‘If only the Uitlanders stand firm on the formula “no rest without reform”,
we shall do the trick, my boy ... And by the soul of St Jingo
they get a fair amount of bucking up from us all one way and another...’
Milner to his colleague,
the Imperial Secretary George Fiddes,
3 January 1899
Milner had returned from England in buoyant spirits, despite General Butler’s astounding decision, while Milner was away, to reject the first Uitlander petition.[1] (Butler ‘is really superb’ was Milner’s comment. To have him ‘out-Krugering Kruger’ was just ‘too Gilbertian’.)[2] Fortunately, the Uitlanders had paid no attention to Butler. And Milner was ‘well pleased’, he told his friend with the results of his own trip to England, even if he had ‘hardly a moment’s’ holiday[3] (no mention, of course, of the five days’ bicycling with Cécile). He had got a wink, so to speak, from Chamberlain. And he had managed, in his quiet way, to tell a number of influential people about his ‘little corner of the imperial chess-board’.[4] Now he heard the latest developments on the Rand from Percy Fitzpatrick’s own lips.
That evening, 31 March, Fitzpatrick had arrived in Cape Town hot-foot from the Johannesburg train. He was exhausted, so he said, by the strain of keeping the negotiations with Smuts ‘on the right lines’ — making sure they failed. But there in Milner’s bleak, grey, gaslit study in Government House the two men talked far into the night, as Fitzpatrick poured out the story of the Great Deal.[5]
First, Kruger was offering direct inducements to the mining houses, concerned with preferential mining rights and more acceptable mining taxes. Second, he was offering a major concession to the Uitlanders in general. He promised to recommend to the Raad that they should restore to the Uitlanders their right to vote after five years’ residence in the Transvaal — although this was only to date from the time they applied for Boer citizenship.
In exchange, the Rand firms were required to make some concessions to Kruger: most important, they must acquiesce in the continuation of the hated dynamite monopoly (Kruger’s source of Transvaal-made explosives). They were also being asked for pledges on three political matters: to back the Transvaal’s stand against the claims of the Cape Coloured and ‘Coolie’ (Indian) traders, to damp down the agitation of the anti-Boer Press, and to repudiate those ‘political mischief-makers’, the South African League.[6]
It was ‘astonishing’, Kruger’s offer, everyone agreed. But could the old fox be trusted? In London, Chamberlain gave him the benefit of the doubt. ‘My own opinion is that the Government of the SAR [South African Republic; that is, Transvaal] are anxious to settle . . . their financial difficulties, the strength of the South African League, their position with regard to the Dynamite Monopoly, the loss of support from Germany, the altered position of England since Fashoda — all make in favour of a settlement...’[7] Milner instinctively took the opposite view.[8] Now it turned out that Fitzpatrick, without any prompting from Milner (and only a few encouraging messages passed by way of Greene, the British agent in Pretoria), had taken precisely the same line as Milner.
The Great Deal, said Fitzpatrick, might be genuine as far as the Boer civil servants, like Smuts, were concerned. But Kruger himself had no intention of giving a fair deal to the Uitlanders. And, anyway, the Volksraad would never agree to the concession, whatever Kruger said. In short, the offer was a ‘soof’, as Fitzpatrick had explained in a speech to a private meeting of all the Rand leaders.[9]
His own first step had been to sound the views of his principals, Alfred Beit and Julius Wernher, and here there was no disagreement. Early in March, Wernher went to see Lord Selborne, Under-Secretary at the Colonial Office, and Wernher’s view coincided with Fitzpatrick’s: he was puzzled by the terms of the offer, he said; he thought part of the explanation was that Dr Leyds, the Transvaal’s Foreign Secretary, had been rebuffed on his recent travels in Holland, France and Germany with the words ‘why don’t you settle with these people?’ But for precisely the same reason as Fitzpatrick, Wernher believed that ‘nothing would come of the overture’.[10]
The next step was to get agreement with the other great firms on the Rand, especially Rhodes’s firm, Consolidated Goldfields, whose head office, like Wernher-Beit’s, was in London. It was Rhodes’s firm, as Milner expected, that gave Fitzpatrick the greatest headache. The firm had sacked their engineer, Wybergh, for the part he had played in the Edgar affair as President of the South African League. And in London, when the chairman of the firm, Lord Harris, came to see Chamberlain a few days after Wernher had seen Selborne, the atmosphere was chilly. Earlier that year Rhodes had flirted with the idea of giving Kruger a loan. Now Lord Harris told Chamberlain that on their part they were inclined to accept the terms of the Great Deal. Chamberlain’s reply was blunt: they could go ahead, of course; it was their own business; but he ought to know what the British public would say — ‘the Financiers had sold their cause and their compatriots, and sold them cheap...’[11]
Meanwhile, Fitzpatrick had broadened the base of his campaign. To unite the mass of the Uitlanders behind the capitalists, he addressed a meeting of twenty-four Rand men, including the leaders of the South African League, at a private dinner on the Rand, and explained the course of the negotiations.[12]
Perhaps the political support that he had thus demonstrated tipped the balance in Fitzpatrick’s favour when he came to deal with the other capitalists’ representatives in the Rand, including ex-supporters of Kruger like J.B. Robinson. At any rate, by 27 March they had agreed on a joint resolution. The keystone of this was the demand for the restoration of the original five-year franchise; this must be retrospective — be offered at once to all Uitlanders who could prove five or more years of residence. Despite opposition from Rhodes’s local manager, the new ‘Declaration of Rights’ was handed over to the Boer authorities by the three firms negotiating on behalf of the Rand, before Fitzpatrick gracefully caused the negotiations to collapse.
