Churchill's Empire: The World That Made Him and the World He Made

by Richard Toye

  In fact, both Liberals were elected. This was probably nothing more than a normal mid-term anti-government swing. Churchill was not downhearted by his defeat, for which he believed superior Liberal organization was partly to blame. In a valedictory speech at the local Conservative Club, he compared the Tory struggle without a fully organized system of electoral machinery to that of the Sudanese against Kitchener’s army at Omdurman.25 In the aftermath of the campaign, as the South African situation became more acute, he stepped up his rhetoric against the Boers. At a Tory fête at Blenheim in August, he predicted that war was bound to break out eventually, but he was ‘not so sure that that was such a very terrible prospect’. England, he said, was a very great power, and the Boers were ‘a miserably small people’. How long, he asked, was ‘the peace of the country and the Empire to be disturbed by a party of filibustering Boers’?26 His desire for conflict was soon met. In October, while the British were preparing for a showdown, the Transvaal government handed them a propaganda coup by issuing an ultimatum of its own, demanding the withdrawal of troops on the borders and the cancelling of reinforcements. As these demands were impossible, war came quickly, the Orange Free State throwing in its lot with the Transvaal. By 14 October – two days after the first shots were fired – Churchill was on-board ship, a commission from the Morning Post under his belt, heading for the Cape. In My Early Life he satirized his own complacency about the military prospects, which at the time was widely shared.27 ‘I thought it very sporting of the Boers to take on the whole British Empire,’ he recalled, ‘and I felt quite glad they were not defenceless and had put themselves in the wrong by making preparations.’28

  Within days of landing, he realized that things were not as simple as he had thought, as the Boers proved themselves to be formidable opponents. They invaded Cape Colony and besieged Kimberley and Mafeking. They also invaded the British colony of Natal and surrounded Ladysmith (Churchill’s fellow correspondent G. W. Steevens was to die during the siege). They were equipped with modern weaponry, including smokeless powder and quick-firing artillery; British preparations and methods were exposed as embarrassingly inadequate.29 ‘It is astonishing how we have underrated these people’, Churchill wrote privately.30 Publicly, he blamed the lack of preparedness on Liberals at home – the efforts of the ‘Peace Party’, he claimed, had delayed the despatch of vital reinforcements.31 Heading for Durban by steamer, he found some relief from the gloom, falling into rhapsodies about the future possibilities of the development of South Africa. Here, finally, was a land where white men could rule and prosper, he felt. ‘As yet only the indolent Kaffir enjoys its bounty, and, according to the antiquated philosophy of Liberalism, it is to such that it should for ever belong.’32

  From Durban he travelled on to the small township of Estcourt, where he found Aylmer Haldane (his friend from Tirah days) and Leo Amery (his former schoolmate who was now a correspondent with The Times). There he fretted for a few days, seeking opportunities for action. On the night of 14 November Churchill and Amery accepted Haldane’s invitation to join a reconnaissance mission towards Ladysmith the next day aboard an armoured train.33 (Churchill had already taken part in one such mission, which had been uneventful.) When he and Amery, who shared a tent, were called at 5.30 a.m., the latter was convinced the train would not depart on time so stayed in bed. In fact, it left promptly and Churchill only just caught it, setting off on a journey that would end in his capture and imprisonment. Years later, during a discussion of early rising, Amery took the episode as proof that the early worm is likely to get caught. Churchill responded: ‘If I had not been early, I should not have been caught. But if I had not been caught, I could not have escaped, and my imprisonment and escape provided me with materials for lectures and a book which brought me enough money to get into Parliament in 1900 – ten years before you!’34

  The armoured train was practically useless as a military tool. The enemy received audible warning of its progress, it provided an all-too-visible target for fire, and its way could be easily blocked. Churchill was well aware of its defects, yet he was reckless. The train got as far as the station at Frere, where Haldane reported back to HQ by telegraph, but instead of waiting for a reply – which would have told him to stay put as the Boers had the previous night been sighted at Chieveley, twelve miles further on – he allowed the train to move onwards. Haldane later admitted that he himself was to blame, but had been carried away by the audacity of his ‘impetuous young friend Churchill’.35 After reaching Chieveley the train turned back – and ran into a trap. It came under fire from Boer forces on a hillside – ‘Keep cool, men’, said Churchill, adding, ‘This will be interesting for my paper’36 – and increased its speed accordingly. Rounding a downhill bend at pace, it smashed into a pile of rocks with which the Boers had obstructed the line. As deadly artillery fire rained down on the derailed trucks, Churchill bravely rallied the defenders and helped clear the line so that the engine, which was still moveable, could escape. This accomplished, and with the engine heading for home carrying the wounded, he went to round up stragglers and was promptly caught by the Boers. As he was led away under escort he told Haldane, who had also been captured, ‘that what had taken place, though it had caused the temporary loss of his post as war correspondent, would help considerably in opening the door for him to enter the House of Commons’.37

