by Celia Sandys
PROLOGUE
‘Twenty to twenty-five. Those are the years!’
WINSTON CHURCHILL, My Early Life
THUS WROTE MY GRANDFATHER WINSTON CHURCHILL more than a quarter of a century after his breathtaking adventures during the Anglo-Boer War. As a young man in his early twenties his escapades on India’s North-West Frontier and with Kitchener in the Sudan had earned him the respect, though not always the approval, of the British military hierarchy. He also proved himself as a journalist and writer, earning more by the pen than by the sword. Members of Parliament had noticed him not just as the son of the late Lord Randolph Churchill, a leading political figure of his day, but as a budding politician in his own right. But it was his exploits in the Anglo-Boer War, during which he became a national hero, which set him on the road to fame. I had always been fascinated by this meteoric overnight leap onto the international stage, a position Churchill would occupy for over a half a century. What, I asked myself, were the circumstances in which a young journalist and aspiring politician so suddenly became a household name?
As the Anglo-Boer War provided the springboard, I decided I had better first understand its origins. I started with my grandfather’s own words, from Volume IV of The History of the English Speaking Peoples:
Two landlocked Boer Republics, owing a vague suzerainty to Britain, were surrounded on all sides, except for a short frontier with Portuguese Mozambique, by British colonies, protectorates, and territories. Yet conflict was not inevitable . . . even in the Transvaal, home of the dourest frontier farmers, a considerable Boer party favoured cooperation with Britain . . . But all this abruptly changed during the last five years of the nineteenth century.
The Cape of Good Hope had originally been settled by Europeans in 1652, when the Dutch East India Company founded a shipping station there. The early Dutch settlers brought with them an innate resentment of any attempt to interfere with their Calvinist traditions and customs. From the outset they were heavily outnumbered by their black and ‘Coloured’ (mixed-race) servants and slaves, not to mention the existing inhabitants of the region. The poorest and most independent of the settlers were itinerant farmers, known as Boers, who moved progressively northwards into the interior, in search of better grazing and of freedom from the authority of the local officials.
In 1806 the British established a naval base at the Cape and, by conquest and a payment of £6 million to the Netherlands, took possession of the colony. The motive at this time was purely strategic – to facilitate the sea route to India. Potential British settlers were deterred by the climate, so the colony’s white population remained predominantly Afrikaner, a minority of whom, particularly the Boers, were resentful of British rule. United in their determination to deny political rights to blacks and Coloureds at a time when slavery was being banished within the British Empire, some five thousand Boers, with a similar number of Coloured servants, moved north in the Great Trek of 1835-37. They crossed the Orange and Vaal rivers to set up the independent republics of Transvaal and the Orange Free State. In 1843 Britain annexed Natal, to the east of the new republics, which thus found themselves unhappily surrounded by British-controlled territory on three sides, while their only access to the sea was through Lourenço Marques in Portuguese East Africa.
The Transvaal was soon in difficulties, threatened from within by bankruptcy and internal dissent, and from without by the Zulus, whose territory was being impinged upon by the newcomers and their livestock. In 1877 Britain, with the formation of a union of South African white communities in mind, annexed the Transvaal – whose independence it had recognised since 1852. No sooner had order been restored than the Boers revolted, under the leadership of Paul Kruger. This conflict, the first Anglo-Boer War, ended after only three months when a small British force was cut to pieces at Majuba Hill in early 1881.
The British government now reversed its policy. Declining to commit the forces necessary to restore its authority in the Transvaal, it granted the colony self-government. These contradictory actions of recognition, annexation, and abdication were reflections of the negative and ambivalent British policy in South Africa generally, which inevitably caused relations between the opposing sides to fester. On the one hand, jingoists in Britain and the Cape dreamed of avenging Majuba. On the other, Kruger, firmly ensconced as President of the Transvaal, was intent on escaping British domination.
