Anglo-Boer War Society Meeting: London, October 2024
On Tuesday 29th Ocober I attended my first meeting of the Anglo-Boer War (ABW) Philatelic Society (ABWPS) at the Union Jack Club in Waterloo London. I was in for an unexpected treat. As this article is long you can skip to
The Jameson Raid
The Nooitgedacht British POW Camp
Mafeking Siege Mail.
The Union Jack Club is situated a stone’s throw from nearby Waterloo Station. It supports and promotes the welfare of serving non-commissioned members of the British military, their families and veteran personnel. It was an honour and a privilege to be invited there. It was a most enoyable and convivial philatelic society meeting, one that involved an excellent lunch (optional) followed by discussion in a secluded, comfortable room where fabulous postal history was passed around the table from member to member.
Left to right: Ian Shapiro. Tony Sandford, Nick Harris.
Marcus and Terence Sorour, David Milstead and James Strutt.
The Jameson Raid
At Stampex, Ian Shapiro had invited me to the meeting of the ABWPS meeting because, he said, “there is going to be a talk on the Jameson Raid”, which he emphasised with his usual enthusiasm, “you really must come along. It will be very interesting”. There is an ironic Chinese curse – “may you live in interesting times”. This refers to a time of strife, upheaval, tension and war. The Jameson Raid of New Year 1895/1896 kick-started just such a time in South Africa, one that culminated in the war of 1899- 190
Queen of Great Britain and Ireland, Empress of India
Victoria Regina et Imperatrix.
In this article I refer to capiitalism and capitalists, imperialism and imperialists, two terms used by modern historians, often Marxists, to describe South Africa’s unfolding history. I believe they describe political facts and that is how I attempt to use them here. Before the discovery of diamonds, wealth in South Africa was largely measured by livestock, most usually cattle. The Mineral Revolution transformed the concept of wealth. It allowed people with money, capitalists, to develop the economy of the country in a new direction, invariably in their and their shareholders’ best interests. Many of them, their employees and others gave their allegiance to Britain, then the world’s greatest imperial power.
I went to the ABWPS meeting with some apprehension. I disagree with the term ‘Anglo-Boer War’ (ABW) as a desciption of the conflict of 1899 – 1902. I prefer to use the more revisionist (not ‘woke’) ‘South African War’ (SAW), an inclusive term that does not restrict the conflict to ‘Anglos’ and ‘Boers’. (Racists teachers once had me believe it was a “White man’s war in Africa”.) Use of ‘South African War’ suggests that it was a war that affected all of South Africa’s people, including Black people whom we now know participated as combatants, ‘agter-ryers’ (Afr. ‘squires’), auxillaries, blockhouse and town guards, stretcher bearers, labourers, spies, post-runners and victims. Despite my contrary opinion on the validity of their society name, the ABWPS made me feel very welcome. Thank you.
Bell’s design of the Cape of Good Hope 6d Rectangular (March 1864).
Hope is seated on an Anchor representing Chandelry and the Sea.
There is a vine (Wine) on her left and a ram at her right (Wool).
Other than ivory and skins, South Africa offered Britain little but colonial wars.
For its first 200 years of European settlement South Africa offered its colonisers, the Dutch and later the British, very little of any exportable financial worth. As the Cape’s first rectangular stamps of 1864 show, its tenuous economy was based on wine, wool and ship’s chandlery. The discovery of diamonds in 1867 and later gold ultimately changed South Africa from an agricultural backwater into a modern industrial society. This transformation is known in today’s South African histories as the ‘Mineral Revolution’.
The Boers (Dutch. farmers) of the South African interior had migrated from the Cape in search of farmland in the 1830s, as well as to escape the uncertainties of British rule. The discovery of large deposits of gold in their country and the consequent mining of it on an industrial scale turned their rural agrarian idyll upside-down. A huge influx of Uitlanders, (Dutch. migrants or foreigners without land), looking to profit from their country’s sudden gold wealth alarmed the Boer farming community and gave rise to very legitimate concerns about the possible loss of their proud independence to outsiders.
After the Boer’s Great Trek of 1835 Britain colonial authorities pursued the farmers into the interior. War with both the Boers and the indigenous people provided the British with costly problems. Over the years it became British colonial policy to encourage the union of its colonies of the Cape and Natal with the two Boer states of the OFS (Orange Free State) and ZAR. After the British Army defeated the Zulu impis in 1879, a confederation of Boer and British colonies in southern Africa looked a real practical possibility.
The Britsh Army used Martini-Henry rifles to halt the Zulu impis.
At the Battle of Isandhlwana the Zulus triumphed.
Any possible confederation was put on hold when the Transvaal Boers under Kruger rebelled in 1880 and humiliatingly defeated the British Army at Majuba in 1881.
The Boers ascended the slopes of Majuba using ‘fire and movement’.
