‘The conference goes on its rather weary way . . .
meanwhile our Uitlanders will lose patience, and upset the game.
We preach them the doctrine of faith in my chief, and of patience for some time after the conference is over ...’
Major Hanbury Williams
(Milner’s Military Secretary) to British Military Intelligence
from Bloemfontein 31 May 1899
The special train left the siding in Kroonstad a couple of hours before dawn on Tuesday 30 May. Then it resumed its journey steaming south down the single-track railway into the heart of the Free State. Before it reached the Zand River, the sun rose out of the mist, painting the mealie patches a rusty yellow and wiping the hoar frost off the metal sleepers.
It was a winter dawn, the hour when the veld shivered like a Canadian prairie. A silent landscape, except for the hiss and rattle of the steel wheels and the honk of the engine. An empty landscape, too, except for the inevitable African children watching the train go by: two wooden carriages and a ribbon of dun-coloured vapour trailing from the tall smoke-stack and cow-catcher back to the horizon.[1]
You could see this was no ordinary special. The engine was flying three flags: green stripes each side of the cow-catcher, orange on the boiler. They were the stripes of the Transvaal vierkleur and the Free State flag respectively. The same flags saluted the train at each station it passed, even the smallest wayside halt.[2]
In the first saloon carriage, dressed in his usual baggy black suit and hidden behind drawn blinds, sat President Kruger with his staff, including the State Attorney, Jan Smuts. Kruger’s eyes blinked painfully behind his small gold spectacles. He would need a carriage closed against the cold wind when they reached Bloemfontein.[3]
At Vereeniging, the frontier post, they had received on the previous evening a parting address from members of the Transvaal Executive. Kruger replied with one of his homely parables. The present franchise law, he said, was like one of those farmers’ dams that only let through the clean water: ‘The clean water is the trusty Uitlanders and through our laws they shall come to join us, and the dirty water is the untrustworthy Uitlanders; they shall stay outside.’ Kruger firmly repeated that he desired ‘peace not war’ and he ‘yearned from his heart that the Conference, now planned to secure peace, should not fail’.[4]
The President had always been able to respond to a crisis. Now he was like an old war-horse scenting battle. Although he had accepted President Steyn’s invitation to come to Bloemfontein for the conference, he was pessimistic about the outcome. Not that the truth about Milner was yet guessed by the Boers or other Afrikaners. The fiery ‘Helot Despatch’ was still locked away in Chamberlain’s red box at the Colonial Office. But Kruger was intensely suspicious of Chamberlain, and Milner was one of Chamberlain’s men. Kruger remembered the occasion in 1877, when he had met Sir Bartle Frere, then British High Commissioner. Kruger had then discovered, he said, that there were two separate men called Frere: one Frere, the charming diplomat with whom he spoke; the other Frere, the man who was planning to subdue the Transvaal. Now, in 1899, as Smuts put it, the same question could be asked of Milner as of Sir Bartle Frere: ‘Which Milner do you mean?’[5]
In the current crisis, Kruger leant heavily on the support of his young State Attorney. As far as Smuts could judge, Kruger now believed ‘war is unavoidable or will soon become so — not because there is any cause, but because the enemy is brazen enough not to wait for a cause’. Smuts, by contrast, thought the English would probably not be so stupid as to launch an ‘unmotivated’ war. ‘If England,’ he wrote to his old friend and political patron at the Cape, Jan Hofmeyr, ‘should venture into the ring with Afrikanerdom without a formally good excuse, her cause in South Africa would be finished.[6]
He did not believe that the Uitlanders’ franchise could possibly give England a casus belli. He imagined England was ‘stoking up’ unrest on the Rand in order to ‘make us lose our heads and so make a wrong move’. He thought that Chamberlain was understandably terrified of the current of Afrikaner solidarity sweeping the whole sub-continent. Still, he found the general situation very ‘obscure and puzzling’.[7] He implored his Afrikaner allies in the Cape to try to persuade the British government to stop harassing the Transvaal.
