Churchill’s Memoirs of the Second Boer War: Story and Credibility
by
Ardil
On many occasions, politicians’ memoirs are viewed as skewed toward the opinions of the politician.[1] Though Churchill had already revealed his political ambitions before serving as a correspondent and in captivity during the Second Boer War, his biases do not appear to have colored his recollections significantly. Many speculated that he entered the Second Boer War solely to build popularity in order to win the parliamentary election upon his return.[2] In this he succeeded,[3] but his memoirs agreed with others’ for the most part. He told two contrasting stories about one phase of his escape from a POW camp: the earlier was partially fabricated to avoid compromising the identities of those who helped him. The adventure of his capture and escape resulted in so much publicity that Churchill became “the best-known young man of his generation.”[4]
Churchill acquired that fame by acting as an embedded journalist in the Second Boer War. Churchill, for most of his uncaptured time in the war, stayed at Estcourt, because he couldn’t get into the besieged town Ladysmith.
The train wreck of the armored train kept at Estcourt for reconnaissance led to Churchill’s capture.[5] Churchill found that the armored train was good in concept, but that proper measures had not been taken for the escape of the crew. “Nothing looks more formidable and impressive than an armoured train,” Churchill would later write, “but nothing is in fact more vulnerable and helpless.”[6] This same armored train had earned such a reputation around camp that it was commonly referred to as “Wilson’s death trap.”[7] It was, in fact, the vulnerability of the armored train that led to his capture. The train was headed up a hill when the Boer troops began a heavy barrage of musketry and artillery on it from a nearby hill.[8] The train driver, wishing to escape this sudden hail of projectiles, drove as quickly as possible up, and then down, the hill. On the downward journey, a sudden stop threw some of the train cars off of the track.[9] The cause of this chaos was a large rock, placed in “a convenient spot”[10] on the tracks, that had stopped the train as it sped down the hill. Churchill, realizing that he was no doubt safer outside the train than inside, due to the ease with which shells penetrated the armor, proceeded outside.[11] Churchill encouraged the train driver and some other men to return to the train, and attempt to reconnect the engine to the train car.[12] For some of the cars, this was not possible, as they had been warped and twisted by the impact.[13] After much pushing, and the assistance of a Boer shell which happened to strike the engine in a lucky spot, they attached engine to one train car.[14] They now observed that the remaining couplings to connect the train cars were severed, and therefore only the engine and the single connected train car were functional.[15] This car was piled with wounded men, and sped toward the nearest station.[16] As the train was beginning to escape, “the Boers increased their fire, and the troops, hitherto somewhat protected by the iron trucks, began to suffer.”[17] In the midst of this disorder, a wounded soldier waved a pocket-handkerchief.[18] Other soldiers did not see this, or authorize it, and therefore continued fighting after the Boers believed them to have surrendered.[19] As men were hunted down, Churchill saw a Boer riding towards him, and reached for his Mauser revolver. He then noticed that it was not there, as he had left it on the engine. Churchill had no choice but to surrender.[20] On this topic both his memoirs and the accounts of others agree.
