The war declared by the Boers on 11 October 1899 gave the British, in Kipling’s famous phrase, ‘no end of a lesson’. The British public expected it to be over by Christmas. It proved to be the longest (two and three-quarter years), the costliest (over £200 million), the bloodiest (at least twenty-two thousand British, twenty-five thousand Boer and twelve thousand African lives) and the most humiliating war for Britain between 1815 And 1914.
I decided to try to tell the story of this last great (or infamous) imperial war, taking as my raw material the first-hand, and largely unpublished, accounts provided by contemporaries.
It was an ambitious idea, to base the book largely on manuscript (and oral) sources. No one had made the attempt for seventy years. In the decade after 1902, the public suffered a barrage of Boer War books. This culminated in a bombardment from the Long Toms, as it were : the seven-volume Times History of the War in South Africa (1906-1909), edited by Leo Amery, and the eight volume (Official) History of the War in South Africa (1906-1910), edited by General Maurice and others. These two massive works have dominated Boer War studies, and will remain indispensable to the historian. They incorporate, often anonymously, a vast mass of original material.
Understandably, as they were completed seventy years ago, both have their limitations.
In due course I began to read the confidential War Office files — those that survived a bizarre decision to ‘weed’ them in the 1950s — the files on which much of Amery’s and Maurice’s work had been based. I was also fortunate enough to be able to dig up, often in odd places, the private papers of most of the generals and politicians on the British side. So there was no shortage of new raw material. I stumbled on the lost archives of Sir Redvers Buller, the British Commander-in-Chief in 1899 — battle letters of Buller’s which had remained hidden under the billiard table at Downes, his house in Devon, and in Lord Lansdowne’s muniment room at Bowood; I sifted through the trunk-loads of Lord Roberts’s papers rescued by the National Army Museum from the care of his most recent biographer, David James (who claims to have burnt every scrap of paper Lord Roberts ever wrote to his wife); I discovered a Secret Journal of the war, written by the War Office Intelligence Department, running to nearly a million words; I saw the private papers of the War Minister, Lord Lansdowne, and other members of Lord Salisbury’s Cabinet. And I traced over a hundred unseen sets of letters and diaries, written by British officers and men who served in the war; these were generously lent to me by their descendants.
I was also privileged to capture on my tape-recorder the memories of fifty-two men who had actually fought in the war, the youngest of whom was eighty-six when I tracked him down.
These forays into the past were exciting and rewarding in themselves. And through them I came to see what I believe to be the main limitations of Amery’s Times History and Maurice’s Official History.
The Times History says too much. An eloquent narrative of the war, Amery’s volumes (especially the first three, of which he wrote a large part himself) also represent what he calls an ‘argument’ — many sided but always partisan. Amery was a disciple of Milner, the man chiefly responsible for making the war. Amery was also caught up in the movement for Army Reform, and committed to one side in the struggle between the two factions in the British Army (the Roberts Ring and the Wolseley Ring) which fought the Boers in the intervals between fighting each other.
The Official History says too little. All its political chapters were eliminated in draft by the Colonial Secretary, Alfred Lyttelton, for fear of offending the ex-enemy, the Boers — that is, for fear of ‘impeding the process of reconciliation’, as he recorded in a confidential minute. And, for fear of offending their friends, the War Office staff found it equally impossible to write frankly about many of the ‘regrettable incidents’ which occurred in the war.
Moreover both the Times History and the Official History share one central weakness. Few sources from the Boer side of the hill, official or private, were available to their authors.
I have been extremely fortunate in the help I have received from modern South African historians. I owe a great debt to Godfrey Le May’s incisive study British Supremacy in South Africa, 1899-1907. I have also borrowed freely from the work in Afrikaans of the Transvaal State Archivist, Dr J.H. Breytenbach, who has already completed four volumes of his monumental history of the war, based on the state archives, Die Geskiedenis van die Tweede Vryheidsoorlog. I have plundered many other works in Afrikaans, especially Dr J.A. Mouton’s study of Joubert, and Professor Johann Barnard’s seminal work on Botha, Botha op die Natalse Front, 1899-1900.
Among the new themes in this story I should like to emphasize four in particular.
First, there is a thin, golden thread running through the narrative, a thread woven by the ‘gold bugs’: the Rand millionaires who controlled the richest gold mines in the world. It has been hitherto assumed by historians that none of the gold bugs was directly concerned in making the war. But directly concerned they were. Owing to the great generosity of Sir Alfred Belt, and the directors of the Johannesburg firm of Barlow-Rand, I have had free access to the political papers of Ecksteins, the Rand subsidiary controlled, at the time of the Boer War, by Alfred Belt and Julius Wernher. I have found evidence here of an informal alliance between Sir Alfred Milner, the British High Commissioner, and the firm of Wernher-Beit, the dominant Rand mining house. It was this secret alliance, I believe, that gave Milner the strength to precipitate the war.
