Hero of the Empire: The Boer War, a Daring Escape, and the Making of Winston Churchill (44 page)

One morning while talking with Churchill, Howard suddenly had an idea. Although he, Dan Dewsnap and John Adams, the colliery’s secretary, had spent the past few days discussing little else than how they were going to get Churchill out of the Transvaal, nothing they had suggested seemed plausible. Now, however, as he sat alone with Churchill, Howard remembered something: The man who ran the store at the mine, Charles Burnham, had a small business
on the side—buying wool for a German firm and shipping it to the coast. At that moment, Burnham had several bales waiting to be sent to Delagoa Bay, on the coast of Portuguese East Africa. There was enough wool to fill seven large boxcars, and it seemed to Howard that they should be able to hide Churchill inside one of them.

The more Howard thought about the idea, the more he liked it. They could load the cars at the mine’s railroad siding, packing the bales so that a hole was left in the center of one of them, big enough for Churchill to crawl inside and survive for the roughly sixteen hours it would take him to reach the border. They could tie a tarpaulin over the top of each car after it had been loaded, so if the train was stopped for inspection, it would be obvious that the fastenings had not been tampered with since they were first secured.

The only thing left to do was talk to Burnham. Although the shopkeeper had no idea that Winston Churchill was even hiding at the colliery, Howard was confident that they could rely on him.
Burnham too was of English origin, although his family had been in South Africa for several generations. In fact, his grandfather Jeremiah Cullingworth had brought the first printing press to Durban, using it to print the
Natal Mercury
, which he had helped to found in 1852. Burnham was smart and resourceful, and he had never been one to shy away from a little adventure.

As soon as he learned of the situation, Burnham immediately agreed to help. After four tense days, constantly worrying about keeping their secret guest hidden and fed, dodging questions from curious employees, hoping against hope that the Boers would not search the mine, the men finally had a plan. The only person who was not thoroughly relieved by the sudden turn of events was Churchill himself.

Although Churchill agreed that this was the best hope they had, rather than alleviating his anxiety, Howard’s plan had only heightened it. Since climbing over the fence of the Staats Model School, Churchill had lived in constant fear of being recaptured. He had been wet, cold and hungry. He had lain alone for hours in complete darkness, fighting off swarms of rats. As miserable as he had been,
however, he had at least been free. Howard’s plan placed that freedom in imminent peril. “
I was more worried about this than almost anything that had happened to me so far,” Churchill would later write. “When by extraordinary chance one has gained some great advantage or prize and actually had it in one’s possession…the idea of losing it becomes almost insupportable.”

Had the plan given Churchill some measure of control, he could have borne the risk with far less fear. When he had been on his own on the veld, hiding in copses and perching on train couplings, ready to jump at the first sign of trouble, he had at least been master of his own fate, if only to some small degree. As soon as he burrowed into the wool bags like a frightened rabbit, he would be obliged to rely on chance, or, worse, someone else’s intelligence and cunning. This state of affairs was far less appealing to him than the dangers he would face if he were once again on his own. “
The idea of having to put myself in a position in which I should be perfectly helpless,” he wrote, “without a move of any kind, absolutely at the caprice of a searching party at the frontier, was profoundly harassing.”

Churchill understood that his new friends had gone to great trouble and risk on his behalf, and he could not repay their generosity by sneaking off as soon as the sun went down as he had in Pretoria. Knowing that he had no other options, however, did not make his situation any easier. “
I dreaded in every fibre the ordeal which awaited me,” he wrote, “and which I must impotently and passively endure if I was to make good my escape from the enemy.”

A few days after Howard had explained his plan, Churchill was sitting alone in the back office, struggling to read
Kidnapped
while he agonized over the powerlessness of his situation, when he heard the sound of gunshots. They were nearby, and they came one after another, in a halting series of jarring blasts. The first thought that raced through Churchill’s mind was that the Boers had discovered that he was hiding at the colliery, and Howard and his friends had
refused to give him up, engaging “
in open rebellion in the heart of the enemy’s country.”

Having been repeatedly warned to stay in his hiding place no matter what happened outside his door, Churchill remained crouched behind the packing cases, listening desperately for another sound that would tell him his fate—more gunfire, a shout, the violent rattling of his doorknob. Instead, he heard voices, calm and measured, and then laughter. A few minutes later, there was again silence outside, and Churchill heard a key turn in the lock and his door slide open. Peering around the packing cases, he saw the pale face of John Howard.

Locking the door behind him, Howard walked quietly toward Churchill, a broad smile lighting up his face. “
The Field Cornet has been here,” he said. “No, he was not looking for you. He says they caught you at Waterval Boven yesterday.” Despite the apparent innocence of the Boer’s visit and his insistence that Churchill had already been captured, Howard had wanted him off the property as quickly as possible. The best way to do this, he had decided, was to challenge him to a rifle match, shooting at glass bottles, and let him win. “He won two pounds off me,” Howard told Churchill with obvious pleasure, “and has gone away delighted.”

Before leaving, Howard turned once more to Churchill and, as if it were little more than an afterthought, told him, “
It’s all fixed up for to-night.” “What do I do?” Churchill asked, realizing that the moment he had been dreading had finally come. “Nothing,” Howard replied. “You simply follow me when I come for you.”

