Hidden History: The Secret Origins of the First World War.

by Gerry Docherty

  In another fawning account, Churchill is said to have ‘hurled himself upon a truck, and after an agonising struggle managed to remain crouching on the couplings between two wagons’.62 Within a very short time, however, thirst forced him to leap off in search of water. Crawling on his belly, he dragged himself through swamps before coming across the Boer township of Witbank. He was unbelievably fortunate to knock on the door of ‘the only family for twenty miles where he would not have been handed over’.63 After three days in hiding, allegedly in the company of rats down a mineshaft, he got aboard another railway truck and concealed himself under bales of wool. It was the train to Delagoa Bay, freedom and ‘a blaze of triumph’.64 That is how Churchill told his story.

  Controversy hung around his account like the rats in his mineshaft. There were accusations that he had behaved selfishly and badly by leaving on his own and creating such self-seeking publicity. Fortune and determined legal proceedings, however, seem to have removed such reservations. British officers in the camp, Captain Haldane, Sergeant Brockie, and Lieutenants le Mesurier and Frankland felt he had ruined their chances of freedom. Haldane’s claims were strengthened by his refusal to appear in court on Churchill’s behalf in a libel case against Blackwood’s Magazine in 1912. Despite these contrary voices, his ‘daring escape’ turned Churchill into a public hero and gifted him a Conservative seat for Oldham in the parliamentary elections just a few months later.

  Quite apart from the hero that was Churchill, British confidence ran well ahead of reality, and the Boer War proved beyond any shadow of doubt that the British Army was not fit for purpose. The war altered Milner’s direct control of South African affairs, for the conduct of military operations was not within his remit. Perhaps he should have been very grateful, since fault for the many military embarrassments that followed could not be laid at his door. For Alfred Milner, war was a beginning, not an end in itself. What mattered was winning, controlling the gold fields, and then weaving the reconstructed South Africa into the fabric of the Empire.

  Though it was a dirty war, dominated eventually by General Kitchener’s tactics and the obscenity of British concentration camps, Milner learned a great deal that would be useful to the Secret Elite in the war of 1914–18. The military incompetence prior to Kitchener’s arrival as chief of staff to Lord Roberts was alarming. Kitchener, however, proved to be difficult; he was not a team player. He was appointed by the War Office as a troubleshooter, cutting through red tape, an organiser who rarely played second fiddle and not a man to give way to politicians.65 In Kitchener’s eyes, war was the responsibility of the armed forces, not civilians. He tended to be consumed by his own authority and did not listen to other points of view. When he altered the army-transport system in the middle of the war, despite the warnings of those who knew the South African terrain, the professional transport officers prophesied disaster, and it duly followed. Kitchener of Khartoum became known locally as ‘Kitchener of Chaos’.66

  The one fear that Alfred Milner carried in his heart, the one prospect that filled him with greater horror than a protracted war and the misery it brought, was the prospect of Kitchener offering the Boers a negotiated peace. Kitchener believed that by 1901 peace was both practical and desirable. Milner thought otherwise. He had not gone through the painstaking trouble of engineering this war simply to engage in a compromise through peace talks. Writing to Violet Cecil, the woman he would later marry, Milner admitted: ‘My only fear is that he [Kitchener] may make promises to people to get them to surrender, which will be embarrassing afterwards to fulfil.’67 His vision for a future South Africa was predicated upon outright victory and the total subjugation of the Boers to the British Empire. He dreaded a botched-up settlement, a ‘Kaffir bargain’ as he called it.68 Quite apart from the gold, an early peace would not only save the face of the Boer leaders but also preserve their identity as a political force.

  This was Milner’s nightmare scenario. He wrote in January 1901 to Richard Haldane, the Liberal Member of Parliament whom he trusted most, that there was no room for compromise in South Africa; they must be out and out victors. The big difference between them was that Milner knew the grand plan. Kitchener did not. Winning the war was a necessity, but winning the peace in Milner’s eyes was a complete necessity. He ensured that peace talks failed by directly lobbying the Conservative Cabinet through the Secret Elite in London. He was adamant there should be no talk of amnesty.69 Kitchener’s lack of political nous was revealed when he complained bitterly to the secretary of state for war, St John Brodrick, that Milner’s policy was absurd and wrong: ‘Milner’s views may be strictly just but they are to my mind vindictive, and I do not know of a case in history when, under similar circumstances, an amnesty has not been granted’.70 Given that Brodrick was Milner’s close personal friend from Balliol College, and party to all that he went to South Africa to achieve, Kitchener simply undermined himself.

