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

This week we spend some time with Johanna van Warmelo and Deneys Reitz, the former who starts a new position as a nurse in a Concentration Camp at Irene outside Pretoria, and the the latter who has just convinced his German fellow travellers that an invasion into the Cape is feasible. Its mid-May 1901. President Steyn of the Free State and his Transvaal colleagues have had a disagreement about the possibility of a cease fire, but that has not stopped General Louis Botha who is in the Eastern Transvaal sending a note to British Army commander Lord Kitchener asking for permission to send an emissary to the Netherlands. Botha want’s to ask President Paul Kruger’s permission to embark on peace talks as he’s growing more certain that the Boers can’t defeat the British in South Africa. The Free State leadership are more intransigent and prefer to fight to the death, led by their fiery leader General Christiaan de Wet. The stage is set for more confrontations between the supposed allies, but as they grind their teeth, in Pretoria Johanna van Warmelo is now determined to assist her Boer sisters and their children who are squeezed into the nearby Concentration Camp. They are beginning to die in large numbers and with the temperature dropping, its bodes ill for the coming winter. Remember in Episode 83 I explained how Johanna and her mother were working as secret agents for the Boers from their strategic base at SunnySide farm on the outskirts of Pretoria. The British did not believe they were involved in spying, but that’s exactly what they were doing. We also heard how Johanna was keeping three separate diaries - one her open diary, the second her secret love diary, and the third her top secret war diary. Historian Jackie Grobler published a book in 2007 called "The war Diary of Johanna Brandt" which combined all three. She was still a van Warmelo during the war, and in May 1901 arrived at Irene Concentration Camp having volunteered as a nurse. Her initial job was to walk around the huge camp looking for sick Boer women and children and then bring these to the attention of the camp doctor. There were six Boer nurses in a camp of 5000 and by early May 3 people were dying a day. Far to the West, somewhere in the vicinity of Harts River, Deneys Reitz and his four German friends were holed up having been left behind by the Commando under the leadership of Mayer. General Koos de la Rey had ordered that the Boers return to their homes for the meantime as the cold weather drew in and the movement around the veld became more difficult. But Reitz was so isolated along with his colleagues that he had decided to take matters into his own hands. Remember last week I explained how Reitz had convinced his fellow travellers that instead of heading back to the north, they should try to enter the Cape Colony. “After I had explained my views…” he writes in his book Commando “…and had pictured the Cape to them as a land of beer for the taking at every wayside inn, they became eager converts, and we agreed to start without delay…”

19 Maj 201916min

We’ve reached May 1901 and surprisingly, General Louis Botha is trying to reach out to Lord Kitchener who is the British Army commander of the over 240 000 troops in South Africa. Botha wants special permission to send emissaries to Paul Kruger in the Netherlands to ask if a ceasefire could be arranged. But that only happened after Botha and Jan Smuts had collected as much information about the Boers position - and it was a depressing account. They were running out of weapons, ammunition, food, clothing, horses, money, everything as Historian Martin Bossenbroek writes. Could supplies be sent from Europe, through German South West Africa perhaps? Between the two countries was a significant desert, but was traversable - still this was indicative of just how desperate the Boer leadership was. While Generals Koos de la Rey and Christiaan de Wet and the other unconventional leaders were foraying back and forth, the echelon of senior leaders was growing more aware of an unsustainable situation. In the southeastern Transvaal reports emerged of British using Zulu warriors to loot cattle from Boers. There’s an allegation made that British officer Colonel Bottomley sent a letter to King Dinizulu suggesting he send his men into the region to grab cattle and around 6 000 warriors crossed to border between Natal and the Transvaal in May 1901. Meanwhile, far to the north west on the Transvaal border with Bechuanaland - modern day Botswana, Deneys Reitz and a small commando under the leadership of Commandant Jan Kemp were under orders to attack the railway line which was being used to ferry supplies into the Mafikeng. General de la Rey had divided his force into two parties, and took one of these south where he began to engage with British columns. Commandant Jan Kemp led his group westwards, and for two days in mid-May they rode through barren country until they reached a point on the Harts River. British troops could be seen along the River, watching for any Boer movement so they decided to make the crossing at night. Reitz was part of a German scouting unit led by the Johannesburg businessman called Mayer that was sent ahead of the main body, riding through the Cunana Native Reserve all night until four the next morning when they crossed the British border.