They used a motley collection of rifles to subdue British Martini-Henry fire.
Boer victory restored their Republic subject to a degree of British suzerainity.
Kruger and his rebels restored the Boer’s republic and its independence but in their haste to sign a treaty made the mistake of conceding their foreign affairs to Britain’s control. At British insistence the Boers also agreed to sign the treaty in the name ‘Transvaal State rather than the ZAR (Zuid Afrikaansche Republiek). This was subsequently renegotiated at the London Convention in 1884 where Britain accepted the use of the ZAR name. Nevertheless, some British imperialists never ceased making the popular argument that the ‘lost colony of the Transvaal’ was or should be subordinate to full British control.
Circa 1899. Postcard. President Paul Kruger of the ZAR.
C. Basson & Co., Box 59. Pretoria. (Transvaal).
Kruger killed a lion as a boy and left the Cape on the Boer’s Great Trek.
He restored their republican independence after rebelling against Britain.
The loss of the ‘Transvaal’ was an imperial humiliation made doubly painful when huge gold deposits were discovered on the Witwatersrand in 1885. This put confederation and the need for British control of the ZAR / Transvaal back on the Colonial Office’s agenda. British and international capital and an influx of a quarter of a million ‘Uitlanders’ into the ZAR by the mid-1890s became an existential threat to the Boer’s way of life. They responded fearfully to the newcomers who now threatened to swamp them. Kruger’s government reacted equally guardedly to the needs to the mining community.
The Jameson Raid was a conspiracy conceived by Cecil John Rhodes, a British diamond and gold mining tycoon who was at the time the Prime Minister of the Cape Colony. It was Rhodes’ ambition to paint Africa in British pink from the Cape to Cairo. Such an imperial outcome would have allowed him to access and ruthlessly exploit Africa’s wealth. He was a self-made man, the arch-British Imperialist of his age and the bete noir of the Republicans Boers He believed, and probably rightly so at that time in England’s history that “to be born an Englishman is to win first prize in God’s lottery of life!”
Apologists for the Jameson Raid would justify it on the basis of grievances that the Uitlanders supposedly suffered at the hands of the Boers, in particular the denial of the franchise after five years. Much was made of the fact that while the Boer’s ZAR was an independent republic, the ‘Transvaal’ was really still an errant British colony. To these imperialists, Britain was a nation with an empire on which the sun never set. It was a national humiliation that ‘dirty backveld Boers’ could dare stand in the way of Englishmen.
This postcard illustrates the ABW / SAW conflict of 1899 -1902.
The Jameson Raid of 1895/96 was the “real declaration of war”. (Jan Smuts).
The Jameson Raid worsened Anglo-Boer relations and precipitated the war of 1899 – 1902. The causes and consequences of the Jameson Raid fouled relations between Boer and Brit in South Africa almost beyond repair and made war an inevitability. It is arguably the most appropriate place to start any discussion on the ABW / SAW. As such, the Jameson Raid made a great subject for my first entry into an ABWPS meeting.
The Colossus astride Africa.
Adventure Capitalist.
What compelled Rhodes to take action was not Britain’s national honour or the rights and grievances of the Uitlanders, which he and others claimed was the noble excuse for this act of corporate piracy, but more practically and venally because Kruger did not offer him the support necessary for extracting deep level gold at maximum profit. It was a bold and daring but ultimately foolish and ineptly managed high stakes gamble that failed.
Rhodes was no stranger to usurping other people’s land. He had begun in 1888 by persuading Lobengula, king of the Matabele, to sign a treaty giving him the rights to mining and administration in Mashonaland, a tribal area not under the direct rule of the king. In 1890 he and his BSAC (British South Africa Company) dispatched an armed force, the Pioneer Column, to annex the territory of Mashonaland, later part of Southern Rhodesia. Its occupation by the Pioneer Column lead to the start of BSAC rule in ‘Rhodesia’. In 1891 this would expand across the Zambezi into Matabeleland itself.
Many of these adventurers would receive land in Rhodesia.
Funded by Rhodes and staffed by gung-ho British officers in the service of his BSAC (British South Africa Company) para-military security force, the purpose of the Jameson Raid was to overhrow the independent state of the ZAR (South African Republic aka ‘Transvaal’), one legally recognised by Britain following its defeat in the First Boer War. This covert military adventure was tacitly supported by the Secretary of State for the Colonies in London, the ambitious Joe Chamberlain. He was more deeply involved in its planning than was realised at the time. Indeed, Chamberlain transferred land at Pitsani to the railways in order that the raiders have an assembly point conveniently close to Johannesburg. The Colonial Office would cover up his involvement after the raid.
Rhodes’trusted confidant, employee and leader of the Raid.
Jameson beleived he was a decisive man of action. It was his & Rhodes’ undoing.
