Episode 40 - Making Lord Kitchener’s acquaintance as de Wet’s farm burns

Its summer – December 1901. General Jan Smuts is on the run in the Cape Colony being chased by tens of thousands of British troops who are fixating on the fact that they don’t seem to be able to pin down this mercurial general. With him is one of our war narrators, Deneys Reitz. Or rather was with him until he became separated in late November and since then has been following Smuts – and trying to stay alive. This week we will hear how he stumbles into another series of largely self-inflicted moments of terror. Reitz has a propensity for falling asleep at precisely the wrong time and as you’ll hear, his escapades in the Cape include another variant. It was close to the Kariega River in the now Eastern Cape where Reitz last rode with Smuts. Then he found himself with a rearguard unit of seven other men who failed to join up with the General after fighting a skirmish with the British. They were laid up at a friendly Boers farm in the district and the next day thought they’d rejoin the Boer commander. But it was not to be. He managed to change from his British khaki uniform which was a death sentence – remember that Lord Kitchener had issued orders any Boer found wearing British uniforms should be shot as spies. They began to ride north westerly and as they went, local farmers told them that a large British column was ahead, also following Smuts. Not for the first time, the small unit of Boers followed a British column following a commando. Then a bizarre moment for Reitz. He bumped into an Englishman who was a relative by the name of Rex. He couldn’t remember the man’s name when he wrote his memoirs in 1902 but recounts. “…a lineal descendent of George Rex, the morganatic son of King George III by Hannah Lightfoot, the Quakeress. George Rex had been sent out to South Africa in 1775 and given a large tract of land at Knysna, on condition that he did not again trouble his august parent..” His descendants lived there ever since and one of them had married Reitz’s mother’s brother. They were cousins.

29 Dec 201919min

This episode takes us to Christmas 1901 and the battle of Groenkop near Bethlehem in the Free State where General Christiaan de Wet catches the British offguard on the top of a two hundred foot high kopje. We will also hear how the opposition party leader Lloyd George narrowly escapes being lynched as a pro-Boer Brit in a night of extreme violence as you’ll hear. The wobble that Chamberlain the Liberal Unionist leader and Sir Alfred Milner were most worried about had begun back in England. The Tax-payer was now fully aware that they were funding a war in South Africa that never seemed to end. The Times newspaper had led a revolt against the government as we heard in previous podcasts. Lord Kitchener was ignored as he complained asbout the fact that most of the new soldiers arriving in South Africa could neither ride nor shoot straight. That was nothing new in the eyes of the British public. They had heard that excuse since October 1899 and it was now wearing extremely thin. Parliament had been prorogued until after the New Year but mounting expenditure and public anger might force government to go into session again at such a late date in the year. Winston Churchill was pro-government, yet was also warning about what he called a disquietening situation which in his words was as “momentous as it was two year ago”.

