by Celia Sandys
His first dispatch was dated 6 November, the day of his arrival in Estcourt. Among much else, it eloquently pleaded the cause of the British colonists in Natal:
They have never for one moment lost sight of their obligations as a British colony . . . The townsfolk are calm and orderly . . . Boys of sixteen march with men of fifty to war . . . The Imperial Light Horse can find no more vacancies, not even for those who will serve without pay . . . This colony of Natal will impress the historian. The devotion of its people to their Sovereign . . . should win them general respect and sympathy; and full indemnity to all individual colonists who have suffered loss must stand as an Imperial debt of honour.
The Boer War brought together a number of rising stars, with many of whom Churchill was already acquainted. At Estcourt he found the Times correspondent, Leo Amery, who had been in the top form at Harrow when Churchill arrived at the bottom. Amery was small of stature and, mistaking him for a boy in the lower school, Churchill had pushed him into the school swimming-pool. The tables had been immediately turned, Amery being several years older, head of his house and no mean athlete. But the incident had led to an academic alliance in which Amery helped Churchill with his Latin translations while the future Nobel Prize-winner dictated the older boy’s English essays. Now Churchill invited Amery to share his tent in the station yard. Forty years on he would invite him to join his wartime government.
There were many others, mostly army officers, who had already come to the notice of the public, but in this sparkling constellation none, new or established, shone more brightly than the youthful, impetuous Churchill. Unusually for anyone except the very highest in the South African firmament, his portrait appears twice in a pictorial record of the Boer War, War Impressions, which was published in 1900 by the well-known British artist Mortimer Menpes. One picture shows Churchill, dressed for the fray, at his tent door. The other is more conventionally posed, with the subject wearing a suit and bow tie. In the commentary accompanying the paintings, the artist’s pen is more revealing than his brush. His subject was ‘quite ready to retire into the background and listen to any one’s conversation – if it is interesting. If it is not – well, I think it might chance to be speedily interrupted.’ Menpes thought the young war correspondent ‘a man who might be unpopular because of his great cleverness. He is too direct and frank to flatter, and would never consent to efface himself in order to give added and unmerited value to the quality of others.’
A century after Churchill’s arrival, Estcourt has spilled much further into the surrounding hills than had the small town of 1899, but something of its original colonial character remains, and there are still plenty of tin roofs. The Churchill connection is enshrined in his freedom of the borough, granted sixty years after he bivouacked there. That this small town should be the only place in the southern hemisphere so to honour him reflects his close association with its inhabitants.
All the women in Estcourt had been evacuated some weeks before, except for Mrs Brewitt, the doctor’s wife, and Mrs Norgate, the wife of an Englishman who had emigrated to South Africa as a young man and who was now acting as a British Army guide. Nevertheless the military influx had swelled the population, and among it Churchill became very much the young man about town. Stories of his time in Estcourt abound even now.
It was at the bar of the Plough, still the local pub, that he bought the horse which would carry him around the district. The local horse trader, who asked an extortionate price for an animal of dubious quality, quickly discovered he had a customer who knew more about horses than he did. Another regular port of call was Dr Brewitt’s pharmacy in the Medical Hall. The building, where Churchill chatted daily with the manager, Mr Tuffy Brickhill, is still recognisable.
Winston Churchill’s Natal
There was one man in Estcourt who boasted for years that he had been the only person to tell Churchill, ‘Go to hell.’ This was Signaller Owles of the Durban Light Infantry, one of the soldiers manning the Estcourt garrison heliograph station. Avid for news from Ladysmith, Churchill approached one evening as a message of little consequence was being received. The Sergeant in charge was replying, sending the letters ‘AAR’.
‘I know the morse code, but what does AAR mean?’ Churchill enquired of Owles.
‘Go to hell,’ was the reply.
Churchill retreated to contemplate this rebuff, but returned shortly afterwards. ‘I realise now that your messages are strictly private, but what does AAR really mean?’ he asked with unusual reticence.
‘It means “Go to hell,”’ replied Owles.
Robert Clegg, the stationmaster at Estcourt in 1899, wrote in the Estcourt Gazette forty years later about Churchill’s arrival in the town: ‘He wanted to know all about everything. He made daily excursions over the hills towards Colenso and went as far as buying or hiring an old spider [a small horse-drawn carriage] in which he journeyed out to Frere and Chieveley to see the Boer camp which could be seen from there.’
Robert Clegg’s great-grandson, Derek Clegg, told me a story, well known in their family, of Churchill beside a campfire or in the bar of the Plough, telling tales of his time in India and the Sudan. Each episode contained more excitement than most people would meet in a lifetime, and the stationmaster believed Churchill’s stories to be much exaggerated. He laughed when the bumptious adventurer declared, ‘Mark my words, I shall be Prime Minister of England before I’m finished.’ Forty years later Robert Clegg would look up from his newspaper and exclaim to his daughter, ‘By Jove, he’s done it!’
