by Celia Sandys
The enemy fire increased. It was remarkable that the engine kept moving. A special edition of the Natal Advertiser that evening described its sorry state: ‘The armoured engine has many bullet marks, and the dome-cover smashed . . . The tender is pitted with bullet marks.’
The din of bursting shells and the whine of ricocheting bullets induced driver Wagner to increase speed, and the men running alongside the engine began to fall behind. Churchill’s dispatch continued:
Seeing the engine escaping the Boers increased their fire . . . The shells which pursued the retreating soldiers scattered them all along the track. Order and control vanished . . . The engine, increasing its pace, drew out from the thin line of fugitives.
Churchill told Wagner to cross the river and wait in the relative safety on the other side while he went back to shepherd in the men who had been left behind. Wagner waited a while, but when it was clear that no stragglers would turn up he steamed back to Estcourt.
Robert Clegg, the stationmaster, met the engine when it returned. He was shocked to see the tender piled with wounded, but relieved to find his son, who had been one of the railwaymen on the train, and who would one day succeed him as stationmaster, unhurt aboard the engine.
I was led by Charles Wagner to the spot where our grandfathers had parted company, Wagner to coax his damaged engine to the other side of the river, Churchill to go back along the railway line to captivity, escape and international fame. The engine-driver had remembered Churchill’s words as he jumped down from the cab: ‘I can’t leave those poor beggars to their fate.’
Even though I knew the ending to the story, my pulse still pounded with anticipation as I retraced the steps that my grandfather had taken nearly a hundred years before. Exhausted but exhilarated as a result of the morning’s action, he must have felt very vulnerable as the train pulled away, leaving him, as he thought, alone.
The ground is open, with a slight rise between the site of the ambush and the Blaaw Kranz River. Through this slight rise the original line of the railway runs in a shallow cutting, now shaded with gum trees, through which, at a distance of about two hundred yards, can be seen the lattice ironwork of the bridge. With my back to the bridge I could picture Churchill running along the line searching for the straggling soldiers who, unknown to him, had already surrendered.
Fresh in my mind as I followed in his footsteps was my grandfather’s account of the incident in My Early Life. His words brought the platelayers’ hut at the end of the cutting and the two soldiers who appeared from behind it vividly to life: ‘My mind retains its impression of these tall figures, full of energy, clad in dark flapping clothes, with slouch, storm-driven hats, poising on their levelled rifles hardly a hundred yards away.’ In such circumstances the cutting must have seemed a death trap, and to anyone else surrender would have been inevitable. Yet Churchill turned and ran. He felt bullets sucking the air to his left and right, and scrambled up the bank.
I also scrambled, breathless, from the cutting to the place where he took cover in a small depression. I could see the river gorge, within sprinting distance. In my mind’s eye I also saw the horseman who approached at a gallop and pulled up forty yards away, rifle in hand. I could imagine no option but surrender.
However, the fugitive still had other ideas. Although he was officially a civilian correspondent, Churchill habitually carried the Mauser pistol which had served him so well at the battle of Omdurman. He reached for it, intending to shoot his way to freedom, but found it was missing. He remembered that he had unbuckled his belt and placed it in the cab while he was working to free the engine after the ambush.
Unarmed as he was, even Churchill realised there could be no escape from the horseman who was now standing stock-still and squinting at him along his sights. Churchill held up his hands. It was only five days since he had written to the Adjutant-General criticising troops who had given up without a fight. No one could accuse him of being fainthearted, yet he was uneasy. Thirty years later, he remembered the moment of his surrender:
‘When one is alone and unarmed,’ said the great Napoleon, in words which flowed into my mind in the poignant minutes that followed, ‘a surrender may be pardoned.’ Still he might have missed; and the Blue Krantz ravine was very near . . . However, the deed was done. Thereupon my captor lowered his rifle and beckoned me to come across to him . . .
It was probably just as well that Churchill had left his pistol in the cab of the armoured train. (It was recovered by his valet Walden, and was eventually returned to him.) One man with a pistol against three rifles in open country could have had only one outcome: he would have been gunned down. On the other hand, had the Mauser still been in his possession, and had he chosen to surrender the moment the Boers came upon him, he could hardly have discarded and disowned it, for when he had purchased it from the London gunsmiths Holland & Holland he had instructed them to engrave it with his name. He would have had some difficulty in explaining why he, a civilian, was carrying a weapon.
As Churchill plodded through the wet grass beside his captors he remembered; with some concern, that in each of his breast pockets was a Mauser ammunition clip. Moreover, the only ammunition supplied for the Mauser was of the soft-nosed ‘dumdum’ variety, severely frowned on in military circles because it caused huge wounds. Why, the Boers might ask, would a civilian have such items in his pockets? He managed to take the clip from his right pocket and drop it to the ground unnoticed. The clip from the other pocket was in his hand when one of his guards asked, ‘What have you got there?’ Churchill dissembled, opening his hand and asking him what was this curious object he had just picked up. The Boer leaned over to take it, then, with a shrug, threw it away.
