The Boer War Read online

  I am also most grateful to more than a hundred others who allowed me to use – and to borrow for unforgivably long periods – precious family records. Some of their names will be found at the back of this book. I remain very conscious of their generosity and forbearance.

  Fifty-two veterans of the war, three of them South African (including one black South African) allowed me to record their war memories. I should like to record my own deep debt of gratitude to them – posthumously, alas, in most cases.

  I have been most fortunate in the encouragement I have received in public libraries, museums, record offices and other archives in Britain, and in South Africa (where I collected material in 1972 and 1977). I should like to thank the staff and trustees of the following institutions who have allowed me to quote manuscript material listed at the back of this book. In Britain: the Army Museums Ogilby Trust (Spenser Wilkinson), Bodleian Library, Birmingham University (Chamberlain), British Museum (Balfour, Campbell-Bannerman and others), Christ Church (Lord Salisbury), Devon and Dorset Regimental Museum, Household Brigade Museum, Hove Central Library (Wolseley), India Office Library (White), King’s College, London (Hamilton etc.), Liverpool Museum (Steavenson), Manchester Public Library, New College (Milner), National Army Museum (Baden-Powell and others), National Library of Scotland (Haldane and others), North Lancs. Regimental Museum, Sherwood Foresters Regimental Museum (Smith Dorrien), Public Record Office (Ardagh and others), Rhodes House (Rhodes), John Rylands Library (Bromley Davenport), Scottish Record Office (Dundonald), Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, University of St Andrews (Alford), Ministry of Defence Library, Westfield College (Lyttelton). In Southern Africa: the Africana Museum, Cape Archives, Natal Archives, Orange Free State Archives, Rhodesian National Archives, Transvaal Archives, De Beers Archives, Killie Campbell Museum, University of Witwatersrand. In Australia: the National Library of Australia.

  I should also like to acknowledge the generosity of the following people who read all or part of my text, and made invaluable suggestions, many of which were adopted: my parents, Fiona Barbour, Professor Johann Barnard, Brian Bond, Janet Carleton, Laurence and Linda Kelly, Dr Shula Marks, Godfrey Le May, Richard Mendelsohn, Kevin Nowlan, Julian Symons, Anthony Sampson and Dennis Kiley.

  I owe an especially deep debt to the latter for helping to teach me Dutch and Afrikaans and raising the standard of my translations. I must also thank Dr Zak De Beer, Donald and Anita Fabian, Tertius Myburgh and all the Camerer family. They helped me in a hundred ways while I was in South Africa.

  I must also acknowledge the skill and patience of four research assistants: Jane Hirst and Anna Collins in Britain, Enid de Waal and Elaine Katz in South Africa. And I must record the amazing good humour of Alexa Wilson and Maria Ellis who turned a writer’s scrawl into a printer’s typescript.

  To Mary Cresswell-Turner, Sibylla Jane Flower and Dorothy Girouard, and to Kevin MacDonnell I owe the splendid photographs in this book, the majority of which will be new to historians of photography.

  I am also greatly in the debt of my copy-editor, Michael Graham-Dixon, who displayed unflinching gallantry under fire.*

  I am only too conscious of how much I owe all my friends at Weidenfeld’s – especially Gila and Christopher Falkus and George Weidenfeld – and Joe Fox of Random House.

  On Anne and Robin Denniston has fallen the heaviest burden of all. The book was planned and written under their roof.

  Finally, I should like to thank my wife, Valerie, who has read all the words I have written and skilfully edited them. By eliminating my ‘most interesting paragraphs’, she has claimed (as Lord Salisbury said to Lord Curzon, after cutting to ribbons his book, Persia) ‘a negative share in a great work’.

  Historical Note

  The crisis in the Transvaal at the end of the nineteenth century was the culmination of two and a half centuries of Afrikaner expansion and conflict with Africans and British.