Such was the inside story of the rise and fall of Kruger’s Great Deal. To Milner these details came as a revelation: not only that Fitzpatrick was working along precisely the same lines as himself, but that Beit and Wernher had backed him at every stage. In reply, Milner was perfectly frank with Fitzpatrick. He told him, according to a note Fitzpatrick wrote to Wernher that week, ‘that in you and Mr Beit he has found quite a new and astonishing kind of millionaire — men with some higher conception than the piling up of money’. He congratulated him on the ‘consummate statesmanship’ with which he had handled — and broken off — the negotiations. And he admitted that, even in his ‘most hopeful moments’, he had not considered it possible that they should have been able to present a unanimous front ‘in such a strong attitude’.[13]
Milner then opened his heart to Fitzpatrick in a way that both astonished and dazzled the Uitlander. Milner explained that the next phase of their campaign would lie with the Press in Britain. The rejection of the first petition by Butler had been a ‘terrible mistake’, which Fitzpatrick and his friends had, by ‘an effort which is beyond all praise, turned to the best possible account. Now all hinges upon the treatment accorded to the [second] petition and that depends on the Press.’ He begged Fitzpatrick to back him up there. And then he repeated to Fitzpatrick what he had told only his most intimate friends: ‘The biggest real danger I have is that Chamberlain might get the idea I want to rush him.’ If Milner himself tried to ‘touch up’ the Press, Joe might get this idea, and he would ‘see me damned before he moved a finger’. So it was left to Fitzpatrick to ‘do the Press’; he must try to ‘get before the House and the public the mass of damning evidence that was in the petitions.... You must not allow the petition to fizzle.’[14]
Next, Milner discussed the possible replies of the imperial government. If the new petition was rejected, he would resign at once; but, fortunately, this possibility need not be considered. At the opposite extreme was the chance that the imperial government would choose to send an ultimatum threatening war; but this would only be done if publication of the petition ‘should so fire public opinion as to make it imperative’. The third possibility was the most likely. Chamberlain would accept the petition, but postpone an ultimatum till Kruger had had more time to consider a climb-down.[15]
Milner begged Fitzpatrick to make a ‘heroic effort’ to hold together his new Reform Movement until they were ready for the ‘great day of reckoning’. It might take time to get the imperial government ‘up to the mark in principle’; and then they must be ready to strike ‘within 24 hours — swift and instant’. Whatever the Uitlanders did — by holding protest meetings or anything else — they must keep within the law.
Milner concluded with one last, disarming indiscretion: ‘Remember, it is the chance of a lifetime. You have got something now which you may never have again — a man here who is with you heart and soul — as keen as the keenest of you. I have just got letters from Fiddes and Greene [the Imperial Secretary and the British agent in Pretoria] — very excited.... I have to pour cold water on them and it breaks their hearts. They think I am not keen enough, but it is not that — I am not going to let Joe think I want to rush him.’[16]
The next five weeks were a nerve-racking period for Milner. As he had predicted, British public opinion did not lash itself into a frenzy over the Uitlanders. The British Press, it is true, took a broadly anti-Kruger line — even the Liberal Daily Chronicle, well known for its anti-imperialist views. But South African affairs did not long command the headlines in any party’s newspapers. And every Tuesday, when the mailbag reached Cape Town with the London papers of three weeks earlier, Milner was forced to admit that what to himself and his staff was an ‘all over-shadowing nightmare’ — the threat to British supremacy in South Africa — was in England still a ‘matter of faint interest exciting only a very small degree of attention’. How odd, he told Selborne, that this should be so. After all, people should think of the ‘enormous material value of the thing involved’ (presumably the importance of South Africa’s £700 million gold industry for the British economy) and also the ‘plainness of the moral issues’.[17] But there it was. No doubt Chamberlain would eventually publish a Blue Book with all the damning evidence against the Boers — including his own public despatches.
