Churchill's Empire: The World That Made Him and the World He Made (14 page)

The dynamics of the campaign were also affected by South African developments. Early on, Churchill declared that Britain faced no threats either at home or abroad: ‘India is loyal, Ireland tranquil, and never were the relations of the country with foreign powers more excellent’.
²⁰
There was no mention of the Boers, even though he had raised the issue in his Cardiff speech the previous month. The very next day, though, Joseph Chamberlain, the Colonial Secretary, warned publicly that the situation in the Transvaal constituted a ‘menace to British interests’.
²¹
Although he was not yet ready to issue an ultimatum, his speech made it clear that the British line was hardening, and that war was a real possibility if the Boers did not back down.
²²
‘Directly Mr Churchill had promised Oldham the peace and prosperity of Imperialism Mr Chamberlain announced the possibility of a Transvaal war,’ the Liberal
Manchester Guardian
commented sarcastically.
²³
Churchill adapted his line to meet the new developments. He now argued that with the eyes of Pretoria concentrated on England, defeat of the Tories in Oldham might encourage the Transvaal regime ‘to think that the Government were not supported by the great masses in England, and it might lead them to bring on war’. For this reason, the voters should back the Conservatives ‘on Imperial grounds’.
²⁴

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’.
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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 rations
³⁹
– 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.
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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’.
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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.