Churchill

by Celia Sandys

  In Pietermaritzburg Churchill was the guest of Sir Walter Hely-Hutchinson, the Governor of Natal. The following day he met the Prime Minister of the colony, Colonel Hime, and risked the overflowing military hospitals. Conflicting emotions appear in his dispatch of that day. He would always be appalled at the suffering and misery caused by war, and he made sure his Morning Post readers were aware of it: ‘all this pruning and patching up of broken men to win them a few more years of crippled life caught one’s throat like the penetrating smell of iodoform.’ But he would also always be attracted by the danger and excitement of battle: ‘Nor was I sorry to hasten away by the night mail towards the camps . . . morning had broken when the train reached Frere . . . So after much trouble and adventure I came home safely again to the wars.’

  There is some confusion over the details of his return to the front. According to contemporary newspaper reports, he landed in Durban on 23 December, arrived at Pietermaritzburg the same evening and set out on the seventy-five-mile journey to Frere the following day. His dispatch to the Morning Post reads as if he arrived in Frere after daybreak on Christmas Day, yet it is dated the twenty-fourth. It seems likely that this is correct, as even allowing for his delay in departing from Pietermaritzburg, the night mail would have reached Frere before midnight, and in My Early Life he describes celebrating Christmas Eve there.

  A doubt also arises over another minor matter: where he took up his new abode. In his dispatch he writes that he got down from the train on arrival at Frere and walked along the line looking for his tent, finding it pitched on the side of the very same cutting where he had fled from the two Boer riflemen less than six weeks previously. In My Early Life he was to write that he took up his quarters in the platelayers’ hut from behind which the two Boers had appeared.*

  What is beyond doubt is that Churchill spent Christmas 1899 within a few yards of the spot where he had surrendered to Field Cornet Oosthuizen on 15 November. In My Early Life he mentions only a dinner on Christmas Eve. The readers of the Morning Post, however, were treated to a detailed description of the festivities:

  Glory to God in the highest and on earth peace and goodwill towards men . . . the hostile camps remained tranquil throughout the day . . . both armies attended divine service . . . the British held athletic sports, an impromptu military tournament and a gymkhana . . . there were Christmas dinners . . . and various smoking concerts afterwards.

  He lost no time in putting his literary affairs in order. On Boxing Day he wrote to the editor of the North American Review, William McRiderley, complaining about their parsimony in paying what he regarded as an inadequate sum for an article of his that they had published. Pointing out that he usually commanded ten guineas per thousand words, he admonished them in future to state their terms in advance, adding: ‘I will do it if I think it good enough.’ McRiderley’s reaction is scribbled in the corner of Churchill’s letter: ‘Cheeky little cuss, ain’t he?’

  In his triumphal return Churchill did not forget those at the Transvaal and Delagoa Bay Colliery who had helped him on his way to freedom. For the moment he had no means of expressing his gratitude. He could not even acknowledge their crucial contribution, but in order to protect them from Boer retribution had to pretend that he had arrived in Lourenço Marques unaided.

  However, back in England a year later, and with the risk of revenge passed, he wrote to John Howard at the mine: ‘I am sending to South Africa by next week’s mail 8 gold watches, which are all of them engraved with suitable inscriptions . . . I hope you will do me the honour to accept these small keepsakes of our remarkable adventure, and believe that they also represent my sincere gratitude for the help and assistance you all afforded me.’ He also recommended to the Secretary of State for War that those who had helped him should receive a medal for their actions, but given the War Office’s ineptness in arranging suitable awards to loyal civilians, it was not surprising they ignored Churchill’s recommendation.

  My search for the watches was a fascinating venture in itself. In view of Churchill’s meticulous attention to detail, I found it surprising that there should have been so much confusion about them.

  In a note from Churchill to a secretary, he gives eight names to be engraved: Dr James Gillespie, J.R. Adams, J.D. Dewsnap, Joe McKenna, Joe McHenry, Chas A. Burnham, Ellen David and Ada Blunden; together with the inscription: ‘From Winston S. Churchill in recognition of timely help afforded him in his escape from Pretoria during the South African War. Dec. 13 1899’. If, as Churchill obviously intended, there was also to be a watch for Howard, nine should have been ordered.

