by Celia Sandys
Knutsford had previously written in a very different vein to Churchill. His letter was dated 26 October 1930, shortly after the publication of My Early Life: ‘I have a lot of work to do but could not leave your book for a moment. I bought it, & have had 2 days real enjoyment. THANK YOU.’ On the subject of the escape, he wrote: ‘You will certainly have a 2nd edition of this book. May I without offence suggest you emphasising the point that you escaped with the cordial agreement of your fellow prisoners . . . you might add a footnote on the point that it was agreed that each should escape in turn, & that to go back (you do say this) would have been impossible.’ Thanking Knutsford for his letter, Churchill added: ‘I should have no difficulty in proving the good faith in which I acted, but the argument is more suited for a libel action than for an agreeable book.’
Those inmates of the States Model School whom Haldane claimed in his diary would have corroborated his version of events had long since died. Lieutenant Frederick Le Mesurier, who joined Haldane in his escape from the school in March 1900, and Thomas Frankland both fell in the First World War, at Ypres and Gallipoli respectively. Brockie was killed in a mining accident soon after the Anglo-Boer War. As far as is known, Le Mesurier had made no comment on the escape. Frankland’s views are also not known, but it is clear that he harboured no resentment against Churchill, as on the occasion of the latter’s marriage in 1908, he presented him with Herbert Maxwell’s two-volume Life of Wellington, beautifully bound in red morocco and emblazoned in gold with the Churchill coat of arms and the family motto: Fiel pero desdichado – Faithful but unfortunate.
Having read in Haldane’s diary how Brockie railed against Churchill after the escape, I thought I would approach Brockie’s family for an explanation. It seems that any resentment on Brockie’s behalf did not extend to his widow, Annie. I spoke to her granddaughter, Mrs Vera Gallony.
‘I have in my possession,’ she said, ‘a letter from your grandfather addressed to my grandmother. I’ve kept it all these years. I knew some day it would be of use to someone.’
Annie Brockie, having fallen on hard times following her husband’s death, had sought assistance from Churchill. He replied on 21 September 1902: ‘Dear Mrs Brockie, I am not a rich man and have to earn by writing all I spend. I send you a cheque for £10 which I hope may be of some assistance to you, and I regret it is not within my power to do more. Yours very truly, Winston S. Churchill.’
In 1935, when amplifying his diary, Haldane wrote: ‘I must allow myself a few words regarding articles by Churchill in the Strand Magazine . . . and the book he has since published [My Early Life].’ He makes two points of criticism. The first is that had Churchill ‘on the night of 12th December carried out the arrangements which had been thought out with great care, and were for the general advantage of himself and his companions, he would have found that most of the difficulties he [later] encountered had been foreseen and, as far as possible, accounted for’. This, as we shall see, is a ridiculous claim. The second point is: ‘Had Churchill only possessed the moral courage to admit that, in the excitement of the moment, he saw the chance to escape and could not resist the temptation to take advantage of it, not realising that it would compromise the escape of his companions, all would have been well.’
The facts are that Churchill showed the way, where his companions hung back. Their escape was compromised by their hesitation. Churchill waited for them, risking his own recapture, until Haldane admitted defeat. Although the three were supposed to flee together, there was obviously never any question of them scaling the fence simultaneously. Someone had to go first, and wait for the others to follow. As Churchill was thought to be the least agile of the three – it was noted that he took no physical exercise – he was to have been given a leg-up by Haldane, who would then follow him. Brockie would go last, having waited in the main building until the first two were over the fence. Had the attempt by Churchill and Haldane been successful, they would have had to wait for Brockie. He might well have been balked, as he and Haldane were after Churchill had got over. No one would then have accused the two of abandoning the third.
