The Conservatives: from victory to disaster

In January 1901 Victoria died and was succeeded by Edward VII, for whom Salisbury felt little personal respect. Salisbury’s beloved wife, Georgina Alderson, had died in 1899 and by 1900 his burdens were telling on him. He was 70, his health was failing, and both his doctors and his colleagues pressed him to give up the foreign office. Lord Lansdowne took over while Salisbury soldiered on as Prime Minister.

In May 1902 the treaty with the Boers was concluded and the experience of almost falling asleep in cabinet convinced him that it was time to go. On 11 July 1902 he retired, having served the fourth-longest premiership after Walpole, Pitt the Younger and Liverpool. He died at Hatfield in August 1903. The end of his premiership can be seen as a symbolic marker of the end of the Victorian period.

There was never any doubt that Salisbury would be succeeded by his nephew, A. J. Balfour (hence [possibly] the phrase, ‘Bob’s your uncle’ - though it might have an earlier origin). Joseph Chamberlain, the only possible rival, was unacceptable to large sections of Conservative opinion (and was recovering from a fall through a plate glass window at the time).

The 1902 Education Act
The greatest achievement of the Balfour government was the 1902 Education Act, though the government got little credit for it. A new law was necessary in order to clarify the legal status of the ‘higher-grade schools’, the educational establishments run by the school boards, which catered for pupils of 12 and older.

The act swept away the 2568 school boards set up by the 1870 Education Act and made county and borough councils the local education authorities (LEAs) for both elementary and secondary schools. The Act provided some much needed rationalization, and set up a statutory system of secondary education, but at the expense of alienating two important constituencies, Radicals, angry at the loss of the directly elected school boards, and Nonconformists.

In drawing up the Act it had become clear that the great problem was what to do with the ailing church schools, some 14,000 in number, where over one third of children were still receiving elementary education. There was huge pressure from the Conservative back benches to use public money to save these predominantly Anglican schools from collapse. However, Robert Morant, the Board of Education civil servant in charge of the act, pointed out that the Boer War had depleted government funds and that the burden of funding voluntary schools could not come out of the central exchequer, but would have to come from the rates. This immediately roused the Nonconformists (‘Rome on the rates’), especially in Wales, where the village school was usually Anglican. [Compare with the earlier issues of tithes and church rates.] They waged a relentless campaign against the act, much to Balfour’s bewilderment (church schools had been aided by central government since 1833!). The Baptist minister, Dr John Clifford, refused to pay the share of rates he deemed likely to go to church schools; other Nonconformists had their goods distrained.

Some Anglicans, notably the MP Lord Hugh Cecil, were also outraged by the act because they feared that in the long run Anglican schools would be effectively nationalized and deprived of their sectarian features. Lloyd George achieved national prominence by making highly personalized attacks in the Commons on the Prime Minister, accusing him of an attempt to

‘rivet the clerical yoke on thousands of parishes’.

The divided Liberal party gained a new lease of life as those who had deserted the party over Ireland began to return to the fold. By-elections began to go against the government – there were sensational Liberal victories at Newmarket and Rye.

Retrospectively the Act can be seen as a major advance in the provision of secondary education, but politically it was an unqualified disaster.

Tariff Reform
Chamberlain had been absent from the debates on the act as a result of his accident. He felt betrayed by its final provisions (which denied church schools the right to opt out of LEAs) and as a consequence felt released from any reciprocal obligation to the Conservatives. It enabled him to embark on a campaign of ‘imperial preference’ which split the Conservatives in a manner reminiscent of Peel’s abandonment of agricultural protection.

There were two main factors behind the campaign.

1. Chamberlain’s passionate imperialism. Worried about British isolationism and unpopularity (as shown by the international reaction to the Boer War), he at first attempted to force an alliance with Germany. When this fell through he envisaged instead a grand union of the British Empire - seeing this as essentially a project for the Anglo-Saxon races.
2. Some disturbing economic facts. Between 1870 and 1900 Britain’s share of world manufacturing production had slipped from over 30% to less than 20%. The United States had overtaken her in 1880 and Germany in c. 1900. These two rivals had large domestic resources and markets, acquired through processes of unification. In 1896 Ernest Williams published Made in Germany. By 1902 the focus of hostility had shifted to America, but the principle remained the same - Britain was suffering from foreign competition.

