But Winston was not the only Churchill involved in the Boer War. Recognising where their duty lay, other family members plunged into the fray with alacrity. The dire news of Buller’s difficulties prompted the British government to send out a larger force under the most famous military commander of the day, Lord Roberts, together with his chief of staff Lord Kitchener, the hero of Omdurman. It was Lord Roberts’s brief to split the Boer front, taking some of the pressure off Buller at Ladysmith, by attacking in the west from the direction of Bloemfontein and Mafeking.
Among the newcomers bringing reinforcements, to Winston’s ‘great joy’, was his brother Jack who had arrived on board the hospital ship the Maine. The idea of going to Oxford seems to have been forgotten, and Winston had suggested Jack come to South Africa believing at the time that the worst of the fighting would be over before he arrived. When they met again, however, he worried whether he had done the right thing in encouraging Jack to get involved. Nor need it be supposed that while Winston was out in South Africa Jennie had sat around wringing her hands about the unknown fate of her missing elder son. Far from it. As well as her two sons, her lover – George Cornwallis-West had sailed two weeks after Winston but had a longer voyage, so missed him in Cape Town – and many of the other men she knew were already involved in the war, and she wanted to be of help. Now, with her remarkable energy, she decided to involve herself in the war effort and to make use of her network of rich and powerful people. But not for her knitting parties or fund-raising teas. Winston describes her activities succinctly: ‘Within months,’ he wrote, ‘she had raised a fund [£41,597 – today, £2.4 million], captivated an American millionaire, obtained a ship, and equipped it as a hospital with a full staff of nurses and every comfort.’11 After a stormy voyage she had arrived at Cape Town, in January 1900, where Jack was able to join her for the voyage to Durban. There she was to collect a consignment of wounded and Jack was to rejoin his unit.
Later Jennie would admit that she did not know how she would have ‘got through’ the time when Winston was missing had she not been totally absorbed in getting the ship equipped and ready to sail. But her reward for all the effort came quickly: one of the first casualties to be carried aboard the hospital ship Maine at Durban was none other than Jack from whom she had only recently parted.
Soon after Jack’s arrival in Cape Town, where Jennie and the brothers had been briefly reunited, Winston had left to move forward with the main force, but Jack and Winston met up again a few weeks later, on 12 February, at the Battle of Hussar Hill. It was Jack’s first time in action and he was resting in his tent when he was wounded in the leg by a stray bullet. Winston, who was actively involved in the fighting, was unscathed (a fellow war correspondent commented that it was almost as though Jack had ‘paid his elder brother’s debts’). It was by an extraordinary stroke of luck that Jack was taken to Jennie’s hospital ship, and as soon as he could be spared Winston rushed to join him and their mother there, spending several days on board the Maine. Before leaving he wrote a note to Pamela, telling her his news: ‘Oh why did you not come out as secretary…in the Maine?’ he wrote, ‘so that I should be going to meet you now? Perhaps you are wise.’12
There were some who believed that Jennie’s main reason for organising the hospital ship was to join her young lover. If so, she was disappointed, for Cornwallis-West fell ill with ophthalmia, severe sunstroke and enteric fever and had been shipped home shortly before she arrived in Cape Town.13 He regarded his service in South Africa as a few exciting months that were ‘rather like an Aldershot field day’ but with live bullets. However, he remembered enough to feel uncomfortable about fighting the Boers, who he quietly concluded were simply fighting to protect their own country from invasion. Later he would report to the Prince of Wales that the British lacked the mobility of the Boers, but he did not dare to reveal his sympathy for the enemy.
Sunny Marlborough already held the post of Paymaster General in Lord Salisbury’s administration when the Boer War had begun in the latter months of 1899. Like many patriots he wanted to serve his country in the crisis, sailing for South Africa on 10 January 1900 as a lieutenant with the Imperial Yeomanry. The on-dit in London’s drawing rooms was that he was glad to go because his marriage was in serious difficulty and he was now leading a bachelor life apart from his Duchess. Consuelo’s mother came over from Paris that month to stay with her at Blenheim, and as Alva was fiercely pro-Boer, Consuelo would have been among the few to hear both sides of the dispute. She attended dinners for local units departing for South Africa, but Consuelo never joined in the flag-waving, tub-thumping patriotism of the British over the war. And she had to be persuaded by Alva to go to Southampton and wave her husband goodbye for the sake of public appearances.
