Right Foot Forward

A START IN FREEDOM by Sir Hugh Foof. 256 pages. Harper & Row. $4.95.

"I am one of the last of an almost extinct species," admits Author Foot, "a British Colonial Governor." Few members of the species have worked harder toward self-extinction than Sir Hugh, who spent 30 years in the colonial service and was Britain's last Governor General in Cyprus before independence. In this sprightly autobiography, which combines exploits worthy of James Bond with a scholar's critical look at current history, Foot draws some important lessons from Britain's race to haul down the flag.

Raised on Burke. Ex-Governor Foot, who is now an adviser to the U.N., believes that the rising tide of animosity of the world's poor nations for the rich will eventually displace the cold war as the greatest threat to peace. Britain, too, once rowed on this flood tide, he says, "but we rowed with it, not against it. The most important thing is to take and hold the initiative. The people must be given a lead, a hope, an assurance that orderly and constructive effort will be worthwhile."

Even among the many superbly qualified colonial administrators that Britain produced, Hugh Foot is a standout. He is a "slightly out of step" member of England's most brilliant nonconformist family. His late father, Isaac, a deeply cultivated man who raised his family on Edmund Burke and amused himself by reading the Bible in Greek, was a Liberal Party member of Ramsay MacDonald's 1931 coalition Cabinet. His brother Dwight was a Liberal M.P., and another brother, Michael, is the enfant terrible of Labor's left wing. "We liked to work to the rule, 'Let not the left Foot know what the right Foot doeth,' " cracks Hugh. Yet the family always preserved a merry unity through a running game of intellectual oneupmanship. One famous parry came in 1958, when Sir Hugh was trying desperately to halt the internecine war between Greek and Turkish Cypriots. Suddenly, he received a cryptic cable from his father: SEE SECOND CORINTHIANS FOUR VERSES EIGHT AND NINE. *Delighted, Sir Hugh cabled back: SEE ROMANS FIVE VERSES THREE AND FOUR./-

Leave Him There. To most of Britain's postwar colonial administrators, the liquidation of empire seemed a natural and even inspiring process. Foot explains: "Take a young man with only a few years' experience in the territory to which he has been sent. Put him in charge of a District. Leave him there for say five years. He becomes wholly devoted to the people of his District. And he spends much of his effort fighting higher authority to get for his people what he thinks they need and deserve."

Foot got his first taste of this process as a junior administrator in the seething British mandate of Palestine in 1929. "From the Arabs I learnt that a governor should be a servant and not a master," he says. "I was never in any doubt that they regarded me as an inferior." In 1937, when the Arabs rebelled against Jewish immigration and British rule, Foot "often idly wished to be on their side of the barricades instead of on the side of authority." Once, acting on an informer's tip, he pursued a rebel terrorist chief to a high mountain village, flushed him out of a corn bin, escorted him off to prison--and then characteristically appealed to the High Commissioner to spare his life. The Arabs were duly appreciative: Foot's name soon appeared at the top of the rebel assassination list.

Fulfillment. Foot survived to chart (on camel back) the Wadi Araba Desert between the Red Sea and the Dead Sea, was blown out of a staff car on his way to demand the surrender of a Vichy French garrison in Syria, got stabbed in the back by an anti-British terrorist in Nigeria. He helped Nigerian politicians draft their constitution, and headed Jamaica's march to stability and independence. As for his last and most frustrating assignment, he says wryly that "anyone who understood Cyprus had been misinformed." Whatever the fate of that unhappy nation, Sir Hugh looks back proudly on his career as empire liquidator. "It was a time of fulfillment," he says. "All the countries in which I served are now governing themselves."

*"We are troubled on every side, yet not distressed; we are perplexed but not in despair; persecuted but not forsaken; cast down but not destroyed."

/- "And not only so, but we glory in tribulations also; knowing that tribulation worketh patience; and patience, experience; and experience, hope."

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