The Edwardians

by Roy Hattersley

  No doubt Chamberlain’s decision to present the Boers with an ultimatum – immediate full citizenship for the Uitlanders or war – was intended to produce the pressure that would finally bring the capitulation which the High Commission had predicted, but Milner had grievously underestimated the resolve of one of the world’s most stubborn races. On 9 November 1899 the Boers published an ultimatum of their own. No more British troops, they insisted, should be landed in any part of South Africa. Three days later, the first shots were fired.

  The impertinence of the Boers’ ultimatum, combined with the memory of Milner’s comparison of British subjects and Greek slaves, turned the tide of public opinion. In October Asquith – already the Liberal heir apparent – had denounced the ‘irresponsible clamour, which we heard from familiar quarters, for war’.9 A month later, he justified the robust response to the Boer ultimatum with the insistence that Britain’s bellicose reaction ‘was neither intended nor desired … it was forced upon us without adequate reason and against our will’.10 Campbell-Bannerman, the Leader of the Opposition, caught the national mood. The Boers, he told Parliament, had ‘committed aggression which it was the plain duty of all of us to resist’.11

  It was assumed that the British Army would swiftly dispose of the Boer irregulars who, the War Office disdainfully reported, were led by ‘officers elected by the burghers they command’.12 It was, as Lloyd George scornfully observed, like ‘the British Army against Caernarvonshire’.13 But for the first few months, Caernarvonshire had the upper hand. Reinforcements had set sail during November 1899, but Rudyard Kipling’s ‘gentlemen in khaki going south’ were both badly led and inadequately equipped. L. S. Amery accompanied the ‘forty thousand horse and foot going to Table Bay’ on behalf of The Times. He described the experience as leaving in his mind ‘an ineffable impression of the incapacity of many of our senior officers, of the uselessness of most of our army training … and the urgent need of a complete revolutionary reform of the Army from top to bottom’.14

  The British Army was under the command of General Sir Redvers Buller who, according to Balfour, had drunk too much for ten years and ‘allowed himself to go down hill’.15 Fortunately, the Boers wasted time and resources by laying siege to three Transvaal towns – Ladysmith, Mafeking and Kimberley. It was the siege of Mafeking which caught the headlines, principally because the officer in command, Robert Baden-Powell, possessed a remarkable talent both for inventing ingenious ways of frustrating the enemy and for publicising his own achievements. Twelve hundred British soldiers (supplemented by a couple of hundred ‘native’ irregulars) faced six thousand Boers; though, when it became clear that the garrison did not intend to counterattack, the number was reduced. The Boers possessed a ninety-four-pound siege gun, so Baden-Powell ‘dug in’ and amused himself by employing ‘ripping wheezes’ to distract the enemy.

  The siege lasted for two hundred and seventeen days, during which time the cavalry killed and ate their horses, drainpipes were disguised to look like field guns, postage stamps (with Baden-Powell’s head on them) were printed and jolly messages were sent home via ‘Kaffir runners’ who crossed the enemy lines at night. Baden-Powell became a national hero. Then, inevitably, iconoclasm set in. It was claimed that the Black South Africans were left to starve, that the Boer troops were fewer than the despatches reported and that the British could and should have broken out. But while the euphoria lasted, the rejoicing represented a view of the world which was essentially Victorian. The Edwardians came to see life differently.

  Despite the diversion of the pointless sieges, the Boers managed to overcome the forces of the Crown three times in one ‘Black Week’ in 1899. There were British defeats at Magersfontein, Stromberg and Colenso, and, by the time of the relief of Kimberley in 1900, they had won a pyrrhic victory at Ladysmith which, although much celebrated at the time, guaranteed that they would lose the war. The Boers attacked the town with such ferocity that Buller recommended its surrender. He was relieved of his overall command and replaced by Lord Roberts.