In the event it was Smuts, not Milner, whom the Cape Afrikaners had tried to persuade. For weeks they had begged Smuts to placate the British government by making concessions to the Uitlanders. ‘Do endeavour, my dear brother,’ wrote William Schreiner, the Cape Prime Minister since the defeat of Rhodes’s party in 1898, ‘to secure reasonable concessions. If you have done that it will be an immense service to South Africa. Imagine the joy with which Rhodes and Co. would welcome the fact, if the President and Raad should be stung into an attitude of refusing to do what is reasonable. . . .’[8] From Jan Hofmeyr, Smuts received a shower of cabled advice: ‘time for pouring oil on stormy waters and not on fire. Do not delay ... situation is serious and time precious.’ Hofmeyr also sent Smuts a warning: he must ‘cherish no illusion about Colony’. Hofmeyr meant that if hostilities did break out Smuts must not expect the Cape Afrikaners to ‘rush en masse to arms’, especially as ‘most of them know nothing about the bearing of arms’.[9]
As Smuts oscillated between the conciliatory mood of his friends at the Cape and the pessimism of his own venerable chief, the two Cape statesmen stepped up their peace offensive. Schreiner begged Smuts to use ‘infinite patience’ at the conference. He must persuade Kruger to improve his offer; recently Kruger had promised the Uitlanders the franchise after nine instead of fourteen years.[10] Smuts agreed to try. But doubts about Chamberlain’s real motives still haunted him.
Suppose the whole conference were to be a sham, a piece of political theatre arranged by Chamberlain for the benefit of audiences at home and in the colonies? If that was the case, why humiliate themselves by making concessions? Indeed, they had already humiliated themselves. By the London Convention, England had specifically bound herself not to meddle in the internal affairs of the State. Now Chamberlain was sending Milner to Bloemfontein to wag his finger at Kruger for his supposed ill-treatment of the Uitlanders.
Smuts returned again to the overwhelming question: did Chamberlain really intend to try to reannex the Transvaal, quite regardless of public opinion? Was it to be war? Then the ‘sooner the better’. His feelings boiled over. ‘Our volk throughout South Africa must be baptized with the baptism of blood and fire before they can be admitted among the great peoples of the world.’ And they would win. ‘Either we shall be exterminated or we shall fight our way out ... and when I think of the great fighting qualities that our people possess, I cannot see why we should be exterminated.’[11]
Yet war seemed a world away as the special steamed into the station at Bloemfontein. It arrived punctually at ten o’clock. The whole town was en fête, as though the crisis was over. A triumphal arch spanned the main street. A great white banner draped the station: ‘God leide uwe beraadslagingen’ — ‘God direct your counsels’. In the place of honour beside the Transvaal’s vierkleur was the Union Jack.[12]
Kruger shuffled from the train, peered through his gold spectacles, and began his reply to the address of welcome. I shall give ‘everything, everything, everything’ for peace, he said, grimly repeating the Dutch word alles. But if ‘they touch my independence, I shall resist’.[13]
The same dawn that found Kruger’s special train steaming south to Bloemfontein found a second special, flying two Union jacks beside the cow-catcher, steaming north to the same destination.[14]
Sir Alfred Milner had woken half an hour earlier after a shaky night in the front carriage of the train. He looked at his watch. It was only six; the sky was still hardly distinguishable from the veld, but the train was already approaching De Aar Junction. At De Aar he was to meet, secretly, Percy Fitzpatrick’s closest political ally from the Rand, H.C. Hull, an Uitlander solicitor. He would reassure Hull. HMG really did mean business this time.[15]
In fact, what were Chamberlain’s own aims in the coming crisis? It was a question that preoccupied Milner and his Uitlander allies quite as much as Kruger and Smuts — and is puzzling even today. Milner knew the official (if private) answer. Since that crucial cabinet meeting on 9 May, both Chamberlain and the government were committed to Milner’s policy of imperial intervention on behalf of the Uitlanders[16] — of ‘turning the screw’ on the old President till a ‘climb-down’ was achieved.[17]
But what did Chamberlain mean by a ‘climb-down’? British demands — restoration of the five-year franchise, with a larger minority of seats in the Raad allocated to the Rand — might give the British Uitlanders individual political equality. It would not give them immediate collective supremacy. No one knew how many British Uitlanders there were in the Transvaal, nor how many of them would opt for Transvaal citizenship.[18] So the peaceful take-over of Kruger’s state, on behalf of the Empire, might not be accomplished for years — not till after Milner’s term as High Commissioner had expired. Would Chamberlain allow Milner to stiffen his demands? Not if Kruger conceded the five-year franchise, Milner had reason to believe. Chamberlain aimed at a diplomatic coup for himself, but only a limited settlement for the Uitlanders. It was all British public opinion would accept.[19]
