by Jan Morris
In 1895 the British in South Africa, hoping to circumvent the Boer railway to Delagoa Bay, removed the customs controls on their frontier with the Transvaal, so that trade could come their way again. Kruger immediately responded by closing the drifts or fords by which the roads out of Pretoria and Johannesburg crossed into British territory. This was a slap in the imperial face, and it was an obvious signal for the rebellion of the Uitlanders. The conspirators moved. Jameson and his force went to Pitsani. A flow of coded messages streamed from Johannesburg to Cape Town, from Cape Town to Pitsani, from Cape Town to London. The South African air hummed with rumour. There were false alarms, second thoughts, cancellations, misunderstandings. The rising was planned for tomorrow, for the day after, it was cancelled, it was postponed. On December 30 Rhodes, learning from Johannesburg that the Reformers were once again postponing the rising, cabled Jameson to hold his hand. But it was too late. On December 29, 1895, at dawn, the little force at Pitsani had saddled its horses, struck its tents, ridden away from the kopjes and crossed the unmarked frontier into the Transvaal Republic
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The Jameson Raid was the summation of the scramble for Africa, and a turning-point in the story of the British Empire. It was like a poor parody of the imperial process. It was underhand, it was mean, and it failed. It was the beginning of the end of that grand confidence which had sustained Victoria’s Empire through so many hazards, always to emerge victorious in the end. The Empire never quite recovered from the ignominy of Jameson’s Raid: it was as though a bubble had been pricked, or some great exotic blossom, grown glorious in the sunshine of a long summer, had reached its amplitude at last and begun to shed its petals.
Jameson’s men were mostly very young, and foolish. There was Sir John (‘Johnny’) Willoughby, and the Honourable Major Bobby White, and there was J. B. Stacey-Clitheroe. There were the 470 troopers of the British South Africa Company police, well-mounted, sensibly dressed in grey, with wide-brimmed ‘smasher’ hats and dark blue puttees. They had a 12-pounder gun and five Maxims, and they seemed to be well enough organized for a dash into the Rand. Stores and remounts had been surreptitiously arranged for them along the route. The telegraph wires would be cut. The Reformers had promised to send out a body of horse to meet them as they approached Johannesburg. Jameson’s own brother was one of the Doorfontein plotters; so was Rhodes’s brother Frank; it was a conspiracy of intimates.
Jameson had been ready to ride since the beginning of December, and he was already primed with a casus belli—an undated letter from the Reform Committee, to be cabled to The Times in London at the right moment, allegedly appealing for help against Boer oppression. Week after week, as the rising was repeatedly postponed, Jameson and his men fretted in the Pitsani heat, until on Boxing Day Jameson heard direct from his brother Sam in the city: ‘Absolutely necessary to postpone flotation…. We will endeavour to meet your wishes as regards December but you must not move until you have received instructions to’. Something seemed to crack inside the Doctor, when he read this. The Uitlanders would never rebel, he told himself, unless he made them. Two messengers arrived from Johannesburg telling him on no account to move, but by December 28 his mind was made up. ‘Shall leave tonight for the Transvaal’, he cabled Cape Town, and summoning his young soldiers to parade, he read them the letter of appeal from the Reformers, and assured them (or so it was later sworn) that the Imperial authorities supported their adventure. They cheered, sang the National Anthem, and led by Dr Jameson on a black horse, crossed the frontier at Burman’s Drift at five in the morning.
Nothing went right. Not all the telegraph wires were cut, so that the Boers knew of the invasion almost at once. The remounts could not be caught. Two messengers overtook the raiders to order them back in the name of the British Government—‘Her Majesty’s Government’, said the second directive, ‘entirely disapprove your conduct in invading Transvaal with armed force. Your action has been repudiated. You are ordered to retire at once from the country and you will be held personally responsible for the consequences of your unauthorized and most improper proceeding’. Another message told Jameson that the rising in Johannesburg had fizzled out with an armistice between the Reformers and Kruger, so that the entire enterprise was aborted anyway.