The only occasion on which Churchill’s memoirs of the Second Boer War did not corroborate his later writings was during the final stage of his escape from captivity. Even in that case, he told only the truth, but not the whole truth. In his book London to Ladysmith via Pretoria, he writes:
“My prayer, as it seems to me, was swiftly and wonderfully answered. I cannot now relate the strange circumstances which followed, and which changed my nearly hopeless position into one of superior advantage. But after the war is over I shall hope to lengthen this account. … On the sixth day the chance I had patiently waited for came. I found a convenient train labeled to Lourenço Marques standing in a siding. I withdrew to a suitable spot for boarding it… the truck in which I ensconced myself was laden with great sacks of some soft merchandise, and I found among them holes and crevices by means of which I managed to work my way to the inmost recess. … indeed they began to search my truck, and I heard the Tarpaulin rustle as they pulled at it, but luckily they did not search deep enough, so that, providentially protected, I reached Delagoa Bay at last, and crawled forth from my place of refuge and of punishment, weary, dirty, hungry, but free once more.”[21]
In a later writing, he reveals that he was driven by hunger and thirst to seek help, even if it meant captivity once more.[22] Going to the nearby town of Witbank,[23] he just happened to knock on the door of a man named John Howard, owner of “the only house for twenty miles where [Churchill] would not be handed over.”[24] Churchill was lucky to the point of improbability. He “had stumbled upon one of the few places in the 110,000 square miles of the Transvaal where it was still possible to find an Englishman.”[25] Howard offered to hide him while they found a better means of escape for him.[26] “I felt like a drowning man pulled out of the water,”[27] Churchill wrote. Churchill was then taken to the bottom of the coal mine that Howard managed, where he stayed for a couple days,[28] and was then moved to a hiding place in Howard’s office, where he stayed for a few more days.[29] After much conversation as to how to smuggle Churchill out of the country, Howard remembered that Charles Burnham, the British-sympathetic proprietor of the store at the mine, had a side business buying and shipping wool for a German firm.[30] They decided that they could slip Churchill into one of the train cars for the shipment.[31] The day that they planned to put Churchill on the train, the Field Cornet visited, carrying the message that Churchill had been caught at Waterval Boven,[32] some 81.3 miles away, the day before.[33] On December 19th,[34] Churchill’s 5th day of hiding in Witbank,[35] he entered a train car filled with wool. Burrowing deep, he prepared for the long journey ahead of him. He waited for hours, along with smuggled food, “enough to sustain him for a journey twice that long,”[36] and a revolver, which Churchill hypothesized was a mere “moral support”[37] and that it “was not easy to see in what way it could be helpfully applied to any problem I was likely to have to solve.”[38] Burnham then rode along with the train, using a bit of “gentle persuasion”[39] along with some bottles of whiskey[40] to get the train through all of its stations without being searched or stopped for excessive amounts of time. Churchill emerged from his boxcar at last, coated in coal dust and “black as a sweep.”[41] Churchill went directly to the consulate after that.[42] So, Winston Churchill did not tell the entire truth about his escape, but he did tell some of it. This is not truly lying; it is more a form of bending the truth. He did find a train labeled for Lourenço Marques, that was filled with “soft merchandise,” and he did hide himself in it. He simply ignored some important facts of the case. It can be understood why he did not speak anything about those who helped him when one considers that they were, at the time of the book being published, still in enemy territory. The book was published in 1900, and the war ended two years later. Therefore, he could not disclose who had helped him without placing them in danger of arrest, prosecution, and perhaps execution.
Churchill himself had risked those consequences when he escaped from the Staats Model School in Pretoria, where he had been held after his capture. He escaped by slipping over a wall on which the electric lights shone particularly dim, while a guard’s back was turned. Churchill’s sketch of the Staats Model School is below.
Churchill realized that “the electric lights in the middle of the quadrangle brilliantly lighted the whole place but cut off the sentries beyond them from looking at the eastern wall, for from behind the lights all seemed darkness by contrast.”[43] The plan made by him and some fellow POWs, Aylmer Haldane and Brokie[44] was to “pass the two sentries near the offices.” He found that if they started at the exact moment when the backs of the guards were both turned, they would be able to make it over the wall. They scheduled the plan for December 11th,[45] but it was rescheduled to the 12th, because a chance did not present itself on the 11th. It seemed as though the 12th would have the same result as the 11th, but a chance came. Churchill, watching the guards at the time, decided that it was “now or never.” He dashed from his hiding place, scrambled over the wall, and lowered himself onto the other side. There he hid, while a sentry on the outside stared directly at Churchill’s hiding place. Luckily, he saw nothing, and left when another sentry came out as well. They both walked away. Churchill wrote that he began to hear two British officer prisoners on the other side of the wall “jabbering Latin works, laughing and talking in all manner of nonsense – amid which I heard my name. I risked a cough. One of the officers immediately began to chatter alone. The other said slowly and clearly, ‘… cannot get out. The sentry suspects. It’s all up. Can you get back again?’ But now all my fears fell from me at once. … I said to the officers, ‘I shall go on alone.’”[46] And so he did.