In a speech in Birmingham in May 1902 Chamberlain declared:

‘The days are for great Empires, not for little states.’

He was then absent from the country on a tour of South Africa from where he returned in triumph in March 1903. In a speech in Birmingham on 15 May 1903 he opened his campaign, challenging the premises of free trade and calling for closer economic unity of the Empire. The Times likened this to Luther’s challenge to the Church of Rome at Wittenberg. The Liberals could hardly believe their luck. Herbert Henry Asquith:

‘Wonderful news today and it is only a question of time when we shall sweep the country.’

Whatever the merits or otherwise of the economic arguments, imperial preference had huge political problems that were in some ways a rerun of the debates of the early 1840s. The budget of 1902 had temporarily abandoned free trade and put a tariff on imported corn in order to pay for the costs of the war, but this was an unpopular measure. Chamberlain was advocating a fundamental change in the country’s commercial policy. Free trade had been the mid-Victorian gospel, and a group of Conservatives immediately went into action to defend it. Lord Hugh Cecil and Winston Churchill declared that if the Tory party became protectionist it would lose its soul.

Throughout the summer of 1903 Balfour tried to hold the party together and work out a compromise position. But he was unable to prevent the formation of rival groups. Free traders set up the Unionist Free Food League, Chamberlain’s followers the Tariff Reform League.
In September and October the cabinet saw resignations of both Chamberlain and the leading free traders. But as a token that Balfour wished to keep Chamberlain on board he brought in his son Austen to replace the free trader Ritchie as Chancellor of the Exchequer. The result was confusion – had Balfour struck a secret deal with Chamberlain? What did the Prime Minister really believe about tariff reform?

In the autumn of 1903 Chamberlain travelled the country arguing for imperial protection (duties levied on foreign but not colonial imports). At a speech in Glasgow on 6 October he called for a duty on corn, imported meat and all dairy produce except bacon, and a tariff on manufactured goods; to offset the increased charge to the consumer, the existing taxes on wine, sugar, coffee and cocoa were to be lowered. But this reminded many Conservatives of the way the party had split on the corn laws in 1846. On 24 October Winston Churchill wrote:

'I hate the Tory party. … I feel no sort of sympathy with them. … It is therefore my intention that before Parliament meets [late January or February] my separation from the Tory party and the government shall be complete & irrevocable & during the next session I propose to act consistently with the Liberal party.’

Meanwhile Asquith went on a similar speaking round arguing against imperial preference. The Liberal argument was the simple Anti-Corn Law League one: protection (in this case imperial preference) would mean dearer bread. Chamberlain’s argument had to be long-term: imperial preference would ultimately benefit British industry and tariffs would pay for social reform (for a while he floated the idea of old age pensions). In December 1903 tariff reformers won three by-elections. But the tide turned in 1904 as Unionist Free Traders began voting against the government.

Balfour tried to heal divisions by promising that if the Conservatives won the next election a colonial conference would be held to discuss imperial preference, and if this were accepted the British electorate would be consulted by means of a second general election.

The Fall of the Unionists
By 1905 Chamberlain accepted that the Unionists were going to lose the next election (though the Liberals were unable to believe that they would win it) but he hoped that after the election he could reconstruct the party round tariff reform. By this time the party was in a state of almost open civil war. In October 1905 Balfour appealed to his party conference for unity but in the following month Chamberlain launched a bitter personal attack. But in December Balfour resigned and the King sent for Sir Henry Campbell Bannerman. Balfour was the last Prime Minister to resign to an opposition leader without first being defeated in a general election.

The one and only, the wonderful McGonagall

Click here for access to all you need to know about Britain's greatest bad poet, William Topaz McGonagall. A national treasure.

