The 1887 Golden Jubilee had been marked by the first Colonial Conference of prime ministers at which Salisbury had emphasized the need of the empire for self-defence. Ten years later at the Diamond Jubilee, to mark sixty years of Queen Victoria’s reign, Chamberlain tried to draw the colonies into an even closer relationship with Britain. As part of the jubilee ceremonies fifteen colonial premiers were sworn in as members of the Privy Council. At the new Colonial Conference Chamberlain attempted to create a Council of the Empire to co-ordinate defensive policy. But, although Canadians, Australians and New Zealanders took pride in belonging to the British Empire, they valued their recently achieved self-government far too much to consent to what they feared might be the thin end of a wedge of centralization. Chamberlain’s invitation was politely refused.
The Diamond Jubilee was the subject of much attention both in Britain and abroad. An even larger parade of representatives of all the nationalities protected by Britain took place to mark the occasion of Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee than had done at the Golden Jubilee. The huge array of ships at Portsmouth reminded the world that Britain continued to rule the waves as she had done since the Battle of Trafalgar. The tiny Queen Victoria crowned by her widow’s lace veil led the imperial procession through London in her open carriage. The ‘Grandmother of Europe’, as she was known now that so many of her children had married the heirs to European thrones, more than ever was the reassuringly human apex of the richest, most powerful, most stable empire in the world. A famous Punch cartoon of that era shows Britannia dancing with herself in ‘splendid isolation’. Britain apparently had no need of foreign allies when she owned so much of the world. In fact the empire was heading for a fall.
With the Jameson Raid on the Transvaal Republic two years before British imperialism had begun to overreach itself. Cecil Rhodes and the Rand lords, whose engineering expertise was responsible for developing the Rand goldmines, had never ceased to resent the way they were treated by the Dutch, as it was their efforts that had made the Transvaal rich. As a boy of ten, the Transvaal’s President Kruger had been part of the Great Trek away from Cape Colony to find a new promised land. He had no interest in alleviating conditions for the Uitlanders besmirching it, who were a motley crew of speculators, adventurers and camp followers. He disliked and disapproved of them quite as much as his primitive and religious fellow Boers. By 1895 affairs were at such a pitch that 35,000 Uitlanders had signed a petition asking for better treatment by the Boers, but it had been rejected. Many of the leading Uitlanders then began to plot a rising against Kruger.
With Chamberlain as colonial secretary, Britain used gunboats and soldiers in a way which had not been seen since Palmerston. Troops were sent to defeat the constant encroachments of the French into British West Africa. During his first term British battleships appeared in the Indian Ocean to force President Kruger to open the fords he had closed to prevent Uitlanders using them to avoid tax on the railways. With Chamberlain so keen to defend British interests, the inventive Cecil Rhodes, by now prime minister of the Cape, and his chief lieutenant Jameson believed they had a receptive audience for their plan to wrest control of the Transvaal and its goldfields from the Boers.
When Chamberlain was approached by Rhodes and Jameson and warned that they planned to go to the rescue of the Uitlanders with a force of about 500 men, he did not try to stop them–he may even have helped them by notifying the police of the British protectorate of Bechuanaland to join the raid. But he does not seem to have known when it would take place. Meanwhile the momentum for a rising fizzled out, partly because many of the Uitlanders were not British but German or American. By coincidence the US president S. G. Cleveland, who was facing re-election, chose this moment to threaten Britain with war over British Guiana’s disputed border with Venezuela. American patriotism was running high–Cleveland talked of twisting the lion’s tale.
Uitlanders did not want the raid to be a triumph for British imperialism, so their uprising never took place. Jameson and his 470 accomplices nonetheless thundered optimistically into the Transvaal. But this time he was dealing not with the more credulous warriors of the Matabele peoples but with the politically savvy Kruger, who having captured Jameson and his troops created an enormous international outcry about the attempt to take over the Transvaal. Britain responded with a whitewashing official inquiry described by the Liberal press as the ‘Lying in State’. Though Chamberlain was cleared, Rhodes was forced to resign as prime minister of Cape Colony. But the British were still largely behind Jameson, whose derring-do became the subject of popular ballads, and many agreed with Chamberlain’s sympathetic description of Rhodes as a ‘rebel patriot’.