All of these experiences were not missed by the British newspapers, who turned him into a hero, based off of his actions at Estcourt with the train.[47] This increased Churchill’s appeal as a parliamentary candidate quite a bit. In fact, Churchill wrote that “It’s clear to me from the figures that nothing but personal popularity arising out of the late south African War, carried me in.”[48]
Churchill may have not been completely honest with parts of his memoirs, but they did win him the popularity he needed for his political career to be successful. In comparison with the recollections of others, it does not appear that his memoirs were specifically structured or augmented to promote his political appeal, nor does he seem to have blatantly lied in his memoirs. The most prevalent form of dishonesty consists of omitting salient details or “bending the truth.” This technique was employed to disguise Howard and Burnham for their protection. Overall, Churchill’s memoirs of the Second Boer War seem to agree significantly with the memoirs of others as compiled by Candice Millard.
Appendix A
Text was from transcript of recording of conversation between Candice Millard and Dave Davies, which can be found at https://www.npr.org/2017/09/26/544447697/how-the-boer-war-helped-winston-churchill-become-the-hero-of-the-empire. The quote follows:
DAVIES: And Churchill is still looking for the glory of war. He still wants to be recognized. He wants to get medals. He wants to get into this fight, but he's not in the Army anymore. So he manages to get it not as an officer, but as a journalist reporting for The Morning Post. Were lines between correspondents and combatants less clear then?
Sources
Footnotes
[1] “Every Candidate an Author: The Ceaseless Boom in Books by Politicians,” The Washington Post, May 27, 2015, https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/every-candidates-an-author-the-ceaseless-boom-in-books-by-politicians/2015/05/27/1d1374ae-fd8c-11e4-8b6c-0dcce21e223d_story.html?utm_term=.f66a8d52ba93 (accessed May 20, 2018).
[2] See Appendix A.
[3] Paul Johnson, Churchill (New York, NY: Penguin Books, 2009), 16.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Winston Churchill, Frontiers and Wars (New York, NY: Konecky & Konecky, 1962), 370. This is a conglomeration of works by Churchill; London to Ladysmith via Pretoria, the one I am using, was published 1900.
[6] Candice Millard, Hero of the Empire: The Boer War, a Daring Escape and the Making of Winston Churchill (New York, NY: Doubleday, 2016), 104. Note British spelling retained in quotes.
[7] Churchill, Frontiers and Wars, 376.
[8] Millard, Hero of the Empire, 128. Churchill, Frontiers and Wars, 378.
[9] Millard, Hero of the Empire, 129.
[10] Ibid., 378.
[11] Ibid., 379.
[12] Ibid.
[13] Ibid., 380.
[14] Churchill, Frontiers and Wars, 381.
[15] Ibid.
[16] Ibid., 382.
[17] Ibid.
[18] Ibid., 383.
[19] Ibid.
[20] Ibid., 384.
[21] Ibid., 408-411.
[22] Millard, Hero of the Empire, 244-245.
[23] Ibid., 249.
[24] Ibid., 248.
[25] Ibid., 249.
[26] Ibid., 250.
[27] Ibid.
[28] Ibid., 253-255.
[29] Ibid., 279.
[30] Ibid., 281-282.
[31] Ibid., 282.
[32] Ibid., 284.
[33] Using Google Maps to find difference between Waterval Boven and Witbank, set the mode to walking.
[34] Ibid., 285.
[35] On Millard, Hero of the Empire, 256, it says that December 15th was about 24 hours after Churchill had knocked, and therefore he had knocked on the 14th. His hiding started on the 14th, and ended on the 19th. Do the subtraction.
[36] Ibid., 287.
[37] Ibid.
[38] Ibid.
[39] Ibid., 288.
[40] Ibid., 289.
[41] Ibid., 295.
[42] Ibid., 297.
[43] Churchill, Frontiers and Wars, 403.
[44] Millard, Hero of the Empire, 198.
[45] Millard, Hero of the Empire, 198. Churchill, Frontiers and Wars, 403.
[46] Churchill, Frontiers and Wars, 404.
[47] Millard, Hero of the Empire, 155-156.
[48] Ibid., 313.
