The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (54 page)

To Winston’s delight, his mother appeared on polling day, “dressed entirely in blue,” according to a newspaperman, “… in a landau and pair with gaily ribboned and rosetted postillions.” Pamela Plowden might recoil from electioneering, but for Jennie it evoked memories of the early years of her marriage. Nevertheless, Winston lost. She was at his side when the returns came in. The Liberals had taken both seats; his margin of defeat was 1,293 votes out of 48,672 cast. The
Manchester Courier
reported that Churchill “looked upon the process of counting with amusement, and the result of the election did not disturb him. He might have been defeated, but he was conscious that in this fight he had not been disgraced.” He had, however, been wounded. Tory newspapers concluded that it had been a mistake to field a green youth in a working-class district. Word reached him that in the Carlton Club members were shaking their heads over the fact that he had run in tandem with a radical: “Serves him right for standing with a Socialist. No man of any principle would have done such a thing!” He later wrote dryly: “Everyone threw the blame on me. I have noticed that they nearly always do. I suppose it is because they think I shall be able to bear it best…. I returned to London with those feelings of deflation which a bottle of champagne or even soda-water represents when it has been half emptied and left uncorked for the night. No one came to see me on my return to my mother’s house.”
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He did, however, receive a letter. It was from Balfour, who regretted his slight and was now “very sorry to hear of your ill success at Oldham, as I had greatly hoped to see you speedily in the House where your father and I fought many a good battle side by side in days gone by. I hope however you will not be discouraged…. This small reverse will have no permanent ill effect upon your political fortunes.” And later in July, Lady Jeune brought Churchill and Joe Chamberlain together in her home on the Thames. They talked of South Africa. Now secretary of state for colonies, “Pushful Joe” was negotiating the government’s growing dispute with the Boers, the Dutch farmers in South Africa. At one point he offered Winston a bit of political advice. He told him: “It’s no use blowing the trumpet for the charge and then looking around to find nobody following.”
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Chamberlain and Sir Alfred Milner, the British high commissioner in Cape Town, were preparing to blow the trumpet for a showdown with South Africa’s Boers, and they wanted the backing of all England. Over the next two months, while Churchill was making his final changes in
The River War,
they carefully built it. By the end of September hostilities were imminent. Obviously Winston would go as a war correspondent. Harmsworth’s
Daily Mail
and Borthwick’s
Morning Post
were bidding for him, but in the end he stayed with Borthwick, who offered him unprecedented terms: expenses, protection of his copyright, and £250, roughly $1,250, a month. He wired news of his coming departure to Chamberlain, who replied from Birmingham on October 4: “I have your telegraph & will write to Milner tonight asking his good offices for the son of my old friend…. I shall be in London on Monday but I gather that you leave before then. If so good luck & best wishes!” In fact, Milner was to receive two letters recommending Winston; Chamberlain’s, which was tepid (“He has the reputation of being bumptious. Put him on the right lines.”), and a warmer one from George Wyndham, the under secretary of state for war: “He is a very clever fellow & is bringing out an unprejudiced mind.”
¹¹³

Actually, Winston wasn’t due to sail until Saturday, so he saw Chamberlain once more. The autocratic colonial secretary invited him to share his morning hansom ride from the Chamberlain house at Prince’s Gardens to Parliament. That morning he was the very quiddity of Joe, “Joe the Brummagem screw-maker,” the self-made manufacturer from the Midlands: the diamond pin in his stock, the homegrown orchid in his buttonhole, his monocle in his eye, and, with the inevitable cigar in his teeth, as calm and self-assured as a slab of his Birmingham steel. “Buller,” he said of General Sir Redvers Buller, the new commander in chief for South Africa, who was still in England, “would have been wiser to have gone out earlier. Now, if the Boers invade Natal, Sir George White with his 16,000 men may easily settle the whole thing.” Sir George was in Ladysmith, which, with Kimberley and Mafeking, was regarded as one of the three keys to English defense. Churchill asked about Mafeking, close to the border. “Ah, Mafeking, that may be besieged,” Chamberlain said airily, “but if they cannot hold out for a few weeks, what is one to expect?” He added prudently, “Of course, I have to base myself on the War Office opinion. They are all quite confident. I can only go by what they say.”
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On Thursday, when the first Boer shots were fired at Kraajpan, Churchill was packing his black tin steamer trunks with Thomas Walden, who had been Lord Randolph’s valet and was now his son’s. Winston had just submitted his first expense account, for £30 18s. 6d. Clearly he had no intention of living a Spartan life at the front. In addition to a compass, a new saddle fitted with a pigskin case, and his Ross telescope and Voigtlander field glass, repaired at Borthwick’s expense, he was taking thirty bottles of 1887 Vin d’Ay Sec, eighteen bottles of St. Emilion, eighteen of ten-year-old scotch, a dozen bottles of Rose’s Cordial Lime Juice, six bottles of light port, six of French vermouth, and six of Very Old Eau de Vie 1866.
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Every evening that week he attended a dinner party in his honor. Since the election he had been trying, without much success, to grow a guardsman’s mustache, and his touchiness about it inspired what may have been the first faint flash of Churchillian wit in London society. A friend of Jennie’s, seated next to him at one of the dinners, told him she liked neither his politics nor his mustache. He replied, “Madame, I see no earthly reason why you should come in contact with either.”
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The Royal Mail steamer
Dunottar Castle
was to sail at 6:00
P.M.
Saturday, October 14, 1899, from Southampton docks. Churchill arrived early, jaunty in a yachting cap, but the huge crowd, perched on roofs and cranes, hadn’t gathered for him. It was there to cheer his most distinguished fellow passenger, Buller, and Buller’s staff. A fleet of civilian liners would follow with forty-seven thousand volunteers, but Sir Redvers was the man of the hour. The general’s special train arrived at the wharf two hours before the
Castle
weighed anchor. Everyone was ready to follow Chamberlain’s trumpet now. The throng sang “Rule Britannia,” “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow,” and “God Save the Queen.” Men shouted, “Remember Majuba!” “Pull old Krojer’s whiskers!” and “Give it to the Boers!” The ship’s foghorn blew. A pioneer newsreel cameraman from the Biograph Company cranked his camera. From the head of the gangplank Sir Redvers thanked everyone and said he hoped he would not be away long. His hope was to be dashed. So were their hopes in him.