Kruger’s policy went hand in hand with the newfound prosperity of his country. The rich seams of gold discovered in the Rand in 1886 brought such wealth and economic influence to the Transvaal that it began to threaten British supremacy in Southern Africa. A plan to counter this was hatched by Cecil Rhodes, Prime Minister at the Cape and the multi-millionaire creator of de Beers, as well as of the Chartered Company which administered the new British colony of Rhodesia, to the north of the Boer republics.
Gold may not have been the root cause of the quarrel, but it played a considerable part. The gold rush had attracted thousands of immigrants, called ‘Uitlanders’, of whom a large number were British. Their presence – they were thought to outnumber the Boers – was a potential threat to the independence of the Transvaal which Kruger sought to remove. In 1890 he tried to block the enfranchisement of the Uitlanders by increasing from five to fourteen years the residential qualification for voting in central government and presidential elections. Rhodes believed that the Uitlanders’ political plight offered a pretext for once more annexing the Transvaal.
His intention was to unseat Kruger by means of an Uitlander rebellion in Johannesburg and a simultaneous invasion by Rhodesian mounted police and Cape volunteers. The invasion, which began on 30 December 1895, was led by Dr Leander Starr Jameson, with troops from Rhodes’ British South Africa Company, from the Bechuanaland Protectorate, which provided a suitable base from which to strike. The Jameson Raid, as it became known, went disastrously wrong. The Uitlanders failed to rise, Rhodes having grossly overestimated the strength of their opposition to Kruger. Jameson’s force was subjected to a running battle and surrendered after four days at Doornkop, twenty-five miles short of Johannesburg.
Kruger published secret documents captured from the raiders and, saving Jameson from summary execution in Pretoria, embarrassed the British by sending him to London for trial. Rhodes, forced to testify, cut a wretched figure in the witness box. Having been exposed as a plotter and bungler who had attempted to shift the blame on to Jameson, he was forced to resign as both Chairman of the Chartered Company and Cape Prime Minister.
Following the failure at Majuba, the fiasco at Doornkop left Britain’s Southern Africa policy in tatters. The Colonial Secretary, Joseph Chamberlain, advised patience, saying that the Jameson Raid had placed Britain in a ‘false position’. Military action was out of the question, as it would leave a legacy of bitterness inimical to Britain’s long-term aim of a union of South Africa. It would also be unpopular in Britain, unless Kruger were to put himself flagrantly in the wrong. Chamberlain considered that time was on his side, and that Kruger, given enough rope, would eventually hang himself.
After 1898 it was the British High Commissioner at the Cape, Sir Alfred Milner, rather than the Colonial Secretary, who was driving British policy. Milner, who saw himself as the protagonist of a South African federation under the British flag, was determined to annex the Transvaal, which he recognised as the main impediment to his plans. In his view, time was on Kruger’s side. Milner needed to raise the stakes.
He found a willing ally in Percy Fitzpatrick, the foremost political activist among the Uitlanders. Fitzpatrick was employed by Alfred Beit, who had partnered Rhodes in the foundation of Rhodesia. The profitability of Beit’s mining operations, in common with those of other magnates on the Rand, was at the mercy of Kruger’s industrial policies, which pushed up the cost of labour and dynamite, and imposed a profits tax. On Beit’s instructions, Fitzpatrick was negotiating for less onerous policies with the Transvaal Attorney, Jan Christiaan Smuts, and a new arrangement, call
ed the Great Deal, was virtually on the table. However, Fitzpatrick had no interest in seeing the Great Deal go through. He was more concerned with his own political ambitions, which he regarded as not inconsistent with those of his employer, and which, incidentally, ran parallel to Milner’s. All the problems, he believed, would be solved if the franchise issue could be settled in favour of the Uitlanders, and control of the Transvaal thus transferred into British hands. But something was needed to raise the Uitlanders’ enthusiasm for politics.
The opportunity came when uproar among them followed the acquittal of a South African policeman for the over-hasty shooting of a young British boilermaker, Tom Edgar, during a drunken brawl. Having engineered the last-minute failure of his negotiations with Smuts, in April 1899 Fitzpatrick was able to present Milner with a petition to Queen Victoria, signed by twenty-one thousand British subjects on the Rand, calling for British intervention on their behalf.
