Hero of the Empire: The Boer War, a Daring Escape, and the Making of Winston Churchill (49 page)

In the summer of 1900, another man who would leave his mark on world history left Africa to return home to England, where he was given a hero’s welcome. Among Churchill’s first stops was Oldham, where, just a year earlier, he had lost his first election. Now he was carried through the streets in a procession of ten carriages. “
10,000 people turned out…with flags and drums beating,” he wrote to his brother, Jack, “and shouted themselves hoarse for two hours.”
The procession ended at the Theatre Royal, the same theater where he had spoken during the last campaign, and where he was now expected to tell the people of Oldham the story of his escape.

Churchill had told the story many times before, but this was the first time he was able to use the names of the men who had helped him.
By that time, the British had occupied Witbank, and he need no longer fear reprisals. As he described the colliery and the mine shaft in which he had hidden, Churchill mentioned that Dan Dewsnap, an Oldham native, had been among the men who had risked their own lives to protect him. As soon as he said the name, the audience erupted. “His wife’s in the gallery,” they cried. “There was,” Churchill later wrote, “general jubilation.”

Dan Dewsnap had been right. They did all vote for Churchill the next time, or at least enough of them did to win the election. Two months after his second speech at the Theatre Royal, Churchill won his first seat in Parliament, coming in second by just sixteen votes to one of the Liberal candidates, Alfred Emmott. “
It is clear to me from the figures,” Churchill wrote to Prime Minister Salisbury the day after the election, “that nothing but personal popularity arising out of the late South African War, carried me in.”

Churchill had also won the election without the help of his mother. Although he no longer needed her celebrity because he now had his own, he had nonetheless begged her to come to Oldham. “
I write again to impress upon you how very useful your presence will be down here,” he had written to her just before the election. Jennie, however, would not be swayed. She was, after all, on her honeymoon.

Despite the adamant objections of her family and his, or perhaps in part because of them, Jennie had married George Cornwallis-West
in July, soon after Winston returned from southern Africa.
Some three thousand people had swarmed the London church just to get a look at the bride. “
The wedding was very pretty and George looked supremely happy in having at length obtained his heart’s desire,” Churchill wrote to his brother, who was still fighting in Africa. “As we already know each other’s views on the subject, I need not pursue it.”

Churchill’s own romantic hopes did not turn out as well, at least in the short term. Although he told his mother that Pamela Plowden was “
the only woman I could ever live happily with,” it seemed that he was not the kind of man the sparkling young socialite was destined to marry. “
She ought to be a rich man’s wife,” one of Churchill’s friends wrote of Pamela soon after the election, and within the year she was. In the spring of 1902, Pamela married Victor Bulwer-Lytton, 2nd Earl of Lytton and the godson of Queen Victoria. “
Miss Plowden frequently has been said to have been engaged,” a reporter for the
Daily Chronicle
wrote, “but she now makes an alliance that was well worth waiting for.”

Like Churchill, who would marry Clementine Hozier six years later, Pamela had a long and apparently happy marriage, but her friendship with Churchill would continue for the rest of their lives. In fact, she was among the first people to whom he wrote after proposing to Clementine. “Secret till Sat[urday],” he told her. “I am going to marry Clementine….You must always be our best friend.” In the end, the correspondence between Pamela and Churchill would span sixty-three years, ranging from his first lovesick missives to her congratulations on his election as prime minister—“All my life I have known you would become PM, ever since the days of Hansom cabs”—to his condolences after the death of one of her sons during World War II.

“
The first time you meet Winston you see all his faults,” Pamela would explain years later to Edward Marsh, Churchill’s private secretary, “and the rest of your life you spend in discovering his virtues.”

Churchill was not one to forget old friends. Even in the heady days following his escape, he never forgot the men who had made it possible. Soon after returning to England, Churchill wrote to Howard, telling him that he was sending him a package that contained eight gold watches, presents for those who had risked their lives to help him. “
I hope you will all do me the honour to accept these small keepsakes of our remarkable adventure,” he wrote, “and believe that they also represent my sincere gratitude for the help and assistance you all afforded me.”
On the back of the watches, Churchill had inscribed each name followed by “from Winston S. Churchill in recognition of timely help afforded him in his escape from Pretoria during the South African War, Dec. 13, 1899.”

Churchill’s friends in Witbank had certainly earned his gratitude. After the young aristocrat had been swept up into the grand celebration at Durban, Charles Burnham and his English neighbors had remained unprotected in the Boers’ heartland, concealing Churchill’s secret and even taking new risks to help Haldane and Le Mesurier follow the path he had blazed. As a result, Burnham and John Howard had barely escaped prison, and possibly execution, at the hands of the increasingly suspicious Boer authorities.

After the train car in which Churchill had been hiding continued on to the firm that was buying Burnham’s wool, someone found what appeared to be greasy finger marks on the bales, indicating that the car had been carrying more than just wool. When Churchill’s escape became known, it was also remembered that Burnham had been spotted walking with a stranger through the streets of Lourenço Marques. Burnham was questioned, but he insisted that if someone had slipped into one of his trucks, he certainly knew nothing about it. Although the Boers were deeply suspicious, they had no proof and so were forced to let him go.

