Churchill in his first, unsuccessful, campaign for Parliament
This Nietzschean sloganeering, though in high favor at the time—Winston was actually quoting John Davidson, a popular poet of the 1890s—begs the question. The fact is that while he spoke well, he was not yet a competent politician. Disraeli had warned Conservatives never to neglect social issues when soliciting blue-collar votes; so, in fact, had Lord Randolph Churchill. Winston was addressing undernourished, underpaid textile workmen, most of whom still wore wooden clogs. He told them: “Never before were there so many people in England, and never before have they had so much to eat.” He praised the status quo, the Conservatives, Irish policy, “pride in our Empire,” and “love for the ancient traditions of the realm.” Although he also urged provisions for the poor—Woom was not forgotten—he was vulnerable to the charge that he represented the vested interests, despite the fact that both Liberal candidates were wealthy men. He even ran afoul of his own party. Salisbury had introduced a bill increasing government support of the Anglican church. Three days before the election Churchill announced that, if elected, he would vote against it. His words were flung at the embarrassed Tories in Parliament. Arthur Balfour, the Conservative leader in the Commons—“the divine Arthur” of the fashionable Panshanger set—said, “I thought he was a young man of promise, but it appears he is a young man of promises.”110
To Winston’s delight, his mother appeared on polling day, “dressed entirely in blue,” according to a newspaperman, “… in a landau and pair with gaily ribboned and rosetted postillions.” Pamela Plowden might recoil from electioneering, but for Jennie it evoked memories of the early years of her marriage. Nevertheless, Winston lost. She was at his side when the returns came in. The Liberals had taken both seats; his margin of defeat was 1,293 votes out of 48,672 cast. The Manchester Courier reported that Churchill “looked upon the process of counting with amusement, and the result of the election did not disturb him. He might have been defeated, but he was conscious that in this fight he had not been disgraced.” He had, however, been wounded. Tory newspapers concluded that it had been a mistake to field a green youth in a working-class district. Word reached him that in the Carlton Club members were shaking their heads over the fact that he had run in tandem with a radical: “Serves him right for standing with a Socialist. No man of any principle would have done such a thing!” He later wrote dryly: “Everyone threw the blame on me. I have noticed that they nearly always do. I suppose it is because they think I shall be able to bear it best…. I returned to London with those feelings of deflation which a bottle of champagne or even soda-water represents when it has been half emptied and left uncorked for the night. No one came to see me on my return to my mother’s house.”111
He did, however, receive a letter. It was from Balfour, who regretted his slight and was now “very sorry to hear of your ill success at Oldham, as I had greatly hoped to see you speedily in the House where your father and I fought many a good battle side by side in days gone by. I hope however you will not be discouraged…. This small reverse will have no permanent ill effect upon your political fortunes.” And later in July, Lady Jeune brought Churchill and Joe Chamberlain together in her home on the Thames. They talked of South Africa. Now secretary of state for colonies, “Pushful Joe” was negotiating the government’s growing dispute with the Boers, the Dutch farmers in South Africa. At one point he offered Winston a bit of political advice. He told him: “It’s no use blowing the trumpet for the charge and then looking around to find nobody following.”112
Chamberlain and Sir Alfred Milner, the British high commissioner in Cape Town, were preparing to blow the trumpet for a showdown with South Africa’s Boers, and they wanted the backing of all England. Over the next two months, while Churchill was making his final changes in The River War, they carefully built it. By the end of September hostilities were imminent. Obviously Winston would go as a war correspondent. Harmsworth’s Daily Mail and Borthwick’s Morning Post were bidding for him, but in the end he stayed with Borthwick, who offered him unprecedented terms: expenses, protection of his copyright, and £250, roughly $1,250, a month. He wired news of his coming departure to Chamberlain, who replied from Birmingham on October 4: “I have your telegraph & will write to Milner tonight asking his good offices for the son of my old friend…. I shall be in London on Monday but I gather that you leave before then. If so good luck & best wishes!” In fact, Milner was to receive two letters recommending Winston; Chamberlain’s, which was tepid (“He has the reputation of being bumptious. Put him on the right lines.”), and a warmer one from George Wyndham, the under secretary of state for war: “He is a very clever fellow & is bringing out an unprejudiced mind.”113
Actually, Winston wasn’t due to sail until Saturday, so he saw Chamberlain once more. The autocratic colonial secretary invited him to share his morning hansom ride from the Chamberlain house at Prince’s Gardens to Parliament. That morning he was the very quiddity of Joe, “Joe the Brummagem screw-maker,” the self-made manufacturer from the Midlands: the diamond pin in his stock, the homegrown orchid in his buttonhole, his monocle in his eye, and, with the inevitable cigar in his teeth, as calm and self-assured as a slab of his Birmingham steel. “Buller,” he said of General Sir Redvers Buller, the new commander in chief for South Africa, who was still in England, “would have been wiser to have gone out earlier. Now, if the Boers invade Natal, Sir George White with his 16,000 men may easily settle the whole thing.” Sir George was in Ladysmith, which, with Kimberley and Mafeking, was regarded as one of the three keys to English defense. Churchill asked about Mafeking, close to the border. “Ah, Mafeking, that may be besieged,” Chamberlain said airily, “but if they cannot hold out for a few weeks, what is one to expect?” He added prudently, “Of course, I have to base myself on the War Office opinion. They are all quite confident. I can only go by what they say.”114
On Thursday, when the first Boer shots were fired at Kraajpan, Churchill was packing his black tin steamer trunks with Thomas Walden, who had been Lord Randolph’s valet and was now his son’s. Winston had just submitted his first expense account, for £30 18s. 6d. Clearly he had no intention of living a Spartan life at the front. In addition to a compass, a new saddle fitted with a pigskin case, and his Ross telescope and Voigtlander field glass, repaired at Borthwick’s expense, he was taking thirty bottles of 1887 Vin d’Ay Sec, eighteen bottles of St. Emilion, eighteen of ten-year-old scotch, a dozen bottles of Rose’s Cordial Lime Juice, six bottles of light port, six of French vermouth, and six of Very Old Eau de Vie 1866.* Every evening that week he attended a dinner party in his honor. Since the election he had been trying, without much success, to grow a guardsman’s mustache, and his touchiness about it inspired what may have been the first faint flash of Churchillian wit in London society. A friend of Jennie’s, seated next to him at one of the dinners, told him she liked neither his politics nor his mustache. He replied, “Madame, I see no earthly reason why you should come in contact with either.”115
The Royal Mail steamer Dunottar Castle was to sail at 6:00 P.M. Saturday, October 14, 1899, from Southampton docks. Churchill arrived early, jaunty in a yachting cap, but the huge crowd, perched on roofs and cranes, hadn’t gathered for him. It was there to cheer his most distinguished fellow passenger, Buller, and Buller’s staff. A fleet of civilian liners would follow with forty-seven thousand volunteers, but Sir Redvers was the man of the hour. The general’s special train arrived at the wharf two hours before the Castle weighed anchor. Everyone was ready to follow Chamberlain’s trumpet now. The throng sang “Rule Britannia,” “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow,” and “God Save the Queen.” Men shouted, “Remember Majuba!” “Pull old Krojer’s whiskers!” and “Give it to the Boers!” The ship’s foghorn blew. A pioneer newsreel cameraman from the Biograph Company cranked his camera. From the head of the gangplank Sir Redvers thanked everyone and said he hoped he would not be away long. His hope was to be dashed. So were their hopes in him.
Eight years earlier Lord Randolph, during his own trip to South Africa for the Daily Graphic, had acquired five thousand shares in Rand Mines. They had been sold to cover his debts, but had he held them their value would have been increased by twenty times at his death, and, shortly thereafter, by fifty or sixty times. That was the key to the Boer issue. After Majuba, Gladstone had negotiated the London treaty of 1884, which had granted limited self-government to the two Boer republics, the Transvaal and the Orange Free State; the two South African colonies, Natal and Cape Colony, were to remain British. Then gold had been discovered in the Transvaal—diamonds had already been found near Kimberley—and Empire builders like Cecil Rhodes wanted the Transvaal and the Orange Free State back. At that time the world’s monetary systems, chiefly British, were dependent on gold. The Empire builders thought they saw a way to regain power over the Boer lands. The gold rush of the 1880s had brought the Transvaal a tremendous influx of Englishmen, or Uitlanders (“Outlanders”—foreigners), as the Boers called them: so many that by the mid-1890s they probably formed a majority of the republic’s inhabitants. To British imperialists they seemed exploitable.
President Paul Kruger—“Oom Paul,” that strong Brueghel peasant whom Chamberlain had called an “ignorant, dirty, cunning” old man—was uncowed. He refused to give these British immigrants the vote. That was what the Jameson Raid had been all about; the raiders had hoped to spark an uprising by the English settlers. Badly planned, the plot had failed. Nevertheless, Rhodes and Chamberlain, who had been implicated in it, were determined to answer the Uitlander’s cri de coeur. The fact that this was a violation of the 1884 pact, in which the British had agreed not to intervene in the Transvaal’s domestic affairs, was ignored. Imperialists continued to speak ominously of “consolidating the Empire.” On the eve of the first Boer crisis Gladstone had warned against “the fascinations of passion and of pride,” but his voice had been stilled in 1898. Thousands of young Englishmen agreed with the more strident advocates of expansion; in India, Churchill had written: “Imperial aid must redress the wrongs of the Outlanders. Imperial troops must curb the insolence of the Boers.” He thought the issue was the persecution of his countrymen, not gold. Chamberlain himself regretted that there was “too much of ‘money-bags’ about the whole business.” Still, he and Milner kept nagging Oom Paul in Pretoria. The Boers refused their demands, and when the British began pouring reinforcements into Cape Colony and Natal, became alarmed. Unless the Afrikaners struck back, they realized, their forces would soon be outnumbered. Kruger, who understood the impact of technology on warfare, decided to put his faith in “God and the Mauser”—the Mauser, his Krupp howitzers and 75-millimeter field guns from the Ruhr, his 155-millimeter “Long Toms” from Schneider-Creusot in France, and, from Britain itself, his Maxim “pompoms.” He issued an ultimatum. If Chamberlain didn’t stop his troop buildup, the Transvaal would fight. On October 11, 1899, three days before the Dunottar Castle sailed, the ultimatum expired and the war began.116
At the last minute the Orange Free State Boers had thrown in their lot with their Transvaal brothers. The British were surprised, but undaunted. Supremely self-confident, they were sure it would all be over by Christmas. The Times thought the ultimatum an “infatuated step” by a “petty republic,” the Globe was irked by this “trumpery little state” and its “impudent burghers,” the Daily Telegraph was “in doubt whether to laugh or weep.” Since Victoria’s coronation two generations earlier, her subjects had been swaggering down the highways of the world, fighting short, relatively bloodless colonial wars at almost no cost; the army had fought only two engagements since the Indian Mutiny of 1857 in which more than a hundred men had been lost. The rewards for this insignificant sacrifice had been immense; Rosebery had told an Edinburgh audience that during the past twelve years 2,600,000 square miles had been added to the Empire, chiefly in Africa. That might be called the end of the red-coat era. Now, at the end of the 1890s, the army was about to fight its first big conflict in its new khaki uniforms. Churchill and the Dunottar Castle were heading for the last of the Victorian wars, England’s costliest struggle between Waterloo and Sarajevo, which would drain the Empire of a half-million men and bring down upon London the opprobrium of the civilized world. “If there was a good case for the Boer War,” Margot Asquith would later write in her diary, “it was indifferently put, and I doubt if a single nation understood it.” The war was about to give England, in Kipling’s phrase, “no end of a lesson.”117
Plunging through high seas and what Churchill called “grey storms”—as usual he was ill—the Dunottar Castle lurched toward the Canary Islands. Cut off from the world, they endured more than two weeks of what Winston called a “heavy silence”; it was, he wrote his mother, “a long time in war, especially in the beginning.” At Madeira they learned nothing, which was “very hard to understand. Why did they declare war if they had nothing up their sleeves? Why do they waste time now?” On their sixteenth day they passed a tramp steamer, the Australian, whose crew held aloft a crude white-on-black sign: BOERS DEFEATED. THREE BATTLES. PENN SYMONDS KILLED.118