  II

  After two days of marching, the captives were taken on to Pretoria, the Transvaal capital, by train. During the journey Churchill fell into a discussion about the war with one of his guards, H. G. Spaarwater. At one point the conversation turned to the issue of the way that black people were treated in Cape Colony in contrast to the Boer Republics. Scholars of the war have long recognized that the conflict had a major impact on the four-fifths of the region’s population who were not white.38 Many of them were simply victims, being caught up in sieges against their will – those trapped in Mafeking were forced to make do with horse-food while whites received decent rations39 – but plenty took more active roles. For example, after overcoming resistance from the British authorities, Mohandas K. Gandhi led an ambulance corps comprising 1,100 Indians.40 (Both he and Churchill would be present at the Battle of Spion Kop, although they did not meet.) Tens of thousands of black and ‘Coloured’ (mixed race) individuals became involved as auxiliaries and combatants on both sides. Non-whites who fought against the Boers risked instant execution if caught. By May 1902 at least 115,000 black people who had got in the way of British sweeping-up operations were incarcerated in concentration camps, and of these at least 14,000 died.41 Churchill himself was aware of the role of non-white combatants, and was ‘conscious of a feeling of irritation that Kaffirs should be allowed to fire on white men’.42 Yet in time he abandoned the idea that the conflict should remain ‘a white man’s war’, and became willing to countenance the use of Indian troops.43 One would be hard pressed to detect the significance of the non-white dimension of the war, though, from the scholarship on Churchill. That in turn reflects the fact that comments on it in Churchill’s own speeches and writings were few and far between. (When he discussed ‘the two valiant, strong races’ in South Africa he was referring to the British and the Dutch.)44 Churchill’s published account of the talk with Spaarwater, then, is unusual in its sustained discussion of ‘the native question’, and it is this which lends it particular interest.

  According to Churchill, the issue of race came up when he predicted to his guard that the Boer Republics would one day enjoy freedom, under the British flag. Spaarwater responded: ‘No, no, old chappie, we don’t want your flag; we want to be left alone. We are free, you are not free.’ Churchill asked what he meant, bringing the response: ‘Well, is it right that a dirty Kaffir should walk on the pavement – without a pass too? That’s what they do in your British Colonies. Brother! Equal! Ugh! Free! Not a bit. We know how to treat Kaffirs.’ Reflecting on this, Churchill determined that he had exposed the genuine root of Boer hostility to British rule.
Episodes such as the Jameson Raid had merely fostered that hostility, he thought, but its true origin lay in ‘the abiding fear and hatred of the movement that seeks to place the native on a level with the white man’. British administration, he claimed, was linked in the Boer mind with ‘violent social revolution’ in which blacks would be declared equal with whites and given the same political rights. Churchill went on to develop an amusing skit, pointing up the oddities of the position of the British ‘pro-Boers’, in which he imagined Spaarwater conducting John Morley toward Pretoria as an honoured guest. As the Liberal pro-Boer and the actual Boer discuss the war they agree on everything, denouncing both imperialism and capitalism, until Spaarwater reveals his racial prejudices: ‘And after that no more agreement: but argument growing keener and keener; gulf widening every moment.’45