  Sir Alfred Milner returned to London in May 1901 to assert his position and stiffen the resolve of any doubters. A reception committee that included government members of the Secret Elite met him at Waterloo Station. All the major politicians were waiting on the platform as the train drew in. Prime Minister Lord Salisbury and his nephew, Arthur Balfour, leader of the House of Commons, led a delegation that included Lord Lansdowne, the foreign secretary, and the colonial secretary, Joseph Chamberlain. Sir Alfred Milner was whisked off through cheering crowds to Marlborough House, where his friend, the newly crowned King Edward VII, rewarded him with the Order of the Bath, made him a privy councillor and raised him to the peerage as Baron Milner. It was a public display of undiluted homage to the leader of the Secret Elite.

  Within weeks, the Cabinet adopted Milner’s policy in South Africa as their policy. Kitchener had been outmanoeuvred, and Lord Milner immersed himself in preparing the ground for success: continuing the war, re-opening the mines, ensuring the flow of wealth to his backers and getting the best of British talent into his own administration.

  With his power confirmed absolutely, Milner returned to South Africa, where the brutal war continued for another full year. The Boer War started badly for Britain in military terms, and no matter how the supportive press exaggerated small successes, its popularity ebbed thanks to two infamous causes that the Liberal opposition made their own. The first was the public outcry that grew from one of Milner’s rare mistakes.

  The British welfare campaigner Emily Hobhouse, armed with credentials from Liberal MPs whom Milner trusted, solicited permission from him to visit the so-called refugee camps. What she saw there fired her sense of moral indignation, and rightly so. Set up as part of Kitchener’s attempt to win the war, the concentration camps were by any standard abominable. From November 1900, the British Army had introduced new tactics in an attempt to break the Boers’ guerrilla campaign. Kitchener initiated plans to flush out guerrillas in a series of systematic drives, organised like a sporting shoot, with success defined in a weekly ‘bag’ of killed, captured and wounded. The country was swept bare of everything that could give sustenance to the guerrillas, including women and children. Some 30,000 Boer farms were burned to the ground and their animals slaughtered. It was the clearance of civilians, virtually ethnic cleansing, uprooting a whole nation, that would come to dominate the public’s perception of the last phase of the war.71

  A total of 45 camps were built for Boer internees and 64 for native Africans. Of 28,000 Boer men captured as prisoners of war, almost all were sent overseas. The vast majority in the camps were women and children. Inadequate shelter, poor diet, total lack of hygiene and overcrowding led to malnutrition and endemic contagious diseases such as measles, typhoid and dysentery. Coupled with a shortage of medical facilities, over 26,000 women and children were to perish in the British concentration camps.

  Emily Hobhouse’s dispassionate The Brunt of the War, and Where it Fell, published in 1902, was more than just a political bombshell.72 It exposed the disgusting truth about how Britain was conducting
war against women and children. She detailed cases where every child in families of ten had perished in the camps, where Dutch charities were forbidden to provide much-needed condensed milk when it was freely available in Pretoria, and how as a consequence ‘children were dying like flies’. The wives and children of men fighting for the Boer army were punished by being put on half the already meagre rations and given no meat whatsoever.73 W.T. Stead was overcome by the evidence presented to him and wrote:

  Every one of these children who died as a result of the halving of their rations, thereby exerting pressure onto their family still on the battle-field, was purposefully murdered. The system of half rations stands exposed, stark and unashamedly as a cold-blooded deed of state policy employed with the purpose of ensuring the surrender of men whom we were not able to defeat on the field.74

