Manning the British Empire: Gender, Identity and Emotions in Early Twentieth Century Britain

This article will provide a detailed analysis of the identity of one gentry man with an important role in making assessments of the manliness of others. It examines the way his gender identity was ‘structured in specific historical formations.’ Ralph Furse was a gatekeeper to elite masculine status through his prime position as a recruitment expert for the Colonial Office. His office was one of the ‘masculine spaces’ in Whitehall within which ideologies, power and authority were constructed. His position is all the more significant given that during this period of crisis in the empire the supply of manpower and the ‘…supply of men of a certain type – practical, resourceful and self-reliant…’ was particularly significant. Furse both reflected and helped influence wider gendered mentalities in the Colonial Service from his position at the centre of an ‘imperial power matrix.’ The interviews he recorded in his notes were a repetitive reinforcement and construction of his own masculinity as a young man finding his manly identity as well as a means of finding manliness in others. We then also see his masculinity as it had developed into his later life and as he reflected on it, after he retired from the colonial service, through his autobiography. The paper offers a number of arguments. Firstly, both sets of material remind us that ‘hegemonic masculinities’, if interpreted in a certain way, can reify subjective individual experiences and identities. Furse exhibits none of the assumed features of a ‘redundant gentleman’, arrogant though he certainly was. His ideal man for the job was broad and inclusive stretching to a diverse set of social groups, with whom, according to his autobiography, he seems to have felt an affinity. But secondly, this ideal referenced a matrix of masculine qualities considered desirable in the successful candidates he interviewed. This matrix included a sober and quiet character trained through ‘good schooling’, emotional self-control that was also exhibited in plain dress, an imposing and large bodily stature, preferable within a white body rather than a colonial one, a skilled or professional man that possessed harder masculine qualities, rather than the ‘softer’ assets of manhood. Overall, this matrix confirms the type of ‘imperial hero’ identified by John Tosh. It also confirms his broader argument that in the later nineteenth and early twentieth century a premium came to be placed on ‘tougher’ and ‘stoical’ men as an antidote to challenges to masculinity at home and to Britain’s imperial power overseas. But, thirdly, emotions played a role here too. Just as Furse sought out men who could control their own emotions and exhibited quite restrained emotional styles, he expected to experience a flat or muted emotional response to his favoured candidates. He reserved more emotive language for the candidates he dismissed as unsuitable.