  The watches were consigned care of the Standard Bank in Cape Town. The manager there notified Howard of their arrival, writing that he would ‘pack the five watches’ for onward transmission. In the event, seven watches were apparently collected by the mine secretary, John Adams, for in a written statement made in 1970 by Howard’s son Lewis, ‘When my dad opened the parcel there were only seven watches to be seen, and none of them bore the inscription which should have gone with my dad’s watch.’

  Churchill instructed that a watch be ordered for Howard and enquiries made about the watch missing from the eight which he had ordered to be sent. We do not know which watch was missing from those ordered, or if a ninth was ever sent to John Howard. According to Lewis Howard, his father never received one. Further enquiry is not possible, as Howard has no living descendants, his grandson having been killed during the Second World War while flying with the South African Air Force.

  At the time of writing the fate of six watches is known. Of these, I have handled three: Daniel Dewsnap’s, which is with his grandson Errol at Vereeniging; Charles Burnham’s, which is in the Killie Campbell Museum in Durban; and Joe McHenry’s, which is on display at Chartwell, Churchill’s country house in Kent, now owned by the National Trust Joe McKenna’s watch is with his grandson Mr Jay Hagger in Guernsey, while Dr Gillespie’s passed into the hands of his nephew, Major-General Robert Urquhart, in Scotland. John Adams’s watch was destroyed in a fire.

  The bank manager in Cape Town could not have been correct when he wrote of five watches, as six were certainly received at the mine. Lewis Howard must also have been mistaken in giving the figure as seven. The final mystery concerns the two women’s watches, for Ellen David and Ada Blunden, neither of which has surfaced. Perhaps, like John Howard’s, they were never sent.

  It was instructive to look through the letters which were later sent to Churchill by his accomplices at the mine. In 1907 John Howard wrote to thank him for an introduction to Lord Selborne, the British High Commissioner in Cape Town. In 1908 Charles Burnham wrote seeking an introduction in East Africa, where he and his two brothers were about to farm. He was also able to tell Churchill of the hazards he had overcome when bribing various officials during their journey from Witbank to Lourenço Marques, which he had not had time to mention before they had parted in 1899. Joe McKenna’s son Joseph wrote in the same year, seeking help ‘in the name of my father’, who had put him through college in England and France with a view to him taking up medicine or the law, but the family finances had run out.

  The amicable correspondence between Howard, Burnham and McKenna and Churchill was not reflected in that with Adams, the mine secretary. In 1921, having fallen out with Howard, Adams sought in a letter to a South African journalist, Dadge Stansfield, to diminish Howard’s role in Churchill’s escape, and also contradicted parts of Churchill’s own account. Adams seems to have been his own worst enemy, as Churchill had written without success to various people on his behalf. The final piece of correspondence, which as far as is known elicited no reply, was a letter from Adams to Churchill in 1922 requesting £100 ‘as a loan until I make good, which won’t he long as I have a splendid diamond proposition the details of which I could let you know later and also put you in the ground floor’.

  The news of Churchill’s arrival in Durban prompted an avalanche of telegrams and letters over the next few weeks congratulating
him on his escape. Two of them announced that the writers’ newly-born sons had been named Winston. Another suggested that ‘after the heroic deeds. . . and sacrifices . . . made for Queen and country’, Churchill should be ‘known in history as Winston the Dauntless’. Other letters came from relatives of prisoners of war, anxiously enquiring about their welfare. Churchill responded by writing reassuring articles in the Natal Mercury and Natal Witness describing the conditions under which captured officers and men were held.

