William Tyler
British Imperialism: The British and the Boers go to War
William Tyler - British Imperialism: The British and the Boers go to War
- And today’s topic could be of no greater importance both to the history of Britain and to the history of South Africa and to the wider global history. And I’m going to talk about the Anglo Boer War, 1899 to 1902. Now, as many of you know, and I know, I’ve got South African listeners who are sitting there already, penned, poised or whatever, finger poised, because you know this history and you’ve been taught it, so bear with me because I need to bring everyone up to speed. The first European settlers in South Africa were the Dutch, and it takes us back to the 17th century. And I’m using James Barbary’s book on the Boer War to, as it were, short circuit this part of the story. And he writes, by the year 1650, the merchant ships of little republican Holland, as well as trading broadly along the American coast, had organised a commercial empire in the Spice Islands of the Orient. There was no Suez Canal, so the Dutch had to travel to the Orient around the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa in a slow, old fashioned sailing ship. The voyage out might take six months. The Cape had a pleasant climate, so the Dutch built a settlement there for their ships to get supplies. That’s how it all started. In terms of European presence in South Africa, I use the term South Africa for the country rather than southern Africa, because that can embrace a wider area.
Then a couple of further things. When the Dutch arrived, they quickly attracted other peoples. Germans and French Protestants, who were driven out of their own countries because of their religion, joined the Dutch in South Africa. And by around 1700, shall we say, there’s quite a population there. We call them all Boers. Boer means farmers, as you all know. But the population began to increase. By 1800, there’s 22,000. But that’s very small in a country the size of what is today South Africa, but they’re basically still in the Cape. So how then did the British get involved? I said a moment, I said yesterday a word or two about that. The British got involved because of, well, Napoleon. Napoleon and the Napoleonic wars are at the base of quite a lot of European and wider history. If you’re American, just think of the purchase of Louisiana from the French. But the story of South Africa is that the Dutch were conquered by Bonaparte. The Dutch navy was incorporated into the French Navy, and therefore there was a threat to the British, who are sailing to India, that they could no longer land at the Cape and take on water and food supplies and indeed repair ships. Whether on the outward or the inward journey, they now face the possibility of attacks on their merchant ships from the French. So the British then get involved with South Africa, and very shortly, they begin to colonise. Now, there is a huge difference in European imperial history. Colonisers are people who go and are there for the long term forever, such as the British in North America, whether the States or Canada.
And in South Africa, they found opportunities. Usually it was younger sons that went out who wanted an opportunity. They wanted adventure, but they wanted a chance to make something of themselves. Now, of course, many would have gone to India, but India wasn’t a place in which you settled. India was a place where you went, made your money, and came home, if you were lucky, to avoid disease. South Africa was so different. It was a pleasant country. This seemed like a Shangri-La to Europeans. And so the British colonised as the Dutch had colonised. And thus we are left with two, and I’ll use the term purposely, we’re left with two European white tribes in southern Africa. And that is a very unusual stance in European imperial history. If you’re Canadian, you’re saying and shouting at me, at the iPad, saying, “No, it’s what we had in Canada.” And it’s true. In the Seven Years War in the 18th century, whether Canada became British or Canada became French was very much up for grabs. But we know how that turned out, and it turned out differently than it did in South Africa, partly because of the nature of the geography of Canada and partly because of the larger number of British Scots, for example, settlers in Canada. Canada was a different story, but it is a story where war happened between two European imperial powers, and in the end, it was the British that won. South Africa isn’t as simple a story. It’s a much more complex story. Now, had I been teaching this in the early 19th century, the British settled, began to settle in the Cape. From 1806, you might have been able to see in the end of the Napoleonic Wars, although the British came to terms with the now independent and free Dutch government, we are left with a Dutch population and a British population in South Africa. And in a sense, there’s always going to be clashes. There’s a cultural difference, there’s a language difference, there’s a religious difference. And anywhere the British go, they are, in imperial terms, they just want to be top dog.
So there is logically going to be trouble. The path to war in 1899 began quite a lot earlier, and it began by an action of the British government in London. In 1833, the British government abolished slavery throughout all British territories, that is, throughout the empire. Therefore, in South Africa. Now, the Boers had kept black slaves, as indeed had the British, but it’s now abolished to the British. And the Boers are unhappy about this. And so they begin what we know as The Great Trek into what they felt was virgin land. Now, this is important. Virgin land doesn’t mean no one was living there. It meant the British weren’t there. The Africans were there, but not the British. Now, both the British and the Boer have traditional, that’s a weasley word to use, have traditional European views of black Africans in the 19th century. They are barbarians, and they don’t regard them as significant. So to the Boer, the lands in Transvaal and the Orange Free State as they became, which the Boers settled in, they saw those. They didn’t regard that as being black territory. They simply regarded it as being non-British territory. The Boers were farmers, but so were the Africans. And we talked about that when talking about the Zulu yesterday, cattle. So were the British. But the British were more than that. The British were entrepreneurs. And that dreadful figure of empire, Cecil Rhodes, is an example of that. Mining. But also remember, Cecil Rhodes began the exportation of apples from the Cape. Entrepreneurs like Cecil Rhodes. And then, of course, well, what are wars fought over? Religion. Yes, and economics as well.