Here is his one of his gems, his poem on the relief of Mafeking,

Concentration camps

There is a useful context in Anne Applebaum's harrowing Gulag (2003, p. 19). She defines concentration camps as

‘camps constructed to incarcerate people not for what they had done, but for who they were’.

They were built for

‘a particular type of non-criminal civilian prisoner …a category of people who, for reasons of their race or their presumed politics, were judged to be dangerous or extraneous to society’.

According to this definition the first modern concentration camps were set up in colonial Cuba in 1895 when, in order to put an end to a series of local insurgencies imperial Spain began to prepare a policy of reconcentración, intended to remove the Cuban peasants from their land and ‘reconcentrate’ them in camps. By 1900 the term had been translated into English and was used to describe a similar British project during the South African War. In 1904 the German colonists in German South-West Africa adopted the British model, but also made the inhabitants (the Herero) carry out forced labour. The first imperial commissioner of German South-West Africa was Dr Heinrich Göring, father of Hermann.

Causes of the South African War

This is the name now most commonly given to the war usually called in Britain the Boer War (more accurately, the Second Boer War) and among South African whites the Anglo-Boer War. Both these titles are inadequate as they leave out the experiences of the black Africans, who were the real losers in the war.

The two Anglo- Boer Wars (1880-81, 1899-1902) were fought to prevent the independence from Britain of the two independent Boer republics, the Transvaal and the Orange Free State.

The Boer Republics
Ever since the British acquisition of Cape Colony was confirmed in 1815 Britain’s relationship with the Afrikaans-speaking white minority of some 20,000 people had been strained. From 1820 large-scale British immigration began in the Cape on land from which the Xhosa had been ejected, while the colony was reshaped in fundamental ways. The two ‘white tribes’ co-existed but did not intermingle, and the Boers always outnumbered the British settlers.

The Great Trek: In 1834 all slaves within the British Empire gained their freedom and the Boers were ordered to free their black slaves. In response to this and to other British administrative measures, between 1834 and 1840, some 15,000 Afrikaners (voortrekkers) trekked inland away from the Cape Colony in search of new land. The trek is commmorated in the Voortrekker Monument in Pretoria.


In Natal some formed a short-lived colony but when this was annexed by the British in 1843 they crossed the Drakensberg and joined other trekkers to form what became the two Boer republics. The Transvaal was awarded independence in 1852 and the Orange Free State in 1854. The area of South Africa under European settlement had now doubled and this greatly expanded territory was divided between the two Afrikaner settlements in the interior and the two British colonies dominating the coasts.

In 1867 diamonds were discovered in Griqualand (Orange Free State) at the confluence of the Orange and the Vaal rivers and the economy of South Africa was transformed. The diamond town of Kimberley was created on the borders of the Orange Free State and the Cape Colony (and it was formally incorporated into the Cape Colony in 1880). In 1871 Britain annexed Griqualand West. In 1871 the English entrepreneur Cecil Rhodes (see opposite) bought up a claim to the De Beers mine in Kimberley (incorporated in 1888 as De Beers Consolidated Mines Ltd).

The region became the largest producer of gems the world had ever known and between 1873 and 1883 tens of thousands of migrant labourers travelled there. The result of the aggressive British policy was an enhanced Afrikaner nationalism. As early as 1872 the Natal Times had declared:

‘The Anglo-Saxon race shall hold undisputed sway from Capetown to the Zambezi’ (New Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Rhodes).

The First South African War
Afrikaner fears were intensified by British policy in the Transvaal. In April 1877 the republic surrendered to the British under Sir Theophilus Shepstone in April 1877 in the wake of financial and administrative disorders and in return for protection against the Zulu chief, Cetshwayo . In 1879 the Zulus were defeated at Ulundi, marking the end of effective African resistance to British rule throughout South Africa.

But having dealt with the Zulus, the British were then faced with the first Anglo-Boer conflict (1880-1), which was more a Transvaal rebellion than a war. It was the attempt by Paul Kruger to recover the republic’s independence.