It was Chamberlain’s dependence on public opinion that filled Milner with a frustration bordering on despair. Of course, it was not Chamberlain’s fault, he knew that. Joe was ‘magnificent’, he assured one of the Cabinet — a real ‘imperial statesman’.[20] But British party politics, as he confessed to other, still closer friends, were ‘rotten’.[21] He explained that ‘for really big and crucial things, the weakness and the compromise, which it [party politics] involves, even with the strongest government, must ruin any settlement.’[22] Milner himself had no intention of compromising with Kruger. He had committed himself ‘heart and soul’ to the Uitlanders. The game was the ‘great game for mastery in South Africa’. He intended to win.[23]
His plan was t0 annex the Transvaal. He would rule it as a Crown Colony, much as his old chief, Cromer, ruled Egypt. It was all part of the larger game of federating the white Empire. He would achieve ‘a place in history as big as the man who made the American Constitution, or the authors of the United Germany’.[24] These were the dreams of Milner’s life and he saw no reason to abandon them now because of one obstinate (and obsolete) old man in South Africa. But how to prevent Chamberlain ‘wobbling’ and ruining everything by compromise? A delicate tactical plan, whose object had to be kept as secret from Chamberlain as from Kruger, was taking shape in Milner’s mind.
Chamberlain wanted a ‘climb-down’ by Kruger leading to a settlement. Milner wanted a war leading to annexation. But these opposite strategies could be served by the same tactics. Chamberlain would agree to Milner turning the screw progressively tighter until Kruger climbed down. Milner would argue that to get a peaceful settlement they must first send out enough troops to frighten Kruger. Together the two screws — increased political demands and increased British garrisons — would precipitate the war. This was, in essence, the scenario that Milner had designed.[25]
Hence the Bloemfontein conference was not, as many people later came to believe, staged by Milner as a piece of political theatre, a sham conference he intended should fail. On the contrary, it was Milner’s first step, according to his agreement with Chamberlain, in ‘screwing’ (Milner’s phrase) Kruger.[26] At this stage, Milner would pitch his demands low enough — he would be ‘studiously moderate’, as he had promised Chamberlain. But once he had Kruger publicly seeking a settlement, the screw would tighten till it became unbearable.
Such were Milner’s ideas. It was a trap for old Kruger out of which there was no escape, except to precipitate a hopeless war — unless, horrible thought, Kruger picked up the offer of the five-year franchise and accepted a settlement there and then.
The special train had by now left De Aar junction far behind and was toiling upwards to Naauwpoort, astride the main watershed of the northern Cape, nearly five thousand feet above sea-level. The last time he had come that way — on a trip to Basutoland — he had found the Great Karoo green with rain.[27] But now look at the veld! The grass was burnt grey by sun and frost; there would be no forage for the burghers’ horses till September. Well, no doubt that was all to the good. No forage meant no war — no invasion by the Boers, at any rate.
From Colesberg, it was downhill all the way to the Orange River and the frontier. The train steamed into Bloemfontein at five o’clock, true to the minute. President Steyn welcomed them much as he had welcomed President Kruger seven hours earlier: with a twenty-one-gun salute of detonators under the rails, and ‘God Save the Queen’. Milner sprang down from the train, a clean-shaven, debonair figure in a morning suit and a grey topper. South Africa seemed to be at his feet. Here was the man, said the Boer newspapers, who would go down into history as one of ‘the greatest of Englishmen’. He could bring ‘peace with honour’ to South Africa.[28]
Bloemfontein (‘Flowers-in-the-Springs’) was then a delightful place, with jacarandas lining the main street and a picturesque old British fort built on a commanding kopje. Its wealth was based on the single-track railway from the Cape to the Rand completed in 1892.[29] Appropriately, the conference was to be held beside the railway station — in the only room with a round table large enough for the dozen men of the two delegations.[30]
When proceedings opened on Wednesday 31 May the omens seemed encouraging. President Steyn made a joke, perhaps not intentionally. He introduced the two men with ‘this, Sir Alfred, is Mr Kruger, of whom you have probably read in the newspapers....’ Kruger did what was expected of him, playing the fool and digging Milner in the ribs, according to the papers, ‘with many hoarse salutes of affection and respect’.[31]
But despite Steyn’s goodwill, Kruger’s good humour and Milner’s good manners, there was to be no meeting of minds at Bloemfontein.
