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For a British university graduate in the early 1950s, the Colonial Service offered a fine opportunity for a fulfilling and worthwhile career. After a brief apprenticeship, in his late twenties or early thirties, he could expect to become a district commissioner in the Fiji Islands or an African colony and to be given responsibility for thousands of ‘natives’ as the ultimate magistrate and authority on the spot. Such opportunities for young men to exercise paternalistic power did not exist in the Western world.

The only drawback of Colonial Service was the question of marriage, or more accurately the problem of how a single white male might find a suitable wife to take to the bush. Marrying locally was impractical; there were few, if any unattached white girls, and an interracial marriage was unthinkable. Fulfilment of this basic human need therefore had to be arranged rather rapidly on a spell of leave back home; the district commissioner’s wife thereafter fulfilled an important role in the white colonial society, which had its strict pecking order from the governor and his wife downwards.