  Fame is double-edged, and cuts both ways. Not all of the communications Churchill received were complimentary. The retired generals and colonels whom he later called ‘The Buck and Dodder Club’ took exception to the unpalatable truths in his dispatch of 24 December, his first communication to his readers after he had received information about the progress of the war which had not been available to him in prison. He had commented favourably on the Boer strategy, while criticising the British: ‘Tactically Ladysmith may be strongly defensible, politically it has become invested with much importance, but for strategic purposes it is absolutely worthless. It is worse. It is a regular trap.’ He had also cabled the Morning Post, his patriotism on his sleeve as he suggested the formation of an irregular mounted unit to mirror those already raised in South Africa: ‘Are the gentlemen of England all fox hunting? Why not an English Light Horse?’ The Morning Leader, in a sarcastic vein, wrote that they were unable to confirm that Mr Winston Churchill had been appointed ‘to command the troops in South Africa with General Sir Redvers Buller VC as his Chief of Staff’.

  Fortunately, Buller took the same strategic view as Churchill. A month before the war started he had warned the Secretary of State for War, Lord Lansdowne, that troops should not be deployed north of the Tugela River. Now he wrote to Lady Londonderry, one of the foremost hostesses of her day: ‘Winston Churchill turned up here yesterday escaped from Pretoria. He really is a fine fellow and I must say I admire him greatly. I wish he was leading irregular troops instead of writing for a rotten paper. We are very short of good men, as he appears to be, out here,’

  Buller lost no time in sending for Churchill, whose opinion he sought on conditions in the Transvaal, and who offered what information he had been able to gather from peering through the chinks in his railway wagon. The General then said, ‘You have done very well. Is there anything we can do for you?’

  ‘A commission, please, in one of the irregular corps now being improvised.’

  This delighted Buller. An irregular force of volunteer mounted infantry, raised at home and in South Africa, was Buller’s answer to the tactical problems of the veldt, which the regular army was ill fitted to solve. He had already recognised, in his letter to Lady Londonderry, the contribution Churchill could make. There was, however, a difficulty to overcome, and Buller paused to consider this before he gave Churchill an answer. ‘What about your paper?’ he asked.

  Although officers were no longer allowed to double as correspondents as a result of his own activities on the North-West Frontier and in the Sudan, Churchill could not afford to break his lucrative deal with the Morning Post. ‘I am under a definite contract and cannot possibly relinquish this engagement,’ he disingenuously replied.

  There was a further pause while the General rose from his chair and circled the room, casting a quizzical eye on the potential recruit while considering how to circumvent the regulation. At length he said, ‘All right. You can have a commission in Bungo’s regiment. You’ll have to do as much as you can for both jobs, but you’ll get no pay for ours.’ ‘Bungo’ was Colonel Julian Byng, subsequently Field Marshal Lord Byng of Vimy and Governor-General of Canada, who was then commanding the South African Light Horse, alias ‘Bingo’s Own’, or the ‘Cockyolibirds’, because of the coloured plumes they wore in their slouch hats. Thus, having been the cause of the regulations forbidding officers from writing for the press, Churchill became the only man ever known to have broken them without reprimand.

  Colonel Byng’s regiment, which Churchill joined on 2 January 1900, was part of Lord Dundonald’s cavalry brigade, recruited from hardbitten soldiers of fortune, farmers, colonists and ‘gentlemen rankers’ from Britain, the like of which Churchill had appealed to in his cable to the Morning Post. These first-class irregulars were led by a group of outstanding officers who nearly all rose to high rank in the First World War: three became army commanders and some half a dozen commanded divisions. One of the latter was Reginald Barnes, who had served with Churchill in the 4th Hussars, had gone with him to Cuba, and, having recovered from grievous wounds sustained soon after arriving in South Africa, was now a squadron leader in the Imperial Light Horse.

  Buller (left) and his staff watching the battle of Spion Kop from Mount Alice.

  Colonel Thorneycroft, who commanded his own mounted infantry regiment of colonials and Uitlanders.

  The author’s son Alexander on Spion Kop, showing the ridge up which his great-grandfather twice climbed under fire. The reservoir in the distance now fills the gorge of the Tugela River.

