Churchill

by Celia Sandys

  The operation began on 11 June. The turning movements were not as successful as had been hoped, and the battle continued throughout the twelfth, by the end of which Hamilton’s force had captured sufficient of the centre ground to be confident of a successful conclusion the following day. However, as day broke on the thirteenth it was seen that the Boers had withdrawn in good order. Hamilton immediately advanced, but the exhausted British cavalry and mounted infantry were in no condition to continue the pursuit.

  In My Early Life, Diamond Hill is covered in a single sentence: ‘I had one more adventure in South Africa.’ Churchill’s dispatch to the Morning Post of 14 June gives a detailed eye-witness account of the three-day action, but omits any mention of his own part. This was left for Ian Hamilton to fill in many years later in his memoirs, Listening for the Drums:

  Winston gave the embattled hosts at Diamond Hill an exhibition of conspicuous gallantry . . . The key to the battlefield lay on the summit but nobody knew it until Winston managed to give me the slip and climb this mountain. He ensconced himself in a niche not much more than a pistol shot directly below the Boer commandos . . . they could have knocked him off his perch with a volley of stones. Thus it was from his lofty perch Winston had the nerve to signal me, if I remember right, with his handkerchief on a stick, that if I could only manage to gallop up at the head of my mounted infantry we ought to be able to rush this summit.

  No doubt Hamilton used the term ‘conspicuous gallantry’ because it was the language of citations for the Victoria Cross, and after the battle he made persistent efforts to achieve some recognition of Churchill’s ‘initiative and daring and of how he had grasped the whole layout of the battlefield’. Hamilton later explained his failure to secure a medal for Churchill: ‘He had two dislikes against him – those of Bobs and K [Lords Roberts and Kitchener]. And he had only been a Press Correspondent they declared – so nothing had happened.’ The military establishment were unlikely to give a medal to a bumptious young subaltern who had so often outsmarted and outperformed them.

  At Diamond Hill Roberts had achieved his limited aim. Botha had achieved rather more. By his successful withdrawal he had inspired the Boers to continue the fight, so that six weeks later it was clear that the war was far from over. The Boer generals de Wet and de la Rey were rampaging across the veldt, while Botha still had a well-organised army at large not much more than a hundred miles east of Pretoria. In late August General Sir Redvers Buller, advancing north from Natal, defeated this army, but the remnants melted into the precipitous country of north-eastern Transvaal to continue a guerrilla campaign.

  On 10 December Lord Roberts sailed for England, Field Marshal Lord Kitchener having succeeded him as Commander-in-Chief on 29 November. Buller had departed on 24 October, five days after President Kruger had fled to Europe to continue pleading the Boer cause, aboard a Dutch warship.

  Kitchener now pursued a scorched-earth campaign, denying the guerrillas anything which might sustain them: horses, families, sympathisers and farm animals. Boer women and children were concentrated in two dozen camps which became notorious for epidemics of dysentery and typhoid. Farms were burnt and a system of blockhouses and barbed wire was built to limit the mobility of the enemy.

  Meanwhile, the ‘Indians’ and ‘Africans’ continued their feud in London. Buller was given his old job, the training command in Aldershot, while Roberts was made Commander-in-Chief of the Army, received an earldom and an award of £100,000. The ‘Indians’ sealed their victory in October 1901 with Buller’s shameful dismissal from the army on a trumped-up charge of indiscipline. In self-defence against an ‘Indian’ campaign orchestrated through Leo Amery and The Times he had made public, against the government’s wishes, the so-called ‘surrender telegram’ which he had sent to General White in Ladysmith. Others had a more favourable opinion of him: a monument to him in Exeter was inscribed ‘He saved Natal.’

  The war dragged on until May 1902, when Botha declared to the other Boer leaders that they had no option but to accept Kitchener’s terms. On 31 May, with Smuts eloquently advocating peace, a meeting of Boer delegates at Vereeniging voted to accept the terms of surrender. They were signed that night in Pretoria; the two republics ceased to exist, were absorbed into the British Empire and together were paid £3 million to help rebuild their shattered economies.

