Beyond the Thirty-Nine Steps

by Ursula Buchan

  JB was flattered, intrigued and excited by Lord Milner’s offer, but he consulted widely amongst his legal sponsors as well as Strachey to see what effect, if any, a two-year* sojourn in South Africa would have upon his future career. They were reassuring, the Attorney-General telling him that it would not hurt him, indeed quite the reverse, and that having been a private secretary to Milner would secure him a lot of South African ‘appeals’. Strachey promised to give him first refusal of Townsend’s place at The Spectator if it fell vacant while he was away, and that his old place would always be available for him when he returned.

  JB chose to be reassured, telling a friend that he would return: ‘with a knowledge of S. Africa unique among English lawyers, and chances of Colonial appeals. My inclination was all for coming, for I love seeing the world and I much prefer politics to law.’25 It is hard to know if this is disingenuous, or just a conflicted state of mind. But at least, as he told Richard Denman, by deciding to return to the Bar after only staying two years, he would be burning ‘very little ship’s timber in his wake’.26

  He told his mother, who was not happy about the prospect, that he was free to come back when he wanted, that he would probably get back to Britain once or twice in two years (which proved illusory) and he would be able to save half of the £1,200 a year (some of which she knew would end up in her purse). He also told her that the Attorney-General had said it was like going on a legal mission such as the Venezuelan Arbitration.* ‘I would be going to live in comfort in one of the healthiest places in the world … Also it will be an adventure…’ But ‘I am not going if it is to hurt you badly.’ Nevertheless, he thought it ‘a great chance, an interposition of Providence’,27 which he knew was usually a winning argument with his mother.

  Shortly afterwards, he wrote to Lady Mary Murray, to whom, in the absence of a mother who could be rational about such matters, he turned for advice. He told her it was a great honour to be associated with Milner, whom he admired, in ‘so serious and difficult a business’.28

  He cancelled a proposed trip to Norway with A. C. Gathorne-Hardy (an old Oxford friend) and, instead, went up to Scotland in late August to say goodbye to his family, bringing Anna down south with him to help pack up belongings for home and to wave him goodbye. He hosted a convivial farewell dinner for his friends; they included Cubby Medd, who came all the way from Northumberland for it, and Hugh (‘Algy’) Wyndham, who had also decided to go out to work for Milner. Anna was sent home with a gold bracelet for his mother. ‘My bonnie old mother, I hope you are being brave and not moping. Two years will go past before you know.’29

  He sailed for South Africa from Southampton, aboard the RMS Briton, on 14 September 1901. After such a sober, tiring, sometimes professionally dull time in London, when, as he said, he had ‘slipped into a sort of spiritual middle-age’, he felt youth coming back to him like a spring tide:

  As soon as we had passed the Bay of Biscay I seemed to be in a new world, with new scents, new sounds, new sights. I was intoxicated with novelties of which hitherto I had only had glimpses in books. The blue days in tropical waters were a revelation of bodily and mental ease. I recovered the same exhilaration which long ago, as a boy on the Fife coast, I had got from the summer sea.30

  ‘As far as weather and seas we might be on the road to Colonsay,’ he told Anna. ‘It is only at night when we have gigantic castles of crimson clouds in the West and dolphins and flying-fish playing round the vessel, that one realises that one is in a very different bit from Quothquan’, a reference to a picturesquely named village close to Biggar.31 While on the ship he read the proofs of his five Blackwood’s stories, which were to be published as the collection The Watcher by the Threshold, and wrote the dedication to Sandy Gillon, who was now reading for the Scottish Bar: ‘… It is of the back-world of Scotland that I write, the land behind the mist and over the seven bens, a place hard of access for the foot-passenger but easy for the maker of stories …’*

  He also made sure he had some idea of the background to British policy in South Africa by reading a number of the ‘Blue Books’; these were British government publications containing reports from the colonies, on which policies were based. Contributing to these Blue Books was one of the tasks that Milner would ask of him. He had thought rather more about the British Empire than many men of his age, although that might not have been saying very much, and the subject certainly touched his idealism. To begin with, he was a Scot, which made him, in 1900, in some ways a ‘colonial’, certainly a man from the periphery. He also had the young Scotsman’s urge for wider skies and broader horizons. And he had a high regard for what he saw as the merits of Western civilisation, which had creatively enfolded both the Hellenistic and Roman, and was underpinned by Christianity. To him, as to many others educated in the same way, the British Empire project was a civilising mission amongst peoples who had not had such advantages, but could slowly be drawn to benefit from them.