12 Maj 201918min

It’s the first week of May 1901, and winter has come early in South Africa. As I mentioned last week, at this point social activist Emily Hobhouse was on board a ship heading for England after experiencing the South African Concentration Camps first hand and she was to mobilise parts of British society against the war by recounting her stories. She was British first, so when she disembarked later in May, she headed straight to the authorities. Emily Hobhouse believed that when they heard her stories about the conditions in the camps, and the rising death rate, government ministers would be so embarrassed they would institute changes. As we’ll hear at the end of the month - and through June - she was sorely mistaken. But she wasn’t alone. The attack on the camp system was also taken up by two other MPs CP Scott and John Ellis. IT was these two who first used in arch an ominous phrase - concentration camps - taking it from the notorious reconcentrado camps set up by the Spanish to deal with Cuban guerillas. AS we heard previously the use of Block Houses by the Americans in the Cuban war was also going to be perfected by the British in South Africa. It was Ellis who had sent his relative Joshua Rowntree to report on the camps. When Rowntree was refused entry into the two new colonies of the Transvaal and Free State by lord Kitchener, his instincts were aroused. British Secretary for War St John Brodrick insisted that these camps were voluntary, that the workers, women and children were all there on their own volition. They had arrived on their own free will as prisoners. How many lived in them, asked Ellis in March, and how many had died? It was only at the end of April that the house of Commons heard the first statistics. In the Transvaal, 21 thousand one hundred and three. By May they’d heard there were 19 thousand 680 prisoners in the now renamed Orange River Colony and 2 524 in the Natal Colony. It was also becoming apparent that St John Brodrick did not have all the information about what was really happening in these camps, at least that was the allegations by Ellis and the opposition leader, Lloyd George. He quoted for example that many of these refugees are what he called coloured people.

5 Maj 201919min

This week, we’ll track a Londoner who rode with Rimington’s Tigers then there’ll be a quick story about a Maori who arrived in South Africa during the war to fight, but also carried a Violin. At the same time, information began to circulate about the British Concentration Camps where tens of thousands of Boer women and children were interned. And the information was worrying. Slowly the numbers began to be squeezed out of the British Government. There were 21,105 people in Transvaal camps in April, 19,680 in Orange River Colony and 2,524 in Natal . The number of deaths was equally difficult to discover because of censorship. Yet these numbers were leaking and they were not good news for those who believed this war to be honourable. Nor was it clear if the figures included the black inmates. We now know they did not. A second strategy launched along with the Concentration Camps was Lord Kitchener’s policy of great drives some over 80 kilometres long. These were his strategy to cope with the guerrillas and finish the war. He understood that he could not catch or destroy the remaining commandos without placing strict limits on their freedom of movement before sweeping them from the veld. This policy was not as clinical in practice as it sounded in theory. The sweeps were often accompanied by looting as well as destruction. Some of the British officer which had been based in South Africa for more than 18 months fighting the Boers had run out of patience and used these drives as an excuse to loot. For some of the soldiers under their command it became a kind of sport. Writing at the time, Captain L March Phillipps who was an officer in the Rimington Guides or Rimington Tigers as they were known began to have serious doubts about the nature of these veld clearing operations. The Tigers had been created by Major Mike Rimington and they were known Rimington’s Tigers due to the leopard skin hatbands worn on their slouch hats. They were also known as the Night Cats because of their many night marches and stealth. In January 1901 the force was reorganised as Damant's Horse under Major Frederic Damant, Rimington's second-in-command, but many continued to call this feared unit the Rimington Tigers. Captain Phillipps looked on exasperated at times during the Great Drives period of this war, March through September 1901. In one of his letters he writes about the British Soldier who was now known as Tommy Atkins. This generic title Tommy Atkins was used from at least 1743. There’s a great deal of debate about the exact origin of the title has been used as a generic name for a common British soldier for many years. The origin of the term is a subject of debate, but a letter sent from Jamaica about a mutiny amongst the troops says in 1743 includes the line "except for those from N. America ye Marines and Tommy Atkins behaved splendidly”. However, our letter writing Captain Phillipps is not as enamoured by Tommy Atkins during the great Drives across the Veld in 1901.

