Past Caring (6 page)

It was my active participation in the debates and functions of
the Union Society that first drew me towards politics as a career.

I saw the Union as a flawed but not unworthy recreation of the
Greek demos and looked towards Westminster in the same way. My
naïvety now astounds me, but, at the time, it ensured that my energies in that direction were undimmed by caution or reservation.

During my second summer vacation , I intimated my sense of
vocation to my family, who supported my endeavours with all the
wholeheartedness I had come to expect. My brother Robert was now
effectively head of the household by reason of my father’s age and
infirmity and was fast establishing a reputation of his own as a
breeder of cattle. My father had been for some years an alderman

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of Okehampton and these factors facilitated my early introduction
to Sir William Oliphant, the sitting Member for Mid-Devon. He
had been in Parliament at this time for more than forty years and
had already indicated that he did not propose to stand for re-election. It was my great good fortune that Sir William’s recommendation, the standing of our family in the county and whatever
fame I won as President of the Union in my last year at Cambridge
sufficed to secure my selection as prospective Liberal candidate in
the constituency. With the next general election due in 1902, I felt
that I had a good chance of so nurturing my prospects that I might
then join the august assembly at Westminster as Mid-Devon’s representative.

I came down from Cambridge in 1897 with a good degree and
accompanied my mother on a six-month tour of France and the
Mediterranean. It was, I think, a great joy for her to be shown the
historical and artistic treasures of Italy and Greece by her favoured
son. It was in Rome that we encountered a college friend of mine:
Gerald Couchman , who had been rusticated during our last year
for pauperizing a fellow-student in a card game. Couch (as we
called him) was one of those fine, rumbustious high-livers whose
morals bore no close inspection but whose spirit and company were
alike irresistible. I paid no heed to his somewhat ruthless style of
gambling—his own finances being precarious and his victims generally better endowed with wealth than good sense, it struck me as
no great crime—but our tutor, the narrow-minded Threlfall, conceived a great personal dislike for Couch, who obliged him by sailing rather close to the wind. In the incident for which he was
punished, Couch had no idea how ill could his opponent afford to
lose. I believe that, when this finally became known to him, he
waived the debt, too late to appease the wrath of Threlfall. So
Couch’s studies stood suspended for a year, during which time we
met him whiling away his days in Rome, where he had secured an
obscure teaching appointment and where his gambling adventures
went unmonitored.

If like attracts unlike, I suppose my friendship with Couch
could be said to exemplify that tendency. In indulging and secretly
applauding his scapegrace ways, I perhaps compensated for that
probity and respectability which, as a budding politician , I had to
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be seen to embrace but which occasionally sat ill with my youthful
exuberance. Even my mother confessed to enjoying Couch’s company in Rome and tolerated in him greater laxity than she would
condone in others.

Couch went back to Cambridge and I went back to Devon , to be
seen at shows and sales with my brother, meeting local residents in
the company of my father (who appeared to see my election as his
last great military campaign) and speaking at meetings with Sir
William. The Liberal Party was then , in all conscience, at sixes and
sevens, still striving to adjust to the retirement of Mr. Gladstone.

Indeed, in three short years we had three different leaders—

Rosebery, Harcourt and Campbell-Bannerman—a helter-skelter
progression which convinced Sir William that he had left his own
retirement too late and which infused me with no very great confidence in the leadership of the party to which I was now committed.

Not that there had ever been any question of my joining the
Conservatives. On all issues of substance—free trade, Ireland, the
Empire, the House of Lords—I was firmly of the Liberal mind, but
such volatility at the helm was a trifle disconcerting. It was my
brother, ever a good judge of land, who pointed out to me how it lay
in this regard. For, as he said, a time of flux was ideal for a young
hopeful to win his spurs.

In the short term, what was needed was patience. And just as,
kicking my heels at Barrowteign , I began to exhaust mine, Gerald
Couchman came to my rescue. In the summer of 1898, he at last
graduated from Cambridge and took up residence in London as a
young man about town , living with an indulgent aunt in St. John’s
Wood. He invited me to stay with him there awhile and, since this
would enable me to follow events in Parliament at first hand, I was
encouraged to go. In the event, my visits became frequent and
lengthy, so delightfully open-handed was Couch’s aunt in the accommodation of guests. Her nephew led me into bad habits with a
cheery smile, but I refrained from his worst excesses and kept my
ear close to the ground at Westminster, where my time was well-spent.

But not, alas, reassuringly spent. There was perceptible during
the spring and summer of 1899 a drift to war with the Boer republics
of Transvaal and the Orange Free State that appeared, to me at any

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rate, to possess an inevitability borne of the most extreme and swag-gering nationalism amongst the populace of London (and, I have
little doubt, of Pretoria too). The low halls and taverns which Couch
sometimes induced me to visit generally rebounded at this time with
the most unreasoning war sentiment and caused me to doubt, for the
first time, my faith in the demos. It became clear that the Liberal
Party would be divided should war come. Campbell-Bannerman
and Lloyd George opposed hostilities and came to be roundly
abused for their pains; Asquith and the former leader, Rosebery,
supported them.