  All of this was conducted expressly on the orders of the British authorities. Concerted attempts were made to dismiss Hobhouse’s revelations by claims that she was slandering British troops, but her exposé fired the Liberal leader Campbell-Bannerman’s outrage over the ‘methods of barbarism’75 being used against the Boers. It was a phrase he hammered home time and again against the Conservative government. It was followed by another attack on the government by the virulently anti-war Lloyd George on 17 June 1901. He railed bitterly at his opponents: ‘Why pursue war against women and children?’ and pointed out with scathing derision that ‘the rate of mortality among children is higher than that amongst the soldiers who have braved all the risks of the field’.76 The following month, when statistical returns from the camps arrived at the War Office, it was clear that Hobhouse’s worst fears had been confirmed. There were 93,940 whites and 24,457 blacks in ‘camps of refuge’, and the crisis was becoming a catastrophe as the death rates grew higher and higher.77 To Milner, the life or death of 118,000 Boer and African civilians therein rated as an abysmally low priority. Friends like Richard Haldane dismissed the utter tragedy of the concentration camps as ‘a great mess caused by the military authorities’,78 but no one should forget that Milner was morally responsible for the camps. He was the high commissioner.

  Ten months after the subject had first been raised in Parliament, Lloyd George’s taunts and Campbell-Bannerman’s harsh words had been fully vindicated. In the interval, at least 20,000 Boer civilians and 12,000 Africans had died.79 Lesser men would have been hounded from office, but Lord Alfred Milner was no lesser man.

  The war was costing the British government around two and a half million pounds per month, and as the secretary of state for war, St John Brodrick, pointed out to Kitchener, they could not profit from any victories until ‘the wheels of the gold mines began to turn’.80 Milner too was anxious to restart production. His Secret Elite millionaire colleagues were dependent on him to pressurise Kitchener into reopening the Rand mines, and this duly happened.

  There is no doubt that the Boer War was about mining rights and ownership of the Transvaal’s gold. One immediate consequence of war, however, was that the gold stream dried up. The great mines like Robinson Deep and the Ferreira emptied their boilers, laid down their huge steel-crushing stamps and stopped all production. The Uitlander workers turned into panic-stricken refugees who only added to the chaos and fear in Johannesburg. Several operating mines were allowed to flood, lest the gold fell into Boer hands, but in November 1901 a small amount of dewatering began again, such was the urgency given to restarting the profit stream.81

  Milner believed that the military commander’s role was to win the war and accept the enemy’s unconditional surrender, not discuss terms of surrender or a negotiated peace. His hackles were raised in March 1902, when the Boers agreed to meet with Kitchener, not him, to discuss peace. An urgent secret telegram was sent to London advising the colonial secretary that Kitchener’s involvement could profoundly upset plans for the future administration of South Africa. Milner knew that Kitchener was very anxious to end the war and get away to India, and had no appreciation of the impact that ‘dangerous concessions’ could make.82 Both Chamberlain and Milner agreed that the Boers needed to taste outright defeat.

  Just days before peace negotiations finally began, Cecil Rhodes died at his home near Cape Town. It was the end of an era. Milner’s place in the secret society was consolidated by his apostolic succession as leader, just as Rhodes had wished; though, in truth, Milner had assumed office after the Jameson Raid.

  When the British delegation presented the Boers with terms of unconditional surrender, it was Jan Smuts who drew up their immediate acceptance. Smuts who drew up the ultimatum and Smuts who penned the proposal to accept Britain’s terms without delay: so quick to go to war, so ready to grasp surrender. Had he undergone a second ‘road to Damascus’ conversion? Or was he always a Secret Elite placeman? The Treaty of Vereeniging was signed on 31 May 1902, and in consequence the Boer Republics were annexed to the British Empire. The winner took all. It has always been so. The Transvaal’s gold was finally in the hands of the Secret Elite at the cost of 32,000 deaths in the concentration camps, including more than 20,000 children; 22,000 British Empire troops were killed and 23,000 wounded. Boer casualties numbered 34,000. Africans killed amounted to 14,000.83 More British soldiers were killed by enemy fire in the Boer War alone than in all Great Britain’s colonial wars in Asia and Black Africa from 1750 to 1913. The British mobilised nearly half a million soldiers, of whom 450,000 were sent directly from the mother country.84 Milner’s war proved costly in human terms, but he regained the gold mines.