Still the Raid continued, in a spirit one feels more of boyish bravado than of power-politics. The horsemen had to cross 190 miles of rough country to reach the outskirts of Johannesburg. At first it was splendid easy going, as the Raid itself perhaps seemed to its protagonists—fine open downland, almost treeless, with wooded ravines and cactus bushes: but when they reached the Rand itself the flavour of the country, as of the adventure, subtly changed. Now the landscape was corrugated with ridges and valleys, tracks twisted here and there, gulleys interrupted every downland gallop, and the points of the compass were never easy to grasp. The conviction of the enterprise faltered, like the pace. The guides lost their way. The troopers were tired and hungry. The horses were worn out. The first Boer horsemen appeared like shadows on the hillsides, following the raiders silently at a distance. When the first shots were fired, on the afternoon of New Year’s Day, 1896, the raiders were only some thirty miles from Johannesburg, but they hardly had a hope. Skilfully the Boers forced them north-west around the perimeter of the city, skirmishing all the way, until at a place called Doornkop, almost within sight of the gold mines, they found themselves surrounded. They fought back bravely enough. Their Maxims were fired until they jammed, their 12-pounder was almost out of ammunition, when on the morning of January 2 they ran up the white flag and limply surrendered. The grand slam had foiled. The rising in Johannesburg had never happened. The British Government had publicly condemned the raid. Rhodes in Cape Town was shattered and disgraced: ‘poor old Jameson’, was all he could say, ‘twenty years we have been friends, and now he goes in and ruins me’.1
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It did not at once break the spirit of the New Imperialism. Though Jameson was tried in England and imprisoned for treason, and though Rhodes was driven from office and never really recovered from the disaster, and though the Kaiser sent President Kruger a warm congratulatory telegram, still the British public on the whole did not disapprove of the venture. They thought it a dashing piece of buccaneering, and were sorry it failed. They admired rather than resented the British Government’s part in the conspiracy—for though Chamberlain was cleared of complicity by a Select Committee, few really believed it, and some thought the Queen herself privy to the plot. They considered that Kruger deserved to be overthrown, that the Uitlanders were unfairly oppressed, and that Jameson was in trouble only because he did not succeed. The amorality of the adventure did not shock them. A celebratory poem by the new Poet Laureate, Alfred Austin, exactly reflected the general mood:
Wrong! Is it wrong? Well, may be;
But I’m going just the same,
Do they think me a Burgher’s baby‚
To be scared by a scolding name?
They may argue and prate and order;
Go tell them to save their breath:
Then, over the Transvaal border‚
And gallop for life or death!
Let lawyers and statesmen addle
Their pates over points of law;
If sound be our sword, and saddle,
And gun-gear, who cares one straw?
When men of our own blood pray us
To ride to their kinsfolk’s aid,
Not Heaven itself shall stay us,
From the rescue they call a raid.
There spoke the spirit of the Scramble, the last rationale of the will to rule. The British people, in the last years of Victoria’s century, believed the Empire must be its own judge. When Kruger seemed likely to visit London shortly after the raid, even Lord Salisbury said he hoped he would be drowned in turtle soup. The young politician Winston Churchill thought similarly at the time, and considered Jameson’s adventure no more than a bold attempt to avenge Majuba. Later he came to change his opinion,
and looking back upon the Raid through the tragedies that were presently to befall the British Empire, saw in that crude filibuster a different and darker meaning. ‘I date the beginning of these violent times’, he wrote then, ‘from the Jameson Raid.’
1 Now open to the public, but ‘Natives and Coloured Persons Not Allowed on Sundays’.
1 ‘An inconvenient flaw’, as Lord Salisbury once observed.
1 Goldie’s admirers wanted to call the consequent dominion ‘Goldesia’. Goldie himself, who claimed to be able to hypnotize people, and carried a phial of poison in his pocket in case he was suddenly struck with an incurable illness, disclaimed all such ambitions, and regarded the scramble for Africa as ‘a game of chess’.