Anglo-German rivalry was felt more keenly round this time and was increased by a tactless telegram which the kaiser Wilhelm II, Queen Victoria’s nephew, sent to President Kruger in January 1896. The kaiser congratulated Kruger on foiling the raid ‘without recourse to the aid of friendly powers’, which suggested that in the event of a war in South Africa the Dutch would have German arms on their side. Germany had become noticeably less friendly to the British. The two powers were rubbing up against one another in colonial and commercial rivalry round the world, with friction arising not only over South Africa but over the Middle East. Germany, intent on replacing Britain as most-favoured nation at Constantinople, used Britain’s demands for reform after a new Armenian massacre by the Turks in 1898 to cement her position and obtain the rights to build a Berlin-to-Baghdad railway. France remained Britain’s chief colonial rival, but she had never made the mistake of attempting to compete with the British fleet. Yet in 1897 Germany began to build a navy as big as Britain’s, and when the kaiser announced that Germany’s future lay on water, alarm bells began to ring within the British government. It was well known that the minuscule size of Britain’s professional army required her to entrust her defence to her navy, as she had done for almost a hundred years. Germany’s refusal to limit her naval expenditure while maintaining and increasing the 400,000-strong army which had mauled France in the Franco-Prussian War was an action Britain could only perceive as hostile.
Germany was replacing Russia as the power Britain felt most wary of, especially after 1890 when Russia, disturbed by the strength of the British reaction over the Penjdeh crisis, turned away from expansion in central Asia in favour of penetrating the failing Chinese Empire instead. In the mid-1890s there had been a general regrouping of alliances all round, though Britain continued to remain unallied. After the death of Kaiser Wilhelm I and the consequent fall of Bismarck, the German–Russian alliance lapsed. France, perpetually afraid of a fresh attack from Germany and desperately in need of a friend, began to court Russia. The understanding between Russia and France was symbolized when French loans were raised at the Paris Bourse for a Trans-Siberian Railway. And in 1895 their links became official. Fear of Germany had created strange bed-fellows: Russia’s eastern autocracy in a Dual Alliance with the volatile Third Republic of France against the Triple Alliance of Germany, Austria–Hungary and Italy. Thwarted colonial ambitions had pushed Italy on to Germany’s side when France seized Tunis in northern Africa. Thus by 1895 Europe was divided into the two armed camps which were such a feature of the geopolitical world in the years before the First World War.
But uneasiness about Germany made little difference to Anglo-French colonial rivalry. In the Upper Nile at Fashoda the two countries very nearly came to blows. Though the Jameson Raid had failed, the spirit of gung-ho imperialism was flourishing more strongly than ever in England. The country now thrilled to the reconquest of the Sudan by Sir Horatio Herbert Kitchener, the commander-in-chief, or sirdar, of the Egyptian army, at the Battle of Omdurman in September 1898. British honour and the death of Gordon were avenged when Kitchener destroyed the dervish armies of the mahdi’s successor, the khalifa, and retook Khartoum. The nation rejoiced even more when Kitchener faced down a small French force sent out from French West Africa to claim the Upper Nile, for France continued to
be infuriated by the British control of Egypt. Straight from the heat of Omdurman Kitchener marched south to Fashoda to challenge Captain Marchand, who had hoisted the French flag. Kitchener put up the British and Egyptian flags in response and left an Egyptian force there. But though the farcical situation was worthy of the contemporary comic operas of Sir William Gilbert and Sir Arthur Sullivan, both countries were in deadly earnest. Lord Salisbury announced that Britain was prepared to open hostilities, and the Royal Navy was put on alert. But when France’s new ally Russia made it very clear that she had no intention of going to war with Great Britain over somewhere in Africa, France was forced to back down.