My position was equivocal, which met with Sir William’s approval but which considerably put out my father, who judged that
methods employed against the sepoys in 1857 should be followed
against the Boers in 1899; in vain did I seek to dissuade him. It
was Couch who convinced me that one could carry reason too
far, never being one to do so himself. We were seated at Lord’s one
day in June—watching Victor Trumper score a century for the
Australians—when we fell to discussing what we should do in the
event of war. Couch was all for enlisting at once and sampling
the excitement of action. The subtleties of the dispute were of no interest to him where an opportunity for overseas adventure was concerned. To a great extent, he won me over. If war did come, I felt
sure that an election would be delayed, not hastened, so time was
likely to hang heavy if I stayed at home. There seemed, moreover,
no substitute for first-hand experience upon which to base my own
view of the matter. Accordingly, we pledged, as only young men
can , to enlist together.

Fortuitously, my father was not unacquainted with General
Buller, the Commander-in-Chief, whose career had started in India
just as my father’s was coming to fruition there and whose family
home was near Crediton. Through his good offices, Couch and I
were admitted that summer to the volunteer reserve of the
Devonshire regiment. When war did break out, in October, we were
gazetted second lieutenants.

So it was that, on October 11, we set sail from Southampton with
General Buller and the rest of the regiment, bound for Capetown.

Aboard, I encountered amongst our fellow-passengers that youthful veteran of Omdurman , Winston Churchill, like me set upon a
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political career, but (at this stage) in the Conservative interest. He
was going to South Africa as a reporter for the
Morning Post
and
little did I think that I would one day sit in Cabinet with him.

We reached Capetown at the end of October amidst a scene of
some consternation , the Boers having by now invested Kimberley
and Mafeking and, shortly thereafter, Ladysmith. Even to a novice
such as I then was, there was a lack of conviction in the dispositions
made by General Buller to cope with this emergency. He split his
force into three and sought to raise all three sieges at once, a division
of effort which proved disastrous. Couch and I accompanied Buller
as junior adjutants north towards Ladysmith. I confess that I for
one was so busily engaged in adapting to the military life in a
strange country that I had little time to spare for assessing our strategy, but my instinct that it was miswrought proved sound. Buller
convinced himself that the Boer forces around Ladysmith were too
strong for him to lift the siege and he was right. But news of
Gatacre’s defeat at Stormberg and Methuen’s at Magersfontein
stung him into a frontal assault upon the Boer positions at Colenso
on the Tugela River on December 15, only three days after reporting that a direct attack would prove too costly. That cost was a comprehensive defeat, a thousand men dead, his own command forfeited
and the creation in the public mind at home of the doleful phenomenon of “Black Week,” which stilled, for a moment, the bellicose
clamour of the music halls.

Unhappily, the defeat at Colenso carried a bitter personal lesson for me. A battlefield far from home is no place to learn that one’s
trusted friend is a coward, but this conclusion was forced upon me
by Gerald Couchman’s conduct that day. In an action to save the ten
guns that were ultimately lost, Buller took a personal hand and,
therefore, we adjutants with him. In this action , the general was
himself wounded and the only son of Lord Roberts was killed. I did
what little I could with what fortitude I could muster, but Couch
held back and, in an incident overlooked by all but me, quitted the
scene in a craven act of self-preservation. I did not despise him for it,
for any sane man would have felt fear that day, but I was chastened
to learn that he could leave my side at such a crucial time. I did not
reproach him afterwards, yet he knew that I had seen , and matters
were never again the same between us.

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When Lord Roberts was appointed as the new C-in-C, Buller
despatched Couch and me to Capetown to await his arrival and perform what services we could in a staff capacity. We passed a long,
silent, grudging journey back, Couch perhaps appalled by his own
discovery about himself, perhaps resenting my silence as a reminder of it, I saying too little for fear of saying too much and reflecting that perchance the censorious Threlfall had been right all
along. It might have cheered us to know that Colenso was the first
and last action either of us was to see in South Africa. It might, but I
must take leave to doubt it.

Lord Roberts reached Capetown in the middle of January
1900, with the redoubtable Kitchener as his chief of staff. He at once
overhauled the organization of the whole campaign and it was this
greater attention to matters of supply, transport and communication that not only effected a transformation of the army’s fortunes
but also detained me in the Cape for the rest of my time in South
Africa. My political reputation , such as it was, had evidently gone
before me, for I was directed to devote some of my time—when it
was not consumed in ordinary staff duties—to a tentative exploration of popular feeling in the Cape, most especially to a cultivation of the Dutch community, with an assurance of happy internal
relations, when the war was over, the ultimate objective. I made little enough progress in this direction , but did what I could and always found contact with the citizenry of the Cape—its elected
representatives, its magistrates and landowners, its journalists and
businessmen—interesting and instructive. Couch was, at this time,
engaged in the coordination of supplies, for which he developed a
forte. I will say no more than that, where the distribution of food
and equipment was concerned, he was not slow to introduce a commercial element to his own advantage. At all events, we saw little of
each other at this time.