Churchill acquired that fame by acting as an embedded journalist in the Second Boer War. Churchill, for most of his uncaptured time in the war, stayed at Estcourt, because he couldn’t get into the besieged town Ladysmith.
The train wreck of the armored train kept at Estcourt for reconnaissance led to Churchill’s capture.[5] Churchill found that the armored train was good in concept, but that proper measures had not been taken for the escape of the crew. “Nothing looks more formidable and impressive than an armoured train,” Churchill would later write, “but nothing is in fact more vulnerable and helpless.”[6] This same armored train had earned such a reputation around camp that it was commonly referred to as “Wilson’s death trap.”[7] It was, in fact, the vulnerability of the armored train that led to his capture. The train was headed up a hill when the Boer troops began a heavy barrage of musketry and artillery on it from a nearby hill.[8] The train driver, wishing to escape this sudden hail of projectiles, drove as quickly as possible up, and then down, the hill. On the downward journey, a sudden stop threw some of the train cars off of the track.[9] The cause of this chaos was a large rock, placed in “a convenient spot”[10] on the tracks, that had stopped the train as it sped down the hill. Churchill, realizing that he was no doubt safer outside the train than inside, due to the ease with which shells penetrated the armor, proceeded outside.[11] Churchill encouraged the train driver and some other men to return to the train, and attempt to reconnect the engine to the train car.[12] For some of the cars, this was not possible, as they had been warped and twisted by the impact.[13] After much pushing, and the assistance of a Boer shell which happened to strike the engine in a lucky spot, they attached engine to one train car.[14] They now observed that the remaining couplings to connect the train cars were severed, and therefore only the engine and the single connected train car were functional.[15] This car was piled with wounded men, and sped toward the nearest station.[16] As the train was beginning to escape, “the Boers increased their fire, and the troops, hitherto somewhat protected by the iron trucks, began to suffer.”[17] In the midst of this disorder, a wounded soldier waved a pocket-handkerchief.[18] Other soldiers did not see this, or authorize it, and therefore continued fighting after the Boers believed them to have surrendered.[19] As men were hunted down, Churchill saw a Boer riding towards him, and reached for his Mauser revolver. He then noticed that it was not there, as he had left it on the engine. Churchill had no choice but to surrender.[20] On this topic both his memoirs and the accounts of others agree.
The only occasion on which Churchill’s memoirs of the Second Boer War did not corroborate his later writings was during the final stage of his escape from captivity. Even in that case, he told only the truth, but not the whole truth. In his book London to Ladysmith via Pretoria, he writes:
“My prayer, as it seems to me, was swiftly and wonderfully answered. I cannot now relate the strange circumstances which followed, and which changed my nearly hopeless position into one of superior advantage. But after the war is over I shall hope to lengthen this account. … On the sixth day the chance I had patiently waited for came. I found a convenient train labeled to Lourenço Marques standing in a siding. I withdrew to a suitable spot for boarding it… the truck in which I ensconced myself was laden with great sacks of some soft merchandise, and I found among them holes and crevices by means of which I managed to work my way to the inmost recess. … indeed they began to search my truck, and I heard the Tarpaulin rustle as they pulled at it, but luckily they did not search deep enough, so that, providentially protected, I reached Delagoa Bay at last, and crawled forth from my place of refuge and of punishment, weary, dirty, hungry, but free once more.”[21]
In a later writing, he reveals that he was driven by hunger and thirst to seek help, even if it meant captivity once more.[22] Going to the nearby town of Witbank,[23] he just happened to knock on the door of a man named John Howard, owner of “the only house for twenty miles where [Churchill] would not be handed over.”[24] Churchill was lucky to the point of improbability. He “had stumbled upon one of the few places in the 110,000 square miles of the Transvaal where it was still possible to find an Englishman.”[25] Howard offered to hide him while they found a better means of escape for him.[26] “I felt like a drowning man pulled out of the water,”[27] Churchill wrote. Churchill was then taken to the bottom of the coal mine that Howard managed, where he stayed for a couple days,[28] and was then moved to a hiding place in Howard’s office, where he stayed for a few more days.