Ace of bureaucrats

Thomas Stamford Raffles (1781-1826) is a man whose name is now better known than his doings. Its syllables conjure a world-famous hotel, a prep-school, the former business class brand of Singapore airlines, a shonky packet of fags, E. W. Hornung’s Raffles the Gentleman Thief, and Viz comic’s Raffles the Gentleman Thug. He also gave his name to a tropical flower that has the largest bloom on earth, and which gives off ‘precisely the smell of tainted beef’.

Most of us will have had the vague sense that he founded modern Singapore (we’re half right about that), and a still vaguer sense that his was a life of glamour, buckle and swash. About that, we are a bit less than half right.

Raffles’s whole career was spent in and around the Eastern Archipelago — Penang, Malacca, Bencoolen, Java — as an employee of the East India Company. In his hardworking, rather short life (he died at 45 of a particularly nasty condition involving a giant veiny lump in his brain called a ‘cerebral arteriovenous malformation’), Tom Raffles rose by charm, application and ingenuity from being an uneducated 14-year-old ‘Extra Clerk’ in India House to senior gubernatorial posts in sweaty and mosquito-ridden outposts of empire.