CHAPTER 26

THE RED AND THE BLUE

A
t 2:00 on the morning of December 19, the door to Churchill’s hidden room opened once again. Churchill, already fully dressed and waiting, looked up to find Howard standing in the doorway. Without speaking, Howard motioned for him to follow, and the two men walked silently into the outer office that lay just beyond Churchill’s hiding place and then out the door.

Stepping outside beneath a bright moon, Churchill could see the railroad siding in the distance, the cars already waiting on the tracks. Nearby, three men were walking in different directions across the veld. Although Churchill could not tell with any certainty from that distance, he believed that it was Dewsnap, McKenna and McHenry, the men who had shown him such kindness while he was hiding in the mine shaft. Along with them was a group of native workers, busy loading a gigantic bale of wool onto the last car.

Crossing the veld, which stretched low and green between the mine office and the siding, Churchill and Howard quickly reached the train. As he walked in front of Churchill along the tracks, Howard passed the first boxcar and crossed behind it, nonchalantly pointing to it with his left hand as he did. Understanding that this was his cue, Churchill scrambled onto the couplings. As soon as he had
pulled himself up, he could see, between bulging bales of wool and the side of the car, a hole just big enough for him to crawl into. Beyond the opening was a tight tunnel running between bales and ending in the middle of the car. Slithering through the narrow space, Churchill came to a small hollow that his friends had made for him, just tall enough to sit up in and long enough to lie down. “In this,” he wrote, “I took up my abode.”

Outside, Charles Burnham, the shopkeeper in whose wool Churchill was now hiding, climbed into the guard’s van, a small carriage attached to the back of the train. After agreeing to help Howard, Burnham had decided that not only would he turn a blind eye as Churchill crawled into one of his boxcars before it headed to Delagoa Bay, but he would ride with him to make sure that he actually made it there. The train would have to stop at several stations along the way, and Burnham knew that it would be inspected by armed guards. Someone would have to intervene.

As well as being prepared to help Churchill along the route, Burnham had tried to pave the way for him ahead of time. The best way to protect his stowaway, he had decided, was to ensure his swift journey. Toward that end, after applying for his travel permit, Burnham sat down with the local railway officials, making the case to them that this particular delivery was urgent. “
I made representation to the railway people that it was essential to have it delivered at once,” he would later explain, “as there was a likelihood of a fall in the market.” The cost to him could be substantial, he said, urging them to help him avoid any unnecessary delays and, wherever possible, inspections.

Hours passed before Churchill even left the colliery. Crouching in his tight burrow, unable to see much of anything beyond the walls of his boxcar, he waited in silence for something to happen. Finally, thin rays of sunlight began to seep through the chinks in the walls and the cracks in the floorboards. Daylight had come, and with it the sound of an engine rumbling down the tracks. Soon after, Churchill could feel his car being bumped about as it was coupled to the colliery’s engine.

There was another pause and then the distinctive, stomach-clenching sensation of movement as the train began to roll forward. Track by track, it slowly left the colliery behind. The mine began to recede in the distance, its winding wheel looming over the coal-blackened processing plant; Howard’s office with its hidden back room, dark and empty now; and, standing in silence as they watched the train disappear, the men who had risked their lives to help Winston Churchill, a man they barely knew and would never see again.

As he settled into his hiding place, Churchill looked around and began to examine the provisions his friends had smuggled into the boxcar. The first item he noticed was from Dan Dewsnap, the engineer from Oldham who had predicted his victory in the next election. Dewsnap had given Churchill the one thing he feared he might need on the final leg of his escape: a revolver. Although he was grateful for the gift, Churchill could not imagine that he would actually use it. “
This was a moral support,” he wrote, “though it was not easy to see in what way it could helpfully be applied to any problem I was likely to have to solve.”

Along with the revolver, Churchill found enough food to sustain him for a journey that was twice as long. As well as two roast chickens, cooked by Burnham’s mother, a loaf of bread and a melon, his friends had tucked into the car sliced meat, three bottles of tea and, from Howard, a bottle of whiskey. “
Smokes were taboo,” Howard later explained, worried that cigar smoke might give Churchill away on the train as it had in the mine shaft. Whiskey, however, could do little harm and might bolster his courage.

Howard had also given Churchill a compass. Although he was not going to be able to see where he was going, Churchill could at least keep track of the train’s direction. He also happened to know every stop it would make on its way to the coast.

While at the Staats Model School, Churchill and Haldane had memorized every station along the Delagoa Bay Railway line. It
had been an easy task for Churchill, who had always had a remarkable memory. When he was at Harrow, he had learned by heart twelve hundred lines of Macaulay’s
Lays of Ancient Rome
.
He could remember entire lectures if they interested him, and, decades after the Boer War, he would still be able to reel off the names of the Transvaal stations in order of appearance, beginning with Witbank and running west to east, from Middelburg to Bergendal, Belfast, Dalmanutha, Machadodorp, Waterval Boven, Waterval Onder, and on and on, all the way to the border town of Komatipoort.