  Paul Kruger died in exile in Switzerland in 1904. Louis Botha became Premier of the Transvaal in 1907, and was the first Prime Minister of a united South Africa from 1910 until his death in 1919. Jan Smuts followed Botha as Prime Minister from 1919 to 1924, and again from 1939 to 1948, and was instrumental in the formation of the United Nations. Botha and Smuts became statesmen on the world stage, where they often acted in concert with Winston Churchill.

  All this was in the future when, in June 1900, a few days after the battle of Diamond Hill, Churchill resumed his ‘full civilian status and took the train for Cape Town’. He would never return to Pretoria, but he never entirely lost touch with it, sending a message on 16 November 1955, the occasion of its centenary: ‘It is my privilege, as one not unacquainted with Pretoria’s hospitality, to offer the city my heartiest congratulations.’

  En route to Cape Town, the train stopped with a jolt a hundred miles south of Johannesburg while Churchill was breakfasting. He descended to the track, and at that moment a small shell burst on the embankment close by. A hundred yards ahead was a wooden bridge in flames. The train was crowded with soldiers, but as far as Churchill could see, there were no officers. In their absence, he once again took charge of a train, as he had done eight months previously (one wonders if the presence of officers would have made any difference). Not wishing to repeat his experience of the previous November, he ran along the line, climbed into the cab and directed the driver to reverse until the sanctuary of a fortified camp three miles back was reached. In the process some Boers appeared and, his full civilian status notwithstanding, Churchill fitted the wooden stock to his Mauser and scattered them with a few rounds.

  At the time he thought this would be the last occasion on which he would see shells and bullets fired in anger. Thirty years later he was to write: ‘This expectation, however, proved unfounded.’

  * Two hundred colonial guides raised by Major Mike Rimington, one of the special service officers sent out in July 1899.

  EPILOGUE

  A Triumphal Progress

  THE Dunnotar Castle, with Churchill aboard, docked at Southampton on 20 July 1900. The conquering hero could not have failed to make the comparison between the rapturous welcome he had received in Durban and his low-key return to his native land.

  Lady Randolph, who would normally have turned out for such an event, was busy preparing for her wedding to George Cornwallis-West, ‘the most handsome man in the Army’. It was an unsuitable marriage, destined for the rocks although it lasted on and off for thirteen years. Churchill took the imminent arrival of a stepfather of his own age in his stride. He was in any case completely absorbed with his own affairs. He had achieved everything he had aimed for when he had set sail for South Africa nine months before, and more. He knew where he was going, and he intended to get there as quickly as possible.

  He had demonstrated beyond doubt that he could make his living with the pen. His first collection of dispatches, London to Ladysmith, published in May, had already sold thirteen thousand copies and the second collection, Ian Hamilton’s March, had been prepared for the publisher while he was still at sea. The River War was about to be reprinted, and The Malakand Field Force was still selling. ‘I have about £4,000 altogether,’ he told his brother Jack. ‘With judicious economy, I shall hope to make that carry me through the lean years.’

  In South Africa Churchill had also established a reputation within the army, and had made friends in high places. Many of the officers with whom he had mixed would rise to high command in the First World War, when Churchill would be a member of the war cabinet. There were some members of the high command, like Kitchener
, who thought him too hot to handle, but as he climbed the political ladder he would win them over. In the wider world his dispatches, written without fear or favour, had confirmed that he was his own man, and had established him as one whose views demanded respect. He had been courted by such powerful men as Sir Alfred Milner, the High Commissioner at the Cape, who following their discussion three weeks earlier had written to Churchill: ‘I spoke very freely of my ideas as to the future, because I see your interest and want your help.’