1 Which Rhodes never set eyes on.
2 Rhodes was not the first to foresee a British Cape-to-Cairo corridor. Gladstone himself direly predicted it, five years before Tel-el-Kebir, as an inevitable consequence of intervention in Egypt—‘be it by larceny or be it by emption’.
1 In fact the British north-south corridor was not achieved until after the first world war, when Tanganyika became a British mandated territory, and the Cape-to-Cairo railway was never completed. Nor, except within South Africa, did the British ever control an east-west corridor across Africa.
1 Whom we last met hoisting the flag in Fiji and accepting Cakobau’s war-club for the Queen.
1 Nowadays one may follow the route of Jameson’s raid fairly exactly by car, the cross-road stores one sees often being the sites of his secret supply depots—in those days most of the store-keepers were British. At Pitsani a pair of kopjes are still named for Rhodes and Jameson, and in 1970 the Pakistanis who ran the store were able to take me in their pickup to the site of the raiders’ camp. As for the Transvaalers, bitterly though they remember most aspects of their long struggle with the British Empire, Dr Jameson they seem largely to have forgotten.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
An Imperial Fulfilment
‘I EXPRESS to you my sincere congratulations,’ said the Kaiser’s telegram to President Kruger, ‘that without calling on the aid of friendly Powers you and your people, by your own energy against the armed bands which have broken into your country as disturbers of the peace, have succeeded in re-establishing peace, and defending the independence of the country against attack from without.’
He was premature in his satisfaction. The failure of the Jameson Raid was an omen, no more, and the British had not yet lost their imperial resolution. Against such insolence from a foreign ruler, they instantly closed their ranks: Chamberlain was cleared, Jameson was glorified, Rhodes was forgiven.1 In fact the British were only now reaching the apogee of their public complacency, and when in 1897 good old Queen Victoria celebrated the sixtieth anniversary of her accession to the throne, the nation made it gaudily and joyously a celebration of Empire. Never had the people been more united in pride, and more champagne was imported that year than ever before in British history.2 What a century it had been for them all! How far the kingdom had come since that distant day when Emily Eden, hearing upon the Ganges bank of the young Queen’s accession, had thought it so charming an invention! What a marvellous drama it had offered the people, now tragic, now exuberant, now uplifting, always rich in colour, and pathos, and laughter, and the glow of patriotism! In 1897 Britain stood alone among the Powers, and to most Britons this isolated splendour was specifically the product of Empire. Empire was the fount of pride. Empire was the panacea. Empire was God’s gift to the British race, and dominion was their destiny.1
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In some ways it was true. The possession of Empire, and particularly of India, kept Great Britain in the forefront of the Powers. There was a good deal of bluff to it, and much self-deception too, but the universal presence of the British flag made the island kingdom a force to be reckoned with everywhere. Britain’s resources of man-power far exceeded her own paltry population. Her worldwide systems of commerce and intelligence were unrivalled. While it was true that the strategic burden of Empire was heavy, it was also true that Britain could exert pressure around the flank of every other Power—on Russia’s south-east frontiers, on America’s northern frontiers, on the European States from her bases in the Mediterranean.
Besides, the very splendour of the Empire was in itself an asset. If it was not in fact impregnable, it certainly looked it, and its assurance gave it authority. Just as the Royal Navy remained supreme largely by virtue of its own swagger, so the proclamation of Empire possessed the virtue of a decree, and made people think it must be binding. The mystique of it all, the legend of blood, crown, sacrifice, formed a sort of ju-ju. The red looked ingrained on the map, as though it had been stained there in some arcane ritual, and the vast spaces of Greater Britain were like a field of perpetual youth, where future generations of Britons would for ever be regenerated.