  In 1652 the Dutch East India Company founded a shipping station at the Cape of Good Hope. At first the colony remained poor. After fifty years there were fewer than two thousand white settlers. And from the beginning these were outnumbered by their coloured servants (including imported slaves) on whom the Europeans depended for their manual labour. The settlers were mainly Dutch Calvinists, with a leavening of German Protestants and French Huguenot refugees. To Africa these Pilgrim Fathers brought a tradition of dissent and a legacy of resentment against Europe. The called themselves ‘Afrikaners’ or ‘Afrikanders’ (the people of Africa) and spoke a common language, a variant of Dutch that came to be called ‘Afrikaans’. The poorest and most independent of them were the trekboers (alias Boers), the wandering farmers whose search for new grazing lands brought them progressively deeper into African territory.

  In 1806, during the Napoleonic Wars, the British government took permanent possession of the colony. Britain’s aim was strategic. The Cape was a naval base on the sea-route to India and the East. But the colony was too arid to tempt many British immigrants. The Afrikaners remained the majority – of the whites. Most of them were prepared to submit to British Crown rule, but a republican-minded minority, the Boers of the frontier, resented imperial interference, especially over their ill-treatment of the Africans. In 1834 Britain ordered slaves to be emancipated in every part of the Empire. This precipitated the Great Trek: the exodus in 1835–7 of about 5,000 Boers (with about 5,000 Coloured servants) across the Orange and Vaal rivers beyond the north-east frontiers of the colony. The voortrekkers (pioneers) quarrelled among themselves, but shared one article of faith: to deny political rights to Africans and Coloured people of mixed race.

  For the next sixty years the British government blew hot and cold in its dealings with the Boers. In 1843 Britain created a second colony by annexing Natal, one of the areas in which the voortrekkers had concentrated. But in 1852 and 1854 Britain recognized the independence of the two new Boer republics, the Transvaal and the Orange Free State. Then in 1877 Britain annexed the Transvaal as the first step in an attempt to federate South Africa. This annexation was reversed in 1881, after Paul Kruger had led a rebellion (the First Boer War) culminating in the defeat of the British at Majuba. The Transvaal’s independence was restored, subject to conditions, including British supervision of its foreign policy.

  In 1895 two multi-millionaires, Cecil Rhodes and Alfred Beit, conspired to take over the Transvaal for themselves and the Empire. The outcome of their conspiracy provides the Prologue of this book. By now two great mineral discoveries had turned the political map upside down. In 1870 began the diamond-rush to Kimberley, on the borders of Cape Colony. It was diamonds that smoothed Cape Colony’s path to successful self-government within the Empire. They also made Rhodes’s and Beit’s fortunes. Rhodes became Prime Minister at the Cape. And together Rhodes and Beit founded a new British colony, in African territory to the north of the Transvaal, re-named Rhodesia. In 1886 began the gold-rush to the Witwatersrand in the Transvaal. But this did not smooth the Transvaal’s path. Gold made it the richest and militarily the most powerful nation in southern Africa. But gold also made, for the second time, the fortunes of Rhodes and Beit – especially Beit. And it precipitated a collision between the Boers and Uitlanders: the new immigrants, mainly British, swept along in the gold-rush. The situation of the Uitlanders was unique. They were believed to outnumber the Boers. Yet by means of a new franchise law, much more restrictive than those of Britain or America, the Boers kept them starved of political rights. In 1895 it was the political hunger of the Uitlanders – backed by Rhodes’s and Beit’s millions – that seemed to offer the British a chance of taking over the Transvaal once again from the Boers.

  PROLOGUE

  Rhodes’s ‘Big Idea’

  Pitsani Camp (Bechuanaland border), Mafeking (Cape Colony border) and Transvaal,

  29 December 1895 – 2 January 1896

  ‘Johannesburg is ready … [this is] the big idea which makes England dominant in Africa, in fact gives En
gland the African continent.’

  Secret letter from Cecil Rhodes to Alfred Beit in August 1895, when they hatched the plot to create a revolution at Johannesburg supported by a raid from Pitsani and Mafeking led by Dr Jameson

  Johannesburg was not ready. That was the message of the last six code telegrams to Dr Jameson. They confirmed his fears. So did a verbal report from Major Heany, the special messenger sent by the Johannesburg ‘Reform Committee’, the leaders of Rhodes’s and Beit’s revolutionary movement in the Transvaal. The ‘flotation’, as they called the rising in which they proposed to seize Johannesburg, was going to be a flop. The revolutionaries were in a funk. ‘Dead against it … fiasco … you must not move … too awful … very sorry … Ichabod.’1

  Jameson left Heany in the white bell-tent at Pitsani, his camp in Bechuanaland within a few miles of the borders of both Cape Colony and the Transvaal. Heany himself had never doubted Jameson’s reaction. He had warned the committee, ‘He’ll come in sure as fate.’ For twenty minutes on that hot Sunday afternoon, 29 December 1895, Jameson paced up and down in the sand outside the tent. Then he called to Heany.