Second, there is a broader strand in the story involving Sir Redvers Buller, who has passed into folklore as the symbol of all that was most fatuous in the late-Victorian British army. ‘Nobody in their senses,’ a distinguished modern historian, Julian Symons, has written, ‘could possibly try to justify Buller’s military actions during the Natal campaign.’ I have made the attempt. At any rate I believe that Buller’s mishaps — and mistakes — must be seen in the context of the feud between the Roberts Ring and the Wolseley/Buller Ring. St John Brodrick, who became British War Minister in 1900, later compared the wrangles between Lord Roberts and Sir Redvers Buller to those between Lord Lucan and Lord Cardigan which precipitated the Charge of the Light Brigade. Certainly this astonishing War Office feud at the end of the nineteenth century explains much that would otherwise be inexplicable in Britain’s bungled preparations for war and her reverses during it. And in the end it was Buller, to his credit, who successfully hammered out the new tactics needed when a nineteenth-century army had to fight a twentieth-century war.
A third strand to the story involves the invisible majority of South Africans : the blacks. Contemporaries talked of the Boer War as a ‘gentleman’s war’ and a ‘white man’s war’. No generalization could be more misleading. From digging in the War Office files, and talking to war veterans, one comes to realize what an important part in the war was played by Africans. Officially absent from the armies of both sides, perhaps as many as a hundred thousand were enrolled to serve British and Boers as labourers, drivers, guides and so on. By the end of the war, nearly ten thousand Africans were serving under arms in the British forces. Many non-combatants were flogged by the Boers or shot. In Mafeking alone, more than two thousand of the African garrison under the orders of Baden-Powell, were shot by the Boers or left by Baden-Powell to die of starvation. In general it was the Africans who had to pay the heaviest price in the war and its aftermath.
A fourth strand involves the plight of the Boer civilians, women and children caught up in the guerrilla war. To deny the guerrillas food and intelligence, Lord Kitchener ordered the British army to sweep the veld clean. The farms were burnt, the stock-looted, the women and children concentrated in camps along the railway lines. Between twenty thousand and twenty-eight thousand Boer civilians died of epidemics in these ‘concentration camps’. I have found much new evidence that Kitchener’s methods of warfare, like the ruthless methods adopted by many modern armies against guerrillas, were self-defeating. The removal of civilians added to the bitterness of the guerrillas. It also freed them from trying to feed and protect their families. But whether or not Kitchener’s methods succeeded as a military policy, they proved a gigantic political blunder. The conscience of Britain was stirred by the holocaust in the camps, just as the conscience of America was stirred by the holocaust in Vietnam. And if the guerrillas in South Africa lost the war, they won the peace.
It is a pleasure, after eight years of vicarious warfare, to be able to acknowledge the generosity of numerous people in Britain and South Africa who have helped me reach the peace.
I am deeply grateful to the following owners of important family papers (listed in the references at the back of this book) who have allowed me to quote from copyright and unpublished material in their care : the Marquess of Lansdowne, the Marquess of Salisbury, the Earl Haig, Lord Allenby, Lady Lucas, Lord Methuen, the late Captain Michael Buller, the late Miss Daisy Bigge, Brigadier Shamus Hickie, Myles Hildyard, Owen Keane, Major Trotter, Harry Oppenheimer, Mrs Rosemary Parker, Mrs Frances Pym (née Gough), Mrs Mackeson-Sandbach and Mrs Mackie Niven (née Fitzpatrick).
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’.
* In spelling South African place-names I have used the contemporary forms adopted by the Official History, not the modern Afrikaans forms.
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.
Pitsani Camp (Bechuanaland border),
Mafeking (Cape Colony border) and Transvaal,
29 December 189 5 — 2 January 1896
‘Johannesburg is ready ... [this is] the big idea which makes England
dominant in Africa, in fact gives England 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. Captain 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 a 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.