Following the British disaster at Majuba Hill (27 February 1881) Gladstone restored the independence under British suzerainty of the Boer republics at the Convention of Pretoria (March 1881). In 1883 Kruger was elected President of the Transvaal for the first of four successive terms of office. The Boers were given further rights of self-government at the Pretoria Convention (1884).

The Transvaal Gold Rush
In 1886 a diamond digger from Kimberley named George Harrison discovered the largest gold field in the world in the Witwatersrand, a ridge running from east to west 30 miles south of Pretoria. This alarmed Kruger who predicted,

‘this will cause our country to be soaked in blood.’

South Africa suddenly assumed great importance in the eyes of the world and its gold supplies contributed to the underpinning of currencies and international trade. In a huge gold rush, African migrant workers poured in, the number reaching 100,000 by 1899. (The photograph on the left is of one of the gold fields.) Europeans, mainly of British and German origin, named 'Uitlanders' by the Boers also flocked to the Rand. The city of Johannesburg sprang up almost overnight. The Uitlanders rapidly outnumbered the Boers on the Rand, though remaining a minority in the Transvaal as a whole. There was a huge cultural divide between the migratory materialistic Uitlanders and the poor, rural god-fearing Boer population of the Transvaal. The nervous Afrikaners denied them voting rights and taxed the gold industry heavily. Every Boer was compelled to own a rifle, no non-Boer was allowed to. Johannesburg, with 50,000, mainly Uitlander inhabitants, was not even allowed an unelected municipal council. No open air public meetings were allowed. Judges were appointed by Kruger, who controlled all the government monopolies from jam to dynamite. In response there was pressure from the Uitlanders to overthrow the Boer government.

The Jameson Raid
Since 1890 Cecil Rhodes had been Prime Minister of the Cape. In the same year through the British South Africa Company he had annexed the territories later known as Southern Rhodesia, the territory of the Ndbele and Shona tribes. In 1894 he pushed north of the Zambesi where he carved out a new sphere for his company in what became Northern Rhodesia. In 1895 the British government annexed Northern Bechuanaland (Botswana). But no great mineral resources were discovered in these territories.

Recognition of this failure encouraged Rhodes to try to organize a coup on Johannesburg, aided from the outside by the Bechuanaland administrator Dr Leander Starr Jameson. Joseph Chamberlain, Colonial Secretary from July 1895, probably gave qualified approval to these plans on the assumption that the raiders would only cross into the Transvaal following a spontaneous uprising of the Uitlanders.

The raid, which took place in December 1895, was blatantly illegal, the internal insurrection never occurred and Jameson’s 500 men were quickly rounded up by Kruger’s police and handed over into British custody. The raid was a disaster for Britain’s good name. Rhodes resigned the Cape premiership. Chamberlain survived a parliamentary enquiry thanks to the good offices of Harcourt, now the Liberal leader, who laid the whole blame on Rhodes. Chamberlain was also saved because British attention was deflected by the congratulatory telegram (‘the Kruger telegram’) which Kaiser Wilhelm II, ever ready to make mischief, sent Kruger in January 1896.

The Jameson raid polarized the two white races in South Africa. Kruger never doubted that the British government and Chamberlain in particular had been behind the plot to overthrow their independence and their suspicions were confirmed by the rapid rehabilitation of those who had taken part. The Boer republics became even more defensive while the British government was drawn more fully into South African affairs.

In 1898 the new British high commissioner was Alfred Milner, an ardent imperialist who worked to mobilize pro-British elements throughout southern Africa. Kruger’s continued refusal to grant the vote to those Uitlanders who were long-term residents, though understandable, gave Britain the chance to assume the moral high ground. Salisbury disliked the growing jingoism at home and the cowboy capitalism of the mining interests, but in the last analysis he shared Milner’s analysis: what was at stake was a struggle to make sure that

‘we not the Dutch are the Boss’.

The dispute had escalated into ‘a deadly fight for racial supremacy.