E
ight years earlier Lord Randolph, during his own trip to South Africa for the
Daily Graphic,
had acquired five thousand shares in Rand Mines. They had been sold to cover his debts, but had he held them their value would have been increased by twenty times at his death, and, shortly thereafter, by fifty or sixty times. That was the key to the Boer issue. After Majuba, Gladstone had negotiated the London treaty of 1884, which had granted limited self-government to the two Boer republics, the Transvaal and the Orange Free State; the two South African colonies, Natal and Cape Colony, were to remain British. Then gold had been discovered in the Transvaal—diamonds had already been found near Kimberley—and Empire builders like Cecil Rhodes wanted the Transvaal and the Orange Free State back. At that time the world’s monetary systems, chiefly British, were dependent on gold. The Empire builders thought they saw a way to regain power over the Boer lands. The gold rush of the 1880s had brought the Transvaal a tremendous influx of Englishmen, or Uitlanders (“Outlanders”—foreigners), as the Boers called them: so many that by the mid-1890s they probably formed a majority of the republic’s inhabitants. To British imperialists they seemed exploitable.

President Paul Kruger—“Oom Paul,” that strong Brueghel peasant whom Chamberlain had called an “ignorant, dirty, cunning” old man—was uncowed. He refused to give these British immigrants the vote. That was what the Jameson Raid had been all about; the raiders had hoped to spark an uprising by the English settlers. Badly planned, the plot had failed. Nevertheless, Rhodes and Chamberlain, who had been implicated in it, were determined to answer the Uitlander’s
cri de coeur.
The fact that this was a violation of the 1884 pact, in which the British had agreed not to intervene in the Transvaal’s domestic affairs, was ignored. Imperialists continued to speak ominously of “consolidating the Empire.” On the eve of the first Boer crisis Gladstone had warned against “the fascinations of passion and of pride,” but his voice had been stilled in 1898. Thousands of young Englishmen agreed with the more strident advocates of expansion; in India, Churchill had written: “Imperial aid must redress the wrongs of the Outlanders. Imperial troops must curb the insolence of the Boers.” He thought the issue was the persecution of his countrymen, not gold. Chamberlain himself regretted that there was “too much of ‘money-bags’ about the whole business.” Still, he and Milner kept nagging Oom Paul in Pretoria. The Boers refused their demands, and when the British began pouring reinforcements into Cape Colony and Natal, became alarmed. Unless the Afrikaners struck back, they realized, their forces would soon be outnumbered. Kruger, who understood the impact of technology on warfare, decided to put his faith in “God and the Mauser”—the Mauser, his Krupp howitzers and 75-millimeter field guns from the Ruhr, his 155-millimeter “Long Toms” from Schneider-Creusot in France, and, from Britain itself, his Maxim “pompoms.” He issued an ultimatum. If Chamberlain didn’t stop his troop buildup, the Transvaal would fight. On October 11, 1899, three days before the
Dunottar Castle
sailed, the ultimatum expired and the war began.
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At the last minute the Orange Free State Boers had thrown in their lot with their Transvaal brothers. The British were surprised, but undaunted. Supremely self-confident, they were sure it would all be over by Christmas.
The Times
thought the ultimatum an “infatuated step” by a “petty republic,” the
Globe
was irked by this “trumpery little state” and its “impudent burghers,” the
Daily Telegraph
was “in doubt whether to laugh or weep.” Since Victoria’s coronation two generations earlier, her subjects had been swaggering down the highways of the world, fighting short, relatively bloodless colonial wars at almost no cost; the army had fought only two engagements since the Indian Mutiny of 1857 in which more than a hundred men had been lost. The rewards for this insignificant sacrifice had been immense; Rosebery had told an Edinburgh audience that during the past twelve years 2,600,000 square miles had been added to the Empire, chiefly in Africa. That might be called the end of the red-coat era. Now, at the end of the 1890s, the army was about to fight its first big conflict in its new khaki uniforms. Churchill and the
Dunottar Castle
were heading for the last of the Victorian wars, England’s costliest struggle between Waterloo and Sarajevo, which would drain the Empire of a half-million men and bring down upon London the opprobrium of the civilized world. “If there was a good case for the Boer War,” Margot Asquith would later write in her diary, “it was indifferently put, and I doubt if a single nation understood it.” The war was about to give England, in Kipling’s phrase, “no end of a lesson.”
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Plunging through high seas and what Churchill called “grey storms”—as usual he was ill—the
Dunottar Castle
lurched toward the Canary Islands. Cut off from the world, they endured more than two weeks of what Winston called a “heavy silence”; it was, he wrote his mother, “a long time in war, especially in the beginning.” At Madeira they learned nothing, which was “very hard to understand. Why did they declare war if they had nothing up their sleeves? Why do they waste time now?” On their sixteenth day they passed a tramp steamer, the
Australian,
whose crew held aloft a crude white-on-black sign:
BOERS DEFEATED. THREE BATTLES. PENN SYMONDS KILLED
.
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