The conference, according to Milner’s Military Secretary, was like a ‘palaver with a refractory Chief’.[32] That was hardly the way Milner would have described it. Whatever miscalculations he had made, he prided himself on not having underrated the old man at the other side of the round table. Kruger was an anachronism — and a giant. Yet Milner planned to undermine the giant with the franchise. He would force Kruger to disgorge a ‘substantial and immediate’ instalment of political power to the Uitlanders. Then, and only for a short respite, would the old beast be allowed to regain his feet.
Throughout the first day of the conference, Milner played his part admirably. He had no wish to ‘apportion blame’, he said, in this ‘deplorable situation’ in which both countries found themselves. But it was his ‘personal opinion’ that the increasing tension between the governments was caused by the Transvaal’s policy towards the Uitlanders. Clear this out of the way; then other outstanding questions could be settled amicably. He put his hand on his heart. Britain had no designs on the independence of the Transvaal. Far from it. If only the Transvaal would treat the Uitlanders better, the Uitlanders would cease to call for Britain to intervene. This would ‘strengthen the independence of the Republic’, as well as re-establishing the ‘cordial relations which we desire’.[33]
Kruger, promising to be brief, took most of Wednesday afternoon to reply. (Milner to Chamberlain that night: the old gentleman ‘rambled fearfully’.)[34] The nub of Kruger’s case was that the political demands of the Uitlanders conflicted with the national rights of the Transvaal. In other countries there was no threat of new burghers out-voting old burghers. Given the same franchise policy in the Transvaal, ‘in a very short time those who are brought in can turn the laws topsy turvy, and do as they like and, with that, my independence would fall’. So he must let the newcomers in gradually: ‘If we give them the franchise tomorrow we may as well give up the Republic.’ Milner was left once again protesting his sincerity. He was not threatening the Transvaal’s independence. ‘I do not want to swamp the old population,’ he declared in a phrase that his enemies would recall later; all he asked was an ‘immediate voice’ for the Uitlanders.[35]
Thursday, the second day, followed the same pattern: Milner, polite and generous to a fault, protesting his sincerity, and Kruger yielding nothing, and gaining nothing. True, Kruger scored a debating point when someone mentioned military preparations. Who could blame the burghers for arming themselves after the Jameson Raid? His Excellency, said Kruger, could ‘follow their spoor’ since the Great Trek. They had never been attackers, always defenders. They followed the words of the Lord: ‘Accursed be he who removeth his neighbour’s landmark.’[36] (Major Hanbury Williams to Intelligence Department: ‘How the old man wept crocodile tears about the Raid!’)[37]
But Milner soon brought the discussion back to the franchise, and now put his first trump on the table. He asked Kruger to go the whole hog: give the Uitlanders back the five-year franchise, and make it retrospective. Any man who had settled in the Transvaal before 1894, and had enough property to qualify — sixty thousand to seventy thousand men, according to Kruger — would thus have the vote for the asking. Back from Kruger came the dogged refrain: no chance of a five-year franchise at all; it would be political suicide for the volk.[38]
On Friday, the third day, the President stopped stone-walling, and negotiations seemed about to begin. He sprang a surprise. He wanted to meet Milner as far as possible on the franchise, and he laid on the table a ‘complete Reform Bill, worked out in clauses and sub-clauses’ (as Milner reported back to London) that he must have had ‘in his pocket all the time’.[39] In return, he wanted Milner to meet him on three outstanding questions: the Raid indemnity, the Boers’ control of Swaziland and, most important, arbitration on rival interpretations of the London Convention of 1884. He added, not without pathos, that he had to think of his burghers: ‘If I have to go back and convince them on matters, I must tell them something has been given in to me, if I give in to something.’[40]