22 Dec 201921min

So its December 1901 Christmas is a fortnight away for the combatants and Christiaan de Wet was tracking his arch enemy, brother Piet. It was revenge he was after and as we all know – it’s a meal best eaten cold and unfortunately Christiaan was overheating. While he stewed on the information that his hated brother was instrumental in setting up the National Scouts, made up of Boer turncoats who now fought for the British, across the world the end of 1901 brought with it a number of fascinating events, incidents and issues. On December 1st : A crowd of 100,000 people turned out at London's Hyde Park to demonstrate in sympathy for recently fired British Army General Redvers Buller. He was now being blamed for the disasters at Colenso and Spioen Kop almost two years previously where the Boers had pulverised the British as they tried to relieve the siege of Ladysmith. But on matters more prosaic. On the 2nd December 1901 a man by the name of King C Gillette began selling his safety razors in the United States. He was inspired by something that could be used and then thrown away, thus ensuring future business. It’s a bit like Monsanto’s seed business these days, but that’s another story. Gillette applied for his US. Patent number 775 134 on December 2 1901. His American Safety Razor Company would become the multi-billion dollar behemoth Gillette Company. Bizarrely Following the commercial success of disposable razors, Gillette refocussed his attention on promoting his views on utopian socialism. Strange but true. On December 3rd 1901 the Australian parliament passed its Immigration Restriction Act primarily to restrict non-Europeans from permanently entering the country. Interesting. Then on December 7 1901 The United Kingdom and Germany delivered an ultimatum to the government of Venezuela, after the South American country reneged on bond payments. Venezuelan President Cipriano Castro was given 48 hours to agree to the terms, or to face a blockade of his nation's ports by the Royal Navy and the German Navy. Well some things never change. On December 9 1901 the first-ever Nobel Prizes were announced, with x-ray discoverer Wilhelm Roentgen receiving the first Nobel Prize in Physics, Emil von Behring being awarded the prize in medicine for his discovery of the first diphtheria antitoxin, Jacobus van't Hoff pioneering work in physical chemistry earning him the chemistry prize, Henry Dunant and Frédéric Passy sharing the peace prize, and Sully Prudhomme winning the prize in literature. The bestowal of the prizes came on the fifth anniversary of the death of Alfred Nobel who I mentioned in Episode 1 of this podcast series. The next day December 10 Joseph W. Jones was granted U.S. Patent No. 688,739 for his invention, "Production of sound-records", which was purchased immediately by the Columbia Phonograph Company for production of its disc-shaped Graphophone records. Jones was paid $25,000 – worth around 700 000 dollars in today’s moolah. Finally in this series of amazing things that happened in December 1901, Guglielmo Marconi received the first trans-Atlantic radio signal, sent 1,700 miles from Poldhu in Cornwall, England to Signal Hill, St. John's in Newfoundland in Canada on the 12th. December. It was the letter "S" ("..." in Morse code)., He is quoted as saying "there was no doubt that the principle of wireless communication had arrived on a transatlantic scale... This was a utility, and would prove itself beyond argument as a vital aid to shipping and military communication." And on the same momentous day, 12th December in South Africa’s Cape Colony, Lieutenant General French finally caught up to General Pieter H. Kritzinger, who had led the Boer incursions into the Cape on three occasion. Unfortunately for him, it was three strikes and he was out.

14 Dec 201918min

This week its all about the scandal of the Concentration Camps which breaks across Great Britain as the Fawcett Commission releases its initial report. We also continue to monitor General Christiaan de Wet who has a large commando of 700 men and is beginning the move towards the Cape once more. His plan is to increase the pressure on the English although his previous attempt a few months before ended in failure. But first, a reality check for Lord Kitchener who has led what has become known as the Drives across Southern Africa where tens of thousands of British troops have been mopping up the remnants of the guerrilla commandos, but at a cost. The Boer women and children have been herded into Concentration Camps along with their black workers and this has turned into a catastrophe. As Emily Hobhouse realised more than 9 months ago, squeezing civilians into camps without proper hygiene or sanitation is a disaster waiting to happen. The country didn’t have long to wait. The Fawcett Commission was made up of a fairly diverse group of women. It was a daring experiment, a women-only commission which would investigate conditions in the Concentration Camps and compile a report which would be given to the Government in December. Between August and December they steamed up and down the veld in their special train. They may have had diverse backgrounds but they were all united in one thing – they believed that the war against the Boers was just and that the civilians were part of the Boer support network and therefore should be punished. Led by Mrs Millicent Fawcett, a liberal unionist and feminist, she was also a leader of the women’s suffragette movement. Lady Knox was the wife of Major General General Sir William Knox, who was on Kitchener’s staff. The four other women included a nurse from Guy’s Hospital two doctors who were already living in South Africa.

8 Dec 201919min

This week General Christiaan De Wet who has been largely dormant for November awakens and begins to leer in the direction of the Cape once more while Sarah Raal continues to ride with Commandant Nieuwoudt and her three brothers but for how long? The presence of a woman fighting alongside the burghers in Nieuwoudt’s commando has become something of a problem for him. He’s worried that she’ll be killed while she simultaneously is creating propaganda for the Boers in her skirts and matching Lee Metford with a hat rimmed with gold, bandolier and serious attitude. The British are highly motivated to track her down so she has now attracting more columns to the Southern Free State. Nieuwoudt has tried already to suggest that she return to some kind of safety in a town – but Sarah refused to listen as she knew it will be straight to a Concentration Camp which she dreaded. Niewoudt was also threading his way through thousands of British troops and the going become increasingly difficult.