28 Apr 201920min

In this episode Easter Sunday had come and gone on the 7th April and for most combatants stretched across the vastness of the South African veld, it was characterised by fear and loathing. The concentration Camps were filling and women and children were beginning to die of diseases like enteric and typhoid. The numbers were in the hundreds a week, by August 1901 more than 1,800 would be dying a month - and a similar number of black men, women and children who’d also been herded into camps to keep them from supplying the Boers with food and logistic support. So it was just over a week after Easter, on April 15th, that Johanna van Warmelo and her mother took a train to try and see her brother, Dietlof, who’d been captured by the British and was being sent to Ceylon. There was no freedom of movement because of the war, and after initially being rejected for not having the correct signatures and paperwork, they made it on board and then chugged off for the 40 kilometre journey to Johannesburg - which even then Johanna calls the Golden City. All along the line one sees the signs of the war, here a blown-up bridge, there, the ruins of a whole train of trucks and carriages. They also took note of the British defensive positions along the line, the plates of iron leading to trenches, covered with sand bags, all around the network of barbed wire. That laughter dried up as they passed Irene just beyond the station, where they saw the women’s concentration camp. Thousands of women and children were living there in tents, they were the families of the men still fighting. Remember Lord Kitchener had ordered that these camps be set up across the north of the country to incarcerate families of the guerrilla soldiers, in an attempt to hurry the end of the war. Johanna was 24 years old. What is remarkable about her, is that she was keeping three diaries. One was her secret military diary, the second her secret love diary, and her third which you could call her open diary. Johanna and her mother were collecting information and spying on the British then sending their intelligence gathering to colleagues across South Africa - and the world.

21 Apr 201920min

Deneys Reitz had broken his own leg in a freak accident and was still hobbling about, his compound fracture causing some pain. General de la Rey ordered him to a small medical camp behind the lines near Hartbeespoort which is west of Pretoria. There he was recovering when the British launched an attack on the Boers. Reitz saddled his horse and galloped to the ridge overlooking the British. But there was no much they could do - there were about 12 000 English versus 600 Boers. The casualties were light, although the British artillery were accurate enough and caused the Boers to fall back from ridge to ridge. By two in the afternoon the English gave up the chase. They rested their horses after the Generals’ ironic speech, and then under the cover of dark rode further away. An amazing sight greeted the men as they crested a rise that night - it was called the Great Comet of 1901, Comet Viscara. But as they rode, a boyish voice from the darkness called out Vlug means retreat, another example of the sense of humour of soldiers making the best of a bad situation. The Royal Observatory in Cape Town, the Argentine National Observatory and the Government observatory in Perth Australia shared their scientific evaluation which put the Comet at 79 million miles from Earth. While the comet caused the Prophet van Rensburg some excitement, there was more excitement in the Cape. Kritzinger was back in the Midlands and causing trouble, while Gideon Scheepers was about to commit a war crime. He shot dead two black troops who'd fired on his men from a farmhouse, saying "it was a white man's war". He was to pay for that act with this life after being captured.