If Milner had wished to do business with Kruger, here was the golden opportunity. He had been given a remarkably free hand by Chamberlain. He could certainly have offered Kruger something to show his burghers. Chamberlain had agreed in principle that the Chartered Company must pay substantial damages for the Raid. It remained for the sum to be fixed; the Transvaal was claiming £1,677,938 3s. 3d. including £1 million for ‘moral and intellectual damages’.[41] (In fact, Beit and Rhodes would have to fork out from their own pockets, as the Chartered Company was too near bankruptcy since the Matabele and Mashona revolts.)[42] Both the Swaziland and the arbitration questions were more complicated. But here again, Milner could certainly have helped Kruger’s difficulties with his burghers. Indeed, Chamberlain specifically empowered Milner to humour Kruger about arbitration.[43]
In return, Milner was being offered a deal on the franchise which he admitted in private was a ‘great advance’ on the existing position.[44] Kruger was prepared to slash the residence qualification from fourteen to seven years. True, Milner had all sorts of objections to the way the proposal would work. It would not give, as he had stated it must, ‘substantial and immediate’ representation to the Uitlanders. For it was to be only partially retrospective, and the length of delay would vary according to a sliding scale. And Kruger was only offering a total of five out of twenty-eight seats in the Raad for the gold-mining districts, compared to Milner’s proposal for these districts to have a minimum of seven seats.[45]
Yet, despite everything, could it not have been bridged, that gap which now divided the two men: five years for the franchise against seven: seven seats for the Raad against five? So it would, without a doubt, if Milner had aimed to negotiate, and not to ‘screw’ Kruger.[46]
Milner brushed aside Kruger’s Reform Bill. It was a ‘Kaffir-bargain’. He made a counter-offer that could only infuriate the old man: what about some form of self-government for the Rand?[47] Kruger knew enough about English politics to see the irony in this. Chamberlain had broken with the Liberals because he refused, on principle, to accept Home Rule for Ireland; here he was trying to impose Home Rule on the Rand. Inevitably, the offer was rebuffed by Kruger, who said the Uitlanders were ‘like naughty children’. ‘If you give them a finger they will want the whole hand, then an arm, then a head, and then they want the whole body bit by bit.’[48]
It was now Saturday, the fourth day of the conference, and the stalemate was unbroken. Milner had sat up half the night preparing an endless list of objections to Kruger’s Reform Bill. He plumped it on to the table and the conference adjourned till Monday. The same afternoon he cabled to London: ‘It seems that the conference will fall.... I have been studiously conciliatory....’[49]
Next day Milner and his staff, in plain dress, attended a service in the Anglican Cathedral, and heard the Dean’s sermon, ‘Blessed are the Peacemakers’. To the Boer public at large the conference still appeared a triumphant success. ‘Peace Assured — Sir A. Milner’s Statesmanship’, ran the headlines of The Standard and Diggers’ News. ‘Forebodings dispelled.’[50] In fact, Milner himself was exhausted by the strain of the last few days. He had failed to ‘screw’ Kruger, but he had not been outmanoeuvred himself. Next day he would have to break off the conference, unless Kruger suddenly caved in. For there was always the danger that Kruger might offer other illusory concessions. ‘If we went on and on,’ he later confessed to Chamberlain, ‘we might get a little more and a little more, each concession being made to appear very big, and finally feel unable, after so many concessions, to break off, and yet find we had a perfectly hollow scheme.’[51]
Milner’s cabled warning that he might have to break off the conference did not reach Chamberlain till Sunday. Chamberlain immediately replied: ‘I,hope you will not break off hastily. Boers do not understand quick decisions.... I am by no means convinced that the President has made his last offer, and you should be very patient and admit a good deal of haggling before you finally abandon the game.’[52]
But before this cable reached Milner, the curtain had already fallen at Bloemfontein. Kruger, his eyes watering, had stood there for the last time, repeating, ‘It is our country you want.’[53] Milner had closed the proceedings with the chilling words: ‘This conference is absolutely at an end, and there is no obligation on either side arising from it.’[54]
What lesson did the antagonists take away with them from the conference, as their two specials steamed back the way they had come?