  This intriguing passage, first published in the Morning Post, has generally been interpreted as a sign of Churchill’s relatively enlightened attitude to race.46 When Churchill’s collected despatches were printed in book form in 1900, several reviewers commented on it favourably. The Spectator, for example, approved of Churchill’s ‘moralising’, and commended him for illuminating the Boers’ abhorrent racial views.47 The Pall Mall Gazette agreed that the Boers’ ‘black filth’ attitude was ‘the secret of so much’.48 Churchill’s friend Violet Bonham Carter (the daughter of the Liberal Imperialist H. H. Asquith) later wrote that the passage proved that ‘even in those days the racial issue was the main bone of contention between the Boers and ourselves’.49 However, Churchill’s words were sometimes read more cynically by contemporaries. ‘The philanthropic motives of the greedy invader are extolled [by Churchill]’, sneered the Irish nationalist Freeman’s Journal. ‘Among the latest found motives for the war is a burning desire to secure equal rights for the poor Kaffir, who is ten times worse treated by the philanthropic capitalists in the [sic] Rhodesia than by the Boers in the Transvaal.’50 The claim that black people were worse off under British than Boer rule was implausible, but we may indeed subject Churchill’s arguments to some critical probing.

  We need to be clear about what he was actually saying. Certainly, he was concerned about the welfare of the Africans, and, as he stated a little later, he believed that the British had gained from their ‘kindly and humane’ policy whereas Boer cruelty had rebounded on the perpetrators.51 Yet, as his earlier comments on ‘the indolent Kaffir’ suggest, Churchill was by no means a believer in racial equality. In the crucial passage he was not advocating the ‘social revolution’ that full equality would involve. Note his statement that ‘British government is associated in the Boer farmer’s mind with violent social revolution’ (emphasis added). He was in fact mocking the racially paranoid Boers for their misplaced belief that British rule would bring such a revolution about. (Equality in the British territories was recognized in theory but serially violated in practice.)52 He may even have been hinting – although this was not how it struck contemporaries – that the liberal-inspired ‘movement that seeks to place the native on a level with the white man’ was indirectly to blame for the war because it had stoked up Boer anxieties. Churchill undoubtedly believed that the humane treatment of Africans was important but this did not imply that Europeans would have to sacrifice their dominant position. And his belief that the British already provided such treatment was in itself staggeringly complacent.

  Moreover, far from being strikingly radical, Churchill’s position was little removed from that of the British government. As the war opened, Chamberlain denounced the treatment of the non-white population of the Transvaal as ‘brutal’, ‘disgraceful’ and ‘unworthy’.53 However, the Treaty of Vereeniging that brought it to a close guaranteed that the question of extending the franchise to non-whites would be left to the Boers to decide after they achieved the promised self-rule under British sovereignty. This, of course, disposed of any notion that the war had been fought in the interests of racial equality: the British authorities paid lip service to the idea, but in the end they prioritized appeasing the Boers in order to end the war as soon as possible. In their view it was unfortunate if, having been granted self-government, the local white rulers of British territories maltreated other races, but only a limited amount could be done about it. ‘We have got in some cases to put up with those things’, said Churchill regretfully as a Liberal minister in 1906.54

  Churchill’s disapproval of Boer racial attitudes was not sufficiently strong to undermine his growing respect for his captors. ‘The Boers were the most humane people where white men were concerned’, he recalled in My Early Life. Their treatment of ‘Kaffirs’ notwithstanding, they were ‘the most good-hearted enemy’ against which he had ever fought.55 According to Haldane, the ‘plain-speaking, ignorant’ Boers with whom Churchill argued vociferously about the war, ‘somewhat shook his faith, and certainly gained his sympathy’.56 This did not mean that his belief in the justice of the war was dented. Rather, it reinforced his existing belief that the Boers should be treated magnanimously in defeat. (Before the war he had written that the military blow against the Transvaal ‘must be stunning; afterwards we may be generous’.)57 Imprisoned along with around sixty British officers in the States Model School in Pretoria, he wrote a letter to his American friend Bourke Cockran in which he explained why he did not support the Boers. ‘Perhaps I do sympathise with their love of freedom and pride of race’, he said, but added that to him British imperial self-preservation seemed to involve ‘a bigger principle’ than either of these things.58 (He thus elevated realpolitik into a principle.) Churchill wanted to send telegrams to the Morning Post, raising the suspicions of the Boers. J. W. B. Gunning, a camp administrator, believed that one of his draft messages was intended to encourage Britain to send more troops. ‘This he showed clearly during a[n] excited stupid conversation with me yesterday evening’, Gunning reported, adding, ‘I don’t trust that little man’.59 Permission to send that telegram was refused.60