  The one thing he had not achieved was the decoration for bravery he so earnestly desired. George Wyndham, the Under-Secretary of State for War, told him that the War Office had received a dispatch dealing with the armoured train incident. Mentioning this to his brother, Churchill wrote: ‘I do not expect I shall get anything out of it, not at any rate the one thing that I want. I have, however, had a very good puff.’ He coveted a medal as proof of his courage, which he regarded as the characteristic which underwrote all others. But his very actions had provided proof in plenty, and a medal would have been no more than the icing on a cake.

  Churchill returned to England greatly matured. He was secure in the knowledge that he had achieved fame and recognition at home, and that he had placed his feet firmly on the international stage. Even so, he was doubtful if he would immediately succeed in entering Parliament, for he was standing in the forthcoming general election – which because of the overtly jingoistic tone of much of the campaign became known as the ‘Khaki Election’ – as a Conservative, for the predominantly Liberal constituency of Oldham. The Conservatives, who were in power, were determined to appeal to the country before the enthusiasm engendered by the recent military victories in South Africa had waned.

  Churchill wasted no time in starting his election campaign. Parliament was dissolved on 17 September, and on the eighteenth he wrote to Lord Rosebery, a prominent politician who had been a friend of Lord Randolph, and Prime Minister from 1894 to 1895: ‘Tomorrow we begin our campaign in Oldham . . . I prepare myself for defeat but cannot quite exclude the hope of victory.’

  His hopes must have been bolstered by the reception he received the following day when he entered Oldham in a procession of ten landaus and spoke to an overflowing house at the Theatre Royal. Describing his adventure in Witbank, he mentioned Daniel Dewsnap, who had predicted: ‘They will all vote for you next time.’ The audience shrieked: ‘His wife’s in the gallery!’ This gave rise to general jubilation, during which the mill girls burst forth with a new music-hall ditty of the day:

  You’ve heard of Winston Churchill

  This is all I need to say –

  He’s the latest and the greatest

  Correspondent of the day.

  The election was energetically contested on the sole issue of the war in South Africa. The Liberals, while supporting the war, alleged gross Conservative misconduct in its prosecution, and argued that they would have avoided the conflict, while achieving the same ends by more skilful diplomacy. As a result, even those Liberals who had supported the war measures found themselves condemned by the Conservatives as pro-Boer. Churchill fought on the platform that the war, being a just one, should be fought to an indisputable conclusion, and followed by a generous settlement.

  Under the electoral system in force at that time, the Oldham constituency elected two Members of Parliament, and four candidates – two Liberal and two Conservative – were vying for the two seats. Churchill had pleaded with his mother to help him with his campaign, but she remained in Scotland on an extended honeymoon, and for feminine presence the Conservatives had to rely on the wife of Churchill’s running mate, Charles Crisp. In a turnout of fifty thousand voters on 1 October, Churchill took the second seat. Splitting the Liberal vote, he was sixteen votes behind the leading Liberal, Alfred Emmott, and 222 votes ahead of the Liberal who came third, Walter Runciman. Crisp trailed Runciman by 177 votes. It had been such a close-run thing that, in rushing to print, The Times of 2 October announced Churchill’s defeat. The record was set straight the following day, with an apology and a leading article welcoming his election to Parliament.

  Oldham had been one of the first constituencies to vote in an election which would be spread over six weeks. As a result of his victory, Churchill found himself a star turn, in demand to speak in support of Conservative candidates still campaigning. Arthur Balfour, the Leader of the House of Commons and soon to become Prime Minister, begged Churchill to speak for him in Manchester. ‘After this,’ Churchill wrote, ‘I never addressed any but the greatest meetings . . . Five or six thousand electors . . . with venerated pillars of the party and many-a-year members of Parliament sitting as supporters on the platform!’

  Winston Churchill had arrived. Still two months short of his twenty-sixth birthday, it seemed to him that he was enjoying ‘a triumphal progress through the country’.

  This triumphal progress had really started with his adventures in South Africa. Had there been no Anglo-Boer War, Churchill’s ambition would still, no doubt, have rapidly propelled him onwards and upwards. But in the event he was able to use the war as his launching pad. What, I wondered, were his later feelings about the causes of that conflict into which he had entered with such enthusiasm.