All Milner could do in the meantime was to keep the Uitlanders ‘pegging away’. ‘The game has been played admirably so far,’ he told Greene, ‘and with steady persistence’ the Uitlanders could expect to win ‘almost universal support’ in Great Britain.[18] In effect, this meant that Greene had to keep the pot boiling on the Rand and keep it well publicized. Hence Greene encouraged Fitzpatrick to channel the Uitlanders’ grievances into public protest — and Fitzpatrick needed no encouragement. From mid-April there were mass meetings at mines all along the Rand to demand restoration of the old five-year franchise, and Fitzpatrick planned to organize delegates for an ‘Uitlander Parliament’, not to negotiate a settlement, but to attract still more publicity for their plight.[19]
Once again, the most dangerous threat to this massive exercise in public relations came from Cecil Rhodes and his firm, Consolidated Goldfields. Despite their agreement to remain neutral, expressed in their having combined with Wernher-Beit in rejecting Kruger’s ‘Great Deal’, the local directors passed a resolution censuring the meeting held by the miners in the recreation hall at the Village Main Reef Mine. They made no secret of their opposition to Fitzpatrick’s policy of feeding the unrest; and they wrote to the directors Jubilee Mine to persuade them to censure their own business manager for taking the platform at one of the miners’ meetings. ‘Nice little beast,’ retorted Fitzpatrick in private to Wernher and Beit in London.[20] Meanwhile, also from London, there were new tales of Rhodes’s personal antics; at a dinner party attended by Arthur Balfour, he had spent the evening singing Kruger’s praises, according to one of Milner’s old colleagues in Whitehall, saying that Kruger was a splendid old man, who had ‘defended his wicket against all comers’.[21]
As tell as ‘getting things “forrarder” locally’, Milner had to work up the pressure on the British Cabinet to persuade them to accept the second petition. Hence the box-loads of secret despatches to Joe Chamberlain that the Wednesday mail-boat carried back to Whitehall. They were masterly documents — the first set at any rate. No one could have guessed the intensity of Milner’s commitment to British intervention, when they read these urbane and detached despatches. For example, in his despatch welcoming the second Uitlander petition, and the consequent ‘revival of the Reform Movement’ temporarily extinguished by the Raid, he expressed surprise that this revival had taken place so soon, and declared it was still ‘too early to say whether it is a passing and more or less fictitious agitation, or the expression of a deep and widespread popular sentiment’. He praised the ‘statesmanship of the mining’ magnates’, yet modestly declared that he did not know who was their leader, but felt that there was ‘some wise head or heads directing their action’. He asked no more than that the Reform movement should not be discouraged by Britain’s ruling out interference at any time in the future under her moral right as a Paramount Power.[22]
In his next secret despatch, he took up the slogan ‘franchise first’ as the point on which all Reformers were united. Privately, Milner well knew that to take up the franchise was to place a time-bomb under Kruger, as it would in due course mean the end of the Boer majority in the Transvaal.[23] But in putting his case officially to Chamberlain, Milner affected to believe that this reform might only result in the election to the Raad of ‘Boer members of a more liberal type’, that might be ‘equally and perhaps even more useful’ than the election of Uitlanders. The Uitlanders’ franchise was, however, he added a ‘stirring battle cry’ which would excite sympathy all over the Empire — as opposed to the grievances of Cape boy cab-drivers, Indian traders and so on, about which it would be ‘impossible to get the world generally to take any interest’.[24]
By mid-April, as the British public continued to take no interest in any South African issue — even the franchise — Milner’s despatches became less urbane. He drew attention to the public meetings of working-class Uitlanders then taking place up and down the Rand. He warned Chamberlain that it could be a ‘serious, perhaps irretrievable mistake if we did not take the present opportunity of definitely ranging ourselves on the side of the Reformers’. He conceded that there was a risk of war. But then the Boers would yield to nothing less than the threat of war, perhaps not even to that . . . [But] If we succeed we shall get rid of this nightmare for ever.’ And he threw down a challenge to Chamberlain (with a hint of blackmail): ‘What has become of the intervention of the High Commissioner . . . which was certainly contemplated, if not absolutely promised’ at the time of the Raid, ‘and which my predecessor was allowed to postpone but never instructed to abandon?’[25]