A conference at Bloemfontein in May-June 1899 failed to resolve tensions. In September, believing that he was calling Kruger’s bluff, Chamberlain sent at ultimatum demanding full equality for British citizens resident in the Transvaal. The Boers declared war on 12 October.

The South African War

The war was the greatest challenge to British Imperial power since the Indian Mutiny. It was the most extensive and costly war fought by Britain between the defeat of Napoleon and the First World War. It pitted almost 450,000 imperial troops against 87,000 republican burghers (the Boers) and foreign volunteers, only half of whom were in the field at any time. It cost Britain £230 million, resulted in the deaths (mainly from disease) of some 22,000 soldiers on the British side, about 34,000 Boer civilians and combatants and an unknown number of Africans. But fewer British troops fell in the thirty-one months of conflict than fell in the first thirty-one minutes of the Somme.

The war had many modern characteristics. Though the bioscope, invented four years before, music-hall audiences could see moving pictures from South Africa. The war also saw a vast outpouring of stories and poems from writers like Conan Doyle and Edgar Wallace. The war correspondent came into his own – Churchill filed reports for the Morning Post, and used his experiences to launch his political career. For the first time generals knew they had to have a good relationship with the press corps. Press ‘spin’ created a war hero in the person of Baden-Powell. The war was wildly popular (at first) though there was a sizeable anti-war press: the Manchester Guardian, the Morning Star and (from 1901) the Daily News.

Click here to listen to an audio of a 1901 performance of 'Goodbye, Dolly Gray'.

Britain’s earlier colonial wars – Mahdist (Sudanese), Zulu, Asante, and Afghan – were no preparation for the sort of war she faced in South Africa. The Boers were mobile and resourceful, excellent shots and horsemen, were fighting (without a uniform) in territory they knew, and were well armed. Though they were portrayed as plucky farmers fighting a great empire, they harboured their own imperialist ambitions. On 4 September 1899 Jan Smuts (left) ent a top secret memorandum to the Transvaal Executive:

‘South Africa stands on the eve of a frightful blood-bath out of which our Volk shall come … either as … hewers of wood and drawers of water for a hated race, or as victors, founders of a United South Africa, of one of the great empires of the world … an Afrikaans republic in South Africa stretching from Table Bay to the Zambezi.’

Lord Salisbury, the prime minister who presided over the war, had a deep hatred for war: ‘a horrible and barbarous thing’. But he had formed a low opinion of the Boers since he came into contact with them in Cape Town in 1851:

‘as degraded a set of savages as any white men in the world: many of them can’t read – few of them can write’.

He had felt humiliated by Gladstone’s concessions after the British defeat at Majuba Hill in the First Boer War.

The war produced great bitterness in British domestic politics, dividing the nation in the same way that the Dreyfus affair divided France. ‘Pro-Boer’ became a term of abuse, and the queen declared herself

‘shocked at the shameful want of patriotism of the Opposition’.

Victorian regard for individual liberty meant that conscription was out of the question so the whole war was fought on a volunteer basis. As they embarked for South Africa troops were handed Songs for England, the war poetry of Alfred Austin.

The first phase
In the first phase of the war the Boers took the offensive by invading Cape Colony and Natal Colony between October 1899 and January 1900. The British fell back on the towns of Ladysmith, Mafeking and Kimberley, which were besieged by the Boers. In ‘Black Week’ (10-15 December, 1899) Britain suffered a series of devastating losses at Magersfontein, Stormberg and Colenso. At Magersfontein the Boer general Koos de la Rey devised a plan to dig trenches in an unconventional place to fool the British and give his riflemen a greater firing range. The result was the loss of nearly 1,000 British soldiers to the Boers’ fifty.

These disasters wrong-footed the government though at the close of Black Week the queen famously told Balfour:

‘We are not interested in the possibilities of defeat’.

