The Rise and Fall of Bartle Frere

       This book charts the life and career of Bartle Frere. He spent his entire working life in public service to the British Empire, first in India and latterly in South Africa. He was awarded high honours for his achievements in India. He served as Governor of Bombay and on the Governor-General’s Council in Calcutta. On returning to London he was appointed to the Indian Council advising the Secretary of State for India. He was regarded as one of the leading experts on India.

       Further commissions came his way. He succeeded in bringing a halt to the slave trade in East Africa emanating from Zanzibar, returning from his visit there to great acclaim. He received a baronetcy for his services. The Colonial Secretary saw in him the ideal person to bring together into a confederated state the disparate factions in South Africa, and he was appointed Governor of the Cape Colony with a wide brief and considerable authority to implement policies and edicts.

       Within three years his career was destroyed, his name reviled in England. Politicians criticised him openly in Parliament and the press was vitriolic. The  Spectator referred to him as a man with “no influence but for evil” and “fanatically blind as to the fundamental laws of political responsibility.”[i] Even recently the noted historian Norman Etherington wrote of him:

    “When a bully with a black hat and a moustache is caught with a smoking gun in

    his hand, posses and juries don’t ask very penetrating questions. Neither, it is

    embarrassing to admit, do historians. Frere was the sort of villain cinema audiences

    love to hate, a sanctimonious, pig-headed, officious, self-righteous, ambitious city 

    slicker from out of town.”

       How did it come about that a man so feted, so devoted to public service that his private life and ambitions always remained subservient to his work, went from hero to villain in three short years? How could a leading administrator, renowned for his judgement, knowledge and steady leadership, have got it all so wrong in South Africa?

       Frere’s decision to declare war on the Zulus led to his downfall. The disastrous defeat at Isandlwana, in which almost all the British soldiers were killed, came as a huge shock in Britain. Doubtless Frere suffered from being the British Government’s scapegoat for the defeat, and from attempts by desperate politicians to spin an account of culpability that took the opprobrium off their shoulders. That could not explain the full extent of his disgrace. His decisions