For two days Jameson had carried on a running fight against the commandos. The Boers had got wind of them from the first. Jameson’s men had cut the Boer telegraph wire at Malmani, but too late. (People said afterwards it was the fault of some troopers who got drunk and cut the fence wire instead.) At first the Boers had hung on their tail, picking off stragglers. Jameson’s men had fought back as they had learnt to fight the Zulu impis: with the rattle of Maxims, the crash of shrapnel from the field-gun and the charge to the death. But the only dead were British. How could they fight mere puffs of smoke? That last night they had huddled together in a rough square formed by the ammunition carts, the ambulance wagons and the horses. The troopers fired into the darkness across their saddles.(25) At dawn Jameson sent a last laconic message to the men in Johannesburg. Though they had had two ‘scrimmages’, they were all right; but they would like a little help if it could be spared.(26)
If help didn’t come, Jameson and his officers well knew what England expected of them. This was the moment they had been trained for ever since boyhood. It was the picture of the Last Stand above the fireplace in the schoolroom and the mess and the rectory. The Gatling has jammed; the colonel, eyes uplifted, grasps his sword; the little band sings ‘God Save the Queen’; and, one by one, they fall.(27)
By eight o’clock Jameson’s little band had suffered sixty-five killed and wounded. Inspector Cazalet was hit in the chest, Major Coventry in the spine, Captain Barry was dying.(28) And then reality at last broke in to Jameson’s world of make-believe. Someone lifted a white flag — not a very good white flag, but the best they could do in the circumstances. It was made from the white apron of an African servant girl.(29) The firing ceased. From all around them, the Boers rose up out of the ground, ‘like ants’, as one officer put it.(30) Most of the Boers were dressed in ordinary brown working clothes, but a few had come straight from New Year festivities and had slung their rifles and bandoliers over their black Sunday best. The Boers disarmed the British, assisted the wounded and seized the baggage. In Bobby White’s black tin box were found the code telegrams from Rhodes in the Cape and from the other plotters in Johannesburg. There was a spare copy of the ‘women-and-children’ letter, and the code book to go with the code telegrams.(31) It lay among the empty champagne bottles.(32)
The humiliation was complete when the dead were counted before burial. The British had lost sixteen, the Boers one man — one less than they had lost at Majuba.
Weeping, Jameson was led away in a cart to the gaol at Pretoria.(33)
In the notes, I have given unpublished sources (including the government confidential prints), a two-, three- or four-letter abbreviation. Italics are reserved for published sources. Full stops separate each reference.
1. Tels nos 73, 77, 79, 80, 81, 82, 26-28 Dec 1895, C 8380/195-8
2. Jameson’s ev, House Paper 311 nos 4513, 4518, 4594-60. Garret etc. African Crisis 86 (and see 76)
3. Troopers’ accounts in Times 24, 25 Feb 29 1896. EGO
4. Phillipps With Rimington 2-6
5. Garrett 90. Hole Jameson Raid 291. Colvin Life of Jameson II, 64
6. Fitzpatrick Transvaal 98. Phillips Some Reminiscences 141-2
7. Colvin I, 266, 272-82: Rhodes-Beit Aug 1895 (cy) PC
8. Willoughby’s official report. Fitzpatrick Transvaal 411-21
9. Standard and Diggers News 18 Jan 1896 C 8380/175, 273
10. Jameson’s ev, House Paper 311 nos 4513 and 4596. Hole Jameson Raid 145-7
11. Colvin I, 13-14
12. Taken from Coventry’s speech at Mafeking. Jameson’s was similar. See Standard and Diggers News 4, 11 and 18 Jan 1896
13. C 8380 (no 61) 191-2. Times 1 Jan 1896. Hole 222-3
14. Hole 223-4
15. Willoughby’s ev, House Paper 311 5512-5548
16. c 8380/185-8
17. C 8380 nos 863-90, 906-26 and app p. 198. Hole 125-6, 137, 151-2
18. Garrett 28-9
19. Jamesons ev, House Paper 311/4605
20. See for example Col Sandbach-Gen. Chapman 23 Nov 1899 in Sand
21. Hole 15-16, 79, 45-6
22. Heany’s ev, House Paper 311/5898. Willoughby’s official report loc cit. Hole 154-5
23. Trooper H. Acton-Adams diary, The Critic Dec 1933 Jun 1934 (Rhodesia National Archives)
24. Trooper Acton-Adams loc cit.
25. Willoughby’s official report loc cit. Hole 172-9
26. Trooper Acton-Adams loc cit. Standard and Diggers News 4, 11, 18 Jan 1896
27. Hole 179
28. The scene was particularly well known to Jameson since the death of Wilson on the Shangani Patrol in 1892
29. Willoughby’s official report loc cit 418
30. Hole 188. Standard and Diggers News 4, 11, 18 Jan 1896
31. C 8390/170. Standard and Diggers News 22 Feb 1896
32. Standard and Diggers News 18 Jan 1896
33. Jameson’s Heroic Charge 25. CO 879/501/927. Hole 292