And here the economics was first the discovery of diamonds at Kimberley, just outside the Orange Free State in 1870, and trouble began to brew about that. And then the discovery later of gold just outside Transvaal’s capital in Pretoria. Now, can we have the map up for a moment? Would you be kind enough? I’ve got a map. I had intended you to receive it, but it wasn’t sent out. Now, if you look at the map, it’s nicely in colour. All you need to know, the green bit at the bottom, Cape Colony, British. Natal transferred from Boer to Britain, and it’s British. The orange bit is the Orange Free State, Boer. And the Transvaal is also Boer. Transvaal, you can see if you’ve got good eyesight on the map, and you make it bigger, you can see Pretoria. Orange Free State you can see Bloemfontein. In Natal, you can see Ladysmith, Colenso, and Durban. Colenso is an important battle. Ladysmith is the huge siege that was central to the war. And over on the far left, just outside the Orange Free State, is Kimberley, which I said was just outside where gold was found. And up in Transvaal, nearer Pretoria, is where gold was found. So you just need to know that when we come to the war in 1899, South Africa is divided between British South Africa and Boer South Africa. So I’m going to put my picture back, and can we get rid of the map now? Thanks very much. I’m being very bossy today. I’m sorry. I’m sorry that you didn’t receive it because I wanted you to receive it so you could print it off. But I guess most people are fairly familiar with it and having now seen it, it’s sort of in your head. War first came in 1880 to 1881, between December 1880 and March ‘81, to be precise.
Now, this is called, in hindsight, the First Anglo Boer War because the one in 1899, the big one, is called the Second Boer War. So if you find references to first and second, the first is 1880 to '81. The second is 1899 to 1902. But if you just see references to the Boer War or the Anglo Boer War, they mean the second one of 1899 to 1902, when the British. We’re talking about the first, 1880 to '81. when the British began to fear that Transvaal was getting, in jargon, too big for its boots. In 1877, the British annexed Natal. Sorry, annexed Transvaal. But the Boers immediately declared independence. The war was short lived and Britain had a humiliating defeat in 1881 at the Battle of Majuba Hill, the British negotiated and the outcome was that Britain recognised the Boer government in the Transvaal, but subject only to the emerging federal nature of South Africa, which the British were anxious to create. It was a standoff in 1881. The British begin to see the Boer as an increasing problem for their interests in South Africa. And remember, by 1899, we’re talking about diamond and gold interests. To hell with cows. It’s diamonds and gold that matter. And we’re also nervous that in Natal and the Cape, we could be subject to a Boer attack.
And anyhow, the gold lies in the Transvaal. Now, this is red rag to a bull as far as the British are concerned. How dare anybody else take the riches of this soil? This is Britain at its imperial height. I’m using the Osprey Boer War Book. It’s called “Boer War Two,” “Boer War One” was the first Boer War. and I wanted to read this. The subsequent gold rush into Transvaal brought a flood of foreign prospectus known to the Boers as Uitlanders, or outsiders, and to the birth of the boomtown of Johannesburg. It also intensified the economic rivalry which underpinned Boer-British intra-relations in the last years of the 19th century. As I said, it’s over economic. An economic division. Yes, there’s a language and cultural division, absolutely. And there’s the division, remember, about slavery in 1833. But here it’s economic. It was Clinton who said, “It’s the economy, stupid.” Well, that applies here in South Africa. And then I wanted to read you a little bit more from this again, to short circuit the story, British commercial interest crowded the Transvaal on two sides. Nevertheless, the Transvaal itself, ruled by the hard Republican Paul Kruger, who had been elected president in the aftermath of the British defeat at Majuba, remained firmly opposed to British interests. Kruger was afraid that the influx of foreign workers in gold fields and foreign capital British would overwhelm the Boers in their own country.
His policy towards the mining magnates, nicknamed the gold-bugs, British, was obstructive. The Uitlanders themselves were refused to vote, yet they were still expected to pay taxes on their profits and subject to military service. We’re back to America. No taxation without representation. In this case, the boot is on the other foot and it’s the Britons who are paying taxes without having a vote in the government. This is sliding inexorably towards a clash. Frustrated. Let me read. Rhodes and the so called gold-bugs planned to overthrow Kruger’s regime in a military coup d'état. And they used as their excuse this, as they saw it, ill treatment of the Uitlanders, particularly the British. And in 1895, Cecil Rhodes pulling the strings. I must do a talk sometime about Cecil Rhodes. He’s become a figure of hate in Britain by many communities, but he is really rather an unpleasant figure in many ways. Now, Rhodes set an invasion in progress, an invasion led by Dr. Jameson in 1895. And the intention of this invasion, an invasion, is in inverted commas. It was a raid. That’s what we call it, the Dr. Jameson raid. But the idea was to trigger a coup d'état, in other words, to get the Uitlanders living in the Transvaal to rise up against the Boers. It didn’t happen. It was a fiasco, and it was a major setback for Britain, although it was not orchestrated from London. The view in London, as ever a British view. You can just imagine the talk in the Foreign Office. I say, oh, boy. What are we going to do about this place called Transvaal? Oh, I don’t know.