When Haldane and Churchill returned to the verandah from the latrine on the night of the twelfth after their second abortive attempt, Brockie taunted them with being afraid. However, having had a look himself, he came back defeated, passing Churchill on the way. Brockie had always been contemptuous of Churchill, and declined to discuss the situation with him as their paths crossed in opposite directions. Yet almost immediately Churchill had succeeded where Brockie had failed. It was a matter of taking a chance when the going seemed good. Churchill was not hijacking Haldane’s plan but simply pushing on where the others were hesitating, thinking, reasonably enough, that they would follow and seize similar chances. Given the circumstances, what other action would Brockie have expected Churchill to take? Surely not to return to the main building and report that the coast had been momentarily clear a few minutes before.
Once he was over the fence, Churchill waited a long time. Although it is not possible to confirm the full ninety minutes he mentions in his own testimony, it is certain that he waited for at least an hour. This can be calculated from a combination of Hofmeyr’s account and the movements of the sentries as reported by the Transvaal authorities’ inquiry. While Churchill was waiting, in extreme peril of being discovered, Haldane and Brockie went off to have their supper, intending to try again later. Hofmeyr places Churchill’s escape at 7.15 p.m., when, as we know from the inquiry, a strategically situated sentry was absent from his post. By the time Haldane and Brockie returned the guard had been changed, and the sentry was back in position. The inquiry states that he had been there since 8 p.m. Haldane’s next abortive attempt to escape, which took place some time after this, and his subsequent whispered conversation with Churchill, would take the latter’s time in the garden to at least an hour. In that time Haldane and Brockie had missed their chance. It seems extraordinary that they allowed supper to come before their escape attempt. Had they shown more determination, been more curious about Churchill’s movements and followed him, it is very likely they also would have succeeded.
Brockie’s summary judgement that escape was impossible, and his contemptuous dismissal of Churchill, may well have been responsible for the failure to follow up the latter’s success. Brockie’s ‘sneering allusions after the event to “Your trusted friend – a nice kind of gentleman!”’ reported in Haldane’s diary, were no doubt fuelled by the realisation that he had been proved wrong. Brockie’s attitude was hardly pertinent, as Haldane implied, to the question of whether or not Churchill had abandoned them.
It is difficult not to sympathise with Haldane, himself an outstanding and much-decorated officer, who, had he but known it, was in harness with a colossus of the twentieth century. The man whose watchword – ‘Never, never give in’ – would reverberate around the world had infinitely more determination than his accomplices, and was not prepared to delay the escape any longer. He was not abandoning them, but simply showing the way.
There seems little doubt that Haldane’s bitterness, possibly stemming from Churchill’s overbearing manner in 1912 and fuelled by My Early Life, caused him to revise, in 1935, the history of their personal relationship. Their correspondence in the early 1900s had been both amicable and mutually supportive, with no trace of resentment or any hint of the ‘unexpected light’ thrown by Churchill’s account of his escape. Haldane, for example, went out of his way to send Churchill copies of two Boer telegrams dating from November and December 1899 concerning his imprisonment and escape. He also suggested how Churchill should explain his possession of them, as he had come by them officially and had no authority to pass them on. For his part, Churchill lobbied his influential friends in order to clear Haldane from General Buller’s reproaches over the loss of the armoured train, and wrote to Haldane: ‘I think you would be most unwise to entertain the idea of leaving the service. People who are your friends are coming into power . . .’ By the end
of his life Haldane’s resentment had waned, and his warmer memories of their campaigns together prevailed. When his memoirs, A Soldier’s Saga, were published in 1948, two years before his death, he presented Churchill with a copy inscribed: ‘With the profound admiration of an old ally.’
However, such is Churchill’s place in history that his escape so long ago still arouses interest and controversy. When Haldane’s letter to Knutsford of 1931, in which he stated that Churchill ‘slipped off without myself or the third man’, came to light in 1997, having been buried in the library of a Los Angeles collector of Churchill memorabilia, it was immediately seized as ammunition by one or two historians seeking to diminish Churchill’s reputation. Here was a new angle for them.