The raid was lead by Dr Leander Starr Jameson, a confidant and employee of Rhodes. The invading force was drawn from BSAC forces. Its commander was Lieutenant Colonel Sir John Christopher Willoughby, (Major, Royal Horse Guards). In command of the Mashonaland Mounted Police was Lieutenant Colonel Henry Frederick White, (Major, Grenadier Guards). In addition to them there were many other British officers involved. One of these, Major Crosse, late of the 5th Dragoons, accompanied the column as a spectator. Some 100 men of the Bechuanaland Border PoliceT would also join the invaders at Pitsani.
It would rapidly fizzle out. He surrendered on 2nd January 1896.
Rhodes had been smuggling arms and ammunition into his Johannesburg mines for some time. He intended these to be used in an armed ‘Uitlander’ uprising that would take control of Johannesburg before the Boers could respond. The argument for the Jameson Raid was that it was a humanitarian attempt to assist their intolerably oppressed kith and kin’ in their desperate hour of need and also to prevent any bloodshed. With so many different nationalities working on the mines any knowledge of this uprising, especially the storage of arms and the training of miners in their use had to be restricted to those who could be trusted the most ie. the British. This work was done via the Reform Committee.
These 100 or so mounted ‘Uitlanders’ turned back before meeting up with Jameson.
The large crowd of non-participants suggests indifference by most Uitlanders.
This photo was previously in the collection of Sir Hercules Robinson.
Robinson was the British High Commissioner in SA 1880–89 & 1895–97.
A full size original photo of this scene was shown by Ian Shapiro.
Jameson’s powerfully equipped force comprised some 500 British South Africa Company policemen armed with modern weapons. They had modern Lee-Speed magazine loading rifles that fired 8 smokeless cartridges, Maxim machineguns, (some say ‘seven’), two 7-pounder and one 12½-pounder field gun. (The Lee-Speed was a commercial version of the Lee-Metford used by the British Army.The BSAC who equipped the MMP (Mashonaland Mounted Police) had bought them commercially.)
The Boer commandos that opposed the raiders were poorly equipped by comparison. Most were armed with the Martini-Henry, a weapon the British Army had used against both Boer and Zulu but which by 1896 it had discarded in favour of the Lee-Metford. Nevertheless, the Boers loved the Martini-Henry which was an accurate single shot, breech-loading rifle that fired a bullet big enough to kill a pachyderm at 500 yards. Its disadvantage was its single shot action was slow, its kick, the difficulty firing lying down and that every shot gave off a puff of white smoke that revealed the shooter’s position.
The invaders jumping off point was at Pitsani in British Bechuanaland, an area conveniently acquired only three months earlier for the railway. From Pitsani it was just 180 miles to Johannesburg, a three or four day march at a push all going well. The plan was that the Uitlanders of Johannesburg would revolt and seize the Boer armoury in Pretoria. Jameson and his force would dash across the border to Johannesburg to “restore order”. With control of Johannesburg Rhodes would control the gold fields.
The raid began over the New Year weekend of 1895–96 with the aim of supporting an armed uprising in Johannesburg, one stoked by Rhodes who had secretly smuggled weapons into Johannesburg. However, not enough had come to give the miners any sense of strength in their numbers. Telegraph communication with Rhodes broke down almost immediately but Jameson, a self-perceived man of action, impetuously decided to strike while he still had the opportunity. His men’s failure to cut the telegraph line to Pretoria meant Kruger knew of the invasion almost immediately it crossed into the ZAR.
Terry Sorour began the meeting by telling us about the research that he had conducted to support his book which was based on the events surrounding the Jameson Raid. Surrounded as were by ample free tea, coffee and biscuits in a comfortable meeting room in London, it was all very civilised, a far cry from the Doornkop battlefield where Jameson’s raiders found themselves outmaneuvered and penned in without food and water on the third day of the invasion. They had ridden some 170 miles (270 km) in three sleepless days and nights and were exhausted. Johannesburg, the prize, lay some 10 miles away. They would not see it. The absence of water was a problem both for the men and the water-cooled Maxim machineguns which now jammed. These and the cumbersome field guns which had slowed the invading column down soon ran out of ammunition after failing to dislocate the entrenched ‘Boers’ on the surrounding hills.
Desperately the mounted invaders charged the entrenched Boers in line abreast but were repulsed. Believing that he had no option but to surrender Jameson asked around for a white flag to hoist. A small handherchief was offered which he refused. Instead he asked a local woman if he could use her large white apron. This incident provided the title of Terry’s book, ‘The Apron Flag’. Her apron was run up the chimney on a stick, a bugle sounded ceasfire and it was all over. Jameson and his men were marched into captivity.
The Raid was the greatest gamble and the grubbiest flop in the history of British imperialism in southern Africa in the 19th century. Its consequences were profound.