It’s a long way away. Let it just settle down. It’ll all settle down. We don’t need to worry our heads about the Transvaal. They’re only farmers, after all. It’ll all settle. Well, it didn’t all settle down. In fact, it got decidedly grimmer. The British High Commissioner, a man called Sir Alfred Milner, believed that Britain had to annex both Boer territories of the Transvaal and the Orange Free State. And he’s very open about that. This is a bid to create a British South Africa. And so the Transvaal and the Orange Free State must become British. Well, if they’re going to become British, they’re going to have to become British by force of arms. The threats are made against Paul Kruger and the Transvaal. However, the Orange Free State makes it very clear that if Britain acted against the Transvaal, the Orange Free State will come to the side of the Transvaal. So Britain will be faced by two Boer states, not one. That’s the sort of background to the situation. Again, let’s emphasise this is white tribe against white tribe, Boer against Britain. And in the middle of all of this is, well, two things are functioning. One is get your hands on the filthy gold and diamonds. This is important. Both sides want those things. The British are, the British, with people like Cecil Rhodes, are, in a sense, more oriented to that British view about the economy. Government representatives from London, like the High Commissioner, Sir Alfred Milner, are more concerned about the extension of the British Empire. We all know the song, the British song, wider still and wider shall thy empire be. And Milner is one of those who certainly would have ticked that box as indeed would Rhodes. So there’s two things going on. There’s the economy and there’s the issue of a wider British empire. From the Boer point of view, their concern is independence from Cape Town, but also independence from London. They are on their own. They owe no allegiance to any European power. They don’t want Britain to interpose, they want a white community.
It’s not so different than when Smith, Ian Smith declared UDI in what was Rhodesia, is now Zimbabwe, a white tribe in charge. That is what the Boers wanted. So war came in January of 1899, and if I use my Osprey book, I will read you what it says about the beginning of the war. And it says this. The Anglo Boer War would prove the greatest military commitment since the Napoleonic Wars, greater even than the Crimean War. We have very few memorials to the Crimean War in Britain, but we do have memorials to the Boer War. And at the end of the 1940s, I remember as a small boy being taken on the 11th of November on Remembrance Sunday, or the nearest Sunday to the 11th of November, to the inauguration of the new Lord Mayor of Bristol. They merged the Remembrance Sunday and the installation of the new Lord Mayor together and there was big processions. But I do remember Boer War, veterans marching and the joke among older generations of my family when somebody said, well, the last war, the war before the last war, and they said, oh, you mean the Boer War? No, they said, we mean the first war. There was always that sort of jostling, as it were. So let me read on. The Anglo-Boer War would prove the greatest military commitment since the Napoleonic Wars. In the nature of such campaigns, it was confidently expected to be over by Christmas.
Oh, dear. How often have we heard that phrase or phrases comparable to a war that seems to go on forever? This war was to drag on with increasing bitterness for three years and will require the participation of every regular British infantry and cavalry regiment except one. That’s a heck of a commitment, as well as unprecedented support from the overseas colonies. In the end, it was won by a scorched earth policy which devastated the belt and caused most hardship among the civilian population, both black and white. And we will come to that. This is not a nice war, if you can ever have a nice war, this is a modern war with terrible consequences for civilian populations and terrible future historical consequences for the history of South Africa. And one might argue, as I shall at the end, for the history of the British Empire. Now, the war began badly for Britain, though how often have, when I’m teaching British history, if I had to state that the war began badly, think about the defeat and retreat from Dunkirk in World War II. The war began badly for Britain, because in December 1899, Britain received a very bloody nose in what became known to the British press as Black Week 1899. Black Week 10th to the 17th of December, the British experienced not one, not two, but three major defeats. It was defeated in a Battle at Stormberg, it was defeated at a battle at Bloemfontein, and most importantly and significantly, defeated General Buller, who was in command, defeated at the Battle of Colenso. This is a Field Marshal Lord Carver’s history of the Boer War, and he writes in this way. I will read you a little bit from his book. Buller’s total casualties at Colenso were 143 killed, 755 wounded, many of them not seriously, and a 240 missing, mostly captured, only 5% of his force. It was by no means a complete disaster, but it was, as Buller described in his cable to Milner in Cape Town and to the War Office in London, a serious reverse.