The Plough and the campfire were not the only places in Estcourt where Churchill relaxed during the balmy evenings of early November. John Atkins, the correspondent of the Manchester Guardian, who together with Amery shared Churchill’s bell tent, gives a picture of a more sophisticated form of social life: We had found a good cook and we had some good wine. We entertained friends every evening, to our pleasure and professional advantage and, we believed, to their satisfaction.’ They would have been waited on by Churchill’s valet Thomas Walden, who, having accompanied Lord Randolph on his expeditions to India and Africa, was no stranger to maintaining high standards in difficult circumstances.
Undeterred by the Boers besieging the town on all sides, Churchill was impatient to get into Ladysmith. His dispatch of 9 November indicates his frustration. It began: ‘How many more letters shall I write you from an unsatisfactory address. Sir George White’s Headquarters are scarcely forty miles away, but between them and Estcourt stretches the hostile army. Whether it may be possible or wise to try to pass the lines of investment is a question I cannot yet decide.’ In fact he had already let it be known locally that he was looking for a guide to lead him to Ladysmith.
The dispatch goes on to describe a reconnaissance by armoured train to Colenso, a small township in no-man’s-land some twenty miles short of Ladysmith. One can imagine Churchill tingling with excitement at the first prospect of action since he had charged with his regiment at Omdurman a year before: ‘The possibilities of attack added to the keenness of the experience.’ They started early in the afternoon, the engine pulling two trucks carrying soldiers and three with platelayers and spare rails, in case it should be necessary to repair the line.
The train slowly wound its way through the undulating grassland, a green landscape with a hazy blue backdrop of the distant Drakensberg mountains. They halted every four or five miles while the officer in charge of the train, Captain Hemsley, questioned locals and liaised with small bodies of troops, some on bicycles, who were patrolling in the vicinity of the track. Evidently there were no Boers about, no mounted men in slouch hats with Mauser rifles who might be alerted by the belching black smoke of the approaching engine into springing an ambush. By mid-afternoon the train had reached Chieveley, some five miles short of its objective. From here the occupants could see a brown speck in the sky: the observation balloon floating above Ladysmith, hidden beyond the distant hills.
The train moved on even more
slowly and warily as Colenso came into view. The little town of less than a hundred tin-roofed houses was silent, and appeared to be deserted. Captain Hemsley stopped the train half a mile short of the first buildings and, accompanied by a sergeant, went forward on foot. According to his dispatch, Churchill followed. No doubt he did more than merely follow. He had, after all, a good deal more active military experience than almost all the officers around him, but in his dispatches he modestly limits his own role to that of correspondent. It is only in his private letters that he writes excitedly of the escapades he so frequently participated in or engineered.
So, the readers of the Morning Post followed with Churchill:
We soon reached the trenches that had been made by the British troops before they evacuated the place . . . The streets were littered with the belongings of the inhabitants. Two or three houses had been burned. A dead horse lay in the road, his four legs sticking stiffly up in the air, his belly swollen . . . We made our way back to the railway line and struck it at the spot where it was cut . . . the damage to the lines was such as could easily be repaired. The Boers realise the advantage of the railway . . . They had resolved to use it for their further advance, and their confidence in the ultimate issue is shown by the care with which they avoid seriously damaging the permanent way. We had learned all there was to learn – where the line was broken, that the village was deserted, that the bridge was safe, and we made haste to rejoin the train . . . So we rattled back to Estcourt through the twilight.
Although he was officially a non-combatant reporter, Churchill was never content to remain a mere spectator. His fellow correspondent Atkins described an occasion when he and Churchill were entertaining the officer commanding Estcourt garrison, Colonel Long. The conversation was distracted by the cries of troops and the clanking of metal on metal, and the Colonel explained that the garrison’s field guns were being loaded onto railway trucks to be withdrawn to a safer position near Pietermaritzburg. Estcourt, he said, would fall should the Boers advance against it. Churchill believed it was a mistake to withdraw the guns, and said so with some conviction, pointing out that signs of evacuation would encourage the hitherto cautious Boers to be more adventurous. Atkins envied his confidence, but as a mere correspondent and thus a spectator, was embarrassed by the way in which Churchill lectured a senior officer. However, Colonel Long was not at all put out, and shortly after he had left them, the noise, which had stopped once the guns were aboard the trucks, began again. He had decided that the guns should remain at Estcourt, and they were being unloaded. Atkins describes how Churchill beamed, and said: I did that.’ Then, assuming a more modest attitude, he added gracefully, ‘We did that.’
In his dispatch of 10 November, Churchill reminded London of its responsibilities, and the cost of meeting them. He had ridden out to have lunch with a farmer who for fifteen years had sunk his entire efforts and assets into his property. He had, wrote Churchill,
bought the ground, built the house, reclaimed waste tracts, enriched the land with corn and cattle, sunk all his capital in the enterprise, and backed it with the best energies of his life. Now everything might be wrecked in an hour by a wandering Boer patrol. And this was happening to a law abiding citizen more than a hundred miles within the frontiers of Her Majesty’s dominions! Now I felt the bitter need for soldiers – thousands of soldiers – so that such a man might be assured . . . The military situation is without doubt at this moment most grave and critical.