A drizzle of rain was falling when the three soldiers and their prisoner reached the Boer focal point, where the headquarters of General Piet Joubert, the commander of all the Boer forces in Natal, was in a tent pitched in a hollow in the hills. Hundreds of mounted Boers in long dark columns, holding black umbrellas over their heads, streamed into view. The other survivors from the armoured train – including Aylmer Haldane – were already assembled under guard. In all fifty-six unhurt or slightly wounded prisoners had been rounded up. The dead, and those seriously wounded who had not escaped on the engine, had been left at the scene. The wounded would be collected by the Boers later, and three of the dead buried on the spot. Their graves, the lettering picked out with spent cartridges from the action, stand as a memorial to this day.
Considering the ferocity of the ambush, it seems remarkable that only six British died: four during the action, and two of wounds. The explanation is that only nine men had responded to Churchill’s call and stepped into the open to try to clear the track of wreckage; the remainder, taking cover among the trucks, were well protected by armour plate. Sixteen badly wounded escaped on the engine, while of those who were left behind ten were delivered by the Boers to the besieged garrison of Ladysmith, and three kept in their field ambulances. Among the prisoners there were seven slightly wounded, including Churchill, who had been hit in the hand. He summed up the number of casualties: ‘Not many, perhaps, considering the fire, but out of 120 enough at least.’ The Boers had four men lightly wounded during the ambush, and two more were killed in a skirmish with a British patrol later in the day.
By now Churchill should have been back in Estcourt having breakfast with his fellow correspondents. Instead, as he later recounted to Atkins, he had been rounded up with the other prisoners ‘like cattle. The greatest indignity of my life.’
For the moment it also seemed the greatest misfortune: a calamity for someone so ambitious, so determined to make a name for himself. Churchill sat drenched and miserable under the dark, lowering sky, munching a bar of chocolate he had found in his pocket. His morale at its lowest ebb, he considered the other option he could have taken. No one would have blamed him had he ridden back to Estcourt on the engine. He would probably have been well received at the garrison, considering all he had done to en
able so many to escape. Instead he had been taken prisoner to no purpose, after returning to the scene to shepherd in men who had already surrendered. He had cut himself off from exciting and boundless adventure, and could no longer hope to explore the avenues of advancement which this war had opened up.
Churchill declared to his guards that as a correspondent and a non-combatant he should be released, and his credentials were taken to General Joubert’s tent. After a while, his civilian status began to give him some cause for concern, particularly when he was picked out from the other prisoners and told to stand to one side. His clothes, designed for campaigning, were cut in a military style, and in his state of low morale he began to worry that a civilian in a sort of uniform, who had taken a prominent part in a military action, might well find himself facing a firing squad. There were many precedents for such summary justice.
In fact he need not have worried, for the discussion within the tent centred not on whether he was a civilian who had taken up arms, but simply on whether he was a civilian or a combatant. In the tent with General Joubert was the thirty-year-old Jan Smuts, then the Transvaal Attorney-General. He advised that Churchill’s participation in the action cast him in the role of a combatant rather than a civilian, and that he should therefore be held as a prisoner, of war. He was told to rejoin his companions. In later years, Smuts and Churchill would collaborate as world statesmen, but at their first meeting outside Joubert’s tent, Smuts saw only a prisoner who was ‘very young, unshaven, dirty looking and very angry at my decision’.
Perhaps the name Churchill was better known than liked at that time in the Transvaal, Lord Randolph having criticised the Boer administration in articles for the Daily Graphic during his tour of Southern Africa nine years earlier. ‘We don’t catch the son of a lord every day,’ said Churchill’s Boer guards now.
The prisoners were lined up and told they would march under escort to the Boer railhead at Elandslaagte, some sixty miles away. There they would entrain for Pretoria, the capital city of the Transvaal, where British prisoners of war from earlier engagements were being held.
It began to pour with rain.
SIX
The Botha Legend
‘An acquaintance formed in strange circumstances and upon an almost unbelievable introduction ripened into a friendship which I greatly valued.’
WINSTON CHURCHILL, My Early Life
As CHURCHILL’S FAME INCREASED THROUGHOUT his long life, so it became ever more prestigious to be identified with his capture on 15 November 1899. Ultimately, more than forty men were to assert that they had played some part in the event. As late as the 1970s obituaries in South African papers were recording the passing of men whose main claim to fame was to have apprehended Winston Churchill, and descendants are still coming forward to claim the honour for their distant relatives. Clearly there has been a good deal of exaggeration.
After his capture Churchill would have come into contact with many members of Louis Botha’s commando, some of whom, having had temporary custody of their famous captive, could legitimately claim him as their prisoner. But guarding him was far from actually capturing him. Other claims, from those whose participation in the ambush had contributed only indirectly to his capture, are even more tenuous.