Unfortunately for him, he also sent another personal cable to the Secretary of State for War, Lord Lansdowne, in London, in which he said, my failure today raises a serious question. I do not think I’m now strong enough to relieve the white. Colenso is a fortress which, if not taken on a rush, could only be taken by a siege. My view is that I ought to let Ladysmith, which is being besieged. I ought to let Ladysmith go and occupy good positions for the defence of South Natal. That is not what the Secretary for War wants to hear in London. My God, he must have said, “The man’s talking negatively!” He’s talking as though this one defeat is actually climatic and is changing his view of the war. We can’t let Ladysmith go on being besieged. We must do something. Then enter an interesting man, Lord Roberts, who’d made his name in India. Bobs, Bobs. Kipling wrote of him in a famous poem, the Hero of the War in Afghanistan at Kandahar. Bobs, Bobs, Bobs. And Lord Roberts is now, well, in the view of the Victorians of the 1890s, an old man. I’m sorry, I don’t wish to offend any man, but he’s actually ten years younger than I am now. He was 67 and he was thought too old. But he wrote an extraordinary letter to the government. It really is a damning letter, and in this I won’t read you at all. But he wrote this letter, interestingly, before the defeat at Colenso. He wrote it on the 8th of December. So he’s not writing it in the light of Buller’s, to some extent, incompetence at Colenso. He’s writing it about Buller, the man before Buller has even taken to battle.
And Roberts writes this to the Secretary of State for War, Lansdowne. I’m much concerned to hear the very gloomy view which Sir Redford Buller takes of the situation in South Africa. That is before his defeat at Colenso. So the man had gone into the battle with a negative view, not just coming out of it. There is, of course, says Lord Roberts, no disguising the fact that we are engaged in a very serious war, one that may cask our resources to the utmost. And the manner in which the difficulties inherent in such a war can be overcome depends almost entirely on the confidence of the commander in being able to bring it to a successful conclusion. A direct attack on Buller. It gets worse. From Bullet’s point of view, Roberts goes on, as I have, I think, often remarked to you, it is impossible to gauge a general’s qualities until he’s been tried. And it is regrettable fact that not a single commander in South Africa has ever had an independent command in the field. It is a feeling of responsibility which weighs down most men. And it seems clear, unless I am much mistaken, that the fifth feeling is having its too frequent effect on Buller. I love the very, very upper class English Buller, just his surname. So what does Roberts propose, albeit from me. But why don’t you send me to South Africa? Is what he in the end says. And the government says, okay, we will send Roberts to South Africa as commander in chief. We trust him, but he’s too old at 67 to take command in the field. So we will send out with him as his senior staff officer, Lord Kitchener. Kitchener, who’d been at Khartoum, and was another great hero, another hero with flawed feet, I have to say.
But that’s another story. So Roberts and Kitchener prepare to go out. Before they do so, Buller has been defeated at Colenso, and as a footnote to history, Lord Roberts’ only son is killed in that battle. Gosh, what must he have felt then about Buller as a commanding officer? It must have underlined very forcibly that he was right in his own mind to send that letter to the Secretary of State for War. The consequences of these three British defeats in December 1899 in Black Week not only caused consternation within the British government, but from the Queen downwards to the lowliest worker in the land. People couldn’t understand it. The British defeated? Now, hang on a minute, hang on one minute. Yesterday we learnt in the Zulu War of 1879 that the British were defeated at Isandlwana. And earlier in this talk on the Boers, we learnt that the British were defeated at Majuba Hill in 1881. There’s a pattern emerging here, and the pattern is this empire is now so large that defending it becomes difficult. Defending it becomes extremely difficult. So what happens? Well, in the short term, we know what happens. The British go on to win. So Lord Roberts arrives. But if you had eyes to see, you would see that already the British Empire was crumbling. Not many people saw the crumbling, but one that did, one that did was Kipling. And Kipling wrote two years before the war began, 1897, at the time of Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee, that we had grown too arrogant to rule.
And if you want to start the story, if you were writing, perhaps giving a series of lectures in a university on the fall of the British Empire, when would you begin it? I would begin it in 1897 with Kipling’s poem, which was published in the Times a few days after the Jubilee itself. And then I would underline it by Black Week 1899 in South Africa with a mention of the defeat in 1879 at Isandlwana, and the defeat in 1881 at Majuba Hill. We have become too big in the Empire to administer and we’re still adding territory. Remember, Milner wants to take Transvaal and Orange Free State. We go on adding territory right through to 1918. We don’t lose territory until Egypt withdraws from the Empire in 1922. But the writing is on the wall in Victorian England, not in post World War I England. It’s begun, the slow, and, well, maybe slow, maybe not. I don’t think it is glacially slow, actually. I think it’s quite fast, because with the, it’s over by the 1960s, so it’s 60 years. It’s not a long time in terms of history. There’s one more British defeat to come before the tide turns. The tide turns because virtually what we saw, every unit of the British army, bar one, has representatives in the Boer War. This is an enormous and cost 22 million quid at the time to put this army in the field, money that Britain bluntly could not afford at the end of the 19th century. There’s one more defeat. It’s a defeat because Buller is still pushing on towards Ladysmith, but a unit of his army is caught at Spion Kop and defeated. And Spion Kop, let me read you a piece. I’ve got books everywhere tonight. Let me read you a piece again from the Osprey book again to short circuit the story or else I shall run out of time. This is Spion Kop. On the night of the 23rd, 24th of January 1900, 1900 British troops scaled the slopes of Spion Kop, an isolated hilltop, and drove off a Boer picket on the summit.
