Great Boer War

by Farwell, Byron,,

  Cronjé had selected the most direct route for placing himself between the British and Bloemfontein, but by doing so he had lessened his chances of escape. He probably thought that the British objective was simply to relieve Kimberley and that if he removed his force from Roberts’s line of march he would not be molested. He could not know that for Roberts the relief of Kimberley was only incidental to his advance on the capital of the Orange Free State.

  At 4:30 A.M. the next day, 16 February, Colonel Ormelie Hannay started out with 2,000 mounted infantry towards Kimberley. An hour and a half later Captain Chester Master, who was with the advance screen of Rimington’s Guides, saw a great grey cloud of dust rising from behind some kopjes on his right front. A stray wagon directly before him was captured; it proved to be a straggler from Cronjé’s convoy. Hannay, after some hesitation, made for the convoy, but his mounted infantry was driven back in great disorder by the Boer rear guard and Cronjé escaped —temporarily.

  23

  THE SIEGE OF KIMBERLEY

  On 14 October 1899, two days after the declaration of war, Lieutenant Colonel Robert Kekewich in Kimberley was talking on the telephone with army headquarters in Cape Town when suddenly the line went dead. At the Kimberley telegraph office the keys, “which had been clicking away merrily like a lot of noisy crickets, one by one, in rapid succession, ceased their clattering and within a few seconds a dead silence reigned in the room.” The Boers had cut the lines.

  Kimberley, the “Diamond City,” was the second-largest town in Cape Colony with a population of about 50,000 people, of whom more than half were Bantu and about 15 percent were Coloureds and Asiatics. It was the most unruly town in South Africa. Eleven years earlier the Diamond Laws Commission had reported that among its then 30,000 inhabitants there had been 11,000 criminal convictions. It had long been a hard-living, hard-drinking town with one saloon for every sixteen inhabitants, women and children included. John Merriman once described it as “a seething mass of opulent iniquity.” Although in recent years a number of respectable and sober people, tradesmen and artisans, had come to Kimberley and a few substantial buildings had been built, there was still much of the boom town atmosphere.

  It was an isolated place midway between the Vaal and the Modder rivers, each about 30 miles away, and nearly 500 miles from the next town of any size; the Kalahari Desert was nearby to the west, and in summer its hot winds stirred the dust that lay deep in the unpaved streets and on the corrugated iron roofs.

  In anticipation of a Boer invasion of this part of Cape Colony a number of British troops had been stationed in Kimberley: the Northumberland Fusiliers, half of the North Lancashires, a few mounted infantry and Royal Engineers, and, arriving just before the siege began, the Munster Fusiliers and the 9th Lancers. In addition there were about 1,100 men in local volunteer forces—the Kimberley Regiment, the police, and the Diamond Field Horse. There were also a few old muzzle-loading cannons. A Town Guard was called into being, its members patriotically agreeing to serve as long as they were not asked to go more than 8 miles from the market square.

  In charge of this force and of the defence of the town was balding, bullet-headed Lieutenant Colonel Robert Kekewich (1854-1914), commanding officer of the 1st North Lancashires. He was a Devonshire man who had joined the army in 1874 and had seen active service on the Perak Expedition in Malaya and on the Gordon Relief Expedition in the Sudan. He was a bachelor, as so many figures on the British side were—Cecil Rhodes, Lord Kitchener, Alfred Milner, Douglas Haig, Hector Macdonald, Robert Baden-Powell, Cornelius Clery, Thomas Kelly-Kenny. (All of the Boer leaders were married.) Kekewich appears to have been a good if undistinguished Victorian soldier, possessing only the ordinary man’s fund of tact. It was his misfortune that tact was needed more than military skill in the defence of Kimberley, for on 10 October, just before the siege began, Cecil Rhodes arrived in town.

