‘Woman Pioneer of Empire’: the making of a female colonial celebrity

Abstract

In September 1924 a motor-car expedition, led by a former Royal Air Force Captain and his South African-born wife, left Cape Town in an attempt to cross Africa and recapitulate Cecil Rhodes's vision of a unified continent under British rule. The sixteen-month journey received close newspaper coverage both in South Africa and in Britain. This coverage and the spin-off products of the expedition, among them a travelogue film, a written memoir, and numerous media appearances, made the participants-particularly Stella Court Treatt—celebrities.

The Court Treatt expedition demonstrates the way in which the British state ruled its colonies in Africa not only by military and bureaucratic means, but also through the symbolic power of modern technology. The tabloid press, the availability of the car and the camera, and the emerging culture of celebrity facilitated the construction and distribution of an image of British colonial ownership to readers in the metropole. A picture of Africa, emptied of menacing groups contesting British rule, emerges from the expedition's reports and from the expedition's narrative. Stella Court Treatt was active in the creation of her persona as a glamorous, plucky and modern colonial celebrity. Using previously unexamined primary sources, this article interrogates questions arising at the intersection of celebrity, colonialism, patriotism and gender in 1920s Britain.

Notes

1. The author would like to thank Danna Agmon, Kevin Brownlow, Oswaldo Dieguez, Dina Fainberg, Bridget Gurtler, David M Hughes, Temma Kaplan, Iris Kashman, Seth Koven, Yvette Lane, Billie Melman, Avner Offer, Abigail Saggi, Bonnie Smith and Dora Vargha for their insightful comments. Special thanks go to Robert Clarke for his editorial suggestions, and to Sue M Lennox and Robert Hinds for their encouragement and for granting access to their family archive.

2. ‘Woman Pioneer of Empire: Cape to Cairo venture Begun’, Daily Express, 23 September 1924, p 1.

3. See, for instance, Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation, London: Routledge, 1992; and Simon Ryan, The Cartographic Eye: How Explorers Saw Australia, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.

4. Stella writes that each participant had his own ‘appointed work’. She was to be second in command and lead the expedition to its final destination should anything happen to CT. She was also nurse and doctor and would ‘keep the diary of the expedition, and this I did faithfully for the whole sixteen months’. Stella Court Treatt, From Cape to Cairo: The Record of a Historic Motor Journey, London, Calcutta and Sydney: George G Harrap & Co, 1927, p 34.

5. Unfortunately, only one minute of this film remains in the archive of the British Film Institute.

6. D L LeMahieu, A Culture for Democracy: Mass Communication and the Cultivated Mind in Britain Between the Wars, Oxford and New York: Clarendon Press, 1988, p 12.

7. By 1936 the Express had the largest circulation of any newspaper in the world, with 2.25 million readers. ‘Daily Express: A Chequered History,’ BBC News Service, 25 January 2001.

8. LeMahieu, A Culture for Democracy, p 19

9. For example, Lord Beaverbrook's 1929 ‘crusade for the empire’, discussed in Larry L Witherell, ‘Sir Henry Page Croft and Conservative Backbench Campaigns for Empire, 1903–1932’, Parliamentary History 25, 2006, pp 357–381.

10. Peter Merrington, ‘A Staggered Orientalism: The Cape to Cairo Imagery’, Poetics Today 22, 2001, pp 324–364.

11. ‘Woman Pioneer of Empire’, p 1.

12. See Pratt, Imperial Eyes.

13. Peter Merrington surveys the development of this concept from Henry Morton Stanley's letters from Uganda to the Daily Telegraph published in 1876, through W T Stead's article published in Windsor Magazine in 1899, cigarette advertisements, and expeditions such as the Court Treatts’ in the 1920s. Merrington, ‘A Staggered Orientalism’, pp 324–364.