14 Apr 201917min

Deneys Reitz will experience a terrible wound to his leg and we will probe an issue that caused much gnashing of teeth - the role of Black South Africans in the war. A quick note for my American listeners, in South Africa people who are mixed race are known as coloured. I know the phrase is frowned on in the U.S., but here in Africa, it's accepted. I’ve tried to show how the myth that there were no black fighting men on both sides is just that - a myth - by using examples of how close black men and women were to the action throughout these podcasts over the last 18 months. Professor Bill Nasson published a book in the Anglo-Boer war series called Uyadela Wen’Osulapho - which is the cry of a fallen Zulu warrior, urging his comrades to carry on the fight. On the cover of his book is a black member of the British army in Mafikeng photographed alongside with lord Baden Powell. Inside the full photograph shows a group of black soldiers sitting with the famous general. All are stern faced, the soldiers holding their Lee-Metford Rifles and sporting large bandoliers around their shoulders. They were scouts and transport riders, armed to the teeth. When the war began in 1899, contemporary observers assumed that blacks would not be allowed to play any part in the coming hostilities but of course that was naive. A British commentator in the Fortnightly Review told readers that blacks in his words “would be impossible to control…” if they were armed. The risk of rebellion meant that the British in particular were petrified of stoking uprisings, considering what had happened to them in Zululand in 1879 where the Zulu had killed 1300 of their best troops at Isandhlwana. Jan Smuts too had written that this was to be a war between whites - saying that this was in the interests “of self-preservation” as he put it. Ironically, by the end of the war, Smuts was sending armed black men to fight in Namaqualand.

7 Apr 201920min

When we ended last week, Deneys Reitz had rejoined General de la Rey along with his Dopper companions, and had been regaled by the prophet, van Rensburg in late March 1901. The General was aware that the British drives were beginning to pay off - that was Kitchener’s plan to encircle the renegade commandos while conducting a scorched earth policy while his notorious internment of women and children in the Concentration Camps continued apace. So at the end of March 1901, Deneys Reitz and the de la Rey commando moved to Tafel Kop from their natural lake called Rietpan in the western Transvaal. That came after de la Rey had suffered a defeat in a skirmish with British troops and lost around one hundred men. He knew they were in an untenable position in the lowland, and wanted to move into broken country which meant escape was more likely when attacked. Remember many of the Boers were now without their horses, 18 months of war and disease meant a shortage was growing of horses, food, clothing, ammunition. This didn’t stop Reitz from continuing to dream about being part of a large scale invasion into the Cape colony. It was this kind of wishful thinking that motivated him along with the core of the Boers. And yet, here, far away from his loved ones, Reitz was about to turn 18 years old. This old young man had been involved in nearly all major battles in Natal starting in October 1899, dozens of skirmishes and near misses, now he was looking forward to legally being able to consume alcohol as his birthday approached. Not that he had avoided the brandy and schnapps over the past year when offered. Still he was clearly excited about his birthday in most endearing way and wrote about it in his book Commando. That excitement was rapidly to turn to exasperation and even fear as they readied the feast early in the morning, a thick mist hanging over their camp because a British patrol was close by. In the Eastern Transvaal, General French’s cavalry and mounted infantry had recovered from some of their supply problems were heard about in previous episodes, the weather had improved. It lost much of its impetus as lack of a supplies hampered mobility and their horses were weakened by the wet weather and lack of forage. The sodden terrain had been miserable for the English troops who laughingly referred to the weather as somewhat like Scotland. We'll also be introduced to General Sir Bindon Blood who had a great deal of experience in Africa, building bridges and pontoons for the British expansion in Zululand in the 1860s, then fighting the Zulus in the infamous campaign of 1879. Eventually he ended up in India and was then drafted back to Africa to fight the Boers in early 1901. With his fine head of silver white hair and a moustache to match, he was easy to spot in a crowd. But more about General Blood, Ben Viljoen and the Sikukuniland warriors clashes later this month.

31 Mars 201917min