  Even though Churchill’s sympathy towards his captors gradually increased, his determination to get out of their hands was not in any way diminished. After his attempts to persuade the authorities to release him as a non-combatant failed – his efforts to defend the armoured train had called that status into question – he determined to break free. Several aspects of his escape on 12 December have caused controversy, but not on the whole deservedly. One of the most significant allegations is that, having originally made a plan with Haldane and another prisoner, he impetuously slipped over the wall without waiting for his colleagues, jeopardizing the other men’s chances of escape. After years of brooding, Haldane – who himself escaped later by another method – concluded, ‘Had Churchill only possessed the moral courage to admit that, in the excitement of the moment, he saw a chance of escape and could not resist the temptation to take advantage of it, not realizing that it would compromise the escape of his companions, all would have been well.’61 In other words, the brunt of Haldane’s criticism was directed not at Churchill’s behaviour at the time of the escape, but rather at his subsequent somewhat self-righteous efforts at self-justification. A perhaps more serious charge was levelled in the Manchester Guardian a few weeks after the British capture of Pretoria in June 1900. A journalist reported: ‘I gather from private letters written by one of the released officers that considerable resentment was felt at Mr Winston Churchill’s publication of the full details of his escape, as thereby others among the imprisoned officers who had hoped to avail themselves of the same means of escape were prevented from doing so by reason of the extra precautions taken.’62 Doubtless some new precautions would have been taken anyway, and it is impossible to say whether or not publication did harm anyone else’s chances. Nevertheless, it was surely a little foolhardy, and yet for some reason this particular criticism never achieved the wide currency that others did.

  Once he was over the wall, Churchill accomplished the next phase of his escape by hopping onto a moving goods train. He jumped off before dawn, in order to find a hi
ding-place until dark fell again. The next night, however, there were no trains. Churchill stumbled on on foot and at last found refuge at a colliery that, luckily for him, was managed by a Britisher, John Howard. With the assistance of Howard and other sympathizers, Churchill hid down the mine for a few days before boarding a train for Lourenço Marques in Portuguese East Africa, where he identified himself to the British Consul. ‘I am very weak but I am free’, he wrote in a telegram to the Morning Post. ‘I have lost many pounds in weight but I am lighter in heart.’63 He then headed to Durban by steamer, where he arrived two days before Christmas and was greeted as a hero by the crowds. His escapade provided British loyalists with a point of light in the aftermath of ‘Black Week’ which had seen major Boer victories at Stormberg, Magersfontein and Colenso. In a pair of impromptu speeches he warned, ‘We are in the midst of a fierce struggle with [a] vast military power’ which was ‘resolved at all costs to gratify its reckless ambition by beating the British out of South Africa’. He promised, though, ‘With the determination of a great Empire surrounded by colonies of unprecedented loyalty we shall carry our policy to a successful conclusion’.64 ‘I was received as if I had won a great victory’, he later recalled, adding: ‘Youth seeks Adventure. Journalism requires Advertisement. Certainly I had found both. I became for the time quite famous.’65

  III

  Churchill was by no means sanguine about the progress of the war, and revealed to journalists the Boers’ conviction that they would drive the British into the sea.66 In a telegram to the Morning Post he warned that one Boer fighter, in the right conditions, was equal to three to five regular British soldiers. He claimed presciently that 250,000 more men were needed, arguing that South Africa was ‘well worth the cost in blood and money’. Calling for more volunteers, he asked sarcastically, ‘Are the gentlemen of England all fox-hunting?’67 His family, for its part, undoubtedly did its bit. He himself secured a temporary commission in the South African Light Horse but was allowed nonetheless to continue acting as a correspondent. His brother Jack received a commission in the same regiment and when he was wounded in February 1900 he was one of the first patients of the hospital ship Maine, the nursing team of which Lady Randolph was managing. She had recently caused more than a few eyebrows to be raised by becoming engaged to George Cornwallis-West, an officer in the Scots Guards who was only a couple of weeks older than Churchill. Cornwallis-West had already been serving in the war but had to return home in the Maine after contracting enteric fever; his marriage to Lady Randolph, which subsequently broke down, took place in July.68 Later, Churchill was joined by his cousin, the ninth Duke of Marlborough, known as ‘Sunny’. Meanwhile Churchill’s aunt, Lady Sarah Wilson (Lord Randolph’s sister) was acting as a correspondent for the Daily Mail.