Before he sailed Sunny was appointed Assistant Military Secretary to Lord Roberts, but after his departure there was criticism in the British press because he had no military training. It was also noted that Lord Roberts’s staff read like a precedence list in Debrett’s: as well as Marlborough, it included the Dukes of Westminster and Norfolk. The government were already feeling the lash of disapproval over South Africa and consequently, when Roberts and the brigade marched north from the coast, the Duke of Marlborough was diplomatically left behind at Cape Town. But Sunny had not sailed to South Africa to be an office wallah, and he asked Winston to get him into the fighting.
Winston’s unpaid post in the South African Light Horse Regiment, which he described as ‘a roving commission’, enabled him to send back daily streams of dispatches to the Morning Post.* He made sure always to be where the main action was and he took an active role in the fighting with various units, in return for a regular supply of adequate horses. ‘I stitched my badges of rank to my khaki coat and stuck the long plume of feathers from the tail of the sakabulu bird in my hat, and lived, from day to day, in perfect happiness,’ he wrote.14 Cock-a-hoop with the success that his corps was enjoying – unlike most, they moved fast and light, tackling the Boers with a like-for-like mobility – he had dared to write in one of his columns: ‘More irregular corps are wanted. Are the gentlemen of England all foxhunting? Why not an English Light Horse?’ He received a cable by return: ‘Best friends here hope you won’t go making a further ass of yourself.’15
But he did not make an ass of himself when he was present at the battles of Tugela River, Spion Kop and Hussar Hill. Rather, he was generally seen where the fighting was hottest, seeming to lead a charmed life. From Spion Kop he wrote to Pamela Plowden that he had endured five ‘very dangerous days – continually under shell and rifle fire and once the feather in my hat was cut through by a bullet’. Pamela (they always addressed each other as ‘My Dearest’) urged him to return home – there was no need, she wrote, for him to place himself in further danger. Winston replied that he would forfeit ‘my self-respect for ever if I tried to shield myself like that behind an easily obtained reputation for courage…but I have a good belief that I am to be of some use and therefore to be spared’.16 This lifelong prescience of his place in history, which he called ‘my star’, would sustain him through many crises, only deserting him late in life. ‘I have faith in my star,’ he wrote to Jennie at this point – ‘that is, that I am intended to do something in the world.’ Meanwhile, men all around him were hit and killed by bullets and shrapnel.
When Ladysmith was relieved by the British on 28 February, Winston rode in with the first column to enter the town, jauntily carrying with him a food parcel for Pamela’s brother-in-law.* Later he wrote to Joseph Chamberlain: ‘You will understand how keen were our feelings of joy and triumph to at last succeed in relieving Ladysmith, and in bringing food to our starving friends. I expect that your satisfaction at home was even greater than ours, for it is more painful to read of disasters at a distance when one cannot do anything to restore them and cannot accurately measure their extent, than it is to sustain them on the spot.’17
Temporarily assigned to the staff of General Sir Ian Hamilton tha
nks to the influence of Colonel Neville Chamberlain,† who was Private Secretary to Field Marshal Roberts (‘Lord Roberts desires me to say he is willing to permit you to accompany this force as a correspondent – for your father’s sake’), Winston met Sunny in Cape Town. There he was able to wangle a transfer to get his cousin out of headquarters, and the two men served together for the next few months. Then, as the city of Pretoria was falling to the British, he and Sunny broke away and galloped directly to the prisoner-of-war camp from which Winston had earlier escaped. His aim was to liberate his former fellow prisoners before they could be shipped out by the Boers, ‘perhaps in the very last train’ with the retreating army. His fears that he might be too late were unfounded, he wrote:
As we rounded a corner, there was the prison camp, a long tin building surrounded by a dense wire entanglement. I raised my hat and cheered. The cry was instantly answered from within. What followed resembled the end of an Adelphi melodrama. We were only two, and before us stood the armed Boer guard with their rifles at the ‘ready’. Marlborough, resplendent in the red tabs of the staff, called upon the Commander to surrender forthwith, adding by a happy thought that he would give a receipt for the rifles. The prisoners rushed out of the house into the yard, some in uniform, some in flannels, hatless or coatless, but all violently excited. The sentries threw down their rifles, the gates were flung open, and while the last of the guard (they numbered 52 in all) stood uncertain what to do, the long penned-up officers surrounded them and seized their weapons. Someone produced a Union Jack, the Transvaal emblem was torn down, and amidst wild cheers from our captive friends the first British flag was hoisted over Pretoria. Time: 8.47, June 5.18
Sir Ian Hamilton, who saw action in that war, wrote many years later that had Winston been a serving officer rather than a war correspondent during his time in South Africa he would undoubtedly have received a VC, for he was several times commended in dispatches for conspicuous gallantry.