Sir Redvers Buller was superseded as chief commander and replaced by Field Marshal Lord Roberts, with Kitchener as his second in command. Roberts gave orders to Buller that he was to do nothing until they had arrived, but Buller attempted one last chance of a victory. On 24 January 1900 the disastrous battle of Spion Kop was fought under the incompetent command of Lieutenant-General Sir Charles Warren (the police commissioner who had failed to catch Jack the Ripper or prevent Bloody Sunday). The East Lancs Regiment were ordered to halt on the wrong hill peak in thick fog, where they were massacred on three sides. The next day the Boers photographed the British dead on the battlefield and published the pictures all over the world.

Some of the British survivors went to a football match to see Liverpool play. At the rear of one of the goals was a hill that reminded them of Spion Kop. The rest is well known.

The pro-Boers
Although there were moves to impeach the War Secretary, Lord Lansdowne, and there were fierce exchanges in the Lords between Salisbury and Rosebery, the Liberal leader, the government was in no danger for the Liberal Opposition was bitterly divided. The leaders of the pro-Boer faction were Harcourt, Morley, Labouchere, and Lloyd George. Behind them was a network of radical, labour, and trade union organizations, and the anti-war cause drew some liberals closer to labour. The journalist W T Stead was the leading light of the Stop-the-War Committee. Altogether, some 60-70 Liberal MPs were ‘pro-Boer’, but about the same number were Liberal Imperialists, led by Rosebery. Josephine Butler broke with her fellow radical Liberals when she supported British policy in South Africa. The Liberal spokesman in the Commons, Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman (1836-1908) attempted to steer a middle cause. He found it impossible to defend Kruger’s violent overthrow of Gladstone’s post Majuba settlement and he was wary of attacking the war when British troops were dying.

The second phase
In February 1900 reinforcements arrived in South Africa under Lord Roberts and the fortunes of war changed. The British then advanced into the two republics. On 18 February General Cronje was surrounded by Roberts at Paardeburg in the Orange Free State and he surrendered, with his 4,000 starving men, nine days later. On 28 February Buller relieved Ladysmith (idealized here by the artist John Henry Frederick Bacon) from its four month siege. This was generally seen as a turning of the tide. Schoolchildren were given a half day’s holiday, Stock Exchange trading was suspended and Kruger was burned in effigy. Bloemfontein was captured on 13 March.

At Mafeking Colonel Robert Baden-Powell’s small contingent, which included Salisbury’s son, Lord Edward Cecil, continued to beat off Boer attacks. With 700 regular troops and 300 local volunteers, 1,000 white civilians and 7,000 non-combatant natives, Boer troops were tied down for seven months. By the use of homing pigeons and African runners they anaged to keep in regular touch with the outside world, and as the months passed, they gradually learned that they were becoming national heroes. On 17 May Mafeking was relieved after a 217 day siege. At 9.20 the same night the Lord Mayor announced the news at the Mansion House. That night millions of people emptied onto the streets of London. Churchill later believed that the crowds were greater than in 1918, Rebecca West that they were greater than in 1945. On 5 June Pretoria was captured. Kruger fled to Portuguese and Dutch protection and formal resistance ended. (He was taken to the Netherlands in a Dutch ship and died in exile in Switzerland in 1904. His body was brought back to Pretoria for burial. His house in Pretoria is now a museum.)

Many British observers now believed that the war was all but over. By September both the Orange Free State and the Transvaal had been annexed as colonies of the British Crown. Roberts returned to England leaving Kitchener in charge.

The ‘khaki election’
At home the ‘khaki election’ was called and was fought between 28 September and 24 October. Chamberlain’s campaign showed a determination to capitalize on patriotic fervour. The principal slogan of the election was:

‘A seat lost by the Government is a seat gained by the Boers’.

However, the extent to which the campaign was dominated by the war has been exaggerated. Liberal pro-Boers did not perform significantly better than Liberal Imperialists. The Unionists gained over 51.1% of the UK vote (1,797,444) to the Liberals’ 44.6% (1,568,141), the Irish Nationalists’ 2.5% (90,076) and the Labour Representation Committee 63,304 (1.8%). For the first time since Palmerston in 1865 an incumbent government had won a general election, even though their overall majority fell by 16 seats, and the general turn-out was down (74.6%). Churchill won Oldham from the Liberals, but on a swing of only 6%, which was just enough to gain the seat.