At dawn the next morning, however, the British line proved to be badly sighted, exposed to both artillery fire and determined infantry assault. During a day of bungling and confusion, the troops clung to the summit, while failed to mount effective supporting attacks. By nightfall, British casualties were so heavy that the commander decided to withdraw. The attack had cost the British 300 dead, 1000 wounded, and 200 captured. They ended up where they had started. Interestingly, Spion Kop has a long post war history because it gave its name to terraces on football grounds in England. And perhaps even if you aren’t British, many of you would have heard of the Kop at Liverpool. At Anfield. At Liverpool football ground at Anfield. It was a big open terrace that looked like Spion Kop, a great terrace where people stood and it was adopted in many football clubs across England. The word Kop, to be a word. It’s interesting how words arrive. Another word that we use that, of course, in terms of Liverpool, but another word that’s died in England but was popular at the time was Mafeking. The relief of the city of Mafeking gave way to mass outpouring of jollity and partying in Britain that the word to Mafeking meant to have party beyond the norm. To go over the top of the party was to Mafeking. I know that, but I’ve never heard it in normal parlance. But if someone said, would you like to come to the Kop for next Saturday’s match? I would know exactly what they were talking about. So interesting how words come out of even grim situations like war.
That marks the end of January 1900, the lowest point. From then on, it’s upwards with Roberts and Kitchener. Roberts led 37,000 men, including, of course, Maxim guns and artillery, into Natal, which the Boers had entered. And Cronjé, the Boer commander in Natal, was forced to surrender with 4000 of his men. Buller finally relieved Ladysmith on the 28th of February, 1900. By mid March, Lord Roberts himself had taken the Orange Free State, Bloemfontein, et cetera. On the 16th of May, finally, Baden Powell and those besieged in Mafeking were relieved. This made a huge impact in Britain because Baden Powell was one of these people the Victorians loved. He was a Victorian hero, and he, like Roberts, was a short man, and I don’t know whether that had anything to do with it. Both are short. And of course, we know subsequently he has found the Boy Scouts movement. Well, we won’t go quite into that part of his life, but this is the defence of Mafeking. The little garrison at Mafeking had held out for 217 days, though it was only severely tested in the last few days before the relief, when the Boers mounted a last desperate and unsuccessful attempt to capture it. The siege had caught the imagination of the British public, and Mafeking achieved an emotional importance out of all proportion to its military significance. Its relief was greeted with immense celebrations in Britain, as I’ve just said.
And the garrison commander, Lieutenant Colonel Baden Powell, became a public hero. So he did. So he did. All so far, so good. By the 2nd of June, Kruger abandoned his capital at Pretoria. Roberts had won at a price in money and at a price in lives. Three days after Mafeking, Roberts entered the city of Pretoria in triumph. Sorry, three days after. On the 5th of June, three days after Kruger had left, Roberts entered Pretoria. Buller, meanwhile, had been advancing cautiously but steadily up to Nepal, suppressing Boer resistance. On the 12th of June, Buller also crossed into the Transvaal. And it’s all over. Except, it isn’t all over. Why not? Because the Boers, in their so called commando units, small units of men, conduct a guerrilla war against the British, and the British respond with blocked houses, in other words, isolated ports with Britons in them, so that they can catch these commando raiders. They also respond in the most appalling act of British imperial cruelty by establishing, and it was their words, concentration camps, in which they concentrated, Boer women and children who’d been left on the farms to encourage the men to surrender. The conditions in the concentration camps were dreadful. Lack of medicine, lack of food, lack of hygiene, lack of everything. Not all in Britain were at all happy. Elizabeth Hobhouse, a reformer, went out and saw the camps and reported back, and it’s big news, but they went on. Concentration camps weren’t invented by the British. They were invented in Cuba, by the Spanish in the 19th century, but the British used them. When I was young, in my childhood in the 50s, we were brought up to believe that everything about the British Empire was wonderful. In fact, I had an email from one of you only this morning saying, that’s exactly how she’d been brought up.