  The British main trench on the day after Spion Kop.

  The same scene today.

  Churchill and Lord Basil Blackwood on Hlangwane Hill, after Spion Kop.

  Lady Randolph Churchill on board the hospital ship Maine, with her son Jack as a patient.

  Churchill, Captain Percy Scott and Jack saying farewell to Lady Randolph and the Maine.

  Brigadier-General John Brabazon, commander of the Imperial Yeomanry.

  General Ian Hamilton.

  Field Marshal Lord Roberts.

  Churchill (seated, second from right) returning home on board the Dunnotar Castle. Standing fourth from the right is Abe Bailey, whose son John later married Churchill’s daughter Diana.

  Churchill in October 1900, as the newly elected Member of Parliament for Oldham.

  We should be wary of taking literally Churchill’s words: ‘I stitched my badges of rank to my khaki coat.’ That was a task he would undoubtedly have delegated to his valet Trooper Walden, who had joined the South African Light Horse when Churchill was captured, and who would now be the perfect soldier-servant. We can, however, imagine Churchill, with his flair for headgear, sticking ‘the long plume of feathers from the tail of the sakabulu bird’ into his hat. Of the assertion that he ‘lived from day to day in perfect happiness’ we need have no doubt.

  Churchill was immediately at home in this company, which messed together around the same campfires and slept under the same wagons throughout the campaign in Natal, becoming the best of friends. Colonel Byng, whom Churchill had met at Aldershot when newly commissioned, made him the Assistant Adjutant, and allowed him to roam where he liked when the regiment was not in action. Thus the Morning Post did not go short of copy.

  It has sometimes been suggested that Churchill, never usually known for pulling his punches, muted his public criticism of Buller out of gratitude for the commission in the South African Light Horse. It is true that his private letters offer a more objective judgement than his dispatches, but those letters also explain why. To Pamela Plowden he wrote on 10 January 1900: ‘Alas dearest we are again in retreat. Buller started out full of determination to do or die but his courage soon ebbed . . . I cannot begin to criticise – for I should never stop . . . but there is no well known General who is as big a man as he is and faute de mieux we must back him for all he is worth – which at this moment is very little.’ No doubt Churchill had already suspected what he would conclude thirty years later: that a Victoria Cross earned as a young officer did not necessarily fit a man to command an army after a quarter of a century of easy living. But, as he explained to Pamela at the time, no one should publicly ‘attack the best men the state can find’. For his London readers he would conceal the tongue in his cheek when, for example he wrote, ‘Sir Redvers Buller and his staff rode up . . . and then we knew all was well.’

  But in early January 1900 all was not well. The Boers, holding the heights along the north bank of the Tugela River, were sti
ll barring the way to Ladysmith, where the morale of the besieged garrison was wearing dangerously thin. The Boer artillery, two Long Toms firing at long range, were not especially effective, but their daily bombardment dominated life in the town. Living conditions and poor diet resulted in ten deaths a day from disease alone. The commander, General Sir George White, did little to maintain the ‘Ladysmith’ spirit. His appointment as General Officer Commanding Natal had been questioned by Joseph Chamberlain, the Colonial Secretary, who thought him too old and ineffectual, but the War Office had chosen him nevertheless. White’s ineptitude had led to the siege, and now the more enterprising regimental officers chafed at his lack of leadership, which the civilians denounced in a poster prominently displayed around the town.

  Faced with this uninspired defence, the Boers decided to settle the garrison’s fate once and for all. It was a dark night with no moon when, in the small hours of 6 January, they attacked Ladysmith at several points simultaneously. The numerical inferiority of the Boers – the majority of the four thousand ordered forward flinched from the actual attack – was compensated for by the superior firepower of their Mauser rifles. On the British side the inability of many officers to understand the tactical implications of the magazine rifles’ rapid fire, and their propensity to attempt to redeem any situation by personal gallantry, led to suicidal counter-attacks. Well after daybreak the struggle was still raging, the combatants often separated by no more than a few yards.