In Milner’s eyes, the moral was obvious. He had failed to trap Kruger because he had failed to frighten him sufficiently. Now they must turn the ‘war-screw’.[55] Before the conference he had warned Selborne privately that they might have to:
If I fail, it will then be your turn ... assume at once the diplomatic offensive and back it with a strong show of [military] force.... All the Afrikaners and all the mugwumps will howl at us.... I don’t care. My view is that (1) absolute downright determination plus a large temporary increase of force will ensure a climb down. It is 20 to 1. And (2) that, if it didn’t, and there was a fight, it would be better to fight now than 5 or 10 years hence when the Transvaal, unless the Uitlanders can be taken in, in considerable numbers, will be stronger and more hostile than ever. Bold words these, you will say. But remember I myself am risking a lot — indeed everything.[56]
Specifically, Milner wanted the War Office to replace General Butler as Commander-in-Chief. He also wanted some competent officers sent out to organize the Cape border towns, like Mafeking and Kimberley. He also wanted an overwhelming force — the exact number was for military experts to decide, but he thought it might be as high as ten thousand men — pushed up into the dangerous northern triangle of Natal, where General Colley had come to grief at Majuba, both to frustrate a Boer attack and to prove ‘irresistible’ as a political lever. Unless they took the right military precautions ‘before the crash’, they might find themselves involved in ‘not only a biggish war, but much civil dissension afterwards’. However, he maintained ‘in spite of all those alarms and excursions, that if we are perfectly determined we shall win without a war or with a mere apology for one.’[57]
In short, Milner’s advice to London boiled down to detailed advice on three crucial military questions. First, how many soldiers to send out to guard the Cape and Natal. Second, whom to appoint to organize and lead them. Third, how far forward to station them. If his advice was taken, he assured the Cabinet — disingenuously — there would be no war.[58]
Kruger was, predictably, less reassured. His suspicions of Chamberlain were confirmed by what he had seen at Bloemfontein. Fortunately, his war preparations were nearly complete — apart from an important consignment of seventy-two field-guns from Creusot which Joubert did not agree to order until July (when it was in fact too late for them to be delivered).[59] He knew he could have an overwhelming advantage if he chose to strike the first blow. However, the strategic key remained the Free State. Like the Cape Afrikaners, Steyn had pressed Kruger to be generous to the Uitlanders. Still, Kruger did not doubt that, if war came, the Free State would fight shoulder to shoulder with the Transvaal. As a little encouragement, he now sent the Free Staters half a million Mauser cartridges.[60] Yet, though more certain than ever that a collision with England was inevitable, Kruger did not stand in the way of Smuts, who took a different view.
Characteristically, his experiences at Bloemfontein had made Smuts oscillate still more violently between his hopes for peace and his instinct for war.
The politician in him declared that war could still be avoided. ‘Britain will never go to war after she knows what the true opinion of the Colonial Afrikaners is,’ he told Hofmeyr. By a display of Afrikaner solidarity — discreet enough, at the same time, not to attract ‘well-founded’ charges of disloyalty — they could force the British government to give up its aggressive designs on the Transvaal. For a war could only be launched from the Cape, and if the Cape government and the majority of its people were hostile, then war was clearly impossible. Moreover, Smuts had high hopes of persuading Kruger to improve on the franchise reforms he had put on the table at Bloemfontein. This would cut the ground once and for all from under the feet of the English war-mongers.[61]
Yet, even while he penned these cool, diplomatic sentences to his friends at the Cape, the passionate side of Smuts’s nature asserted itself. ‘Milner is as sweet as honey,’ he scribbled in a note to ‘Lappie’ (the pet name for his wife) during the conference, ‘but there is something in his very intelligent eyes that tells me he is very dangerous.[62]
