Chapter 10
Johannesburg, 1899
Winston Churchill
In 1899, Winston Churchill headed to South Africa as a newspaper correspondent for the Morning Post to cover the Boer War.
Young Churchill, the reporter, was on an armoured train, loaded with British soldiers, performing a reconnoitre between Frere and Chieveley in the British Natal Colony in November 1899. A Boer commando force had placed a several rocks on the track at a blind bend, they then chased the train firing their rifles and making quite a ruckus. It was their intention to scare the train driver into increasing his speed so he could not slow down when he saw the obstruction on the tracks. The train hit the rocks and the first few carriages derailed one was carrying young Winston. The Boers then opened up with field guns and rifle fire from a high vantage position.
The British soldiers who survived returned fire, whilst others on the train did there best to get their injured and wounded colleagues out of harm’s way. They then tried to uncouple the locomotive so that it could back off down the line to safety, all the while under fire. After some seventy minutes of action the Boers swept down the hillside. A number of British soldiers were taken prisoner, but the locomotive loaded with men had escaped.
Churchill found himself alone in a gully beside the track. The summer sun was blistering hot. He was covered in sweat, oil, dust and his comrades’ blood and was exhausted. A Boer commando got off his horse, got down on one knee and raised his Mauser rifle aiming it at Winston. Churchill went for the pistol in his belt but it wasn’t there it was on the train. He had no other choice but to surrender.
General Botha
The two men stared at each other, one fearlessly and one with fear.. What made this surrender significant was that Churchill had yielded to General Louis Botha. Both men would go on to be Prime Ministers of their respective countries.
Churchill was a fairly insignificant young man, twenty-five years old at the time but he came from an elite family. His father, Lord Randolph Churchill, had been an eminent politician and the family bloodline goes back to beyond the First Duke of Marlborough (Battle of Blenheim, 1704). The Boers knew they had a valuable bargaining chip. For many reasons they decided to treat Winston as an officer POW, despite the fact he was a civilian at the time.
The prisoners were put on a train for transport to Pretoria the then capital of the Boer Transvaal Republic. Along the way they passed an imposing mountain.
It was called Majuba Hill, it was here in February 1881 the Boers gave the British army a real hiding. It was in this battle the Boers mastered their hit and run guerrilla tactics. Soon after that defeat the British negotiated a ceasefire thus ending the first Anglo-Boer War. After the Battle of Majuba the British army never again wore their famous red tunics in to battle- they adopted khaki combat uniforms thereafter.
The top of the mountain pass ends at Laingsnek, next to the base of Majuba Hill, itself the site of another humiliating British defeat only a month earlier.
When the train transporting the prisoners passed by Majuba it was early evening and the light was fading. Churchill described the sight as ‘a great dark mountain with memories as sad and gloomy as its appearance’
The prisoners’ train then continued on its journey to Pretoria Churchill and his fellow prisoners were imprisoned in a converted school in the middle of Pretoria. It was a POW camp for captured British officers. The prisoners were marched through the streets of Pretoria before reaching their new home, the Boer towns folk came out to stare at their British enemy.
Churchill’s observations on first sight of the State Model Schools building were ‘We turned a corner; on the other side of the road stood a long, low, red brick building with a slated veranda and a row of iron railings before it’.
Churchill described how he and the imprisoned British army officers had drawn large maps and how they updated them with any and all information they received about battles, troop movements etc., much of the information reaching them via unconventional sympathetic sources.
On the night of December 12th, when several prison guards turned their backs, he took the opportunity to climb over the prison wall. Wearing a brown flannel suit with £75 in his pocket and four slabs of chocolate, Churchill walked on leisurely through the night in the hope of finding the Delagoa Bay Railway. So began his great escape and journey to freedom.
Churchill jumped onto a train and hid among soft sacks covered in coal dust. Leaving the train before daybreak, Churchill continued on his escape. Lady luck was on his side, Winston happened upon the home of Mr. John Howard, manager of the Transvaal Collieries. Upon knocking on his door, Mr. Howard’s response to Winston’s plea for help was “Thank God you have come here! It is the only house for twenty miles where you would not have been handed over. We are all British here, we will see you through.”
Mr. Howard first hid Churchill in a coal mine, which made him quite ill, he was then transported to safety. Churchill had to squeeze into a hole at the end of a train car loaded with bales of wool. This was a very uncomfortable journey.
Churchill had only been in captivity about four weeks when he escaped Churchill contacted the local British consul in Lourenco Marques, establishing his identity, and then travelled on a steam ship down the coast to Durban, the main port of Natal. News of his escape had made both the British and local newspapers and a sizeable crowd greeted him as a hero on his arrival in Durban. This undoubtedly appealed to his considerable ego. In the New Year, 1900, he travelled by train back to the Colenso area to resume his reporter duties. On arrival at the army camp he was shown his tent, it was just 50 yards from the exact spot where he had been captured six weeks previously.