  Roberts was sixty-eight when he was appointed, but he assured the Secretary of State for War that he was still young enough to do the job. ‘I’ve avoided evening parties. I go to bed early. I think I ride to hounds as well as I did ten or eleven years ago. You see, I’ve always felt the country might need me some day.’16 But the new C-in-C was a veteran of the Crimean War in which he had won a Victoria Cross. In the Afghan Campaign of 1879, from which he took his title (Roberts of Kandaha), he had pacified the country after a forced march from Kabul to Kandaha. The army which King Edward was to inherit, despite having changed, to the King’s distress, ‘from royal red to dreadful khaki’ was old fashioned in attitude, equipment, strategy and leadership. However, the appointment of Roberts was, in itself, a boost to morale. On 7 February 1900, Victor Cavendish predicted ‘We ought to have some big news soon … Roberts has started for the front.’

  According to folklore, ‘The Relief of Mafeking’ was one of the great moments in imperial history. But it was the siege of Kimberley which illustrated what the colonies – the old empire which never quite recovered from the Boer War – were really about. Cecil Rhodes, Prime Minister of the Cape, was caught in the town when it was surrounded and he believed that he possessed the right to impose his will on the commanding officers. He argued about troop levels (sometimes too few and sometimes too many), had a bigger and better field gun made in the De Beers workshops (which normally constructed mining machinery), issued orders about personal safety to the civilian population and, in the fourteenth week of the siege, grew bored with what for him was relative inactivity. So he sent an ultimatum to the British government. Either Kimberley was relieved or he would surrender the town to the Boers. The High Command capitulated. Troops were diverted from other essential tasks and Kimberley was relieved on 14 February 1900. Rhodes then put the whole campaign in perspective with a speech to the De Beers shareholders. ‘When we look back at the troubles we have gone through and especially all that has been suffered by the women and children, we have this satisfaction. We have done our best to preserve that which is the best commercial asset in the world, the protection of Her Majesty’s flag.’17

  It was a highly commercial Empire which King Edward inherited and led into the twentieth century. But, at the time, the lifting of the Kimberley siege was greeted as a classic victory for British aims and proof that Roberts would turn the tide of war. Victor Cavendish was ecstatic. ‘Very good news … Roberts telegraphed that French has relieved Kimberley … A few more telegraphs during the day. All point to big successes. Mainly due, as far as we can see, to Lord Roberts and French.’

  Roberts’s tactics were indeed an immediate success. He used almost his entire force as mounted infantry and pursued the elusive guerrillas who were his opponents across the veld. It was necessary to hide from the British press and public the penalty which had to be paid for victory – the death of thousands of horses, killed by heat, exhaustion and starvation. But the success of the new plan made Roberts a national hero. In late February 1900, he defeated a force of 4,000 Boers outside Bloemfontein and, when Kruger left the Transvaal, it seemed that the war was won. In November of that year, the Boer Republic was officially annexed by the British Empire and Field Marshal Lord Roberts was able to return home to become Commander-in-Chief of the whole British Army, just in time to ride at the head of Queen Victoria’s funeral procession in February 1901. His popularity was so great that the crowds of mourners burst into spontaneous applause as he passed. His response was a stern gesture of disapproval. The Edwardian Army was under the command of an officer from the old world of chivalry.

  The war, which made Lord Roberts a national hero, made David Lloyd George the champion of radical Britain. From the start, the Liberal Party had been hopelessly ambivalent about the government’s response to the Transvaal’s treatment of the Uitlanders. At its worst moments, it was deeply and obviously divided. Lloyd George himself did not steer a steady course. He insiste
d that he was a ‘radical imperialist’ who wanted at least to keep the Transvaal within the bounds of the Empire, but he felt a visceral sympathy for the tiny nation in conflict with a major power, and he openly rejoiced that, during the early phase of the war, ‘a small nation, with the size of an ordinary German principality, has been able to defy the power of Great Britain’.18 He believed in something he called ‘Home Rule All Round’ – maximum autonomy for colonies big enough to be independently viable within the Empire. He regarded war of any sort as a calamity. The Boer War was particularly abhorrent to him because he believed that it was more motivated by the demands of trade than by the noble hope of spreading pax Britannica. And he was right. He clearly had Joe Chamberlain in mind when he complained that ‘Some people talk as if they have the British Empire in their own back yard. They put up a notice. No Admittance Except on Business.’19