Whether it had made the British rich was always to remain debatable. Rich they undoubtedly were, and the pound sterling was the basis of the whole world economy, but how much of this wealth came from the Empire, nobody really knew. There were pros and cons. On the one hand was India, which had for many generations provided a flow of specie, and during Victoria’s reign had offered an almost limitless field for investment. On the other was the terrible cost of maintaining the vast and ramshackle imperial structure, with its garrisons in every continent, its enormous patrolling fleets, its consumption of talent and energy that might have found more immediate productive uses at home. One could point to the immense flow of trade within the Empire, but equally one could argue that the most profitable British overseas investments were in foreign countries. There was no single year in Victoria’s reign in which Britain’s exports were more valuable than her imports; but she always enjoyed a handsome balance of payments, because of the City of London, the financial and insurance capital of the world, whose preeminence had little to do with Empire. Nobody could really strike a balance: but if economists sometimes argued for less elaborate ways of keeping the nation prosperous, the man in the London street in 1897 had little doubt that the cash in his pocket, like the pride in his spirit and the grand excitement of Jubilee, sprang from the success of Empire, the national vocation.
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By now the effects of imperial possession, scattered and particular in 1837, were diffused throughout Great Britain, and formed a familiar part of life’s pattern. There were no longer specific ports, like Bristol or Liverpool, which were imperial gateways: the whole island was a gateway of Empire now, and the imperial products and merchandise flowed through every seaport. Nabobs no longer came home to build their Sezincotes, but there was scarcely a gentleman’s house in the country which was not in some way enriched by the imperial experience, whether by the existence of a bank account stuffed with the profits of colonial trade, or just by the Maori carvings, Benares trays or Sioux beadwork which gave a lick of the exotic to the drawing-room.
London was littered now with imperial statuary, heroes of the Mutiny, great pro-consuls, C. J. Napier in Trafalgar Square, Gordon like a mystical vicar on his plinth. Colonial outfitters, colonial agents, colonial bankers, the makers of colonial inks, beers, pianofortes, camp beds, portable baths were inescapable in the streets and directories of the kingdom. Whole industries of Birmingham or Lancashire thrived upon the colonial trade. High on its bleak hill in Easter Ross Sir Hector Munro’s gates of Negapatam still intermittently showed through the mist, but by now the trophies and emblems of Empire were generally less theatrical, more accessible, and were beginning to form a homely part of the national heritage.
Not far from Henley-on-Thames, for instance, at the village of Ipsden in Oxfordshire, there stood the Maharajah’s Well, with its attendant orchard. It was covered with a dome of cast iron, and it had been given to the village by His Highness the Maharajah of Benares, in token of his attachment to the British Empire. A charitable trust ensured that the villagers of Ipsden should have free water from the well for ever; a warden lived on the spot, in a pretty c
ircular cottage; an orchard was planted with cherry trees, to provide for the maintenance of the well. Nearby a pleasure garden was created, for the enjoyment of the fortunate villagers: it contained a pond shaped like a fish, the Maharajah’s personal symbol, a mound called Prubhoo Teela, and an ornamental ravine called Saya Khood. The whole was called Ishree Bagh, and around the dome of the well were inscribed in iron letters the words ‘His Highness The Maharajah of Benares, India, Gave This Well’.1
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Not many people doubted the rightness of Empire—‘any question of abstract justice in the matter’, wrote Trollope, ‘seems to have been thrown altogether to the winds’. The British knew that theirs was not a wicked nation, as nations went, and if they were insensitive to the hypocrisies, deceits and brutalities of Empire, they believed genuinely in its civilizing mission. They had no doubt that British rule was best, especially for heathens or primitives, and they had faith in their own good intentions. In this heyday of their power they were behaving below their own best standards, but they remained as a whole a good-natured people. Their chauvinism was not generally cruel. Their racialism was more ignorant than malicious. Their militarism was skin-deep. Their passion for imperial grandeur was to prove transient and superficial, and was more love of show than love of power. They had grown up in an era of unrivalled national success, and they were displaying the all too human conceit of achievement.