All the evidence points to Field Comet Sarel Oosthuizen, known otherwise as ‘the Red Bull of Krugersdorp’, as the galloping horseman whose levelled rifle finally convinced Churchill that escape was impossible. There is a single piece of contemporary evidence, which in itself is compelling. It is a two-page telegram, dated 28 November 1899, which was sent to the Secretary of State of the Transvaal, Francis William Reitz, by Captain Daniel Theron, a legendary officer who was commanding the Boer scouts. Among other comments on Churchill’s conduct during the action, it reports: ‘He also refused to stand still when Field Comet Oosthuizen warned him to give himself up. It was only when Oosthuizen took aim at him with his rife that he surrendered.’ As Sarel Oosthuizen would die of wounds later in the war, the list of pretenders was able to grow, with no one to challenge their accounts until the historians weighed in.
The identity of the two foot-soldiers who appeared from behind the platelayers’ hut cannot be established with the same certainty. Dolf De La Rey and his brother-in-law François Changuion are two names which crop up in a number of accounts, and on examination they emerge as the most likely contenders. Changuion’s account of the event is recalled by his great-niece, Mrs Yvonne Knowles. According to him, Churchill asked, ‘Who may my captors be?’ as he and the two riflemen trudged beside the mounted Oosthuizen towards the Boer headquarters, which has a ring of authenticity.
Churchill, however, became convinced that his captor was none other than General Louis Botha, later to become the first Prime Minister of the united South Africa, himself. He was persuaded of this when the two men met at a private luncheon in 1902 while Botha was visiting London to seek assistance for his war-devastated country. Churchill recalled their conversation:
We talked of the war and I briefly told the story of my capture. Botha listened in silence then he said, ‘Don’t you recognise me? I was that man. It was I who took you prisoner. I myself,’ and his bright eyes twinkled with pleasure. Botha in white shirt and frock coat looked very different in all save size and darkness of complexion from the wild war-time figure I had seen that rough day in Natal. But about the extraordinary fact there can be no doubt. He had entered upon the invasion of Natal as a burgher; his own disapproval of the war had excluded him from any high command at the outset. This was his first action. But as a simple private burgher serving in the ranks he had galloped ahead and in front of the whole Boer forces in the ardour of pursuit. Thus we met.
The facts hardly support this account. Botha was by no means a private burgher serving in the ranks, but was the leader of the commando which ambushed the armoured train. Within a week of that action he was to take charge of all Boer forces in Natal. Even allowing for Botha’s energy and flair, it is unlikely that he would have abdicated command at a crucial moment to become the lone horseman to whom Churchill raised his hands. Had he personally effected the capture, or even interviewed the prisoner, he would surely have mentioned it in a letter which he wrote to his wife the following day which describes the action in some detail and ends with the instruction: ‘Publish this.’ It seems likely that Botha was not even aware at this stage that such an important prisoner had been taken.
How was it that Churchill could have got his facts so wrong? The answer probably lies in Botha’s limited command of English. Churchill may simply have misunderstood his account of both his involvement in the early stages of the war and his position of overall command during the ambush. However, Churchill had been convinced by their conversation, and henceforth the two men, who had clearly taken to one another, fostered this agreeable tale. Sixty years later, when historians were still debating the matter, Churchill was in no mood to change his mind. When his official biographer, his son Randolph, produced historical evidence to the contrary, he replied: ‘I was captured personally by Botha as stated in my book [My Early Life],’ the word ‘personally’ being a handwritten insertion in an otherwise typed letter.
Some explanation is needed as to why Churchill’s usually open mind remained closed for ever on this subject. For one thing, he had no reason to doubt his understanding of Botha’s description of events. That conversation harking back to the battlefield forged a bond between the two men, and bonds forged in battle tend to last a lifetime. In this case the bond was struck three years after the battle, but, resulting from a shared experience of mortal danger still fresh in their minds, it was to prove enduring. Churchill and Botha were to become firm friends, and to collaborate on such momentous issues as the granting of self-government to the Transvaal and the Orange Free State in 1907, and they would sit together in the Imperial War Cabinet during the First World War. Churchill was to write: ‘Few men that I have known have interested me more than Louis Botha.’ He took a romantic v
iew of Botha – a ‘grand, rugged figure’ – and saw in him ‘the Father of his country, the wise and profound statesman, the farmer-warrior, the crafty hunter of the wilderness, the deep, sure man of solitude’. It is not surprising that Churchill rejected subsequent accounts which did not fit the version of his capture as he had interpreted it from the man who had apparently claimed to be the lone galloping horseman.
When Botha, as Prime Minister of the Transvaal, came to London for the 1907 Colonial Conference, he brought with him as his official hostess his daughter Helen. As a Minister at the Colonial Office, Churchill saw a good deal of Botha during this visit, and, evidently, even more of Helen. Although this was her first trip to Britain she spoke English perfectly, having been educated for seven years in Brussels under the care of Madame de Rounge, who was related to the Belgian royal family. At nineteen Helen was sophisticated, vivacious and pretty. She was already the toast of several European Courts, and during her stay in England she would visit Buckingham Palace on a number of occasions, catching the eye of King Edward VII.