And it was only now that she and I had come to a realisation that we were given very much a view of the British Empire through rose tinted spectacles, through Victorian eyes, and not through the eyes of the 20th century. But then, after all, my history teacher, from the age of 7 to 13, was himself a Victorian. Could we have expected any more? And I’ve mentioned my aunt, who was a Victorian. They had Victorian values. You can’t judge them on the values of today. But we who’ve lived through from the 50s to today, who are British, know that the British Empire is not as we were taught it. And the concentration camps in South Africa in 1900 were appalling. I’ve got a small account here from Osprey that I wanted to share. As early as June 1900, Lord Roberts had authorised the burning of Boer farms, of Boers known still to be fighting in the guerrilla campaign. Unable to catch and destroy them, Roberts was striking at their supply base. Lord Kitchener, when Roberts went home, Lord Kitchener simply went one stage further in adopting a proper scorch earth policy. Boer non-combatants, women and children, could not be left unprotected on the belt. They would be rounded up and housed in makeshift refugee camps known as concentration camps. The camps were crowded and insanitary. Food was poured in the administration, inefficient. Disease soon broke out in the camps, and by the end of the war, 1902, over 26,000 women and children had died in them. Over 26,000 women and children, not men, had died in those camps. I wonder how many people in Britain today, if you were to walk down a street and ask people, knew about this. I guess very few. I certainly wasn’t taught it when I did the war at school. It then goes on to say, this left a scar on the soul of the Africana nation, which to this day has not fully healed. Well, we’ll come to that in a moment. Eventually, peace was signed on the 31st of May, 1902, at Vereeniging. V-E-R-E-E-N-I-G-I-N-G. I’m sure I’ve pronounced that incorrectly. Vereeniging. It’s a difficult word to say, and you’ve made me hesitant after yesterday that pronouncing difficult words. Let me read you two things here which I think are important in different ways.
First of all, the Boer War had been immensely destructive. Some 8,000 British troops had died in action, and a further 13,000 from disease, as over 20,000, over 4,000 Boers had been killed. In addition to the civilian losses in the camps, the 26,000 women and children, the economy of South Africa had been devastated and the war had cost Britain over 220,000,000 pounds in the money of the day. The legacy of bitterness it provoked affected the history of South Africa. Absolutely true. Absolutely true. But there’s something we haven’t said. There’s something we have not said. Despite all the peace talks between Boer and British, and the peace that was concluded, the African population of South Africa were undoubtedly the true losers of the war. They were excluded from the peace negotiations and were the only group who emerged from the war without political or economic concession, because neither of the white tribes would recognise that need. Whereas in India, Britain was dealing in a quite different way, having Indians into the Indian civil service, for example. This is different. No one thought of the Africans. So we’re left with two problems at the end of the Boer War. One is the continuing to use the word we’ve just read, hatred between Boer and British. And secondly, a feeling of being left out in the constitutional debate by black Africans, who are by far the majority of people. The British had won, and this was confirmed constitutionally by the creation of what the British had been thinking of for a long time, the Union of South Africa in 1910. But the loss to Britain in terms of international prestige, concentration camps, for example, and the fact that it could be beaten by it was always said, and the Kaiser said this in Germany, beaten by a group of farmers, marks for me the beginning of the end of the British Empire.
And I want to read you from Jeremy Paxman’s book, if I may, just a little piece here, his book on Empire. Remember, all the books I’ve mentioned are on my blog and you can look it up. The worm of uncertainty ate away at fervent imperialists like Joseph Chamberlain in Britain, who complained to the 1902 Imperial Conference that the weary titan staggers under the too vast orb of its fate. We have borne the burden for many years. We think it is time that our children should assist us to support it. Pompous words, but much the same as Kipling had put in his poem in 1897, our children means America, and Kipling, who’d been married to an American. Kipling talks in the poem about handing over the baton to the Americans as the voice, whatever you like to call it, the voice of democracy, civilization, they would have said, in the world. And Kipling says, but the Americans basically said, the Americans won’t be the same because they don’t like body bags. His way of saying, the Americans don’t really want to get involved in Europe. The titan struggles under the too vast orb of its fate. Said Chamberlain, we have borne the burden for many years. We think it is time that our children should assist us to support it. Paxman goes on to quote Rudyard Kipling in this Jubilee poem of 1897. Far called, our navies melt away. The Navy was the great strength of the British Empire. Far called, our navies melt away. On dune and headland sinks the fire Lo, all our pomp of yesterday is one with Nineveh and Tyre. He’s projecting forward to the end of the empire. It’s over. Joseph Chamberlain is recorded as saying this in a speech. England without an empire. Can you conceive it? England, in that case, would not be the England that we love. It would be a fifth rate nation existing on the sufferance of its more powerful neighbours.