Later, when the conference was over, the pieces of the puzzle began to fit into place. It was Milner who was the clue — Milner, who had contemptuously broken off the conference, Milner who was ‘much more dangerous than Rhodes’. Was he playing this part under Chamberlain’s orders, or was he the driving force? Smuts confessed he did not know.[63] But he saw ominous parallels between the current situation and the situation on the eve of Britain’s first annexation of the Transvaal in 1877: the same ‘lying petitions’ for imperial intervention, the same outside forces working for war to ‘defeat the work of time’. It filled him with indignation to think that this ‘academic nobody’, this man who fancied himself ‘a great imperial statesman’, was trying to destroy in a moment everything they had tried to create.[64]
Well, in due course, Milner must pay the price. He had insulted the ‘spirit of Afrikanerdom’. Smuts did not conceal the personal satisfaction it would give him to force Chamberlain to have Milner recalled in disgrace, like that other great English proconsul, Sir Bartle Frere.[65]
Head of chapter Major H. Williams-DMI 31 May 1899, CO 417/275/363
1. Volksstem 31 May, Express (Bloemfontein) 2 Jun, Cape Times (weekly edition) 3 Jun, Standard & Diggers News 30 May 1899
2. Volksstem 31 May 1899
3. Fisher Kruger 218-19 quoting Rompel Uit den Tweeden Vryheidsoorlog
4. Volksstem 31 May 1899 (indirect speech in original)
5. Smuts-Hofmeyr 10 May 1899, SP I, 233-5
6. Ibid
7. Smuts-Leyds 30 Apr 1899, SP I, 227-9
8. Schneider-Smuts 6, 10, 15 May 1899, SP I, 229-30
9. Hofmeyr-Smuts 6, 10, 15 May 1899, SP I, 230, 236-7
10. Schreiner-Smuts 19 May 1899, SP I, 237-9
11. Smuts-Hofmeyr 10 May 1899, SP I, 231-5
12. Volksstem 31 May 1899
13. Cape Times (weekly edit) 3 Jun, Standard and Diggers News 30 May 1899
14. See note 1
15. M’s diary 30 May 1899, Mil (dep 69). M-C 25 May 1899, Mil 14 (SA 28)
16. C-M 10 May 1899, C 9345 226-31
17. For ‘screw’ see M-C 8 May 1899, CO 417/261 and M-Gell 18 Jun 1899, Gell 533
18. See Marais 1-3, Wilde 112-13. Cf Balfour-C 6 May 1899, Cham 5/5/39
19. Selborne-M 7 Oct 1899, Mil 17 (SA 31)
20. M-Gell 9 Aug 1898, Gell 511
21. M-Dawkins 4 Jan 1902, Mil 28 (SA 46)
22. M-Bertha Synge 19 Dec 1901, Mil 28 (SA 46)
23. M-C 8 Jul 1898, MP I, 267
24. M-Dawkins 4 Jan 1902, Mil 28 (SA 32)
25. The evidence that Milner already wanted a war is circumstantial. See esp. M-Bertha Synge 20 Apr 1898 Mil 8 (SA 45) ‘The Boer Govt is too great a curse to all S. Africa to be allowed to exist, if we were not too busy to afford the considerable war, wh. alone can pull it down.’ Cf M-Selborne 17, 24 May 1899, MP I, 384-5, 400-3
26. M-Gell 18 Jun, Gell 533
27. M’s diary 3 Apr 1898, Mil (dep 68)
28. See M-Selborne 24 May 1899, MP I, 400. Express (Bloemfontein) 2 Jun 1899
29. TH I, 102-3
30. Express (Bloemfontein) 2 Jun 1899
31. Standard and Digger’s News 31 May 1899
32. Maj Hanbury-Williams-WO 31 May 1899, CO 417/275/363
33. C 9404/14-15
34. M-C 31 May, CO 417/261/13894
35. C 9404/15-19
36. C 9404/20-1
37. Maj. Hanbury-Williams-Intell Dept c. 1 Jun 1899, CO 417/275
38. C 9404/25-7
39. M quoted MP I, 418
40. C 9404/34
41. TH I, 186-7
42. Selborne confid min 17 Feb 1898, Sel Box 9/8
43. C-M 5 Jun 1899, CO 417/262 (Af 572/84). Chamberlain was annoyed. See Wilde 110-11
44. M-C CO 417/262/14169
45. Ibid
46. See H. W. Dust’s min of 4 Jul 1899, CO 417/262
47. C 9404/38-41
48. MP I, 418-19
49. M-C 4 June 1899, CO 417/262
50. Standard and Diggers News 3 Jun 1899
51. M-C 14 Jun 1899, MP I, 423-4
52. C-M 5 Jun 1899, CO 417/262 (Af South 572/83-4)
53. MP I, 407 pres from M’s notes of conference. These words are not in C 9404
54. C 9404/44
55. M-Gell 18 Jun 1899, Gell 533
56. M-Selborne 17 May 1899, MP I, 384-5 (‘material’ mistake for ‘military’?)
57. M-Selborne 24 May 1899, MP I, 400-2
58. Selborne-M 25 Jun 1899, MP I, 445-6
59. DMI report on captured docs re Schneider’s orders, CO 417/335/96-113
60. Hofmeyr-Smuts 17 Jun 1899, SP I, 254-6. MP I, 449, 502
61. Smuts-Hofmeyr 13 Jun 1899, SP I, 248-9
62. Smuts-‘Lappie’ (S.M.) Smuts 1 Jun 1899, SP I, 242
63. Smuts-Hofmeyr 13 Jun 1899, SP I, 248-50
64. Smuts-Merriman 18 Jun 1899, SP I, 257-8 (‘nobodies’ in orig.)
65. Smuts-Hofmeyr 9 Jul 1899, SP I, 264-5