  JB also saw Empire as providing opportunities for adventurous spirits to test themselves to the limit in challenging environments – Lewis Haystoun loses his life but finds his soul on the Indian frontier in The Half-Hearted. And, as he wrote many years later and, it must be said, with the benefit of hindsight, he saw ‘in the Empire a means of giving to the congested masses at home open country instead of a blind alley … Our creed was not based on antagonism to any other people. It was humanitarian and international; we believed that we were laying the basis of a federation of the world.’32

  After a fortnight at sea, he landed at Cape Town, where he did not tarry, leaving soon after by train, amidst crowds of refugees fleeing from the sporadic guerrilla warfare. He was bound for Johannesburg, where Milner was based. The train passed through the Karoo, where he saw ‘huge stony hills, absolutely desert, except for clumps of heath and prickly pears and cactuses. The air was marvellously fine and clear, and sunrise was a thing to remember. We breakfasted at Matjesfontein [sic], and I had time to have a look at [General] Wauchope’s grave.’33 Once he had crossed the Orange River into the Orange River Colony, newly if fragilely under British administration, the country became flatter and more pastoral. Here soldiers came out of their trackside barracks, their bayonets fixed. ‘Soldiers began to come in at wayside stations – officers going up to Bloemfontein, so dirty and ragged that only their white teeth and clean nails distinguished them from tramps.’34 Near the border with the Transvaal, he encountered a young lieutenant-colonel, Douglas Haig. JB arrived in Johannesburg on 4 October, having travelled, he reckoned, about 8,000 miles in twenty-one days. ‘It was pleasant to get clean again and get between sheets, and I went to bed and slept like a graven image.’35 He reported to the Office of the High Commissioner the next morning, and was allocated an office to himself.

  Never much liking hotel life, he almost immediately set up house in Parktown, an easy horse ride north of the very new and raw city of Johannesburg, with other young Britons working in the administration: Gerard Craig Sellar, Hugh Wyndham and Lord Basil Blackwood. The last arrived with seven lurchers, forty walking sticks and an Indian servant.36 JB was to write of this charming man as he knew him in South Africa: ‘His air was full always of a quiet cheerfulness, with a suggestion of devilment in the background, as if he were only playing at decorum. His interest in life was unquenchable, and he found endless amusements in that somewhat dull environment.’37 The house, wooden in construction with a wide verandah, was set on the edge of a wood, but looked out towards the Magaliesberg forty miles away, ‘a great range of jagged blue mountains which might be the Coolins [Cuillins of Skye]’,38 he told Stair Gillon. It had a flower and vegetable garden, an orchard and good stabling. Craig Sellar imported his English housekeeper, butler and maid, while a number of local men looked after the horses, the cow, the two dozen chickens and the maize (‘mealie’) patch, so this bachelor establishment was well cared for.

  Except for JB, these men came from aristocratic families and, apart from Blackwood, they were all rich. Ho
wever, they were not so spoiled that they would not roll up their sleeves and dig the vegetable garden. JB was detailed to look after the flowerbeds and took pains to pull up the indigenous South African species in order to sow European flowers. In that regard he could not be said to be ahead of his time. He told his sister, ‘My father would rejoice at the sight of hot-house plants like heaths and begonias springing out of the dust.’39 Although these young men gardened, they still dressed for dinner, as if they were in England.