For Howard, it had been an even closer call.
Not long after he had helped Haldane and Le Mesurier on their way to Lourenço Marques, he heard a knock on the door of his office and opened it to find a Boer commandant and five burghers. They had come to arrest him and take him to Pretoria for interrogation. Realizing that if he
went to Pretoria he might never come back, Howard decided that his best chance was to try to bribe the men. If that didn’t work, he was not going to go without a fight. “Should they not fall in line with his suggestions, then it was a matter of his life for theirs,” Howard’s son would explain years later. “He would shoot it out with them.”

Inviting the men into the dining room, the same room where he had brought Churchill on the night he arrived at the colliery, Howard gave them food and whiskey and then told them he was going to pack a bag. He returned a few minutes later with two revolvers in his pockets. Standing at the room’s only door, next to where he had stacked the men’s rifles, he made his proposition: If they would let him go, he would give them £50 now and another £200 after the war. The men agreed, not knowing that Howard was prepared to shoot them if they had turned him down. Soon after, they returned to Pretoria to explain to their superiors that John Howard had somehow slipped through their grasp.

As grateful as Churchill was to his old friends, he was equally respectful and generous to his old enemies.
Although during the war he had defended Kitchener’s scorched-earth policies, writing to his brother that by burning a few farms, they might persuade more burghers to stay home rather than go out and fight, he also argued strongly that as soon as the war was won, they should be as compassionate in victory as they had been unflinching in battle. “
We embarked on the stormy ocean of war to find true peace,” he reminded his readers in an article at the end of 1900. “Beware of driving men to desperation….Those who demand ‘an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth’ should ask themselves whether such barren spoils are worth five years of bloody partisan warfare and the consequent impoverishment of S. Africa.” Churchill’s advice was not well received by his fellow Englishmen, but he did not care, nor ever would.

For the rest of his life, after every war in which England fought,
Churchill would exhort his country to offer “the hand of friendship to the vanquished.” For the Boers, he argued, “
the wise and right course is to beat down all who resist, even to the last man, but not to withhold forgiveness and even friendship from any who wish to surrender….Therein lies the shortest road to ‘peace with honour.’ ”

Churchill himself extended the hand of friendship not just to the Boers as a people but directly to the man who had personally been responsible for many of the battlefield defeats that had kept the war going for so long—Louis Botha.

The two men met for the first time in 1903, not long after the end of the Boer War, when Botha visited England to ask his former enemies for help in rebuilding his country. Although Botha had been responsible for the attack on the armored train that had led to Churchill’s capture and imprisonment, the two men quickly became friends.

“Few men that I have known have interested me more than Louis Botha,” Churchill would write many years later. “An acquaintance formed in strange circumstances and upon an almost unbelievable introduction ripened into a friendship which I greatly valued.” Churchill and Botha understood each other, perhaps better than anyone else they knew. Although they had had strikingly different childhoods, their young adult lives had been defined by war, and they both seemed destined to lead their nations in the new century.

In 1907, just over seven years after he had sat astride his horse on that rain-swept hillside in Frere, watching Churchill’s train steam toward the trap he had laid, Botha was elected prime minister of the Transvaal. Now a high official of the same British Empire he had sought to defy, Botha traveled to England to take part in the Imperial Conference, a meeting of the leaders of the self-governing colonies. Churchill, then undersecretary of state for the colonies, also attended the banquet, which was held in Westminster Hall, the oldest building in the Palace of Westminster, whose six-foot-thick stone walls, vast spaces and delicate statuary were designed to overawe visitors with tangible proof of British power.

Striding through the great hall to the place that had been
reserved for him, the former Boer commander paused when he saw Lady Randolph Churchill, standing next to the man who was once his battlefield prisoner. With the simplicity of a burgher, and the courtesy of the international statesmen he and Churchill had both become, Botha acknowledged to Jennie the strange, intertwined history he shared with her son. “
He and I,” Botha said, “have been out in all weathers.”

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The prospect of writing about Winston Churchill, even a small part of his life, is as daunting as it is thrilling. I took courage from the fact that, throughout the process, I was never alone. Some of the greatest minds not just in Churchill studies but in the field of history have gone before me, revealing Churchill in all his brilliance, boldness, originality and lust for life. After spending years reading an ever-expanding library of books about Churchill, I owe a tremendous debt of gratitude to a great number of historians and writers. Although it would be impossible to list them all here, I would be remiss if I did not mention at least those who had the most profound impact on this book.

My first and greatest debt is to Sir Martin Gilbert, whose death just last year was a great loss to his many friends and admirers. Gilbert was not only the most trusted and respected Churchill biographer, he was an incredibly skilled and prolific historian, and what I learned from him went far beyond the events of Churchill’s life. Gilbert was first brought to the subject, as a young Oxford graduate student, by Churchill’s son, Randolph, who hired him as a research assistant. Before he died at the age of fifty-seven, just five years after his father’s death, Randolph had completed the first two volumes of the definitive Churchill biography that Gilbert continued. These two volumes, as well as the related
Documents
, cover Churchill’s early life and, as such, were an invaluable resource, guide and friend to me as I conducted my own research.