It seemed yet another triumph for British arms, and it was in a mood of patriotic euphoria that Britain began to move towards war with the Boers. The Boers believed that the British government had been secretly behind the Jameson Raid and that there would one day be another attempt to take over the Transvaal. President Kruger’s government began to stockpile arms with the enormous profits from the goldmines. Chamberlain and the rest of the Conservatives and Unionists became convinced the Boers were a threat not only to peaceful coexistence but to British supremacy at the Cape. The Jameson Raid had created race hatred between the Boers and the English settlers. After Rhodes’s disgrace his government had been replaced by a Dutch ministry at the Cape sympathetic to the Boers. With some of the Boers in the Transvaal advertising themselves as liberators of the oppressed Dutch at the Cape, the possibility loomed of the colonies joining up under Dutch leadership in a Dutch United States of South Africa. There were rumours that German officers were advising the Boers. The Germans were certainly selling arms to them.
The treatment of the Uitlanders within the Boer republics worsened. There were violent clashes between Boer police and the Uitlanders, and a petition from over 20,000 workers was sent to Queen Victoria asking her to help them. The high commissioner of South Africa, Sir Alfred Milner, warned that Britain had to intervene quickly to protest about the Uitlanders’ treatment or the sight of ‘thousands of British subjects kept permanently in the position of helots’ would undermine faith in the British Empire. War was inevitable if Kruger would not grant the civil rights that Britain requested. There was a last conference at Bloemfontein in 1899. But the stubborn old Kruger would not betray his people and their sacred land. If the Uitlanders were given the vote, even in five years’ time, they would outnumber the Boers. When Kruger could not agree, Milner broke off negotiations and went back to the Cape. The Second Boer War ensued.
Apart from Radical Liberals like the rising Welsh solicitor MP David Lloyd George and the socialists, British public opinion and press were still in the grip of military frenzy. Young men, particularly well-to-do ones, were mustard keen for the war, believing in a vague way that it would test them, that it would be good for them. Everybody imagined that the war would be short and sweet. In fact it was prolonged, very expensive and far from the walkover that Britons expected.
The Boers turned out to be superb marksmen armed with state-of-the-art European weaponry. Most of their soldiers were really just Dutch farmers, but a hard life on the veldt had left them in superb physical condition. Britain’s popularity with other nations, repelled by what appeared to be bullying of the two small Boer republics by the mighty British Empire, dwindled to a dangerous low. And the Orange Free State and the Transvaal were almost a match for her. It took two and a half years, £200 million and 450,000 British soldiers to defeat 50,000 Boers. More and more volunteers were sent out by the boatload from Britain 4,000 miles away in their brand-new ‘khaki’ combat uniform, invented to blend into the African bush.
The Boers’ fatal mistake was to attack the colony of Natal, which contained only British settlers, instead of making for the Cape where there were 30,000 Dutch. Nevertheless for much of 1899 and 1900 British troops were completely unable to relieve the siege of Ladysmith in Natal, and Mafeking in Bechuanaland on the border of the Transvaal. Under Colonel Robert Baden Powell, Mafeking held out for 217 days. (Baden Powell would later become famous as the founder of the Boy Scouts and Girl Guides movement, which trained young people in disciplined and self-reliant behaviour.) So badly did the British fare against the Boers, despite their superior numbers, that after ‘black week’ in December 1899, a series of massive defeats, the commander-in-chief Sir Redvers Buller was replaced by Lord Roberts. It was not until May 1900 that Mafeking was relieved by Roberts.
Ultimately the Boers were let down by their lack of military training and coherent strategy. Roberts and his second-in-command Kitchener of Khartoum managed to outflank the Boers’ commander Piet Cronje. By August 1900 Roberts had seized the capitals of the Boer republics Bloemfontein and Johannesburg, the main Boer armies had given up and Ladysmith had been relieved. Later that year the Transvaal and the Orange Free State were formally annexed as colonies to the British crown. A khaki election–that is, a war election, because many of the voters were still in khaki uniform–was called that year by the Conservatives, who hoped to cash in on the war’s popularity.