  The group chosen by Milner to be his private secretaries, or allocated specific tasks in the post-war reconstruction, shifted in personnel over the years until his departure in 1905, but it was always about a dozen strong. It included Hugh (‘Algy’) Wyndham, a son of Lord Leconfield; Robert Brand, a son of Lord Hampden, Governor of New South Wales; Lionel Hichens, who had fought in the Boer War and would one day be Chairman of Cammell Laird, the shipbuilders; Lionel Curtis, who had also fought in the Boer War and who became an important imperialist thinker; Patrick Duncan, the clever son of a Scottish crofter who became Governor-General of South Africa in 1937; Geoffrey Robinson, later called Dawson when he was the influential Editor of The Times; Dougal Malcolm, a classics scholar who had beaten JB to the All Souls Fellowship; Lord Basil Blackwood, a younger son of the Marquess of Dufferin and Ava, who illustrated Hilaire Belloc’s Cautionary Tales; and Philip Kerr, later the Marquess of Lothian, who was Lloyd George’s private secretary in the last two years of the Great War and helped draft the Treaty of Versailles. (Gerard Craig Sellar was a friend, but not a member, of Milner’s staff, having been sent out by Joseph Chamberlain from the Colonial Office to be Clerk to the Legislative Assembly.)

  They were Oxford graduates, bright, enquiring, hard-working, self-confident, liberal-minded by the standards of the time, although inclined to a patrician sense of superiority, and by no means free of the pervasive paternalism with which Britons viewed the constituent parts of the Empire. They were conspicuously loyal to Milner. They were nicknamed ‘The Kindergarten’ by a barrister in Johannesburg who disliked Milner, and they adopted the name as a badge of pride. JB maintained later that he had been a member of the forerunner to the Kindergarten proper, what he called ‘The Crèche’. Most of the Kindergarten later became members of the Round Table, an organisation that advocated imperial federation, with ever closer political and economic unity of the various parts and even, ideally, in the future a world government. Significantly, JB was never a member of the Round Table since his ideas on the way the British Empire should develop began to diverge from those of Milner and his young administrators before he left South Africa.

  Soon after JB arrived in Johannesburg, he joined the mounted battalion of a territorial outfit called the Rand Rifles. The main function of this unit was to defend Johannesburg and the army posts surrounding it from attack by Boer guerrillas. In fact, JB lasted as a trooper only until April 1902, because his urgent work for Lord Milner precluded him from turning out much, if at all. He told his son Johnnie that he had been shot at by Jan Smuts five times as he and two other troopers galloped away from an ambush, an exciting tale of derring-do almost certainly with no basis in fact.* He seems, however, to have been awarded the Queen’s South African Campaign Medal,40 so the story may not be complete nonsense.

  JB struck up a swift rapport with Lord Milner, whom he found kind, approachable, helpful and extraordinarily hard-working, if rather emotional and not always level-headed. He was to feel a deep and enduring loyalty to him – and vice versa. Although they had met only once in England, Milner’s reputation was well known in Oxford, for he had been a mighty scholar. Benjamin Jowett, the Master of Balliol, considered him the ablest student of his time. Twenty years older than JB, Milner had put away his scholarship on a high shelf and become a dedicated senior public servant, both in England and in Egypt, before going out to South Africa in 1897, where his reputation became extremely mixed; he was applauded by some as the strong man in a crisis, but criticised by others for bearing some responsibility for the war, because of his intransigence. Certainly, he didn’t think a great deal of Boers and he could never see eye to eye with President Kruger of the South African Republic. When JB arrived in the autumn of 1901, the British were finally winning what had been a surprisingly difficult and protracted campaign, and thoughts had turned to post-war reconstruction, where Milner’s talents as a courageous, pragmatic, if autocratic administrator, who understood finance, began to reveal themselves.

  JB’s tasks, initially, were to draft despatches and prepare reports on various subjects for ‘His Exc – very much the sort of work an industrious “devil” at the Bar does for his leader.’41 He worked long hours, as did all the administrators, but felt marvellously invigorated nevertheless.