They took this to mean that the enemy had been routed in three engagements, though the loss of Symonds, a Natal general, was difficult to reconcile with victory. Winston heard an aide tell Buller, “It looks as if it will be over, sir.” Sir Redvers replied, “I dare say there will be enough left to give us a fight outside Pretoria.” The soundness of this military judgment was confirmed when, two days later, on October 31, they anchored in Table Bay and a launch sped out bearing, in Winston’s words, a “Man Who Knew.” All the tidings were grim. Mafeking and Kimberley were surrounded by Boers—had been, in fact, since the Dunottar Castle left Southampton. After Symonds’s death General Sir George White had begun retreating into Ladysmith, which was itself threatened with encirclement. The enemy had been defeated nowhere. So much for the reliability of tramp steamers as news media. Ashore, Winston interviewed a distraught Milner and sent off a report: “We have greatly underestimated the military strength and spirit of the Boers. I vy much doubt whether one army Corps will be enough to overcome their resistance.” Moreover, Kruger wasn’t the only man with troublesome immigrants. Milner had told Winston that the Boers who lived here in Cape Colony under the Union Jack were “trembling on the verge of rebellion.” Winston concluded that the British government could, “for the moment, be sure of nothing beyond the gunshot of the Navy.”119
Buller intended to remain in Cape Town, pondering his choices and awaiting the arrival of his troop transports. At home, Salisbury was telling a Guildhall audience that his confidence in the British soldier “is only equalled by my confidence in Sir Redvers Buller.” Churchill wasn’t so sure. The general struck him as the kind of man who plodded “on from blunder to blunder and from one disaster to another.” It was, Winston felt, time to leave him. During the voyage he and J. B. Atkins of the Manchester Guardian had agreed to knit their fortunes; now they decided to reach Ladysmith before the enemy slammed the door. On inquiry at the Mount Nelson Hotel they learned that by taking a train to East London, seven hundred miles away, and continuing by small mail boat or tug to Durban, they could beat other correspondents to the front by four days. It would be risky; the railroad skirted Boer strongpoints and was undefended. They caught the last express to get through safely and reached Durban, but the sea leg was an ordeal. Their ship, a steamer of about 150 tons, had to fight its way through a howling Antarctic gale. Between waves Winston could see “rocks which showed their black teeth endlessly a bare mile away upon our port beam.” The seasickness, however, was far worse. He lay in his bunk “in an extreme of physical misery while our tiny ship bounded and reeled, and kicked and pitched, and fell and turned almost over and righted itself again… through an endless afternoon, a still longer evening and an eternal night.”120
Arriving at midnight, they slept six hours and awoke only to be told that they were too late; Ladysmith was invested. The disappointment was
deep, but they resolved to get as close to it as possible. Another train, zigzagging up and down hills and negotiating hairpin curves, took them sixty miles to Pietermaritzburg and on to Estcourt, a town of about three hundred stone-walled houses roofed with corrugated iron. Estcourt was the end of the line. They could hear the Ladysmith cannonade from there. While his valet pitched his tent, Winston uncapped his pen and began to write. All along the way he had been interviewing everyone who had fought or seen the Boers, beginning, in Durban, with Reggie Barnes, his companion in Cuba and polo teammate later. Barnes had been wounded in the groin storming a hill at Elandslaagte; his colonel had fallen beside him; sixty-seven of their men had been killed or wounded in the assault. He had said: “All these colonials tell you that the Boers only want one good thrashing to satisfy them. Don’t you believe it. They mean going through with this to the end.” Again, Churchill’s instincts told him Barnes was right. They betrayed him, however, when he talked to Uitlander refugees. On November 5 he reported “the fullest confirmation of the horrible barbarities perpetrated by the Boers,” telling of a woman who had been flogged across the breasts and commenting: “Such is the Boer—gross, fierce, and horrid—doing the deeds of the devil with the name of the Lord on his lips. It is quite true that he is brave, but so are many savage tribes.”121
One is struck, in reading Churchill’s accounts from the South African battlefields, by the frequency with which he encountered old friends and acquaintances. Barnes was one. Ian Hamilton commanded troops nearby. Brabazon, back in uniform, was on his way. Leo Amery, Winston’s fellow Harrovian, was the Times correspondent in Estcourt, and among the officers there was Captain Aylmer Haldane, whom he had known in India. On the night of November 14 the captain was ordered by his commanding officer, Colonel Charles Long, to lead two companies aboard an armored train and probe the Boer lines. As he later wrote in his memoirs, he was leaving headquarters when he noticed Churchill “hanging about to pick up such crumbs of information for his newspaper as might be available.” Haldane described his mission to Winston and “suggested that he might care to accompany me next day. Although he was not at all keen he consented to do so, and arranged to be at the station in time for the start.”122
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