  Rhodes’s reasons for coming to Kimberley at this time are obscure. He must have known that his very presence there would be an added attraction for the Boers, that they bore him no love for his part in the Jameson Raid, that as former prime minister of Cape Colony, member of the Privy Council, and the richest Briton alive, he would make a fine catch for them. Rumour said that the Boers were already gloating over the prospect of capturing this proudest lion in Africa and parading him through the streets of Pretoria in a cage. Still, Kimberley was his town. It was here that he had amassed his first huge fortune, and he owned many of the enterprises, large and small, to be found there. Most important, he controlled the great De Beers Company which dominated the town. Perhaps, as was said, he thought his presence in the town would ensure its speedy relief. He certainly behaved as if this was his mission, but it is difficult to believe that Rhodes would deliberately allow himself to be among the besieged, or if he did that he understood what he was getting into, for, as Conan Doyle said, “Among other characteristics, Rhodes bears any form of restraint badly. . . . ”

  By proclaiming martial law Kekewich superseded the authority of the mayor and placed himself in charge of the town, at least in theory, but Rhodes, accustomed to having his own way in everything, always, had in the past run the town as he saw fit and he intended to go on doing so, martial law or not. The mayor had always obeyed him, and he undoubtedly expected Kekewich to be equally compliant. Rhodes had a low opinion of military men, but in the beginning he chose to be cooperative and Kekewich was appreciative. When it was decided to raise another mounted force, the Kimberley Light Horse, Rhodes provided the equipment from the resources of De Beers and Kekewich made him the regiment’s honorary colonel. The first sign of a rift appeared when Kekewich discovered that, contrary to his order that all messages sent out of Kimberley be censored, Rhodes had instituted his own messenger service—a system he maintained throughout the siege in spite of Kekewich’s objections—and it proved to be a more efficient system than any the army could devise. Kekewich sometimes found it difficult to get messages out; Rhodes never did.

  He maintained unbroken his correspondence with political figures and friends; he even managed to carry on his usual business correspondence: one of his early messages was to his farm manager in Rhodesia about fences on his farms; in December he sent out detailed instructions concerning the payment of De Beers debentures and letters about a railway project; he sent word to Lady Cecil Bentinck asking her to take care of his home in Cape Town, and such messages as, “Hear Lady Chesham in coming. Tell her she may stay at my house.”

  The first ten days of the siege were quiet, marked only by the preparations being made on both sides; the first shots were not exchanged until 24 October and the Boers did not actually close in on the town until early November. Nevertheless, Rhodes was impatient from the beginning, and he wasted no time in demanding that the British army relieve Kimberley. He wrote to friends, officials, politicians, and men of influence in Cape Town and London. Three weeks after his arrival he was sending a flood of excited, almost hysterical messages demanding instant relief to save the city from “hordes of the enemy” and to avert a “terrible disaster.” Prompted by Rhodes, the mayor, judges, and other prominent citizens echoed his demands. Lord Rothschild was asked to press the cabinet to make the military come at once to the rescue. “It is perfectly possible,” Rhodes insisted, “but military authorities will do nothing.”

  He wrote Milner that “if Kimberley falls everything goes.” There were plenty of soldiers available, he added; “I cannot understand delay.” Milner complained to Lord Selborne, undersecretary of state for the colonies, that Rhodes kept sending him “panicky telegrams about immediate relief, which is impossible.”

  Ignorant of all this activity, Kekewich was astonished to receive a message from Buller saying, “Civilians in Kimberley representing situation there as serious. Have heard nothing from you. Send appreciation of the situation.” Kekewich replied: “Situation in Kimberley not critical.”

  From a military viewpoint Kimberley was not important. Had Kekewich and his men
abandoned it and fled south they probably would have been more useful, and had they destroyed the mining equipment before they left, the town would have been of little value to the Boers. But this was unthinkable; private property was sacred; the great Cecil Rhodes was in the town, and there was a mystique about Kimberley and its diamond mines. So it was that Buller, reluctantly, against his better judgement, sent Methuen on what proved to be his vain mission to relieve it.

  In the first month of the siege Kekewich had an opportunity to evacuate the women and children in the town and to rid himself of the necessity of feeding some militarily useless mouths. Early in November General C. J. Wessels sent in a demand for unconditional surrender, adding that if this was not accepted he would still be willing “to receive all Afrikaner families who wish to leave Kimberley, and also to offer liberty to depart to all women and children of other nations desirous of leaving.” This was a generous offer, and from both a military and a humanitarian viewpoint Kekewich should have accepted it. He drafted a proclamation which included Wessels’s offer, but Rhodes disapproved and suggested that the offer be limited to Afrikaners. Redrafted, the proclamation was approved by Rhodes and published in the Diamond Fields Advertiser (owned by Rhodes). Only one family left.