We will not have it. We had no choice. We had no choice. We come out of the First World War only 12 years after it began, only 12 years after the signing of the peace in South Africa. We come out of that war victorious because in 1917, the Americans came with men and material. And then, of course, the Americans come in the middle of the Second World War with more men and more material. The children came. And we don’t have the power. We’re in no position to take a world leadership role. Sometimes our politicians forget that. We are beholden today to Biden, not to Sunak. And it all began in South Africa. And what of South Africa? Well, eventually, despite Smuts, who became the Englishman, even suggested that if Churchill died during the war, Second World War, Smuts might become Prime Minister of Britain, a Boer commando leader. But despite Smuts, in the end, the Africana right, if we can call it that, introduces apartheid in South Africa. And the exclusion of black Africans becomes engraved in apartheid South Africa until Mandela creates a black Africa, a black South Africa which is a multiracial South Africa. In Mandela’s dream. Remember the picture of Mandela with the South African rugby team? And now. And now, in a report in the Economist, which has only just been published in the last week’s Economist, looking at figures, it shows how large numbers of South Africans, in a poll taken in South Africa, say they would suffer an unelected leadership if it provided stability. We live still in South Africa and in the wider world because of apartheid, we live with the consequences of the Anglo Boer War. Thank you very much for listening. I’m sure there’s lots of questions and lots of people wanting to say all sorts of things. Let’s have a look.
Q&A and Comments:
Lots of people commenting if Wendy’s still there. Lots of people commenting on what you said was great.
Oh, that’s interesting. Naomi says she grew up in Canada pronouncing it the same way as I do. Yeah, it’s interesting, this word. The Second South African War, that’s Barbara, no Spion Kop is the second South African war. It’s Majuba Hill which is the first South African war.
Q: Do we have any information about the reaction of the indigenous population?
A: No, because they didn’t record anything. What we said yesterday about written African history, all we can gather is resistance by black populations to settlements and to the enslavement of black Africans. We have only a European version of the story.
Kimberly is where diamonds were found. I thought I said that, Brian. I think I said that if you heard gold, or if I said gold, I certainly didn’t. I’m sorry if I said that. As the young say, I misspoke, but I don’t think I did.
Oh, Faye, you make a really interesting point. Faye says, having learnt all this history in South Africa, it’s wonderful to hear it from the British side. Now, that’s an important point, because this is the problem with history. We talk about historians being objective, but we’re not objective. We can’t be objective. We may try to be objective. We should try to be objective. But I’m British, I’m white, I’m well educated, I’m 77 years of age. So you have to take that into account. If you had someone who was British, who was black, female, 25, historian. They will do it differently. If you had a South African who’s white, South African and young, they will be different than a white South African who is older. If you have a black South African who’s young, it will be different from the white South African. History, it’s very difficult to be entirely objective, although we tried, funnily enough.
I was talking to Trudy earlier today about. Well, it was about the Ottoman Empire and the collapse of it and the creation of problems in the Middle East. And she said, well, if we did it together, there would be both a Jewish and a non Jewish voice. And that would aid people to understand we were striving for objectivity. I think that’s true. I have to say I love team teaching with somebody else, particularly if it’s with a woman, because there’s a change in the timbre of voice, which I think helps. But of course, that doesn’t normally happen today because it’s too expensive. So people just lecture on their own. But there is a big case to be made for two people with differing views.
“The Boer War” by Pakenham is a great book. Yes, it is, Hazel. There are so many books. As I said yesterday about the Zulu War, we’ve become obsessed by the Zulu War. We’re less obsessed in Britain by the Boer War than we are by the Zulu War because of this thing about the noble savage concept. We didn’t really feel positive about Boers. And since, of course, apartheid, we felt far less positive, even less positive, if that’s possible, than we did after the war itself.
Oh, Raymond Morris Boer War, says David. I was surprised to see one in Toronto. Yes. You see, there were a number of what at the time were called colonial forces that went to South Africa in support of the British, and Canada was one of those. It’s amazing to think that there were, that we didn’t have sufficient soldiers of our own. That’s why in 1914, we had to call for volunteers almost immediately. We just simply didn’t have enough people under arms.
Margaret. My grandfather’s brother fought in it. He was from New Zealand. There must have been demands for volunteers throughout the empire. Yes, exactly. Thanks, Margaret.
Q: I would have had a great uncle who was killed in the World War. I didn’t know there were two of them. He was born and lived in New Zealand. Would he have been conscripted?
A: No, not conscripted. He would be, like our Canadian friend said a moment ago. He would have been volunteered. They would have appealed for volunteers.
Thank you, Rita, as ever, for putting up my blog.
All the books I’ve mentioned are on the blog. But as I said, in relation to the Pakenham book, there are lots of books. There is one book on the blog that may be of interest to all of you, but particularly to South Africans. There’s a book called “Commando” and it’s on my blog, which is written by a Boer. It’s written in English, so there’s no translation for Afrikaans. And it’s an extremely interesting book. And the author went on to serve in Smuts’ government during the Second World War. He actually died in 1944. And Smuts himself is interesting, because, Smuts is a subject firm. Thank you, Rita. You’ll have to come and do these lectures for me.
Q: Arlene says, which Kipling poem was read at the Jubilee?
