The Boer War by Martin Bossenbroek & Yvette Rosenberg

Author:Martin Bossenbroek & Yvette Rosenberg
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Non-Fiction, War & Post-War, History, Colonialism & Imperialism, Africa, United Kingdom
ISBN: 9781609807481
Publisher: Seven Stories Press
Published: 2018-01-09T05:00:00+00:00

Fever

Ladysmith, 3 March 1900

Not many sons would escort their mother on a tour of a battlefield almost 10,000 kilometres from home, where they had taken part in a life-anddeath struggle barely a week earlier. Winston Churchill was that kind of son. Neither he nor his mother gave it a second thought. She was an unconventional woman who did as she pleased, he had never known her to be otherwise, and she happened to be passing that way. Lady Randolph had arrived in Durban towards the end of January 1900 on board the Maine, a hospital ship she had chartered in London on behalf of an American women’s relief group. Churchill had visited her in Durban some time earlier. Once the hostilities were over, she wanted to see the front where it had all taken place: the reports her elder son had written, the misfortune that had befallen her younger son, who happened to be one of her first patients on the Maine.

Churchill obtained a pass for her as if it were the most normal thing in the world. He would have liked to take his friend on the trip as well, but for some unfathomable reason Pamela Plowden had decided to remain in England. Lady Randolph had embarked on her ‘sightseeing tour’ in early March. She had taken the train to Colenso, and at Chieveley passed close to the derailed trucks of Churchill’s first exploit. After that it was a matter of improvising. She crossed the Tugela over a makeshift bridge and then travelled on to Ladysmith in an open railway truck. The journey was slow but it had one big advantage, ‘We could see and understand everything with the help of Winston’s graphic tongue.’ And there was plenty of time for ‘Kodaking’. Ladysmith itself was a disappointment: a sweltering, dusty ghost town, houses with shutters over the windows and people slinking warily through the streets. Fortunately Sir Redvers was kind enough to invite her to dinner and offer her a real bed in the convent where he was staying. The following morning Lady Randolph left for Durban and a week later sailed back to England.72

The relief group she was working with was one of many spontaneous initiatives organised in the wake of Black Week, in Great Britain and its overseas territories. ‘We are not interested in the possibilities of defeat; they do not exist,’ 81-year-old Queen Victoria had replied on hearing the bad news. Her subjects throughout the British Empire echoed that view. Many of them also wanted to do something about it. ‘War fever’ cut across all geographical and social boundaries: from Ottawa to Melbourne and Auckland, from the polo club to the music hall and the beer hall, everyone was eager to help. Thousands of volunteers applied to join one of the newly formed cavalry regiments such as the Imperial Yeomanry in Britain, or the Imperial Light Horse or the South African Light Horse—the Churchill brothers’ Cockyolibirds—in the Cape Colony and Natal. It was the same in Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

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