Milner’s recommendation for intervention had actually been agreed by the British government when leading Cape Afrikaners proposed a meeting between Milner and Kruger. President Martinus Steyn of the Orange Free State offered a venue at Bloemfontein. Milner promised Chamberlain that he would be ‘studiously moderate’, but he was bent on war, and had no intention of reaching any compromise. Yet after three days the gap between the two sides was so narrow that Milner became alarmed. He brushed aside Kruger’s offers, describing them as a ‘Kaffirbargain’, and cabled Chamberlain that the negotiations might have to be broken off. Chamberlain, who was still seeking a settlement, replied: ‘I hope you will not break off too hastily . . . you should be very patient . . . before you finally abandon the game.’
The cable arrived too late. Kruger had sensed Milner’s true intentions – to annex the Transvaal. ‘It is our country you want,’ he had said, with tears in his eyes. Milner had closed the negotiations with an icy response: ‘This conference is absolutely at an end, and there is no obligation on either side arising from it.’ It was 5 June 1899.
The talks having broken down, Milner now convinced the government in London that the British Army in Natal should be reinforced. He disingenuously assured them that a show of strength would force Kruger back to the negotiating table, and war would be averted. The obsession of Milner, the High Commissioner, with imperial expansion, the ambitions of the Irish political adventurer Fitzpatrick, and the financial interests of the ‘gold bugs’ had, together, taken charge of British policy. Events were leading inexorably to war.
Although there was much sympathy for the Boers among the Continental states of Europe, who also shared a general inclination to exploit Britain’s difficulties to their own advantage, no country was prepared to incur British displeasure by committing itself to open support of the Boers. In any event, Britain’s naval supremacy enabled her to implement her policies in South Africa without fear of foreign intervention. Seasoned regiments with ample stores and artillery were sent to the Cape from India and the Mediterranean, and by the end of September 1899, fifteen thousand British troops were ranged in a threatening manner along the borders of the Transvaal and its ally, the Orange Free State. In London, thought was given to mobilising General Sir Redvers Buller’s 1st Army Corps and cavalry division as an indication that Britain meant business, but few preparations were made. The War Office was firmly of the view that Buller’s thirty-five thousand men would not be needed, and it was widely believed if war came, the Boer commandos would be chased from the field by Britain’s professional army.
The Boers thought differently, and with reason. Thanks to the wealth of the Transvaal they could, within a week, mobilise a force of some twenty-five thousand men, equipped with modern small arms and artillery. To this could be added a further fifteen thousand men from the Orange Free State. Apart from the artillery, who were professional soldiers, this was a civilian army of burghers commandeered to fight when their country was threatened. The Boer forces were organised into commandos, each of some five hundred mounted riflemen, their mobile tactics of hit-and-run well suited to operations across the local terrain, of which they had intimate knowledge. Their effectiveness would so impress Churchill that more than forty years later, as Prime Minister during the Second World War, he would order the formation of commandos for raiding purposes.
Kruger’s final words at the Bloemfontein conference had correctly summed up Milner’s intentions: to annex the Transvaal. Assuming, reasonably enough, that Milner was pursuing the British government’s policy, Kruger issued an ultimatum on 9 October 1899. It demanded that all points of difference be settled by arbitration, and that the British troops be withdrawn from the Transvaal’s border. Failure to accept these terms would be regarded as a formal declaration of war. Milner had succeeded in his plan to brand Kruger as the aggressor, and the British government was more than content to ignore the ultimatum.
War began two days later. Ill-conceived and uncoordinated policies had embroiled Britain in a conflict it had hoped to avoid, but which, now joined, it was convinced could be speedily and successfully concluded.
It was a conviction that the young Winston Churchill shared as he set sail for the Cape from Southampton on 14 October. It was a conviction that would soon be shattered.
