Archibald R. Colquhoun

Artist Info

Archibald R. Colquhounat sea off the Cape of Good Hope, 1848 - 1914, London

http://id.loc.gov/authorities/names/n85108166

Colquhoun, Archibald Ross (1848–1914), explorer, colonial administrator, and author, was born at sea off the Cape of Good Hope in March 1848, the fifth of six children of Dr Archibald Colquhoun (c.1804–1890) of Edinburgh, an employee of the East India Company, and his wife, Felicia (c.1817–1855), née Anderson. Educated at Glasgow Academy, Helensburgh School, and the Moravian School at Neuwied in the Rhineland, he joined the Indian Public Works Department in 1871 as an assistant surveyor. In 1879 he was secretary and second in command of a government mission to Siam and the Shan States, and in 1881–2 he travelled from Canton (Guangzhou) to Bhamo to find the best railway route between China and Burma. Widely regarded as an explorer of the first rank, his Indian administrative obligations prevented him from accepting an offer from Henry Morton Stanley to act as second in command of his Congo expedition. In 1883 The Times appointed him its correspondent in the Franco-Chinese War and for the Far East, and in 1884 he was awarded the Royal Geographical Society founders' gold medal; his publications on the trade potential of Burma were welcomed by British chambers of commerce. In 1885 he became deputy commissioner in Upper Burma; his career came to an abrupt end, however, when a frank criticism he made of government policy fell accidentally into the hands of his superiors.

In 1889, through the offices of James Rochfort Maguire and Alfred Beit, Colquhoun accepted an offer from Cecil Rhodes of the post of first administrator of Mashonaland. In 1890 he secured the eastern frontiers of the territory through treaties with local chiefs. Subsequently, however, he complained to Rhodes that proper administrative procedures were not being followed. Leander Starr Jameson regarded Colquhoun as a pedantic bureaucrat, largely because the latter tried to exercise strict controls over land grants to avoid clashes with the African population. Colquhoun retired on grounds of ill health and was succeeded by Jameson.

In 1894 Colquhoun became the agent in Peking (Beijing) for the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank and in the following year he surveyed Nicaragua and Panama as possible routes for a Central American canal. From 1896 until 1913 he undertook several tours of Siberia, China, Japan, the Philippines, the Dutch East Indies, southern Africa, North and South America, and the Habsburg empire. In 1900 he married Ethel Maude Cookson [see below], who shared Colquhoun's conviction that British public opinion should be informed about the perceived threat to British interests in Asia from other great powers, as well as his belief in the need for compulsory military service, naval preparedness, imperial federation, and ‘national efficiency’, concerns which he stressed at lectures to various learned and military societies. He was an active member of the Royal Colonial Institute and in 1908–9 took a leading role in a campaign to reform its constitution. He edited United Empire from 1910 until his death on 18 December 1914 at 26 Iverna Gardens, London.

Powerfully built, with a walrus moustache and a fondness for champagne, Colquhoun was a mercurial character whose life embodied several paradoxes. For all his experience of administration and exploration, he seems to have been unable to deal with South African frontiersmen because he lacked the common touch. He advised on economic development, yet his own business deals were a failure. Unfairly accused by Jameson's biographer, Ian Colvin, of being one of Rhodes's mistakes, he was in reality an accomplished writer of more than fourteen scholarly books and numerous articles on colonial administration, comparative ethnography, railway and canal construction, land settlement, trade prospects, and geopolitics and defence in the European colonial empires, Russia, China, east Asia, and the Americas. He was a regular contributor on these subjects to British, North American, and German journals and newspapers. He was one of the most widely respected travel authors of his time and he built up a series of influential friendships, counting sometime American presidents Theodore Roosevelt and William Taft, and the Canadian imperialist Sir George Parkin, among his friends.

Colquhoun's widow, known after her remarriage as Ethel Maude Tawse Jollie (1874–1950), founder of the Rhodesian Responsible Government Association, was born Ethel Maude Cookson at Lichfield Road, Castle Church, Stafford, on 8 March 1874, the eldest daughter of Dr Samuel Cookson, general practitioner, of Foregate, Stafford, and his wife, Jane, formerly Gibson, née Day. She studied art about 1894 under Anthony Ludovici at the Slade School of Art, where she first met Colquhoun, although their friendship did not develop until they met again in 1900; within a few weeks of this second encounter they were married. The couple shared political interests, and Ethel Colquhoun was a leading member of several organizations of particular interest to him, such as the National Service League, the Imperial Maritime League, the British Women's Emigration Society, and the Women's Unionist Association, of which she was an executive member. She also shared her husband's interest in the colonial empire and gave several scholarly papers to learned societies on colonial subjects. They remained married, apparently very happily, until his death in 1914. Given Colquhoun's disappointment with the slow development of Southern Rhodesia after his departure in 1891, it is perhaps ironic that it was his widow, by then remarried—her new husband was a Rhodesian farmer from Melsetter called John Tawse Jollie—who in 1917 founded the Responsible Government Association there, which set the territory's course outside the Union of South Africa in 1922. She became a thorn in the side of the British South Africa Company, and was elected to the legislative assembly of Southern Rhodesia in 1923 as the first woman parliamentarian in the British overseas empire. She regarded the attainment of self-government as in no small way revenge for what she saw as the British South Africa Company's bad treatment of her first husband. She died in Salisbury, Southern Rhodesia, on 21 September 1950.

Donal Lowry

Sources

A. R. Colquhoun, From Dan to Beersheba: reminiscences of public service (1908) · E. Colquhoun, ‘Archibald Colquhoun—a memoir’, United Empire, 6 (1915), 99–109 · J. A. Edwards, ‘Colquhoun in Mashonaland: a portrait of failure’, Rhodesiana, 4 (1963), 1–17 · I. Colvin, The life of Jameson, 2 vols. (1922) · E. Tawse Jollie, ‘The Pungwe route to Southern Rhodesia: a footnote to history’, United Empire, 21 (1930), 432–5 · E. Colquhoun, Two on their travels (1902) · T. R. Reese, The history of the Royal Commonwealth Society, 1868–1968 (1968) · A. R. Colquhoun, Across Chrysê: from Canton to Mandalay, 2 vols. (1883) · D. Lowry, ‘“White woman's country”: Ethel Tawse Jollie and the making of white Rhodesia’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 23/2 (1997), 259–81 · m. cert. · d. cert. · b. cert. [Ethel Maude Cookson] · census returns, 1881 · The Times (28 Sept 1950)