  In his election campaign he had described the war as just and necessary. It would have been surprising, given his recent experience and the political climate in Britain, if he had held any other view. It was a view he reiterated during November 1900 to capacity audiences during the twenty-nine lectures which Christie’s lecture agency arranged throughout the country. But whereas the British provided sympathetic listeners, audiences in America, where Churchill lectured in ten cities during December, proved very different. In a letter to Lady Randolph he described the atmosphere: ‘There is a strong pro-Boer feeling which has been fomented against me.’

  In Chicago he was heckled by Irish-Americans, and although he turned their abuse to cheers by describing the Dublin Fusiliers in action – ‘trumpeters sounded the charge and the enemy were swept from the field’ – he did not enjoy the experience. In Boston the chair was taken by Mark Twain, whose introductory speech, although very complimentary to Churchill himself, included the words: ‘I think that England sinned when she got herself into a war in South Africa which she could have avoided.’ Churchill’s retort, ‘My country right or wrong,’ drew the reply, ‘When the poor country is fighting for its life, I agree. But this was not your case.’

  Churchill stuck to his guns and saw the tour through, when speakers of lesser calibre would have abandoned it. But there is no doubt he was surprised by the depth of pro-Boer feeling.

  It had, however, not affected his views when he made his maiden speech in the House of Commons on 18 February 1901. He ridiculed the sympathy which some Members of Parliament professed for the Boer cause: ‘If I were a Boer fighting in the field – and if I were a Boer I hope I should be fighting in the field – I would not allow myself to be taken in by any message of sympathy.’ He continued by welcoming the recent decision to send reinforcements to South Africa, but, advocating a strategy of stick and carrot, appealed for leniency towards those Boers who surrendered, saying that they should be guaranteed their security, religion and ‘all the honours of war’. In answer to those Members who had ‘seen fit to stigmatise [the war] as a war of greed’, he said: ‘This war from beginning to end has only been a war of duty.’

  He had evidently put behind him that fleeting moment of the previous June when, as he had told his Morning Post readers, he and a fellow officer had ‘scowled at the tall chimneys of the Rand’. From his election speeches onwards he spoke of nothing but ‘a just war’. It would be thirty years before he hinted at second thoughts, when, describing the arguments he advanced during the election of 1900, he wrote: ‘This at the time was my sincere belief.’

  I turned to A History of the English Speaking Peoples. As it was written largely in the 1930s but was revised before its publication in the 1950s, I thought it would reveal whether Chur
chill had undergone any change of mind on the events which led to the Anglo-Boer War. In it he points to the Jameson Raid, which ‘ended in the failure it deserved’, as the turning point at which ‘the entire course of South African history was . . . violently diverted from peaceful channels’. Beyond that, he simply records accurately the catalogue of misunderstandings and the course of events which led to war.

  It was while reading his short story ‘The Dream’ that I stumbled on some of his further thoughts. In this short account he relates how, one foggy November afternoon in 1947 while he was in his studio copying a portrait of his father that had been painted in Ulster in 1886: ‘I turned . . . and there, sitting in my red leather upright armchair, was my father. He looked just as I had seen him in his prime.’ There followed a conversation, in the course of which Churchill related the history of the last half-century, while his father commented on what he heard.

  Lord Randolph enquired how his son earned his living, and was told that he wrote books and articles for the press. Up to his death the father had held no high opinion of his son’s abilities, and his reply faintly echoes that: ‘Ah, a reporter. There is nothing discreditable in that.’ Churchill made no mention of the many other roles he had played (and was still playing – ahead were four more years in his second term as Prime Minister) during the past fifty turbulent years. As Churchill’s tour de force drew to an end, his father expressed surprise that his son had ‘developed so far and so fully’. He observed that Churchill seemed to know a great deal about world events, and might have done a lot to help and even made a name for himself had he gone into politics. With that the dream ended.