That same day, prompted no doubt by his recent excursion, Churchill wrote a letter of over six hundred words to the Adjutant-General in London, Sir Evelyn Wood. He began with a tribute to Reggie Barnes, who was lying wounded aboard the Sumatra in Durban Harbour. Churchill used his influence with the Adjutant-General to commend his friend in the hope that, in spite of his serious wounds, ‘the State may find a useful servant in the future’. The patient did indeed remain a useful servant, eventually retiring after the First World War as Major-General Sir Reginald Barnes, KCB.
Most of the letter was devoted to an appreciation of the military situation: ‘here we remain at Estcourt . . . in an untenable cup in the hills. Five days have however passed in safety. Four more will bring reinforcements and change the complexion of affairs. Were the Boers less ambitious they would be more formidable.’
Churchill then explained the less ambitious strategy which would have brought the Boers more immediate success, but which, fortunately, they had not followed. They would have been better advised to tear up the railway line from Durban and so delay the British troops being sent for the relief of Ladysmith. But because they themselves planned to use the line in their advance to Durban after they had taken Ladysmith, they had done little damage to it, and had left the bridges intact. Nevertheless, Churchill continued, the situation hung in the balance: ‘It is astonishing how we have under-rated these people . . . A long and bloody war is before us – and the end is by no means as certain as most people imagine.’
He went on to criticise the number of British prisoners who had been taken, and the manner of their capture: ‘The Boers have captured twice as many soldiers as have been hit – not a very pretty proportion . . . I think we ought to punish people who surrender troops under their command.’ This last remark reflected Churchill’s lifelong philosophy, encapsulated in a Second World War speech by the words ‘Never give in.’ No doubt in the early stages of the Boer War some demoralised troops had given up too easily; and Churchill may have had in mind the abandonment of the wounded at Dundee, who included his friend Sir Penn Symons. He would also have been influenced by his personal experience of previous campaigns, when tribal enemies took no prisoners, and themselves either fought to the death or melted into the hills. But this was war in an entirely different context, and one in which he had yet to get to grips with the enemy. When he did, within a week, he would have cause to remember, somewhat ruefully, his strictures on those who had surrendered.
At this stage Churchill criticised the conduct of the war only in private, and – in marked contrast to his frank comments on other campaigns – his dispatches contained nothing intended to rock the boat. It was not that there had been no serious errors of judgement by the generals. The attempt in the first few weeks, before adequate forces had arrived, to defeat the Boers as they invaded Natal, had resulted in the bulk of the British forces becoming besieged in the disease-ridden town of Ladysmith. This whole strategy, and the inflexible tactics to implement it, had been so misplaced that Buller, supported by the War Office at home, wanted to sack General Sir George White, the general officer commanding in Natal. But White, now trapped in Ladysmith, was more at the mercy of the Boers than of the War Office. The errors and stupidities would not have escaped Churchill’s notice, but in his view there was nothing to gain by drawing public attention to them while the crisis persisted. It was more important to maintain morale.
The breadth and depth of Churchill’s connections is illustrated by the confidence with which he corresponded with the highest in the land, and the frequency with which he bumped into influential friends. Throughout his time in South Africa he was to reinforce friendships already established in the military world and to forge new ones which, besides bringing personal pleasure, would assist him politically in the years ahead. Inevitably for someone of Churchill’s nature, his activities would confirm the opinion of him in a few minds as impossible and incorrigible. These antipathies sometimes caused temporary and local difficulties, but, as with General Kitchener, seldom had permanent ill-effects.
Kitchener’s aversion to Churchill, which had begun even before the young man’s arrival in the Sudan, and which was to be fanned into fury by The River War, was kept burning when, as Chief-of-Staff in South Africa, he bumped into him again. The fences were to some extent mended in 1914 when Churchill, as First Lord of the Admiralty, wrote to Kitchener, who had just become Secretary of State for War: ‘It is a great pleasure to work with you.’ When Churchill was forced out of the Admiralty in 1915, Ki
tchener appeared sorry to see him go. Churchill later wrote: ‘When I left the Admiralty . . . the first, and with one exception the only one of my colleagues who paid me a visit of ceremony was the overburdened Titan whose disapprobation had been one of the disconcerting experiences of my youth.’
The River War, which was published while Churchill was at Estcourt, received almost universal acclaim. A single paper, the Saturday Review, carried a hostile notice: ‘Only this astonishing young man could have written these two ponderous and pretentious volumes.’ The reviewer was irritated by the author’s ‘irrepressible egoism’ and ‘airs of infallibility’. The Daily Mail also referred to an ‘astonishing young man’, but in praise rather than censure, calling the book ‘an astonishing triumph’.
While his book was selling out in London, Churchill was scheming to get into Ladysmith. He had let it be known that he would pay £200 to anyone who would lead him through the Boer lines, and William Park Gray, an enterprising twenty-one-year-old trooper of the Natal Carbineers, took up the challenge. The grandson of a first-generation English settler, he knew the local countryside intimately. He was the regiment’s rifle-shooting champion, and his stamina in the saddle was legendary. His military talents would take him to the rank of Lieutenant-Colonel in the First World War. Anxious to acquire £200 and to escape close military discipline for a few days, he was ideally suited to the task.
Many years later he recorded his impressions of Churchill, whom he found sitting in his tent: