by Richard Toye
Churchill owed permission to revive his dual soldier–journalist role to General Sir Redvers Buller, the commander of operations in Natal. After the Sudan War – not least with Churchill’s own activities in mind – the War Office had forbidden combatants to act as correspondents and vice versa, but he was granted a unique dispensation from the new rule. Churchill’s position, of course, made it difficult for him to publicly attack Buller’s inept conduct. In private he was scathing, writing that were he to begin to criticize Buller he would never stop. Yet given that there was no plausible figure to take the General’s place, he argued, he had to be backed for all he was worth, ‘which at this moment is very little’.69 So, when Buller’s ponderous attempts to relieve Ladysmith met a major setback at the end of January at the Battle of Spion Kop – British troops captured this key summit only to beat an ignominious retreat – Churchill insisted the defeat was not a catastrophe. Rather it was ‘simply a bloody action, in which was effected a lodgement in the enemy’s entrenchments that proved untenable’.70 (A few months later, back in England, he admitted it had in fact been a disaster.)71 At the time, Churchill did maintain a reputation as an outspoken figure, which was by no means wholly unjustified. One officer of his acquaintance noted: ‘He is an awfully good little chap, & will undoubtedly make his mark, but not I think a very big one, as he has little power of self restraint – if he is thirsty he must drink – if he has nothing to talk about, he still must talk – the same with his writing.’72 All the same, some other journalists were at times prepared to go further than Churchill did. In April one of The Times’s correspondents (possibly Leo Amery) wrote, ‘Our generals, regimental officers, and soldiers are all brave, none braver, but it is useless to shirk the fact that the majority of them are stupid.’73 This, commented Reynolds’s Newspaper, ‘out-Churchills Mr Winston Churchill’; indeed, Churchill himself was critical of such attacks.74
Churchill did ruffle some feathers himself, however, as a long-forgotten episode demonstrates. At the end of February, Ladysmith was relieved at last. Churchill gave a dramatic description of the British column’s ride towards the town, and of how a ‘score of tattered men’ came running from the trenches and rifle pits to meet it, some crying, some cheering, all pale and thin.75 The next evening Sir George White, who had led the defence against the siege, granted him an interview. White had been much criticized for allowing his men to be trapped in Ladysmith in the first place. ‘He spoke with some bitterness of the attacks which had been made on him in the newspapers, and of the attempts of the War Office to supersede him, attempts which Sir Redvers Buller had prevented’, noted Churchill.76 This appeared to reveal an intrigue against a man now regarded in Britain – if not amongst his colleagues – as an authentic imperial hero. It was claimed that the War Office had tried to make White a scapegoat for its own blunders.77 White described Churchill’s report as ‘mischievous’ – he appears to have thought he had been having a private conversation – but he pointedly refused to repudiate the comments ascribed to him.78 Perhaps realizing he had been indiscreet, Churchill edited out the phrase about the War Office when his despatches were published in his London to Ladysmith, via Pretoria.79
The fighting in Natal now died down as the Boers retreated, and Churchill tried to get moved to a more eventful theatre. While awaiting permission for a transfer, he developed his opinions on how the Boers should be treated after the war. After his escape he had emphasized that his new-found respect for the ‘manly virtues’ of the Boers did not at all reduce his belief in the necessity of fighting them, which was essential for the sake of British manhood.80 However, in contrast to the prevailing opinion, he did not favour revenge against the enemy once they had been defeated. In late March he outlined his views in a telegram to the Morning Post and a letter to the Natal Witness. The pursuit of an ‘eye for an eye’ attitude would lead to the war being prolonged into a lengthy guerrilla phase, he argued. ‘Peace and happiness can only come to South Africa through the fusion and concord of the Dutch and British races, who must forever live side by side under the supremacy of Britain.’81 He had genuinely gone out on a limb here. Although the Manchester Guardian praised his ‘rare logic and commonsense’, his views were predictably unpopular with British colonists in South Africa.82 The war correspondent of the Chronicle wrote sardonically of how the ‘apparition of a real member of the aristocracy like Mr Winston Churchill advocating clemency has startled them out of their wits’.83 The Freeman’s Journal claimed, improbably, that Churchill’s comments had put his life at risk.84 ‘Winston is being severely criticised about his Peaceful telegrams – and everyone here in Natal is going against his views’, wrote his brother in a letter to Lady Randolph. ‘They say that even if you are going to treat these Boers well after their surrender, this is not the time to say so.’85 The latter point would also be impressed upon Churchill by Sir Alfred Milner, the British High Commissioner, as they lunched together below Table Mountain a few months later. But Milner was sympathetic to Churchill’s views and he won, if only for the time being, the younger man’s loyalty.
At last, Churchill secured permission to join the army headed by Lord Roberts, the Commander-in-Chief, as it moved into the Boer territories. In his friend Ian Hamilton he at last found a general whose conduct of operations he could truly admire, a point he emphasized by calling his second book of despatches Ian Hamilton’s March. Churchill was present at the relief of Pretoria in June and a few days later showed ‘conspicuous gallantry’ (Hamilton’s words) at Diamond Hill. He climbed to within a short distance of the enemy and then signalled to Hamilton that the summit could be rushed.86 In spite of the run of victories, the Boers were as yet far from defeated; the guerrilla phase that Churchill had anticipated was about to begin. He himself, in expectation of a general election, gave up his army commission and returned to Britain in July. On coming ashore at Southampton, his first concern was to establish whether the fearsome Christiaan De Wet, Commandant General of the Orange Free State, had yet been captured. Informed that he had not, Churchill showed chagrin but not surprise. ‘De Wet is an eel’, he remarked.87
IV
A few days after landing he travelled to Oldham, where he received a rapturous reception from the townspeople, and, although the election had not yet been formally announced, he was once more adopted as a Tory candidate. (His running-mate this time was to be C. B. Crisp, a stockbroker.) Speaking at the town’s Empire Theatre, on a stage decorated with Union Jacks, he reflected on the ‘stirring succession of violent events’ in South Africa which had moved the country ‘as nothing had moved it for a great number of years’. Volunteer recruitment after Black Week had provided proof that the ‘gentlemen of England’ did not shirk their duty. The war, he predicted, would be over within months: ‘He did not wish to be sanguine, or he would like to say a week [. . .] but he would rather keep within the limits of absolute certainty.’ He claimed that when he had first gone to the Cape he had hoped that the Boers could be given back their independence after the war – if so he had not said so at the time – but said he had now reached the conclusion that they could not be allowed ‘a Republic the size of a shilling’. Such a thing would endanger British authority in South Africa, and the Boer territories must therefore be absorbed into the Empire. He also eulogized Milner: were he to be removed from his present position as High Commissioner it would be ‘a serious national loss’.88
A few weeks after this Churchill sent a letter to Milner which shows that he was not quite as confident as some of his public words suggested. He advised him that the British public were ‘rather worried at the wearisome prolongation of the war’. Although Churchill did not share the widespread ‘hard view of the Boer, as a creature unfit to live’, he also believed that it would be ‘useless and even mischievous to say anything now that could lessen the hostility and contempt with which the Boer is regarded’. That was because an angry public opinion would be needed to sustain the war effort: ‘You will want all the fire to carry you
up the steep gradient.’ He feared, however, that there was a remarkable amount ‘of pent up feeling, Liberalism, sentimentality, humanitarianism, chivalry’ that was threatening to burst free. This, he explained, was what accounted for his public support for the harsh anti-guerrilla tactics that the British were now employing:
The ordinary safety valves of public expression and free speech are screwed down. Someday there will be an explosion, so that your steam engine had better get to the end of its journey as soon as possible, otherwise it may, when the machinery breaks, slip backwards down the hill.
It is because I fear that contingency that I try my best to justify all these farm burnings and other measures of severity. We must top the rise before the Power is withdrawn.
With a combination of sycophancy and self-confidence, he told Milner: ‘I have neither influence nor power, but I can reach a wide public, and if there be anything you want said – without saying it yourself – and my political conscience approves it, I should be proud to be your servant.’ He could, he said, ‘draw an audience of 4000 people in any big town’.89 Milner reciprocated Churchill’s approval – he read his letter with ‘appreciation and a great measure of agreement’ – but within a few years the relationship between them would sour.90
It should be emphasized again that Churchill was not a completely slavish follower of the government line. In a speech in August in Plymouth, he launched a scathing attack on the War Office. During the past few years it had, he said, ‘neglected every one of the lessons which it ought to have deduced from the military progress of the Continent’. After he concluded his detailed indictment – subsequently quoted in a Liberal leaflet – a heckler called out, ‘And all this while you had a Conservative Government in power.’ According to one report, ‘Mr Churchill was quite disconcerted by the cutting words, and is declared to have found it necessary to make a pause to recover himself.’91 During the subsequent election he did not retract his criticisms, but he did downplay them.92 Thus although his departures from Conservative orthodoxy were not insignificant, they were limited. The Boers should be treated decently after the war, he thought, but in the meantime it was justifiable to burn their farms, as ‘repressive measures were necessary’ in order to bring them into submission.93 The War Office might be susceptible of improvement, but the war effort as a whole had been the ‘Pride of the Empire and the astonishment of the world’.94
Churchill’s role in the election campaign itself, which began in September, has received relatively little attention.95 The promises of ‘Tory Democracy’ had not been forgotten entirely – his election address spoke in favour of old-age pensions – and religion again reared its head, this time with Churchill denouncing ritualism in the Church of England, a topic about which, given the unconventional nature of his religious views, it is hard to believe he really cared much.96 Predictably, though, the war dominated debate in Oldham, as it did throughout the country.97 In spite of his hero status and the overall weakness of the Liberal Party, Churchill could not expect a walkover; the battle was hard fought. His opponents – Emmott and Runciman again – were Liberal Imperialist supporters of the war and could not be attacked as pro-Boers. On the other hand, it was not too hard to ridicule their position. The voters would have to choose, Churchill said, between two Conservative candidates and two Liberal candidates who agreed with the Conservatives: ‘It will be like choosing between turtle and mock-turtle!’ His Liberal opponents did not dispute the justice of the war, merely alleging that it had been mismanaged; but Churchill scorned the notion that a Liberal government ‘supported by the Peace Party’ would be ‘skilled in the management of bloody wars’.98
Nevertheless, Churchill did not have everything his own way. The Oldham Evening Chronicle, attempting to wrest discussion back towards domestic questions, devoted an editorial to his turtle soup metaphor and claimed that it was apt. This was because the government’s ‘turtle policy’ benefited the wealthy at the expense of the poor: ‘During the last five years the rich man’s plate has been handed up many times and has always returned filled with turtle.’99And when Churchill denounced Gladstone’s ‘shameful’ surrender to the Boers in 1881, the Leeds Mercury quoted Lord Randolph who, of course, had eventually come to approve the settlement. ‘Mr Winston Churchill is entitled to manufacture what political capital he can out of Majuba Hill; but he ought not to forget that in sneering at Mr Gladstone’s South African policy he is also sneering at the deliberate judgement of his own father, who was once the idol of the Tory party.’100 Such attacks may not have done Churchill much harm – few Oldham voters would have read the Leeds Mercury anyway – but they do remind us that not everyone was dazzled by his reputation. Indeed, when polling day came in Oldham (on 1 October) the result was very tight. As can be seen from the figures below, the combined Liberal vote was 203 greater than the Tory total; Churchill owed his victorious second place to the way votes were distributed among the candidates.
Emmott (Liberal)
12,947 (elected)
Churchill (Unionist)
12,931 (elected)
Runciman (Liberal)
12,709
Crisp (Unionist)
12,522
The national result was a massive Tory victory, albeit with a reduction in the party’s majority as compared with 1895. As was then customary, polling extended over a number of weeks, and so Churchill, whose result had been declared early, was able to campaign on behalf of other Tories throughout the country. His tour turned into a kind of ‘triumphal progress’ through key seats selected by the party managers.101 The Glasgow Herald described him (not disapprovingly) as playing the role of ‘an itinerant juvenile Gladstone’.102 He was astute enough to realize, though, that the wave of Conservative popularity might not last for ever. He wrote privately: ‘I think this election – fought by the Liberals as a soldiers battle, without a plan or leaders, or enthusiasm has shown so far the strength not the weakness of Liberalism in the country.’103
V
MPs did not receive a salary, so Churchill needed to earn money to carry him through the years ahead. As soon as the election was over, then, he embarked on a lucrative lecture tour describing his experiences in South Africa. In this way, the Empire would come to his financial rescue. He was now transformed into an imperial educator of the kind who had impressed him in his youth – appropriately, his first effort was made at Harrow School.104 Equipped with a magic lantern – the Victorian equivalent of PowerPoint – he often used a geography teacher’s flourish: ‘This is a map of South Africa. Take a good look at it, it belongs to us.’ (This evoked loud applause.)105 One of the most dramatic accounts of one of his lectures is of his appearance in Leeds:
A vivid description of the awful night and day on Spion Kop and a triumphant eulogy of the superb genius of Lord Roberts, and a hearty and repeated acknowledgement of the courage and tenacity of Sir Redvers Buller, were the conspicuous features of the lecture, spiced, as it was, with allusions to the ‘far-famed plainness of the Dutch frau’ or contemptuous references to the ill-equipped critics of our ‘stupid officers’, and ending on a really solemn note – the realisation, with something like a feeling of awe, and almost of sadness, of the extinction of separate nationalities, but at the same time the expression of a confident belief that the bravery and skill of such men as De Wet and [General Piet] Joubert might in the future be among the supports of a united South Africa.106
The audience, in other words, received not only entertainment but also a clear didactic message: the Boers were to be absorbed into the Empire not merely territorially but spiritually, as their sense of a separate national identity was extinguished.
The American leg of his tour was less successful both financially – owing to an incompetent and grasping promoter – and in terms of its reception. There was significant pro-Boer feeling in the USA, much of it coming from the Dutch and Irish populations. Bourke Cockran, Churchill’s Irish-born politician friend, thought the war to be ‘the greatest viol
ation of justice attempted by any civilized nation since the partition of Poland’.107 (The men’s personal relationship was not affected by this political difference.) The ambivalent response to Churchill was nicely captured when the author Mark Twain introduced him to a fashionable audience at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York on the anniversary of his escape from prison. Churchill, Twain said, ‘knew all about war and nothing about peace’. Twain added that he himself disapproved of the war in South Africa, ‘and he thought England sinned when she interfered with the Boers, as the United States is sinning in meddling in the affairs of the Filipinos. England and America were kin in almost everything; now they are kin in sin.’ But in spite of his Boer sympathies, he generously welcomed Churchill (himself half American) as ‘a blend of America and England which makes a perfect match’.108 Churchill recalled that, when he argued with Twain in private conversation, he was forced back to the refuge of ‘My country right or wrong’. ‘When the poor country is fighting for its life, I agree’, rejoined Twain, ‘But this was not your case.’109 It was with some relief that Churchill arrived in Canada just before Christmas. ‘Thank God, we are once more on British soil’, he said as he stepped off the train in Montreal.110 His reception in the country was much warmer than the one he had had in America. He also met, for the first time, the future Canadian Prime Minister W. L. Mackenzie King. The fastidious King later claimed privately that on this occasion he found Churchill at his hotel drinking champagne at eleven o’clock in the morning.111