ONE
Gateway
‘War service was the swift road to promotion and advancement. It was the glittering gateway to distinction. It cast glamour upon the fortunate possessor alike in the eyes of elderly gentlemen and young ladies.’
WINSTON CHURCHILL, My Early Life
BY THE AGE OF TWENTY-FOUR, Winston Churchill was already a seasoned campaigner. Leaving the Royal Military Academy in December 1894, a fortnight after his twentieth birthday, he had been commissioned into a fashionable cavalry regiment, the 4th Hussars, on 20 February. He was impatient to make an immediate impact, but found the army almost entirely occupied with the chores and pleasures of peacetime soldiering. The usual pursuits of the cavalry officer during his five months of winter leave, pursuing foxes across the English Shires or young ladies through London drawing rooms, were not for the young Churchill, and he looked around for some scene of active service which would provide experience and perhaps medals. The world was largely at peace, but in Cuba a guerrilla war between indigenous rebels and the island’s Spanish rulers was reaching a conclusive stage.
Within eight months of joining his regiment, Churchill set off for Cuba. He had used his family connections to good effect. Not only had his father been a national figure, but Lady Randolph Churchill, his beautiful and talented mother, numbered Edward, Prince of Wales among her many admirers. Little wonder that in Churchill’s pocket was an introduction to the Spanish Captain-General. For company he had Reggie Barnes, a fellow officer who had been persuaded that an adventure in Cuba would be more beneficial and less expensive than a season fox-hunting. To defray the expense of this private venture Churchill had secured his first journalistic contract, having arranged with the Daily Graphic that he would be paid five guineas for each ‘letter from the front’ he dispatched to the paper.
On his way to Cuba he stopped off in New York. Here he was looked after and introduced around by Senator Bourke Cockran, another admirer of Lady Randolph. Cockran, a distinguished lawyer and politician, was probably the first person to recognise the young man’s vast potential, and admitted himself profoundly impressed with the vigour of Churchill’s language and the breadth of his views. The two men were to strike up a friendship and maintain a long-standing political correspondence. Years later Churchill was to say of Cockran’s political oratory, ‘He was my model – I learned from him how to hold thousands in thrall.’
After a week in New York, a thirty-six-hour train journey to Tampa, Florida and a short sea-crossing, Churchill and Barnes arrived in Havana on 20 November. They lost no time in setting out by train and coastal steamer for the war zone, where they attached themselves to the Spanish General’s staff. There followed days in the saddle, advancing through ‘endless forests and undulations of a vast, l
ustrous landscape dripping with moisture and sparkling with sunshine’.
Having researched even thus far into Churchill’s adult life, I could already see that he always made the very best of whatever cards he held. A winter of idleness was being put to the best possible use. His mother’s sponsorship, which others might have used simply to enhance their social life, provided him with a passport to New York and Cuba. His contract with the Daily Graphic was no doubt obtained largely on the strength of his father’s reputation with that paper for which he had written from South Africa in 1891. Lord Randolph would have been agreeably surprised, having only a year before his death in January 1895 expressed his concern that his son would become ‘a mere social wastrel, one of the handful of public school failures’.
The cards were not always to be so favourable. In the next few years Churchill would be dealt hands which others would have thrown in without hesitation. Somehow he always turned them into winners.
Churchill did not celebrate his twenty-first birthday on 30 November 1895 with a ball at Blenheim Palace, his ancestral home. That would have been conventional, and he was not a conventional young man. It was not the popping of champagne corks but the crack of rifle-fire which heralded his coming of age. In Cuba, under fire for the first time, a bullet missed his head by less than a foot before fatally wounding the horse beside him. It was the first example of what would be Churchill’s phenomenal luck in the face of enemy fire.
This short adventure in someone else’s war brought Churchill his first medal – the Spanish Red Cross, which unfortunately he could not wear on his British uniform – and earned him a certain amount of notoriety in the British press. It also earned him twenty-five guineas, his first income as a journalist. His letters from Cuba, written while living rough, were a portent of his formidable journalistic talents.