Fortunately for Milner, these taunts brought no response from Joe, for the despatch took a fortnight to reach London, and by this time a new phase of the struggle was about to open. By then even Chamberlain himself had become disturbed by the lack of public interest in his South African policy, and an urgent request was sent to Milner for a despatch publication in Chamberlain’s forthcoming Blue Book.[26]
It was the chance that Milner had been waiting for. Not for nothing had he once been the Assistant Editor of The Pall Mall Gazette. A few days later he cabled back one of the most flamboyant despatches ever sent by a Viceroy, one that came to be known as the ‘Helot Despatch’. ‘The case for intervention is overwhelming.... The spectacle of thousands of British subjects kept permanently in the position of helots ... calling vainly to Her Majesty’s Government for redress ... a ceaseless stream of malignant lies about the intentions of the British government.’[27]
For months Milner had been longing to rub ‘some vitriol’ into one of his public despatches;[28] but the part he had been forced to play had precluded it. Now, it was his job to ‘break the crockery’, as he told Philip Gell, even if it would seem a strange metamorphosis for the ‘calm and conciliatory diplomatist’ to be the ‘firebrand’ spurring the British public to action. He saw no choice. Everything depended on arousing the public — on ‘stiffening the wobblers’, as he put it.[29] He alone could do the job. By nailing his own colours to the mast, he would also nail the government to his own policy.
It was 9 May when the British Cabinet was expected to decide whether to commit themselves to intervention. Milner’s staff at Government House had been on tenterhooks for days. It so happened that the drains at Government House had chosen this moment to give trouble. What with that, and the endless cold downpours of rain — for winter had now come to the Cape — it proved a difficult time.
Milner could hardly snatch a moment away from the endless slog at the official boxes. The sheer quantity of work was ‘really too awful for words’, declared the faithful Ozzy, his Private Secretary.[30] The Chief would have to sell the race-horse he’d bought in a moment of euphoria, and later christened ‘Chamberlain’ (you couldn’t rush him); no hope of having time to go racing.[31] And the bicycle Milner had shipped out from England (chosen for him by Cécile) had been put away, sad relic, in Government House.[32]
Milner himself admitted to being ‘rather knocked up’ by the strain of these last few days, according to his diary. He could not sleep properly; his heart seemed to be playing up. Still, he had bravely taken up a new sport — archery. He was given a few lessons by Mrs Hanbury Williams, the wife of his Military Secretary; she fancied herself as a toxophilite. He did not show any particular promise. But he got a breath of air, as the arrows hummed across the lawn of Government House and plumped into the red, white and blue concentric rings of the straw target. It was the long hours he was cooped up at this desk that ‘really killed him’.[33]
What if Chamberlain failed to persuade the Cabinet to accept the call for intervention on the side of the Uitlanders? ‘I will take risks — big risks — but not silly ones,’ Milner had confided to Fitzpatrick a month before. ‘If I go smash ... I can go back to something else.’[34] Perhaps his mind was already turning to what he would do if he was recalled, like those earlier advocates of a forward policy in South Africa. He might give up politics altogether — by now he had saved enough to live on — and live a life of ‘contemplative obscurity’. That was one of the great ambitions of his life, as he had decided years before, when he had stopped in Athens (it was after being rejected by Margot Asquith) and wandered alone at the foot of the Parthenon.[35]
The morning that Milner expected to hear the Cabinet’s decision, he took his ADC, charming, pink-cheeked Bendor Belgrave, for a ride up the path that led from Cecil Rhodes’s eyrie, Groote Schuur, towards the heights of Table Mountain. The dismal weather of the last few days had suddenly evaporated.[36] A cold south-easter scraped bare the grey flanks of the mountain. At their feet lay the whole Cape peninsula. It was one of Rhodes’s favourite haunts, the kind of place where a man can mistake himself for a colossus.
When they returned, the cypher cable from Chamberlain had arrived: ‘The despatch is approved. We have adopted your suggestion.’[37] It was as brief and as blunt as that.