The Reform Committee plotters in Johannesburg, including the so-called ‘Randlords’ were arrested. In the raid’s aftermath Rhodes was severely censured and forced to resign as chairman of the Chartered Company and Cape Prime Minister. However, Britain was not ready to give up on her long-held plan for a South African confederation. In order to bring the subjugation of the ZAR forward, Alfred Milner was appointed High Commissioner to South Africa in 1897. His actions would leave the Boer’s no choice but to launch a pre-emptive attack.
Intended to rescue the Rand, the Raid failed miserably. The recession that had started in late 1895 soon worsened and became a full-scale depression which lasted until late 1888. It led to a majority of the Cape Dutch community switching their political support from Rhodes to their republican kin north of the Orange River. It hardened Boer opinion against the benefits of being a part of the British empire, led to the creation of a ZAR and OFS mutual defence treaty, the purchase by the Boer republics of huge quantities of modern arms and ammunition from France and Germany and gave Kruger a resounding victory in the 1898 ZAR election. However, it also awakened the Kruger’s govenment to a recognition of the importance of the mining industry in its new political economy.
Smuts’s greatest service to Britain was his creation of the RAF.
Writing in 1906, Jan Smuts, the Cambridge-educated ZAR State Attorney and ex Boer General who had invaded the Cape in the hope of inspiring an uprising among the Cape Dutch, described the Jameson Raid of 1896 as the “real declaration of war” against the ZAR. He became a formidable and leading British Empire loyalist, a commander of the Southern Force in the invasion of German SWA, the first Allied campaign victory of WW1. He limited German forces in East Africa while not defeating them. In London he was given a hero’s welcome and made a member of Imperial War Cabinet. He was later a Field Marshall in Britain’s armies and a wartime Prime Minister of SA (1939 – 1948). He was the exception not the rule. Unlike Smuts, the bitterness felt by republican Boers for Britain’s conduct in the ABW / SAW scarred and divided White South Africa for generations.
As ever, an Shapiro, was able to add some excellent items of ephemera to the conversation that followed Terry’s presentation of his book. Ian first showed examples of crockery, two white plates printed with sepia busts of Rhodes and Jameson. This unusual offering was followed by signed photographs of Rhodes and Jameson both together and , individually. Ian also showed us a stampless letter written by Rhodes and addressed by him to Jameson in Bulawayo. It had presumably travelled in a BSAC company bag.
Ian also showed examples of the first postcards printed with an image in SA. Entitled ‘The Late Crisis in Johannesburg’, these are ZAR printed stationery postcards overprinted on the reverse with photos of events that occurred during the Jameson Raid. The earliest recorded date of use is the 3rd February 1894, a month and a day after the raid was stopped dead in its tracks. As synchronicity would have it, Ian also found a large format photograph among his collection when preparing for this meeting. To his surprise and delight he realised that it was the original photo of Bettington’s Horse, above. in very impressive detail as reproduced on a ‘The Late Crisis in Johannesburg’ postcard.
This is thought to show pro-Boer Irishmen parading in Johannesburg.
The arming and training of ‘Uitlanders’ had to be done in the utmost secrecy.
The Nooitgedacht British POW Camp
The Anglo-Boer War Philatelic Society is one I had once applied to for membership but had never joined. I was about to discover the extent of this lost opportunity to share in its members’ outstanding examples postal history from South Africa’s most divisive war.
Endorsed “Corpl G Moody, Imperial Yeomanry, 13th Battalion, Prisoner of War’.
Manuscript ‘Gezien / Censor’ and Censor’s name. Postmarked Machadadorp, ZAR.
One of only seven known Nooitgedacht POW Camp letters, all outgoing!
The first cover shown to me at my first ABWPS meeting. Stunning!
Nick Harris produced a remarkable item of mail from the Boer’s Nooitgedacht POW camp which he passed around the table. Nooitgedacht held some 1800 British prisoners, about half of whom were removed by the Boers from the POW camp at Waterval on 4th June 1900, the day before the occupation of Pretoria by British forces under Lord Roberts. The writer of the lettersheet was among some 450 men under Lietenant Colonel B. Spragge captured in the disaster at the northern OFS town of Lindley on 31st May 1900.
The writer of the lettersheet was among some 450 men under Lietenant Colonel B. Spragge captured near Lindley on 31st May 1900. Prior to this cover I was only aware of the New Model School POW camp that housed Winston Churchill in Pretoria. This gem was well worth the trip to the ABWPS in London. And then it got even better.
Mafeking Siege Mail.
Nick Harris showed some utterly remarkable examples of Mafeking Siege mail.
Unfortunately it was at this point that I had to leave to catch my train before the peak travel cut-off. What little I saw of Nick’s over-printed GB ‘Mafeking Besieged’ material was so special I was sorely tempted to stay. It was was with heaby conflict in my heart that I forced myself to leave.
I have now joined the society. I look forward many more fine lunches and displays.