  Lord Milner was elevated to Viscount Milner by the appreciative Edward VII on 1 July 1902 and weeks later sworn in as governor of the Transvaal and the Orange River Colony. Discriminatory laws that had been enforced against non-whites remained untouched, and the policy of white supremacy continued. Milner was vexed to find that many of the troops whom he hoped would stay to populate South Africa were leaving because economic prospects looked bleak. He desperately wanted to root the Empire’s future in the potential wealth of South Africa and urged Chamberlain in London to help him boost immigration by aiding the reconstruction of the country. He dreamed of developing a wider sense of British patriotism in South Africa, far in excess of that present in Canada or Australia, and was prepared to stay and fight for it.

  In September 1902, after being handed the keys to 10 Downing Street by his uncle, Arthur Balfour asked his friend Milner to return home to take up the post of colonial secretary. It was unquestionably an acknowledgement of his high standing. Milner refused. Even when the king made it known that he was the royal choice, Milner stayed on to complete his task. He made it clear that Alfred Lyttelton, another member of the inner circle of the secret society,85 should be appointed, and so he was.

  This microscopic example demonstrates how the real power inside the Secret Elite worked. Milner held sway as their leader, and neither the prime minister nor the king denied him. Who else in the Empire would have dared override such authority? Theoretically, they had the power to insist Milner did as he was instructed, but both the head of government and the head of state bowed to his wishes and respected Milner’s deep-seated view that completing the task in South Africa took priority.

  Viscount Milner turned his attention to the practical business of transforming the country into a model British dominion. He administered the Transvaal and Orange River Colony as occupied territory, recruiting into the upper layers of his civil service a band of young men whom he had mainly recruited from his beloved Oxford University. This group, which became known as ‘Milner’s Kindergarten’, replaced the government and administration of the two former republics and worked prodigiously to rebuild the broken country.86

  ‘Milner’s Kindergarten’ comprised new blood from the best universities: young, educated men with a deep sense of duty and loyalty to the Empire and capable of populating the next generation of the secret society.87 Milner’s connection with All Souls and Balliol was particularly important in providing suitable recruits for his personal administrat
ion. The challenge was formidable. He estimated that there would be a short but important period after the war during which the British population could be increased through immigration. Prosperity would return when the gold-mining industry was restored and the hundreds of thousands of prisoners of war, civilians in concentration camps and native labourers, were resettled. Thirty thousand burned-out farms, smashed railway lines and a communications system in tatters would have to be restored. Thereafter, a united, self-governing, white community supported by black labour would see the benefits of being in the British Empire and want to become a vital and permanent part of it.88 Milner needed men of quality to serve in the reconstruction of South Africa, and he was determined to enlist the very best brains with the greatest possible energy for the task ahead.89 Oxford friendships, contacts with the Colonial Office and personal association with Milner were a good starting point, but above all they had to share his commitment to the Empire.

  What marked out these young men, a collection of mere minor colonial administrators in 1902, is how their careers blossomed under the patronage of Alfred Milner and the Secret Elite. Of the eighteen men appointed by Milner to his administration in the ‘Kindergarten’, nine of them attended New College, Oxford, four went to Balliol, five were also Fellows of All Souls90 and every one proved to be a Milner ‘loyalist’. They were endowed with good fortune, education and family connections, and were skilled in personal relations.91 Through Milner’s patronage, and membership of the Secret Elite, they would all go on to high office in the British government and international finance, and become the dominant influence in British imperial and foreign affairs for the next 40 years.92

  The unrelenting litany of political, academic and journalistic achievement of the men from Milner’s Kindergarten is unparalleled. Ponder for a second on the likelihood of such success from any random group of university graduates in any period of history. They became viceroys, secretaries of state, permanent secretaries, governors general, ambassadors, knights of the realm, managing directors, bankers, industrialists, Members of Parliament, Members of the House of Lords, editors of major newspapers, professors of history, members of war cabinets, writers and guardians of the great imperial dream. These men were recruited by Alfred Milner, moulded, trusted and proven able. They went on to become the Secret Elite’s imperial guard, the physical proof of its triple penetration of politics, the media and education. They were fired by his total dedication to the cause, and South Africa was their testing ground. Whatever else, Milner recruited and built formidable teams, and, as a result, had at his beck and call an unrivalled network of talent on which to draw for the rest of his life.