by Winston Spencer Churchill 1874-1965

The Uganda Railway

When it opened in 1901, the Uganda Railway still wasn’t in Uganda, and Westminster’s MPs were still debating whether or not to build it.

1901

Queen Victoria 1837-1901 to King Edward VII 1901-1910

Introduction

Two years after Uganda became a British Protectorate in 1894, work began at Mombasa in British East Africa (Kenya from 1920) on a railway inland to Uganda. Thanks to African terrain and British bureaucracy, when Winston Churchill published the following assessment of it in 1908 the meandering line terminated at Kisumu, 660 route-miles away but still short of the Ugandan border.

by Winston Spencer Churchill 1874-1965

SHORT has been the life, many the vicissitudes, of the Uganda Railway. The adventurous enterprise of a Liberal Government, it was soon exposed, disowned, to the merciless criticism of its parents.* Adopted as a cherished foundling by the Conservative party, it almost perished from mismanagement in their hands. Nearly ten thousand pounds a mile were expended upon its construction;* and so eager were all parties to be done with it and its expense that, instead of pursuing its proper and natural route across the plateau to the deep waters of Port Victoria, it fell by the way into the shallow gulf of Kavirondo, lucky to get so far.* It is easy to censure, it is impossible not to criticize, the administrative mistakes and miscalculations which tarnished and nearly marred a brilliant conception.

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* Churchill was himself a Liberal party MP, having crossed the House from the Conservatives in 1904. He was appointed Under-Secretary of State for the Colonial Office in 1905, and three years later President of the Board of Trade. That same year, 1908, he married Clementine Hozier.

* According to Measuring Worth, roughly £1.2m per mile at today’s prices for a project. The metre-gauge, steam-powered line was 660 miles long. Comparisons with modern projects may mislead because the technology and labour conditions have altered enormously. However, according to the BBC, the new standard-gauge diesel line between Mombasa and Nairobi, shadowing the Uganda Railway and opened in 2017, cost £2.5bn for 293 miles, or roughly £8.5m per mile. It was built by the China Road and Bridge Corporation, with 90% of the funding provided by the Export-Import Bank of China. In February 2020, The Guardian estimated the cost of the UK’s fully electrified HS2 project, upgrading London’s rail connections with the North West, at £307m per mile.

* The line finally reached the Ugandan capital of Kampala in 1931, thirty years after the Mombasa-Kisumu (at that time named Port Florence) stretch opened. For a map published in 1909, see Wikimedia Commons.

Précis

In 1908, Winston Churchill gave his assessment of the recently-built Uganda Railway, which began at Mombasa in Kenya. He said that the concept was visionary, but thanks to the politicians who thought of it and then abandoned it, and others who took it up eagerly and then mismanaged it, costs were too high and the route was ill chosen.

Jigsaws

Express the ideas below in a single sentence, using different words as much as possible. Do not be satisfied with the first answer you think of; think of several, and choose the best.

The Uganda Railway was planned by the Liberals. They gave up on it. In 1895 the Conservatives revived the plans.

See if you can include one or more of these words in your answer.

IAbandon. IICredit. IIIWho.

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