  For Milner, and thus for JB, two of the main problems facing South Africa towards the end of the Second Boer War were, firstly, how to make the country districts prosperous and peaceful again as soon as possible after such a terrible ravaging and, secondly, how to get the Transvaal mines going once more, since on these the economic prosperity of the country depended, at least in the short term. The first concerned the Afrikaners, the second the Uitlanders, who were non-Boer white expatriates who had come to South Africa in the nineteenth century to work in the mines and elsewhere. JB wrote to Dougal Malcolm’s wife, Angela: ‘There is uncommon latent wealth, both mineral and agricultural, and when we have quiet, well-governed industrial towns and the country districts leavened with English settlers and made prosperous by a scientific irrigation system, the land will be on the road to genuine prosperity. Meanwhile, of course, things are still in embryo, and the martial law régime retards our civil reconstruction.’42

  While settling in to his new life, he had also to deal with his parents’ decision to come out to South Africa, after his father received an invitation to act as a locum minister in Port Elizabeth for six months. His wife thought that the change of scene would be a holiday for him. Despite ever more desperately discouraging letters from JB, his parents arrived in South Africa in December 1901, bringing with them Alastair, aged seven.

  JB’s disapproval of the scheme no doubt had more than a tinge of ‘am I ever going to get away from my parents?’ irritation – his letters to his sister at the time have a decidedly ironic tone – but it was prompted by very real concerns as to how restricted their movements would be, since martial law obtained at the ports, and they would be vulnerable to illness in the unhealthy climate of south-east Africa. He offered to help pay for a holiday for them in Madeira or Egypt, but to no avail. They would not be told.

  In the end, the six months passed off reasonably well, even JB having to concede that, since everyone was very kind to them, it would do them good. His brother Alastair acquired a mongoose which, in that bookish family, was inevitably called Rikki.* However, by the end of April they had had enough: ‘[Father] makes a good traveller, but a bad colonist’,43 JB told his sister. He was certainly rather shocked by how thin his family were when he went to visit them in Port Elizabeth in the second half of May 1902. Soon after, they left to go back to England, much to everybody’s relief.

  JB was detailed by Milner to work on two major projects, which were to take him all over southern Africa, from the Cape to the Limpopo River, engendering a deep, long-lasting love of the country as a result. They were, firstly, the improvement of conditions in the ‘concentration camps’ – the first time that this phrase, made so hideous by the Nazis in the Second World War, was used – and, secondly, the business of land settlement after the war. These were highly sensitive issues.

  The refugee camps had been set up during the war by the British Army to accommodate the many people, especially, but not exclusively, Boer women and children, who had been displaced by General Lord Kitchener’s ‘scorched earth’ policy, whereby Boer farms were laid waste, to prevent the guerrilla commandos from getting supplies from their own kin. However, the conditions in these tented camps had become a scandal, with disease and malnutrition r
ife as a result of overcrowding, while the education of the children was abysmal or non-existent. JB had written in The Spectator shortly before he left for South Africa about the inmates of the refugee camps: ‘… we have to remember that our charges, while they are the relatives of our enemies, are also the stock of our future citizens. We have to preserve good temper, patience and humanity, knowing that every misfortune will be only too readily interpreted as a crime.’44 He was horrified when he first visited the camps.

  The terrible conditions there had caused a furore in Britain, fired by a courageous activist, Emily Hobhouse, who had toured many of the camps in the summer of 1901. The outcry her report engendered prompted the government to set up the all-women Fawcett Commission, chaired by the Liberal Unionist and prominent suffragist Millicent Fawcett; they visited the camps and recommended sending out many more nurses and teachers from home or other colonies, increasing food rations and achieving much higher levels of hygiene.

  Joseph Chamberlain, Colonial Secretary and, by the by, father of Neville, bowed to pressure from both sides of the House of Commons and instructed Milner to override military control of the camps in order to bring the death rate down. The situation was not easy, however, since, as JB told his brother Willie, the military was not only ‘damnably incompetent’ but also obstructive. In December 1901 he wrote to Richard Denman: ‘I have been worrying [Lord Kitchener] lately to get supplies for my camps and he has nearly taken my head off.’45

  It was JB’s task, with others, to decide questions concerning water supply, sanitation, catering, hospital and financial management – a challenge for a young man of twenty-six without, as yet, much grasp of the Boer language, known as the ‘taal’. He found it expedient to invent a wife and children in order for his words to carry any authority at all with the Boer mothers. However, by mid-January 1902, he could write to Charlie Dick, ‘Thank Heaven, now things are better, and I think Chamberlain may face Parliament confidently.’46