  At seven o’clock on Monday morning, 6 November 1899, the Boers fired two shells, the first of many, in the direction of Kimberley, and the hooters of the De Beers mine sounded the alarm. Dr. E. Oliver Ashe, a Kimberley physician, wrote: “It was a weird, ghastly sounding alarm and scared nervous people out of their senses.... the three blasts frequently repeated during this part of the siege fairly gave one the horrors, especially at night.”1

  In Kimberley, as in other besieged towns, shell fragments held a fascination for the civilians and unexploded shells were thought great prizes. Small boys, ever the first to dare, took to running out to snatch up pieces as soon as a shell had burst. Sold as souvenirs, they brought good prices, large fragments fetching as much as £2, while an unexploded shell brought £5.

  Shelling was seldom heavy, and it was not very effective. No supply depots were destroyed, none of the defenders’ guns were disabled, the mines were undamaged, and in the four months of the siege less than two dozen citizens were killed by shell fire. On 14 November, when the town received some sixty hits, total casualties were two cats and a cab horse killed outside the Queen’s Hotel. There was usually a bombardment every morning, except on Sundays—and when it rained—“the morning hate,” it was called. One of the first of the civilian casualties was a Bantu woman, killed in the street in front of the Kimberley Club. A barman, leaning out a window to watch an approaching shell, was decapitated. Near the railway station a shell hit a house, mortally wounding a woman and killing the baby in her arms. Winifred Heberden, wife of Dr. G. A. Heberden, who had fled with his family to Kimberley from Barclay West, wrote in her diary for 11 November:

  Bombardment began at sunrise from three guns at Schmidt’s Drift Road. ... When they stopped we had breakfast and sallied forth to inspect the damage done, and to see if we could get any pieces.

  The worst casualty had occurred in front of the Catholic Church, where a poor old native woman had been killed. I was looking at the spot where she had died, when a man near me kicked something soft and dusty, and remarked: “That’s a piece of her brain, Missis—”; so, feeling rather queer, we went away.2

  On 25 January a shell exploded in the dining room of A. T. Webster, blacksmith and wagon maker. Most of the family were in the room; five-year-old Andrew was mortally wounded, two other children were injured, and Webster’s wife was so badly wounded in the leg that it was later amputated.

  Such tragedies as these were rare, and, as sieges go, this one was not particularly ferocious. The Boers made no effort to storm the town, contenting themselves with camping around it and leisurely bombarding it. The British made some sorties, suffered a few casualties, and took a few prisoners, but, as seems to happen in all sieges, the aggressive spirit of the besieged diminished as time went on and there were fewer and fewer sorties. The Boers, too, grew indolent, and their laagers took on a domestic air; women joined their men, bringing their children, and to some it seemed like an extended picnic.

  The combatants were courteous. When a doctor with the Boers came in under a white flag to ask for chloroform and brandy, they were readily given him, and Kekewich kept the Boers informed of the condition of the wounded prisoners, even offering to take in and nurse any seriously wounded men in the laagers. Kimberley had good hospital services and even an X-ray unit.

  As the town settled in to siege life no one was more helpful, no one busier, than Rhodes. He established a soup kitchen and supplied fruit to the troops and milk for the sick and wounded in the hospitals. He employed nearly 10,000 Bantu on public works, including scavenging, tree planting, and the building of roads and bomb shelters. He formed a committee to help the families of those killed and wounded, he cared for Boer prisoners, and at Christmas he distributed plum puddings. In addition to his role in raising the Kimberley Light Horse, he put De Beers employees to work building a fort on the outskirts of town, and he allowed the De Beers workshops to be used for the fabrication of items needed by the military. Above all, he permitted the De Beers chief mechanical engineer, George Labram, to devote his considerable talents to problems created by the siege.