They duly won the election, but their hold over the nation was drawing to a close. The Labour Representation Committee, prototype of the Labour party, had been created six months before in February 1900. Its candidates won only two seats in the general election, with Keir Hardie gaining one of them, and the Conservative majority was 134. But the Labour party was the rising sun, though its breakthrough would not come until the 1906 election. The long years under the Conservatives had achieved very little for many workers, as was dramatically highlighted at the beginning of the Boer War by the poor physical shape of the recruits. Shockingly, one in three of the British men who volunteered for service was found unfit for duty by the army doctors. The Tory government simply could not pay for social reforms when Chamberlain was sending British armies all over Africa, nor was there the political will.
The Boer War was continued by little groups of Boers carrying on guerrilla warfare from the hills. Lord Kitchener had taken over as commander-in-chief and in the end the Boers were defeated by his ruthless use of total war. He built blockhouses or garrison huts to guard the railways and prevent the Boers blowing them up. Much more controversially, to thwart the guerrilla tactics which made every home a potential shelter, Kitchener forced the evacuation of the Boer farms. Civilian Boers were placed in enormous concentration camps, in huts surrounded by barbed wire, a concept which was to be used with such evil effect some thirty years later in Germany.
Though it was extremely effective, such an inhumane way of proceeding created an uproar in Britain, especially when it became known that a fifth of the inmates were dying in the camps. Of the 100,000 Boers confined in them, 20,000 died. The figures were even worse for one camp, where disease and insanitary conditions killed half the Boer children interned there. It was then that the quiet new leader of the Liberals, a Glaswegian MP from a wealthy family named Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, forever endeared himself to the Boers and the Radical wing of his party. At a time when the national mood was blindly patriotic he dared to criticize the British army publicly by calling the concentration camps ‘methods of barbarism’. A strong-minded British spinster, the fearless Miss Emily Hobhouse, led an expedition out to South Africa to find out what was going on. When she was stonewalled by the army, she took the story to the press to create more of an outcry. Chamberlain was forced to send out proper administrators for the camps to take over from the army, which had enough problems feeding itself let alone the enemy. The anti-militaristic and humanitarian spirit of England had started to reassert itself after a period of quiescence. The mushroom growth of imperialism was starting to shrivel and die as rapidly as it had sprung up.
But the Queen of England was also declining rapidly. The consummate Victorian, Gladstone, had died three years before and had been buried in Westminster Abbey after a magnificent state funeral. The old queen lived to see the first year of the twentieth century; after that her health began to falter. On 22 January 1901 she died
in her eighty-second year at Osborne House on the Isle of Wight. Despite her fondness for a forthright and elderly Scots ghillie named John Brown, Victoria had never ceased mourning Prince Albert. She was buried beside him in the mausoleum at Frogmore, inside Windsor Home Park.
The Victorian age and the nineteenth century had come to an end together. When Victoria died there was not only great sorrow among her subjects but also a sense of disbelief. She had been on the throne since 1837, so that even people in their sixties had known no other monarch. She had been a fixture that seemed as permanent as the Tower of London.
SAXE-COBURG
Edward VII (1901–1910)
The next thirteen years of life in Britain display a curious mixture of the ultra-modern existing side by side with the traditions of the past. Fifteen per cent of Britons were still employed as servants, making possible the grand lifestyle enjoyed by the well-to-do in the wake of the example set by the new monarch Edward VII. The long dresses and formal outfits we see in photographs of the Edwardians speak of an age still very different to ours. On the other hand, after the first election of Edward VII’s reign, over fifty British constituencies had Labour MPs. More women had jobs than ever before as teachers and nurses and in the new profession of typist. Although they did not have the vote, a suffragette movement was beginning.
The Story of Britain Page 77
