathetic, always, if at all possible, for helping the lame dog over a stile.
The early days of this war were darkened for him by a period of miserable ill-health originating from some tropical infection which he picked up in the course of an official tour in the Colonies. By undergoing a most rigorous and prolonged course of treatment he succeeded in overcoming that severe handicap and was passed fit for service anywhere in the world. He won his hard fight, he achieved his heart's desire to serve as a front-line soldier, and he was killed in action. Your Lordships will like to hear that he had served with conspicuous ability and success, and he was, in the last weeks of his life, intensely happy in his service. Whether or not he had some premonition of his end—and such things do happen—he wrote, on the very last day of his life, two letters, one to his 13 wife and one to his three young children which in themselves are the finest monument which any soldier could possibly have, the most moving last will and testament that I have ever read. These are too intimate for me to quote here, but the words which he himself wrote, not long before his death, of a friend killed in action, might serve as an epitaph for himself: By tradition and training and instinct his mind didn't work along mean lines and that was the end of it. His rights and his duties were so much a part of his mind and so inextricably mingled in the pattern of his thought that I do not suppose he would have found it possible consciously to separate them. It is of such stuff that the great servants of this country are made and we can ill afford to lose him now. Great servants are rare and will be desperately needed in the future. Those are his words. My Lords, we have lost a great servant. The fact that he used those words in that order—"great" and "servant"—are a measure of his ideal and of his standards.

§ LORD ADDISON
My Lords, I should like to say how much we appreciate the fact that the noble Duke has taken the opportunity to pay a tribute to these two members of your Lordships' House who have gone, and in particular with regard to Lord Dufferin. The impression on my mind as I sat listening to him was of the awful waste that this war means. Here was a man just beginning, in the prime of his life's capacity. As the noble Duke has said, we and the nation will miss such men, just as we have missed tragically in the last few years those hundreds of thousands of men who would now have been in the prime of life but who were killed in the last war. This will be another addition to that tragic waste.
As to Lord Lugard, I am sure we do most sincerely appreciate all that the noble Duke said. I remember those days when I myself was taking one might say a more distant interest in these things, when Lord Lugard's name was a household word. One knew about him, although, quite frankly, I knew very little about many others responsible for our Colonial affairs. He was a great pioneer and a constructive statesman. I think the reputation that Britain holds in the world of the value and efficiency of her administrative services in the dominions, which have done so much to 14 bind them to us during these years of strain, is due to the fact that the nation produces men of this stamp; and many of them, I am sure, must have been inspired by the splendid example which Lord Lugard set.

§ VISCOUNT SAMUEL
My Lords, the House will have been moved by the touching tribute paid by the noble Duke to the memories of Lord Lugard, and of Lord Dufferin, a man of great abilities whose loss we so greatly deplore. Lord Lugard was one of the finest Colonial administrators of this country or, indeed, of any country. He helped to carry through that great policy of peaceful change which in our own time has transformed Africa. He was a man of practical energy and at the same time wise restraint. He was of the very best type of Colonial statesmen. The progress and prosperity of Nigeria is especially his achievement and will be for ever his monument. He influenced also the opinion here in this country of students of Colonial affairs. I remember, as a young man, being very deeply impressed by his book The Rise of our East African Empire which indeed induced me, in the very early days of East Africa and Uganda, to visit those countries and to see what achievements were being accomplished in the early days of British rule. He was one of those men of experience, knowledge and wisdom whose presence here confers such great distinction upon your Lordships' House, and we especially will mourn his death.

LORD STANLEY OF ALDERLEY
My Lords, I follow the noble Duke and the noble Viscount who has just sat down in a melancholy task indeed. As a very great friend of Lord Dufferin, I feel I cannot altogether withhold my tribute to him to-day. It is as though a rich mine of assayed and proved worth has suddenly been taken so that we can no longer use its treasure, and I think the loss to your Lordships' House is indeed a grievous one. As you have heard, Lord Dufferin's life was not painted altogether in bright colours. To the brilliance of his scholarship and his wit, to the devotion to his ideals there were the more sombre undertones of frustration and ill-health. Many of your Lordships will no doubt remember in the early years of the war how Lord 15 Dufferin struggled against illness and almost continual pain in an attempt to do his duty as he saw it. Simply by force of will he attempted to overcome these grave illnesses and difficulties. But above all, all the time he wished to be a soldier. With an enduring patience and determination he bent all his energies to that end and finally, as you know, his dearest wish was realized.
Last year he was posted to that part of the world which will for ever be connected with the illustrious line of Blackwood. Your Lordships have heard that by Fort Dufferin, not far from the ancient capital of Burma, whence he derived his Earldom, he fell in battle. He died as he would have wished, in close contact with the enemy, carrying out a mission, as I understand it, of extraordinary hazard. Whether it be fate, whether it was by design, I know not, but at least he fell, as I say, in that part of the world adding lustre to a name already illustrious. So, my Lords, he died, and we who are his friends, while we shall mourn his loss, do give him as the example of a man with a deep and abiding love for his country, a man nurtured and moulded in our best traditions, and yet with that elasticity of mind which was able to adapt conditions to changing needs. He was a man to whom office with responsibilities came early. He brought to it a fresh and youthful inquiring mind, a mind untramelled by any thought of self-interest or indeed by fear of criticism, a mind working only for success for its own sake. That is Lord Dufferin's reputation and I believe it will be long held in honour.