Another member of the Churchill family who saw a form of service in the Boer War was Lady Sarah Wilson, the younger sister of Lord Randolph and aunt of Winston and Sunny. She was nine years older than Winston, and in the spring of 1899, aged thirty-three, she had travelled to South Africa with her husband Lieutenant Colonel Gordon Chesney Wilson on a holiday tour of South Africa and Rhodesia. Lady Sarah was probably the perfect wife for a soldier, but the Churchill wives – Goosie, Jennie and Consuelo – regarded her as a trouble-maker and a cruel gossip. Consuelo loathed her, describing her as ‘hard and sarcastic’, particularly to Goosie who had not sufficient wit to register the barbs of her adversary. It was Lady Sarah who had attempted to upstage Consuelo by giving the signal to the ladies to retire after dinner at Blenheim. Jennie also disliked this sister-in-law, and the feeling was mutual. Hence, in family biographies, especially those by Consuelo and Jennie, Lady Sarah does not show to advantage.
However, in October 1899 she was unwittingly to become the first ever woman war correspondent. When war looked likely that autumn she and her husband had abandoned their holiday and proceeded to the small garrison at Mafeking, where Lieutenant Colonel Wilson was appointed ADC to Colonel Robert Baden-Powell. For a while he rode with his chief on the western borders, raising two regiments of irregular horse (later known as the Protectorate Regiments), recruited principally from the district between Mafeking and Bulawayo, while Lady Sarah busied herself with setting up a field hospital.
On 13 October an army of three or four thousand Boers threatened to storm Mafeking, which was protected by only 378 British soldiers under Baden-Powell. Lady Sarah did not wish to leave, but she felt she could hardly refuse when Baden-Powell asked her to go and arranged transport for her in a Cape cart drawn by six mules making south for Cape Town. She set off with her maid and the following day the Boers began shelling Mafeking.
With the countryside in uproar, Lady Sarah was forced to break her journey at an isolated farm called Setlagoli at Mosita, about twenty-five miles from the border. There she was marooned for weeks, but at least she was able to collect intelligence about the Boer movements from the occasional horseman passing through, such as the Daily Mail correspondent who called in on his way south to cable his dispatches to London. She inserted a microscopic note into an old cartridge case and recruited an ancient servant on the farm to go to Mafeking to give the beleaguered garrison news of the surrounding country. This worked, so it was occasionally repeated, and during the first two months of the siege it was practically Baden-Powell’s sole means of receiving information from outside.