So he had won that round after all. The Cabinet had agreed to intervene — peacefully at present — on the side of the Uitlanders. But Milner was allowed no respite. A fortnight later he heard of another peaceful intervention: by Kruger’s allies. Hofmeyr and Schreiner, leaders of the Cape Afrikaners, proposed that Milner should go and meet Kruger and try to settle matters face to face; President Steyn offered Bloemfontein, the Free State capital, as the meetingplace. Milner regarded the conference as premature. He was waiting eagerly for the publication of the Blue Book containing Chamberlain’s official reply to the Uitlanders’ second petition — and to his own ‘Helot Despatch’. He would have liked to postpone negotiations till after this Blue Book was published — and both the British public and Kruger were properly briefed about the seriousness of the situation. Now it was the Blue Book that would have to be postponed. If they had rejected Steyn’s invitation, ‘it would have been too likely to lead to an outcry both here and in England that we wanted war’.
Milner promised Chamberlain to be ‘studiously moderate’ at Bloemfontein. But he wrote to Philip Gell with a hint of triumph. When the ‘Helot Despatch’ was published, ‘never again would people reproach him with discretion.’[38]
Head of chapter M-Fiddes 3 Jan 1899, Mil (dep 69)
1. Butler-C 4 Jan 1899, CO 417/259. W. Butler 400-3
2. M-Selborne 31 Jan 1899, MP I, 301
3. M-Selborne 23 Jan 1899, MP I, 301. M-Fiddes 23 Dec 1898, MP I, 299. M-Bertha Synge 11 Feb 1899, MP I, 302. M-Iwan-Müller 28 Nov 1898, Mil 192
4. M-Rosebery 12 Dec 1898, Rose Box 75/160-4
5. M’s diary 31 Mar 1899, Mil (dep 69). Fitzpatrick-Wernher 6 Apr 1899, Fitz. Menpes 99
6. Fitzpatrick-Greene, M-C 3 Mar 1899, Mil 13 (SA 27). MP I, 319-32. See also MP I, 329. Fitzpatrick Memories 171-4. Marais 248-56
7. M-C 4 Mar 1899, CO 879 (Af 572 11). C’s min 8 Mar 1899 etc, C0417/259/557
8. M-Greene 14 Mar 1899, Mil 13 (SA 27)
9. Fitzpatrick-Greene 3 Mar 1899, MS cit. Copy of Fitzpatrick’s speech Mil 13 (SA 27)
10. Selborne’s min 9 Mar 1899, CO 417/259/561. Marais 250-1
11. M-C 11 Mar and C’s min 14 Mar 1899, CO 417/259. Marais 252-3
12. Greene-M 18 Mar 1899 and typescript copy of speech Mil 13 (SA 27). Marais 253
13. Fitzpatrick-Wernher 6 Apr 1899, Fitz. See M-Fiddes 1 Apr 1899, MP I, 331. And see M’s earlier comments in M-Selborne 8 Mar 1899, MP I, 324-5; and later note M-Selborne 14 Jun 1899, MP I, 437
14. Fitzpatrick-Wernher 6 Apr 1899, Fitz
15. Ibid
16. Ibid. Cf M-Fiddes 3 Jan 1899, Mil 45 (SA 37)
17. M-Selborne 5 May 1899, MP I, 348
18. M-Greene 3 Apr 1899, MP I, 345-6
19. Greene-M 5 May 1898, C 9345. Marais 257, 263-4. Fitzpatrick Transvaal 360, 364
20. Fitzpatrick-Wernher I, 8 May 1899, Fitz
21. E. Hamilton diary 1899, BM 48764/99-102
22. M-C 29 Mar 1899, CO 417/260/9383-5, 9398-9
23. M-Rely Hutchinson 8 May 1899, MP I, 358: ‘before the bomb bursts’
24. M-C CO 417/26o/9969
25. M-C 19 Apr 1899, CO 417/260/11467. Wilde 102-3
26. MP I, 347-8. Wilde 97-8. Marais 266
27. C 9345/209-12 edited version. MP I, 349-53 gives full text
28. M-Selborne 5 Apr 1899, MP I, 348
29. M-Gell 18 Jun and nd 1899, Gell 533, 534. M-Selborne 24 May 1899, MP I, 400
30. O. Walrond-Gell 26 Apr, 7 May 1899, 1 Mar 1898. Gell 502, 529, 530
31. Walrond-M 28 Dec 1898, Mil 31 (SA 25)
32. M’s diary 13 Apr 1897, Mil (dep 67). No refs in the diary for 1899
33. M’s diary 28 Apr, 1, 2, 5 May 1899, Mil (dep 69)
34. Fitzpatrick-Wernher 6 Apr 1899, Fitz
35. M’s diary Apr-May 1891, Mil (dep 59)
36. M’s diary 9 May 1899, Mil (dep 69)
37. C-M (tel) 8 May 1899, Mil 14 (SA 28)
38. M-Gell 22 May 1899, Gell