1 Dec 201917min

This week’s episode is dominated by a young woman who we heard about last week called Sarah Raal. While some of her exploits have been exaggerated for Nationalist reasons years after the Boer War, there’s no doubt that she was extraordinary by any measure. Remember she is in her early twenties and escaped from Springfontein Concentration Camp outside Bloemfontein heading to join her four brothers who were fighting with Commandant Nieuwoudt who was part of General Herzog’s commando in the Free State. It’s around November 1901 when she joins the commando, and immediately is thrown into the thick of action. Nieuwoudt and his men and one women head off to a place called Boomplaas. “I was apprehensive about going there as it was the scene of my previous capture” she writes in her biography published in English in 2000. The commando ended up in the small settlement of Excelsior which was only to become a town in 1910, well after the war ended. This is where Sarah caught sight of the mountains to the East which loomed in purple and grey tones, and appeared malignant. “The imposing mountains frightened me, they looked so mysterious and full of unknown danger that I felt as if some misfortune may befall us at any moment…” she writes. That was around 50 miles due east of Bloemfontein and the Sarah’s life became increasingly more desperate in the coming weeks. She was to face numerous skirmishes fighting alongside her Boer brothers, and as you’ll hear, Sarah became a target for the British who realised there was a woman fighting against them.

24 Nov 201920min

Episode 113 covers events happening in November 1901 with six months of the war and this podcast left to run. This week Deneys Reitz and his fellow Boers suddenly realise they should not be wearing British uniforms which they donned after running out of clothing. Lord Kitchener has issued a proclamation that any Boer found clad in British uniforms should be shot out of hand as a spy. We also hear about Sarah Raal - one of the Boer women who actively fought in the war and was eventually made a prisoner of war. Her story was captured at the time in various ways - not least by curious photographers who clustered around a railway line during her transit after being caught fighting as a commando member. Her courage and gall is legendary and has been somewhat buried over time.

17 Nov 201919min

The first week of November 1901 shipping records published in the Times of London featured regular updates such as this one: “The Armenian left Port Natal for Bombay on Nov 3 with Boer prisoners, 36 officers and 981 men. They were escorted by the following: 67 th Battery RFA – Major Manifold, Captain Tapp, Lieutenant Sheppard, 2/Lieutenants Newland, Russell and 157 men 69th Battery RFA – Captain Belcher, Lieutenants Clark, Herbert, 2/Lieutenant Shaw and 156 men The Times continues to list a contingent of 350 men to guard just over a thousand Boers. Then the report states: “The Menes has arrived at Gibraltar, from Alexandria, bringing 109 officers and men of the 1/Derbyshire Regiment for South Africa. They will wait at Gibraltar for the Manhattan, which will take these troops to South Africa.” Still they came, thousands of troops from across the empire, many serving more than one tour in Africa. And through late October and into November 1901 that the English press began to paint the war in South Africa as never-ending. The editorials for most part up until this period in the conservative press in particular had been in full support of the Anglos fighting the Boers - but a series of embarrassing reports from South Africa led to a reappraisal of both the strategy, and the tactics at times. It was Bakenlaagte where General Louis Botha had decimated Lieutenant Colonel Benson’s mounted column leaving the British with almost 350 casualties and the Colonel dead. There was General Jan Smuts who cornered a company of 17th Lancers killing or wounded almost the entire unit of 167. These figures shocked the public back home who had believed the final phase was under way, where a handful of bandits as they were known who were hiding in the vast veld would be tracked down and killed or imprisoned. The bitter end of this war is upon us. And it was troops like those on the Mendes who still faced a focused enemy in the Boers who had no-where to go and were fighting for their survival. Another battle that had shaken the British resolve back home involved Robert Kekewich. If you remember our previous podcasts, Kekewich made his name during the siege period at the start of the war in 1899 through to the second quarter of 1900. He was officer in command at Kimberley - remember his to-and-fro with the arch imperialist, Cecil John Rhodes? Yet, for all the bad blood, Robert Kekewich was a hero in the eyes of the English back home. As the hours of daylight shortened back home, as the Autumn dappled dark light settled into the grey of winter, the gloom quickened when it came to citizen’s perceptions of the South African war.

10 Nov 201918min