  He was going in, despite everything, damn them. He’d ‘lick the burghers all round the Transvaal’. If the fellows at Johannesburg wouldn’t start the rising as agreed, their hands would have to be forced. It was a chance of a lifetime. At any rate he wasn’t spending another day at Pitsani Potlucko.2

  ‘Boot and saddle!’ Dust swirled across the parade ground, as the grey-suited, slouch-hatted Rhodesian police paraded in a hollow square. ‘Dress by the left! Bugler!’ Defiantly the bugle calls echoed off the tin walls of the single store at Pitsani, and floated across the three miles of empty white veld between Pitsani and the invisible Transvaal frontier. Silence, except for the shuffling of the troopers’ horses – branded ‘C.C.’ on their rumps – and the hum of the wind in the single telegraph wire.3

  Jameson had nearly four hundred Rhodesian mounted police at Pitsani, belonging to the Chartered Company. It was this company, created by Cecil Rhodes and Alfred Beit, that administered the new British colony of Rhodesia under Crown charter. Many of the police looked like colonials. They had that swagger, the loose seat in the saddle, and the easy lift and fall of the carbine on their hips.4 Jameson had collected another one hundred and twenty volunteers twenty-five miles away at Mafeking – just within the borders of Cape Colony. That brought the total of the Chartered Company force up to about six hundred if one counted the Cape Coloured ‘boys’ who led the spare horses.5 Jameson had originally planned to invade the Transvaal with fifteen hundred.6 With six hundred it did seem a bit of a tall order: one regiment against the whole Boer army. But Jameson and the Rhodesian troopers had faced hopeless odds before. They had crushed Lobengula, King of the Matabele, in 1892: six hundred against six thousand Matabeles. This new expedition, according to Cecil Rhodes, would be ‘easier than Matabeleland’.7

  At Pitsani, after six months’ work, Jameson had scraped together six Maxim machine-guns, two 7-pounder mountain guns and a 12½–pounder field piece.8 Some other refinements were stacked on the wagons beside the black tin trunks of Sir John Willoughby and the staff: a cask of Cape brandy for the men, and crates of champagne for the officers.9 Otherwise, they had cut the baggage train to the bone. The plan was to make a three-day dash for Johannesburg, before the Boer commandos could mobilize. Unfortunately, rumours about the rising ‘blabbing’ was Jameson’s word – had already reached the local papers. So it was now or never.10

  ‘Eyes front!’ On the burnished sand of the square, the lines of troopers saw Dr Jameson step into the sunlight. This was the great Dr Jim, pioneer Administrator of the Chartered Company in Rhodesia, and Cecil Rhodes’s right-hand man. He was dressed in a fawn-coloured coat, a short, slight figure, with a pale face, nervous brown eyes, and a boyish grin. But his voice was a magnet.11 He began something like this: ‘Some of you lads may think we’re going to attack Linchwe and his niggers.’ Linchwe was the local Bechuana chieftain who had had the cheek to go all the way to Whitehall to protest against the take-over of his strip of land by the Chartered Company. ‘Well, that’s all bosh about Linchwe. We’re going into the Transvaal in support of the Uitlanders.’12

  Jameson took a crumpled piece of paper out of his pocket and began to read aloud in his nervous voice. It was a letter of invitation from the committee of Uitlanders in Johannesburg organized by Rhodes and Beit – the mine-executives, miners and others who comprised the British and foreign business community of the Transvaal. ‘All the elements necessary for armed conflict…. The one desire of the people here is for fair play…. Thousands of unarmed men, women and children of our race will be at the mercy of well armed Boers….’13 Some of Jameson’s officers may have felt a trifle embarrassed. It was stirring stuff about the women and children, but not the precise truth, they knew. The letter, written a month before and left undated, was supposed to be kept for the moment after the Johannesburg rising had begun.14 Still, it was a wise precaution of Jameson’s to take the letter as a kind of passport. It would cover them with both the Chartered Company and the Imperial government in case there were awkward questions. Without it, they might have looked like pirates. As it was, the three senior officers – Colonels Johnny Willoughby, Raleigh Grey and Bobby White – were worried about the risk of losing their dormant commissions in the British army. Jameson had reassured them with a wave of the hand; and they took it that Joseph Chamberlain (the Colonial Secretary) and the British government must be in the know.15