14. See, for example, the five-volume book The Story of the Cape to Cairo Railway and River Route, 1887–1922, dedicated to Rhodes's work. In the second preface of the book, Earl Buxton, then the former High Commissioner and Governor-General of the African Society, explained that, ‘The Cape to Cairo Highway is much more than a mere highway. By its means Africa is being rapidly won to civilization and commerce.’ Earl Buxton, ‘Foreword’, in Leo Weinthal (ed), The Story of the Cape to Cairo Railway and River Route, 1887–1922, London: Pioneer Publishing and African World, 1922, p xxxii.

15. James B Wolf, ‘Imperial Integration on Wheels: The Car, the British and the Cape-to-Cairo Route’, in Robert Giddings (ed), Literature and Imperialism, New York: St Martin's Press, 1991, pp 112–127.

16. Court Treatt, From Cape to Cairo, pp 54–55. All references to this work are given as page numbers in parentheses in the text.

17. Stella informed her readers that had they not restricted themselves to a British route, ‘our problems would have been simplified [ … ] we would have found roads [ … ] and we could have avoided bridgeless rivers and swamps. But the desirability of blazing a trail through British Africa was superior to every other consideration.’ Court Treatt, From Cape to Cairo, p 32. On the importance of mapping as a tool of domination see, for example, Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. and extended edn, London and New York: Verso, 2006, pp 163–185 (ch 10, ‘Census, Map, Museum’).

18. For example the Crossley advertisement placed under an interview with Stella published after the expedition's return reads: ‘Cape to Cairo: the Court Treatt Cape to Cairo Expedition’, and dubs the endeavour as a historical event, stating that the ‘impossible has been achieved by CROSSLEY CARS. No other car in the world has ever completed this gigantic task.’ Another advertisement for ‘The North British Rubber Co.’ was placed on page 19 on that same day under an interview with Major Court Treatt titled ‘In A Strange Car’ in the Express's ‘motor notes’ section. Daily Express, 14 February 1926, pp 9 and 19.

19. From Cape to Cairo by Car, issued by Crossley Motors Ltd, Manchester and London, nd, p 3.

20. Errol Hinds, Stella Court Treatt's brother and a participant in the expedition, claims CT financed the expedition. This is quoted in a private letter he wrote to film historian Kevin Brownlow, who was working at the time on a book about early British cinema (Kevin Brownlow, The War, the West, and the Wilderness, New York: Knopf, 1979). Letter to Kevin Brownlow, 12 April 1973.

21. Stella informed her readers, for example, of the special permission granted them to drive the cars across a railway bridge over the Zambesi at the Victoria Falls, because of ‘ours being expedition cars’. Court Treatt, From Cape to Cairo, p 103.

22. ‘Court Circular’, The Times, 8 April 1926, p 15.

23. ‘Court Circular: Receptions’, The Times, 5 July 1928, p 19.

24. ‘Photograph of Stella Court Treatt’, Bassano vintage print, circa 1925, Photographers Collection, NPG x84915, National Portrait Gallery.

25. Sandy Nairne, National Portrait Gallery website, available at http://89.234.0.17/about/organisation.php (accessed 11 March 2009).

26. The conceptual link between the two cities that the Court Treatts’ expedition enforced in the 1920s was a remnant of an imperial culture spellbound with Egypt and the potential of linking Cairo and Cape Town. The British saw ancient Mediterranean empires as a model and the Phoenicians’ ancient presence at the Cape offered a precedent for their own colonial presence. Merrington, ‘A Staggered Orientalism’, p 341.

27. Merrington, ‘A Staggered Orientalism’, p 357.

28. ‘Historic African Expedition Accomplished’, Daily Express, 25 January 1926, p 1.

29. Shirley Brooks, ‘Images of “Wild Africa”: Nature Tourism and the (Re)Creation of Hluhluwe Game Reserve, 1930–1945’, Journal of Historical Geography 31, 2005, pp 220–240, p 222.

30. In 1930 Chaplin Court Treatt published Out of the Beaten Track: A Narrative of Travel in Little Known Africa, in which ‘a real African hunter’ writes of his experiences in Africa. However, CT writes more of his hunting for frames than for game: ‘This hunting for photographs is far more fascinating and tantalizing than hunting to kill. Imagine the anxiety to approach so near as to make the perfect elephant photograph possible; far nearer than would be required for the bullet of the rifle. Picture the caution of manoeuvre necessary to photograph more animals whereas in shooting, one bullet means a stampeded herd and only one elephant.’ Chaplin Court Treatt, Out of the Beaten Track: A Narrative of Travel in Little Known Africa, London: Hutchinson & Co, 1930, p 32.

