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.

To the credit side of his ledger was a consistent determination to eradicate slavery and the opium trade, a genuine interest in understanding and preserving the native language, culture, flora and fauna of the places under his command, and a utopian rather than rapacious notion of the way an eastern empire might flourish under a sort of Pax Britannica. He even wrote a History of Java, though not apparently a very good one. To the debit side we could put arrogance, pettiness, vanity, a tendency to take credit for the work of others, a lack of husbandly gallantry (he wrote proudly to his cousin that ‘neither rank, fortune nor beauty’ had influenced his choice of bride) and a slightly elastic sense of financial propriety.