Eventually food ran out at the farm, and there was no way of replenishing stores since the railway line was cut. So Lady Sarah rode out alone to the local Boer commander, and with Churchillian self-confidence offered herself as a hostage in exchange for food and supplies. She suggested that they could exchange her for a Dutch woman in Mafeking who, she had learned, was anxious to leave the town. Instead, the Boers offered to exchange her for a Boer fighter whom they were anxious to see freed. Lady Sarah thought this infra dig, and on 2 December she wrote her husband a message which was passed between the Boers and the British. ‘My dear Gordon, I am at the laager. General Snyman will not give me a pass unless Colonel Baden-Powell will exchange me for a Mr. Petrus Viljoen. I am sure this is impossible, so I do not ask him formally. I am in a great fix as they have very little meal left at Setlagoli or the surrounding places. I am very kindly looked after here.’
Her husband replied the following day: ‘My dear Sarah, I am delighted to hear you are being well treated, but very sorry to have to tell you that Colonel Baden-Powell finds it impossible to hand over Petrus Viljoen in exchange for you, as he was convicted of horse-stealing before the war. I fail to see in what way it can benefit your captors to keep you a prisoner. Luckily for them, it is not the custom of the English to make prisoners-of-war of women. Gordon Wilson.’19
Eventually, though, Baden-Powell agreed to the exchange, and Lady Sarah galloped into Mafeking during the handover to ringing cheers from the men in the trenches. Her departure from Mafeking had been unnecessary, for the town had not been stormed as feared. Baden-Powell had some brilliant officers and engineers on his staff, and during her absence the British had not only held out but had constructed over six miles of trenches, which enlarged the town to the extent that even with their superior force the Boers did not have the ability to storm it on all sides. There were also eight hundred bomb shelters to protect the residents, and the entire network of trenches and shelters was connected by field telephones. The Boers were unaware that the town had been restocked with food, fuel and other supplies shortly before 13 October, so that with rationing they could hold out for months yet. There was also a belief among the Boers, learned of much later by the British, that the town was stocked with dynamite and that the entire perimeter had been mined by the British, so the Boer chiefs were reluctant to move forward.
But after five months food was indeed becoming short, and on 3 April 1900 Sarah got a message to her sister in London: ‘Breakfast to-day – horse sausages; lunch – minced mule, curried locusts. All well.’ Occasionally, she was allowed a tiny bread roll for breakfast, but it had to last for dinner too. ‘No dogs or cats were safe…but all the while we were well aware our situation might have been far worse. The rains were over, the climate was glorious, fever was fast diminishing, and, in spite of experiencing extreme boredom, we knew that the end of the long lane was surely coming.’20 She decorated the mud walls of her dugout with huge Union flags and African spears captured in the Matabele War, and held dinner parties for six whenever she could find the rations.
After the unidentified Daily Mail correspondent was captured by the Boers Lady Sarah wrote via the occasional courier to Alfred Harmsworth, and was consequently commissioned to keep a diary for the Mail about life in the beleaguered town. Although she had no training as a journalist and her dispatches were necessarily irregular, the resulting column gained a large following of readers who approved of her no-nonsense styl
e and avidly followed the fortunes of their besieged countrymen. ‘The Boers have been extremely active in the last few days,’ she wrote briskly in March 1900. ‘Yesterday we were heavily shelled and suffered eight casualties…Corporal Ironside had his thigh smashed the day before and Private Webbe of the Cape Police had his head blown off in the brickfields trenches.’21 She described how, by force of personality, Baden-Powell generated sufficient loyalty and trust to overcome the great hardships, the worry over dwindling supplies of food and medicines, and a frightening outbreak of typhoid during which the Mafeking hospital was attacked with great force by the enemy. Somehow, with a grit and determination that thrilled the Daily Mail’s readers, the garrison held out for 217 days.
The end came on 17 May when British forces arrived to relieve the town and people gathered to sing ‘Rule, Britannia!’. At home in London when the news broke the city went wild with jubilation, dancing in the streets and letting off fireworks. Indeed the celebrations were so exuberant that a new verb – to maffick – was added to the language, meaning to make extravagant public demonstrations of joy. Lady Sarah’s weekly dispatches describing life in Mafeking as the town held out against the Boers seemed to symbolise British determination in the face of great adversity, and she was subsequently decorated with the Order of St John of Jerusalem.
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