[29] After much conversation as to how to smuggle Churchill out of the country, Howard remembered that Charles Burnham, the British-sympathetic proprietor of the store at the mine, had a side business buying and shipping wool for a German firm.[30] They decided that they could slip Churchill into one of the train cars for the shipment.[31] The day that they planned to put Churchill on the train, the Field Cornet visited, carrying the message that Churchill had been caught at Waterval Boven,[32] some 81.3 miles away, the day before.[33] On December 19th,[34] Churchill’s 5th day of hiding in Witbank,[35] he entered a train car filled with wool. Burrowing deep, he prepared for the long journey ahead of him. He waited for hours, along with smuggled food, “enough to sustain him for a journey twice that long,”[36] and a revolver, which Churchill hypothesized was a mere “moral support”[37] and that it “was not easy to see in what way it could be helpfully applied to any problem I was likely to have to solve.”[38] Burnham then rode along with the train, using a bit of “gentle persuasion”[39] along with some bottles of whiskey[40] to get the train through all of its stations without being searched or stopped for excessive amounts of time. Churchill emerged from his boxcar at last, coated in coal dust and “black as a sweep.”[41] Churchill went directly to the consulate after that.[42] So, Winston Churchill did not tell the entire truth about his escape, but he did tell some of it. This is not truly lying; it is more a form of bending the truth. He did find a train labeled for Lourenço Marques, that was filled with “soft merchandise,” and he did hide himself in it. He simply ignored some important facts of the case. It can be understood why he did not speak anything about those who helped him when one considers that they were, at the time of the book being published, still in enemy territory. The book was published in 1900, and the war ended two years later. Therefore, he could not disclose who had helped him without placing them in danger of arrest, prosecution, and perhaps execution.
Churchill himself had risked those consequences when he escaped from the Staats Model School in Pretoria, where he had been held after his capture. He escaped by slipping over a wall on which the electric lights shone particularly dim, while a guard’s back was turned. Churchill’s sketch of the Staats Model School is below.
Churchill realized that “the electric lights in the middle of the quadrangle brilliantly lighted the whole place but cut off the sentries beyond them from looking at the eastern wall, for from behind the lights all seemed darkness by contrast.”[43] The plan made by him and some fellow POWs, Aylmer Haldane and Brokie[44] was to “pass the two sentries near the offices.” He found that if they started at the exact moment when the backs of the guards were both turned, they would be able to make it over the wall. They scheduled the plan for December 11th,[45] but it was rescheduled to the 12th, because a chance did not present itself on the 11th. It seemed as though the 12th would have the same result as the 11th, but a chance came. Churchill, watching the guards at the time, decided that it was “now or never.” He dashed from his hiding place, scrambled over the wall, and lowered himself onto the other side. There he hid, while a sentry on the outside stared directly at Churchill’s hiding place. Luckily, he saw nothing, and left when another sentry came out as well. They both walked away. Churchill wrote that he began to hear two British officer prisoners on the other side of the wall “jabbering Latin works, laughing and talking in all manner of nonsense – amid which I heard my name. I risked a cough. One of the officers immediately began to chatter alone. The other said slowly and clearly, ‘… cannot get out. The sentry suspects. It’s all up. Can you get back again?’ But now all my fears fell from me at once. … I said to the officers, ‘I shall go on alone.’”[46] And so he did.
All of these experiences were not missed by the British newspapers, who turned him into a hero, based off of his actions at Estcourt with the train.[47] This increased Churchill’s appeal as a parliamentary candidate quite a bit. In fact, Churchill wrote that “It’s clear to me from the figures that nothing but personal popularity arising out of the late south African War, carried me in.”[48]
Churchill may have not been completely honest with parts of his memoirs, but they did win him the popularity he needed for his political career to be successful. In comparison with the recollections of others, it does not appear that his memoirs were specifically structured or augmented to promote his political appeal, nor does he seem to have blatantly lied in his memoirs. The most prevalent form of dishonesty consists of omitting salient details or “bending the truth.” This technique was employed to disguise Howard and Burnham for their protection. Overall, Churchill’s memoirs of the Second Boer War seem to agree significantly with the memoirs of others as compiled by Candice Millard.