  Labram was a remarkable man. A thirty-year-old American engineer, he had come to South Africa three years before and had quickly established a reputation as an ingenious inventor. He now turned his thoughts to the needs of Kimberley. There were too many cattle for the limited grazing available within the perimeter, but they could not be slaughtered without waste because there was no refrigeration, so Labram designed and built a refrigerator with a capacity of 14,000 cubic feet. He constructed a watchtower 155 feet high with a telephone exchange which linked it with all of the principal points of defence. He built powerful searchlights which covered the main approaches to the town and one large one (called “Rhodes’s Eye”) which was used for signalling to Methuen when he drew close. He invented a combination of dynamite and powder and manufactured shells for the British guns.

  The Boers had modern Krupp guns, but the largest guns the Kimberley garrison possessed were old 7-pounders. Rhodes asked Labram one day if he had ever built a cannon. Only as a boy to shoot firecrackers on the 4th of July “to celebrate the time we licked the British,” Labram said. “Well,” said Rhodes, “build one now to celebrate the time you are to save the British.” With no previous experience with ordnance, Labram designed a breech-loading, rifled gun with a 4.1-inch bore capable of firing 28-pound shells. Using such machines as were found in the De Beers workshops, he built it in just twenty-four days. As The Times History said, “The production of this gun must be considered one of the most remarkable events in the history of beleaguered garrisons.” It was indeed. The gun, named “Long Cecil” in honour of Rhodes and mounted on an iron carriage, was fired for the first time with some ceremony on 20 January 1900, Mrs. Pickering, wife of the De Beers secretary, pulling the lanyard. Each shell was stamped: “With C.J.R.’s Comps.”

  Everyone liked George Labram. Many people saw as one of his most extraordinary feats the simultaneous friendship he was able to maintain with Rhodes and Kekewich. No one else in Kimberley achieved this.

  When “Long Cecil” opened fire the Boers were shaken, for Labram’s gun was more powerful than anything they had on hand. They hastily sent for one of their own “Long Toms”—a 6-inch Creusot which could fire a 96-pound projectile more than 10,000 yards. By 7 February the gun was in place and at 10:00 A.M. opened fire.

  At the end of each day Labram was in the habit of taking a cup of chocolate with Dr. and Mrs. Heberden. They were all staying at the Grand Hotel. On 9 February Labram had to forgo this pleasure, for he was to dine with Rhodes and he was late. He was hurriedly dressing when a shell from the Boers’ Creusot, the last of the day, crashed through the ceiling and exploded in his room. His body was partial
ly dismembered and so unrecognizable that it was thought at first he had escaped.

  Kekewich’s relations with Rhodes rapidly deteriorated after Labram’s death, and consequently his power and influence in Kimberley crumbled. Kekewich did his best to humour the great man, but Rhodes was so full of suggestions and advice, so bristling with ideas—some good and some very bad indeed—that he had of necessity to oppose him at times, and this enraged Rhodes. When Methuen started his march from the Orange River and relief seemed imminent, Rhodes advised Kekewich to send off a force of mounted men to relieve Mafeking. This was not one of his better ideas, and Kekewich wisely rejected it. Maddened, Rhodes accused him of being afraid of a handful of farmers: “You call yourselves soldiers of an Empire-making nation. I do believe you will next take fright at a pair of broomsticks dressed up in trousers. Give it up! Give it up!”

  When Methuen drew closer, Rhodes sent a message outlining for him the strategy he ought to adopt. It was very good strategy, but Methuen was incensed that a civilian should presume to give him advice, and the unfortunate Kekewich was blamed for not controlling the uncontrollable Rhodes. Methuen told Kekewich flatly: “I am arranging military defence with you, and Rhodes must understand that he has no voice in the matter.” Rhodes, of course, was incapable of understanding any such thing, and Kekewich, who was as inarticulate as were most regimental officers, found himself unable to explain why.

  While the battle of Magersfontein was being fought, Kekewich watched the smoke and dust from the watchtower Labram had built for him without even attempting a sortie on the Boers around him. Together with everyone else in town, he expected to see advanced elements of Methuen’s army enter Kimberley within the next twenty-four hours. But the Boers flashed them the bad news, “We have smashed up your fine column,” and that night the searchlight south of Magersfontein blinked out a brief message from Methuen: “I am checked.”