  Lloyd George could never keep secret his contempt for the Uitlanders. ‘The people we are fighting for,’ he told a meeting in Caernarvon, ‘are German Jews’20 – a description which was as inaccurate as it was offensively anti-Semitic. He was not alone in feeling, and expressing, that particular prejudice, though he was almost certainly responsible for promoting it within Parliament. John Burns, soon to become the first ‘working man’ to reach the Cabinet, described the British Army in South Africa as ‘the janissary of the Jews’ and he combined with Keir Hardie to promote a resolution in the House of Commons which attributed the war ‘largely to Jews and foreigners’. Even John Morley forgot the lessons he had learned at John Stuart Mill’s knee and claimed that ‘a ring of financiers … mostly Jewish, are really responsible for the war’.21

  The campaign against the war was fought with all the weapons at the disposal of the government’s enemies. When Lloyd George addressed the Palmerston Club at Balliol, he assumed the mantle of ‘natives’ friend’ – a new role for a man who had often derisively referred to Indians, as well as Africans, as ‘niggers’. ‘There might be something magnanimous in a great Empire like ours imperilling its prestige and squandering its resources to defend the poor helpless black. Unhappily, here again is a fiction. The Kaffir workers of the Rand are better treated and have better wages and have more freedom under the dominion of the “tyrant” Kruger than they enjoy in Kimberley or Matabeleland.’22

  The leader of the ‘war party’, Colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain, was even more unscrupulous in his attacks on people he called ‘pro-Boer’. In the summer of 1900, he announced his discovery that Members of Parliament had been in direct communication with Boer leaders including President Styne of the Orange River Free State. It would, he said, be wrong to publicise the names of the men who had been in treacherous touch with the enemy, but he clearly anticipated everyone would take it for granted that Lloyd George was among them. Notwithstanding Chamberlain’s conspicuous reticence, the letters were published in full at the end of August. Nothing in them was even remotely disloyal and none of them had been written or signed by the still Honourable Member for Caernarvon Boroughs. Vindication did not encourage magnanimity. The attack on Chamberlain for using the letters to smear an innocent MP was accompanied by personal allegations against the Colonial Secretary himself. Asked how he proposed to conduct his campaign against the Boer War, Lloyd George replied, ‘Go for Joe.’

  Initially he went for Joe’s brother. Arthur Chamberlain was chairman of Kynochs, an engineering company which, according to Lloyd George, had been ‘virtually made by the government’ after being commissioned to work for the Admiralty despite ‘offering the highest tender for the contract’. The Colonial Secretary reacted with appropriate outrage. ‘It is a gross abuse to attack a public man through his relatives for whom he is not responsible.’ Perhaps. But it made Lloyd George the rising star of an increasingly demoralised party.

  The Liberals were so divided over the South African war that in June 1900 Asquith was able, with characteristic detachment, to write: ‘I follow with languid interest the triumph of our arms and the dissolution of party.’23 Worse was to follow. During the autumn of that year, Sir William Lawson moved a ‘pro-Boer’ amendment to a government motion endorsing the conduct of the war. It was supported by John Morley, Henry Labouchere, Lloyd George and twenty-seven other Liberal Opposition MPs. Edward Grey, the Liberals’ authority on foreign affairs, endorsed both the government’s resolution and its policy. So did Asquith and thirty-eight other Opposition MPs. Henry Campbell-Bannerman, the party leader, abstained together with thirty-four of his followers and explained that he was ‘anti-Joe, not pro-Kruger’. The public demonstration of so deep a division presented the government with an irresistible temptation. Parliament was dissolved. The ‘khaki election’ followed in October 1900.