Appendix A
Text was from transcript of recording of conversation between Candice Millard and Dave Davies, which can be found at https://www.npr.org/2017/09/26/544447697/how-the-boer-war-helped-winston-churchill-become-the-hero-of-the-empire. The quote follows:
DAVIES: And Churchill is still looking for the glory of war. He still wants to be recognized. He wants to get medals. He wants to get into this fight, but he's not in the Army anymore. So he manages to get it not as an officer, but as a journalist reporting for The Morning Post. Were lines between correspondents and combatants less clear then?
Sources
- Churchill, Winston S. Frontiers and Wars. New York, NY: Konecky & Konecky, 1962.
- “Every Candidate an Author: The Ceaseless Boom in Books by Politicians.” The Washington Post. May 27, 2015. https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/every-candidates-an-author-the-ceaseless-boom-in-books-by-politicians/2015/05/27/1d1374ae-fd8c-11e4-8b6c-0dcce21e223d_story.html?utm_term=.f66a8d52ba93 (accessed May 20, 2018).
- Johnson, Paul. Churchill. New York, NY: Penguin Books, 2009.
- Millard, Candice. Hero of the Empire: The Boer War, a Daring Escape and the Making of Winston Churchill. New York, NY: Doubleday, 2016.
Footnotes
[1] “Every Candidate an Author: The Ceaseless Boom in Books by Politicians,” The Washington Post, May 27, 2015, https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/every-candidates-an-author-the-ceaseless-boom-in-books-by-politicians/2015/05/27/1d1374ae-fd8c-11e4-8b6c-0dcce21e223d_story.html?utm_term=.f66a8d52ba93 (accessed May 20, 2018).
[2] See Appendix A.
[3] Paul Johnson, Churchill (New York, NY: Penguin Books, 2009), 16.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Winston Churchill, Frontiers and Wars (New York, NY: Konecky & Konecky, 1962), 370. This is a conglomeration of works by Churchill; London to Ladysmith via Pretoria, the one I am using, was published 1900.
[6] Candice Millard, Hero of the Empire: The Boer War, a Daring Escape and the Making of Winston Churchill (New York, NY: Doubleday, 2016), 104. Note British spelling retained in quotes.
[7] Churchill, Frontiers and Wars, 376.
[8] Millard, Hero of the Empire, 128. Churchill, Frontiers and Wars, 378.
[9] Millard, Hero of the Empire, 129.
[10] Ibid., 378.
[11] Ibid., 379.
[12] Ibid.
[13] Ibid., 380.
[14] Churchill, Frontiers and Wars, 381.
[15] Ibid.
[16] Ibid., 382.
[17] Ibid.
[18] Ibid., 383.
[19] Ibid.
[20] Ibid., 384.
[21] Ibid., 408-411.
[22] Millard, Hero of the Empire, 244-245.
[23] Ibid., 249.
[24] Ibid., 248.
[25] Ibid., 249.
[26] Ibid., 250.
[27] Ibid.
[28] Ibid., 253-255.
[29] Ibid., 279.
[30] Ibid., 281-282.
[31] Ibid., 282.
[32] Ibid., 284.
[33] Using Google Maps to find difference between Waterval Boven and Witbank, set the mode to walking.
[34] Ibid., 285.
[35] On Millard, Hero of the Empire, 256, it says that December 15th was about 24 hours after Churchill had knocked, and therefore he had knocked on the 14th. His hiding started on the 14th, and ended on the 19th. Do the subtraction.
[36] Ibid., 287.
[37] Ibid.
[38] Ibid.
[39] Ibid., 288.
[40] Ibid., 289.
[41] Ibid., 295.
[42] Ibid., 297.
[43] Churchill, Frontiers and Wars, 403.
[44] Millard, Hero of the Empire, 198.
[45] Millard, Hero of the Empire, 198. Churchill, Frontiers and Wars, 403.
[46] Churchill, Frontiers and Wars, 404.
[47] Millard, Hero of the Empire, 155-156.
[48] Ibid., 313.