A: It wasn’t actually read at the Jubilee, it was written for the Jubilee. It was published in the Times afterwards and most people simply didn’t understand the message. The poem was, as Rita rightly says, called “Recessional.” You don’t have to have a copy. I had it for my 21st birthday. A great big thick with all Kipling’s poems. But if you put Kipling plus “Recessional” onto Google, you will get the whole poem come up. How many British troops were involved? Something like 80-odd thousand in the end. Hope you’ll treat us to a talk on Rhodes. I don’t like talking about Rhodes. He what? I really don’t. Yeah, one day you might twist my arm, but Rhodes is. Is really. We know he’s like many of them. It’s worrying, is Rhodes. Rhodes invented his own uniforms. It’s on show. Rhodes came from a town called Saffron Walden in Essex, and his uniform is in a museum there, but he invented it himself. He was dodgy in all sorts of unpleasant ways, not just financial. His father was a vicar.
Q: Was the vicar in Saffron Walden?
A: No, not Saffron Walden. Sorry. Bishop’s Stortford. He wrote.
Sorry, Josie says, hope you’ll treat us to Rockford. He wrote in Kimberly that he was fed up waiting for the British with soldiers from many countries in the Empire, to hurry up and get him out. Meanwhile, the British army were falling. Fell into the trenches at Bloemfontein.
It is a fact that Germans first suggested the use of trenches. Is it? That Germans first suggested use of trenches to the Boers? Well, they might have done, but remember, trenches were used outside Gettysburg in the American Civil War. Now, there’s a lot of arguments about what is a trench, but trenches have been used forever and a day. But the modern use of trenches probably begins at Gettysburg.
Q: What was the source of funding for the Boers?
A: Well, they were supported by Germany from outside.
Who is this? Brian? Interesting. The area now where the Voortrekker Monument stands used to be called Roberts Heights, maybe only changed in 1960. My father was stationed as medical officer at the hospital in Roberts Heights during World War II. Now called Military One. Michael says it now became Voortrekker. I can’t pronounce that word. I’m not even going to try. H-O-O-G-T-E. Hoogte.
Q: Angela, what stage did Churchill get?
A: Oh, Churchill was a volunteer, but Churchill decided that when a train was attacked, Churchill took command. He had no right to take command. But Churchill is Churchill. He was captured, he escaped through a lavatory window and returned to Britain a hero and won his first seat as a hero of the Boer War in 1900 for Oldham in Lancashire, as a conservative. And his mother, the American heiress, came to support him and went around Oldham, a very working class cotton town, in 1900 in a carriage dressed to the nines. Gold, silver, jewellery, feathers everywhere, to the great embarrassment of Winston.
Michael. In my youth, I had an elderly uncle, an early Jewish immigrant from Lithuania. He became a farmer in eastern transfer. I was told he rode with the Boers. I fought with them.
Yes, there were Jews who fought on both sides in this war. Kop in Dutch means head or top of something, says Margaret. Yes, indeed it does. And it’s used in English as well. But in English, I used to support a country house which was being saved from demolition, called Kop Hall because it was on a hill. But then it’s spelt in English C-O-P. It means exactly the same as Kop in Afrikaans or Dutch. I believe that both Churchill, war correspondent, Gandhi, stretcher bearer, were present. They were, yeah. Gandhi is interesting because Gandhi actually had views which were anti-black.
Q: How did these events shape their impressions of Empire’s subsequent lives?
A: That’s too big a question for me to answer straight off. That they affected them is true. We were taught guerrilla warfare was first used in the World War. That is partly true. But it was also used, the Americans will tell us it was also used in the Spanish American War, but it is used, in fact, at school in the late 1950s, early 1960s, at my public school in the Cadet Force, we were still being taught how to crawl, as though we would be if war came in the 1970s. We will be crawling through the belt. We did the leopard crawl. I can’t remember what the others were called. Oh, it was awful. And when I told my dad, who said, what did you do in the corps? And I said, well, we learnt all these crawls, he said, oh, my God. That’s what we were taught. He went to Bristol Grammar School. That’s what we were taught in the 1920s. And it had been shown to be completely useless in World War I. But we went on teaching boys in Cadet Corps the strategies of the Belt in 1920s, which my father thought was awful. And then in the 1960s, we were still being taught it. In fact, in World War I, when the volunteers came forward in Britain, they called up non-commissioned officers who had fought in the Boer War, and they taught these young men to fight the Boer War and they were going into the trenches, places like the swamp. It was completely.
Oh, completely nonsense, Stan. You’re absolutely right. The book, “Barbed Wire” is an extremely good book and worth using. Barbed wire, of course, is something that the Americans used out on the prairies. Gosh, you all are asking such.
[Host] We may have to, one or two more questions and then wrap it up, perhaps.
Thank you all for engaging so well tonight. And the question, I wish I had hours and hours, because the questions are better than the content of the talk, that’s for sure. So thank you very much for joining in. Do look on my blog and it’s also on the thing that Lockdown send out. You can find my blog and you can read up on a number of things if you wish to do so. But it always has a book list every week. Now, next week, a different century and a different country. I hope I can keep up with this. We’re doing Switzerland at the time of the Reformation. Oh, my goodness. What a change.
So thanks for listening. See you all next Monday. Next Monday for Switzerland. Bye.