In a Sunday Times article of 1 June 1997, headed ‘Boer War Letter Reveals Churchill the Bounder’, John Charmley, author of Churchill: End of Glory, commented: ‘If you believe Haldane, and the letter has an authentic ring about it, young Winston broke the gentleman’s code of honour.’ However, the evidence, as we have seen from several sources, shows conclusively that Churchill had not ‘slipped off’. John Ramsden, Professor of Modern History at Queen Mary and Westfield College in London, was quoted as saying: ‘There have been suspicions about Churchill’s mythmaking – Sir Hubert Gough, a Boer War commander, said he did not recognise one event as described by Churchill – and this letter confirms contemporary fears about the man’s reliability.’ Of all people, a historian should not be surprised if events that take place in battle imprint themselves differently on different participants, particularly when the individuals are relatively junior, and are in the thick of the action. He could also reflect that, for a variety of reasons, a senior general in the First World War might make slighting remarks about a First Lord of the Admiralty who was never reluctant to interfere with War Office business. In any event, the conjunction of a letter written in bitterness and remarks based on the recollection of events in action many years before is hardly convincing evidence of unreliability. A third historian, Andrew Roberts, commented more realistically: ‘He was a young man in a hurry who always broke the rules. It was a secret behind his greatness.’
In general this may well have been the case, although Churchill broke no rules when he escaped from the States Model School. However, had he not, as a non-combatant, stretched them during the armoured train ambush, the engine and the badly wounded men would not have escaped. More significantly, had the newspaper reporter not returned to the fray when, with honour, he could have escaped on the engine and filed his copy, he would never have been taken prisoner. His was an example which any soldier would have been proud to follow.
TEN
Wanted Dead or Alive
‘I was in the heart of the enemy’s country. I knew no one to whom I could apply for succour. Worst still I could not speak a word of Dutch or Kaffir.’
WINSTON CHURCHILL,
dispatch to the Morning Post, 22 December 1899
WHEN THE NEWS OF CHURCHILL’S escape arrived over the wires in London on 14 December, Oliver Borthwick, the editor of the Morning Post, lost no time in relaying the glad tidings to Lady Randolph; ‘Just received the following from Reuter, “Churchill escaped”. The country being free from Boers & knowing his practical turn of mind I have no doubt that he knows what he is about and will turn up with an extra chapter of his book finished in a few days time at some British encampment.’
Borthwick’s prediction was closer to the truth than he realised, for even as he was writing the letter, Churchill had turned up at a British encampment of sorts, a coalmine run by an Englishman. But the reassuring letter in no way reflected Churchill’s situation. The hue and cry his escape had caused across the veldt had given him a difficult and dangerous forty-eight hours, and his hideaway in the coalmine could be no more than a temporary sanctuary on the hazardous road to freedom.
Two days earlier, having emerged from the bushes beside the prison railings, Churchill had walked down Skinner Street to the Apies River, to this day a dry streambed except after heavy rain, when it can suddenly burst into flood, where he sat on the parapet of a bridge to consider his plans. A story which was to be widely spread in South Africa had him boasting of wading the ‘mighty Apies’. It is unlikely that the river would have been in flood in December, and in any case, there was the bridge on which he had sat. Never guilty of undue modesty, Churchill would surely have remembered and written about crossing a river in flood. Years later he attributed the story to a reporter’s imagination, but by then an electricity sub-station on the Apies had been named ‘Winston’, and the legend established.