  Joe Chamberlain, who had wanted an even earlier election, became the star of the Unionist campaign. He fought on the slogan, ‘A seat lost to the Government is a seat won by the Boers’, and he concentrated his fire on the ‘pro-war’ Liberals, many of whom had explicitly supported government policy. James Garvin, later editor of the Observer and Chamberlain’s official biographer, wrote that the campaign’s ‘main object was to break the Liberal imperialists’ in the hope of destroying the party as an effective political force. That aspiration was not gratified. The Unionist majority was increased, but only by four seats, and the popular vote split in the government’s favour by only 2,400,000 to 2,100,000. Writing to Lord Rosebery, Winston Churchill suggested that the result demonstrated ‘the strength not the weakness of the Liberals’.24

  The campaign had certainly demonstrated who was the Liberals’ coming man. Lloyd George’s opponents issued a leaflet which asked rhetorically why the Caernarvon Boroughs should vote for their Conservative candidate. The Tory answer was, ‘Because his opponent has been on the enemy’s side throughout the war and he insults the generals and the soldiers of the Queen.’ Lloyd George replied in even more evocative language. ‘The man who tries to make the flag the object of a single party is as great a traitor as the man who fires at it.’25 When his majority increased by a hundred votes (2,412 to his opponent’s 2,116), he was so moved by his success that the Manchester-born Welshman made unsupportable claims about the virtue displayed by the country of his adoption: ‘I am more proud of my countrymen tonight than ever before. While England and Scotland are drunk with blood, Wales is marching with steely step on the road to liberty and progress.’

  In fact, Wales marched in step with the rest of Great Britain. The ‘anti-war’ Liberals – Labouchere, Burns and Campbell-Bannerman himself among them – were all returned to the House of Commons with comfortable majorities which they attributed to their highly principled stance. It was the ‘pro-war’ Liberals who began to worry about their standing within the party. Their response was the creation of the Liberal Imperial Council and the divisive announcement, ‘The time has come when it is necessary to clearly and permanently distinguish Liberals in whose policies in regard to Imperial questions patriotic voters may justly repose confidence from those whose opinions naturally disqualify them from controlling the actions of an Imperial Parliament.’26 Campbell-Bannerman was offended by more than the syntax. His denunciation of the Council at a meeting in Dundee was made more aggressive than he intended by a slip of the tongue. He did not intend to imply that his critics were on the point of joining Lord Salisbury’s government, but he referred to the ‘Liberal Unionists’ rather than the ‘Liberal Imperialists’.

  At the opening of the new session of Parliament, the Liberals briefly closed ranks in support of various assaults on the record and reputation of Joseph Chamberlain. Most spectacular among them was David Lloyd George’s amendment to the Loyal Address, the device by which the House of Commons debates the government’s programme at the opening of the parliamentary year. Ministers of the Crown, the amendment declared, should have no ‘interest, direct or indirect, in any form or company which contracts with the Crown’ unless they ‘have taken precautions effectively to prevent suspicion’. Everybody who was anybody
knew which Ministers of the Crown Lloyd George had in mind. But, to remove all doubt, he let it be known that the Chamberlain family – Arthur, Joseph and Austen – held shares in Hoskins and Sons Limited and Tubes Limited, in addition to those in Kynocks, about which he had complained during the general election campaign.

  It was by such self-promotion that Lloyd George achieved national fame, or at least notoriety. By the time of King Edward’s accession he had achieved the status of potential national leader. His new status was demonstrated by the ease with which he broke the monopoly of popular newspapers in support of the South African war. The Daily Chronicle – one of London’s ‘penny papers’ – had initially been solidly against government policy. But its proprietors demanded that it change its mind. H. W. Massingham, the editor, resigned and joined the Manchester Guardian. The Daily News, the Chronicle’s direct competitor, had always been ‘Milnerite’ in all its attitudes towards imperial questions. Faced with the possibility that there would be no popular newspaper supporting his cause, Lloyd George organised an ‘anti-war’ syndicate to take over the Chronicle. George Cadbury (a Birmingham Quaker who, like so many of his faith, made chocolate) donated £20,000, giving the enterprise the name of the ‘cocoa press’. But there were other equally significant, if less newsworthy, benefactors. Among them was J. P. Thompson, a textile manufacturer from Bolton. He made the new company an interest-free loan of the same size as the Cadbury donation.

  Lloyd George had become influential with Liberals all over the country, especially those of a Nonconformist persuasion. He was, he still insisted, a Liberal Imperialist. But he was a different sort of Liberal Imperialist from Asquith and Grey. The nuances of Liberal foreign policy became increasingly important during the early months of Edward’s reign when the government made a distressing discovery. The Boers were fighting on. The war was not over.