Memoir of the Career of Thomas Edward Rogers [‎6r] (11/118)

the immediate goal ahead - a degree at Cambridge if I could win school and
university scholarships to reduce the sacrifices my father was bent on making
despite the loss of his job in the depression following 1929 and despite my
wish to spare him by giving up a university career and taking on what work I
could. A school leaving scholarship and an exhibition at Emmanuel College
settled the issue and I read subjects which really attracted me: history and
modern languages (French and German). Above all I had for tutor the uniquely
stimulating Edward Welburne, later Master of the college, who brought to wide
reading his own subtle observation of human action which gave his pupils fresh
insights derivable from no other source and a contempt for the sham or the merely
pretentious and superficial. Later we became friends and I count it the greatest
experience of my life that this undoubted genius crossed my path.
It was a curious coincidence, given my later service in Pakistan, that in
my first year at Emmanuel an Indian Muslim member named Rahmat Ali, presumably
building on the general idea of the philosopher-poet Muhammad Iqbal for a separate
state for Indian Muslims, produced a page draft giving first substance and
name of Pakistan to the idea which seemed at this early stage too visionary to
make headway. But with uncertainties as to my father's and my own future still
present I had not yet thought of a career in India, the future of which in the
thirties was still not clear. It was only in my final year that an encouraging
talk with a University careers officer, who persuaded me I would be well suited
to the ICS, that memories of the Lawrences came flooding back to help me decide
on trying for that service. Including my first probationary year I spent five
years in it before I was taken into the Indian Political Service The branch of the British Government of India with responsibility for managing political relations between British-ruled India and its surrounding states, and by extension the Gulf, during the period 1937-47. .
My first job as Assistant Magistrate in Mymensingh district gave me a proper
sense of humility at the scale of work I would carry out when fully trained.
*v
Mymensigh, my chief, Ben Kindersley told me, was larger than Belgium and with more