31. See for instance Stella's ridicule of the tourists encountered at the Victoria Falls: ‘The tourists presented themselves as heaven-sent targets at which to aim our mischievous shafts. They insisted upon prowling round the camp, and annoyed us intensely by looking all wrong, in that setting, with their immaculate white helmets and large bone-rimmed goggles’ (my emphasis). Court Treatt, From Cape to Cairo, p 107.

32. ‘Historic African Expedition Accomplished’, p 1.

33. ‘The Court Treatt Expedition: A National Recognition’, The Times, 17 March 1926, p 17.

34. For example, Court Treatt's Out of the Beaten Track or their cinematic travelogue Stark Nature (1930).

35. Chandrika Kaul, ‘Introductory Survey’, in Chandrika Kaul (ed), Media and the British Empire, Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006, p 4.

36. See Alison Light, Forever England. Femininity, Literature and Conservatism Between the Wars, London and New York: Routledge, 1991; and Chris Waters, ‘“Dark Strangers” in Our Midst: Discourses of Race and Nation in Britain, 1947–1963’, Journal of British Studies 36(2),1997, pp 207–238.

37. Stella believed that she was participating in a historic moment. This is evident from the title of her book but also from private correspondence with Kevin Brownlow four decades after the expedition. Brownlow was interested in Stampede, a 1930 movie made by the Court Treatts, and wrote to Stella asking for information about it. Stella replied that if he was writing a history, he should read From Cape to Cairo, because ‘Cape to Cairo is African history’. Letter to Kevin Brownlow, 12 September 1972.

38. Stella used this phrase when she described the large crowd that assembled to see them off in Cape Town: ‘children [ … ] looked on in round-eyed wonder at those people who were going out into the land of story-books, where fierce lions roamed, and thrilling elephants and leopards and cannibals dwelt!’ Court Treatt, From Cape to Cairo, p 35.

39. Leon De Kock, ‘South Africa in the Global Imaginary: An Introduction’, Poetics Today 22, 2001, pp 263–298, p 266.

40. De Kock, ‘South Africa in the Global Imaginary’, pp 266–267.

41. Angela Woollacott, To Try Her Fortune in London: Australian Women, Colonialism and Modernity, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001, p 48.

42. For instance the Hegelian views of Africa conceive it as a place with no history: ‘Unhistorical, Undeveloped Spirit, still involved in the conditions of mere nature, and which had to be presented here only as on the threshold of the World's History’, in G W F Hegel's Lectures on the Philosophy of History (1834). Cited in Merrington, ‘A Staggered Orientalism’, p 324.

43. ‘Woman Pioneer of Empire’, p 1.

44. ‘Historic African Expedition Accomplished’, p 1.

45. ‘Historic African Expedition Accomplished’, p 1.

46. ‘Historic African Expedition Accomplished’, p 1.

47. E W S, ‘Cape to Cairo: The Record of a Historic Motor Journey by Stella Court Treatt’, Journal of the Royal African Society 27(105), 127, p 95.

48. Back page, Daily Express, 13 January 1925.

49. Dane K Kennedy, Islands of White: Settler Society and Culture in Kenya and Southern Rhodesia, 1890–1939, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1987, p 128.

50. Wendy Webster, ‘“There'll Always Be an England”: Representations of Colonial Wars and Immigration, 1948–1968’, Journal of British Studies 40(4), 2001, pp 557–584.

51. Kennedy, Islands of White, p 110.

52. Susan Kingsley Kent, Making Peace: The Reconstruction of Gender in Interwar Britain, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993, pp 6–9, 99.

53. See Light's fascinating discussion in Forever England.

54. Webster, ‘“There'll Always Be an England”’, pp 561–562.