In a brown suit and Adrian Hofmeyr’s hat, Churchill was indistinguishable from the burghers taking the night air, and for the moment in no danger. That would come when, as a lone figure, he set out to cover the three hundred miles to Komatipoort, on the border with Portuguese East Africa (now Mozambique). He assumed that by dawn his escape would be discovered. The Boers would cover all exits from Pretoria, and throw their net across the Transvaal. It was imperative that he move on as soon as possible, but the compass and map which would have provided directions, and his intended means of sustenance, meat lozenges and opium tablets, were back with Haldane and Brockie in the States Model School. Still, he had £75 in his pocket, which might buy his way out of trouble, four slabs of chocolate to keep him going, and the constellation Orion shining brightly above for guidance. He would find the railway and follow it eastwards. He struck the line half a mile further on, at a point where, winding through the hills, it ran north to south. Hazarding a guess at the right direction, he began to walk along it:
The night was delicious. A cool breeze fanned my face, and a wild feeling of exhilaration took hold of me. At any rate, I was free, if only for an hour. That was something. The fascination of adventure grew. Unless the stars in their courses fought for me, I could not escape. Where, then, was the need for caution? I marched briskly along the line. Here and there the lights of a picket fire gleamed. Every bridge had its watchers. But I passed them all, making very short detours at the dangerous places and really taking scarcely any precautions. Perhaps that was the reason I succeeded.
After two hours he saw the signal lights of a wayside halt which, judging from the distance he is likely to have covered, must have been the small settlement of Koodoespoort. Skirting around the platform, he hid in a ditch some two hundred yards beyond it, intending to wait for a train and jump aboard before it had gathered too much speed after stopping at the station. After an hour he finally heard the whistle and rumble of an approaching train, and saw the yellow headlights as it slowed to a halt at the station. Five minutes later, a further blast of the whistle and a sudden hissing of steam signalled its departure. As soon as the engine had passed him, Churchill sprang from the ditch, clutching at the nearest handhold. However, the train was travelling faster than he had anticipated, and it was only after several attempts that he managed to hold on, and heave himself onto the couplings of the fifth truck. Clambering into the wagon, he found it full of empty coal-bags, and realised he had jumped a goods train returning to a colliery. Still unsure if the train was going his way, he burrowed among the bags and settled down to sleep. At least it was carrying him away from the enemy’s capital at a steady twenty miles an hour.
‘How long I slept I do not know, but I awoke suddenly with all feelings of exhilaration gone, and only the consciousness of oppressive difficulties heavy on me.’ Churchill decided to leave the train well before dawn, in order to find water and a hiding place while it was still dark. He would lie up by day and jump another train the following night. If he could repeat the procedure two or three times he would arrive in Portuguese East Africa while still sustained by his slabs of chocolate, and without having to run the risk of foraging for food.
He crawled from among the coal-bags, lowered himself to the couplings, and jumped. ‘The train was running at a fair speed . . . My feet struck the ground in two gigantic strides, and the next instant I was spraw
ling in the ditch considerably shaken but unhurt. The train, my faithful ally of the night, hurried on its journey.’
Churchill found himself among high grass, wet with dew, in a wide valley. He discovered a pool, from which he drank long to quench his thirst and stave off its return during the sweltering day ahead. Climbing from the valley to find a hiding place in the surrounding hills, he saw with relief that the railway line ran towards the expanding sliver of light on the eastern horizon. He had taken the right train.
He selected a hiding place among trees on a hill which commanded a view of the whole valley. Three miles to the west he could see the tin roofs of a small village, which must have been Balmoral, while at the foot of the hill was a native kraal, with its inhabitants dotted about the surrounding patches of cultivation or tending their flocks of goats.
As the day dragged on and the heat became oppressive, Churchill longed to drink from the pool barely half a mile distant, but was deterred by the occasional figures of white men riding across the valley, and one Boer who came shooting birds close by. He remained within the cover, his sole companion ‘a gigantic vulture, who manifested an extravagant interest in my condition, and made hideous and ominous gurglings from time to time’. Churchill ate a slab of chocolate, which satisfied his hunger but increased his thirst.
The elation and excitement of the previous night had burnt away . . . I was so nervous and perplexed about the future that I could not rest . . . I realised with awful force that no exercise of my own feeble wit and strength could save me from my enemies, and that without the assistance of that High Power which interferes in the eternal sequence of causes and effects more often than we are prone to admit, I could never succeed.