  One last precaution: they must cut off communication with the Cape. Not that Jameson had shown any great regard for orders by telegram while the lines had been open. Working for Rhodes in these last years in Rhodesia had taught Jameson and Willoughby when to turn a blind eye to instructions: a Nelson eye to the telegram. Provided, that is, the orders were not personally signed by Rhodes. And one thing must have struck Jameson about the fiasco of the last few days. Each stage of the collapse of the movement in Johannesburg had been reported to him by way of Rhodes’s office, but not one telegram was signed ‘Rhodes’.16 He had left the final decision to Jameson. Well, there would be no more orders to anyone at Pitsani for some time. Some troopers smashed down the telegraph poles and sliced off a long length from the single copper cable, burying it in the sand beside the poles. Jameson’s other contingent were doing the same near Mafeking. To prevent the Boers being warned, the Boer line to Pretoria would be cut at Malmani, thirty miles beyond the frontier.17

  Of course it was a wild gamble, this dash for Johannesburg. But then so was much of the work of Rhodes’s Chartered Company, and in fact much of the history of the British Empire. ‘Clive would have done it,’ Jameson told a friend. He was sure of that.18 If Jameson gambled and won – if they could rush Johannesburg into a rising and forcibly take over the Transvaal – they would be forgiven the illegality.19 If they gambled and lost – well, the usual penalty was death. Death but not necessarily defeat. It was one of the lessons of history that it needed a disaster to make the British interested in their Empire. They seemed to prefer dead generals to living generals; they avenged them by completing their work. At least half the Empire had been conquered by dead men. People could see the process happening in the Sudan. Any day now the English would avenge Gordon by taking over the whole of the Mahdi’s country. Already the same process was happening in the Transvaal – ever since the Battle of Majuba, where General Colley and four hundred men had been cut up by the Boers fourteen years before.20

  Jameson knew what his staff officers felt about Majuba. They all came from decent regiments: Johnny Willoughby from the Horse Guards, Grey from the Inniskillings, Bobby White from the Welch Fusiliers.21 It was British officers like this who took Majuba personally. Not just the thought of those brave fellows who died: also the shame of the others who had raised the white flag. Majuba was ‘unfinished business’ for the British army, something to wipe off the slate.

  In the gathering dusk the bugle sounded. Cap
tain Lindsell and a dozen scouts clattered off down the rutted wagon road, then turned east towards the darkness. There could be no going back now. Jameson mounted a black stallion. He took off his felt hat, and there were three ringing cheers for the Queen. Then they trotted out of Pitsani, followed by the African servants and the mule-carts. The moon had risen, flashing on the tin walls of the village and the brass-and-steel mountings of the Maxims, before the column was engulfed in dust.22

  Across the border and into the Transvaal rode the six hundred.

  Four days had passed, and the morning of 2 January found Jameson’s column halted close to a small whitewashed farm south of a kopje called Doornkop, in the brown, grassy hills of the Rand. They had ridden 170 miles into the Transvaal, with hardly a halt for sleep; the troopers were slipping from side to side in their saddles; and the officers were mixed with the men.23 Ahead was their goal, Johannesburg, the Golden City, only a couple of hours’ ride. As dawn broke, they could see the endless lines of tall iron chimneys, the gigantic wheels above the mine-shafts and the gleam of the mine-tailings, the golden slag in that lunar landscape. And their goal might indeed have been the moon, for all their chance of getting there.

  Betrayal, that was the only word for it. Johannesburg had not risen. Their friends had made their peace with President Kruger and his Boers. The news had been brought to Jameson by two bicyclists. Not one armed volunteer had ridden out to join the column.24 Now Jameson’s path was barred by a relentless and invisible enemy.