Salisbury, who distrusted the jingoism of the electorate and the democracy that had given him three landslide victories, constructed an administration full of his family and associates. His nephew Arthur Balfour was First Lord of the Treasury and Leader of the Commons; another nephew was President of the Board of Trade; his son-in-law was First Lord of the Admiralty and his eldest son Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office. In the Lords Rosebery ironically congratulated Salisbury

‘on being the head of a family with the most remarkable genius for administration that has ever been known’.

The radical Liberal Labouchere dubbed the new administration the ‘Hotel Cecil’

The third phase
In the third phase of the war, the Boer commanders abandoned conventional engagements and waged the first of the twentieth century’s anti-colonial guerrilla wars, attacking telegraph wires and railroads. These new tactics changed the strategy of the war and made the traditionally large British military formations ineffective.

In March 1901 Kitchener, devised a scorched earth policy that eventually led to the destruction of 30,000 farmhouses and about 40 small towns. He also built 8,000 blockhouses linked by 3,700 miles of barbed wire in a defensive line that eventually stretched for over 4,000 miles, from which they conducted ‘sweeps’ across the veldt in an attempt to trap and isolate the enemy. Eventually over half the Boer male population of military age had been taken prisoner.

The concentration camps
The civilian population were rounded into concentration camps – a term which did not then carry its later malign meaning. Once the harsh policy of homestead burning was adopted, there was often no alternative accommodation on the veldt, and British commanders saw the policy as a humane alternative to leaving the Boer women to ‘be insulted or molested by natives’. A total of 45 tented camps were built for Boer internees and 64 for black Africans. The Boer camps held mainly the elderly, women and children. Attendance was largely voluntary, though in practice most of the internees had nowhere else to go. Voluntary schools were established in the camps and nearly twice as many Boer children received regular schooling received schooling during the war than before it. But the overcrowded conditions, poor diet and inadequate hygiene (often owing to the Boers’ own lack of sanitary knowledge) led to a large number of deaths – about 4,000 Boer adults and 16,000 children (25% of the inmates) and 12% of the black Africans died (though the African statistics are unreliable).

See here for an Afrikaner version of this story.

Between December 1900 and May 1901 Emily Hobhouse (1860-1926) visited the camps on behalf of the Women and Children’s Distress Fund, and her exposure of the conditions received wide publicity: she described what she saw as ‘crass male ignorance, stupidity, helplessness, and muddling’. But she also found that the conditions in the camps varied, depending on such factors as the superintendence, supply of fuel and water, and the date the camps were constructed.

In June 1901 she met Campbell-Bannerman. Following this meeting, on 14 June, he delivered a speech to the National Reform Union at the Holborn Restaurant before a predominantly pro-Boer audience, which included Harcourt and Morley:

‘A phrase often used was that “war is war”, but when one came to ask about it, one was told that no war was going on, that it was not war. When was a war not a war? When it was carried on by methods of barbarism in South Africa’.

This led to a press uproar. On 17 June Lloyd George accused the government of ‘a deliberate and settled policy’ of ‘extermination’. Outraged, the Liberal Imperialists threatened secession from the party and on 20 June Asquith publicly rebuked his leader. One insider described it as ‘war to the knife and fork’ within the Liberal Party. Speaking in the Commons, Lloyd George declared:

‘A war of annexation against a proud people must be a war of extermination … the savagery that follows will stain the name of this country.’

It was a common feature of pro-Boer propaganda not only to accuse the British army of deliberate cruelty – a tactic that delighted the Irish nationalists - but also to idealize the enemy. The Boers were presented as courageous and simple farming people and set in opposition to the shady Jewish speculators of Johannesburg.

Between August and December 1901 the all-female Fawcett Commission, headed by the suffragist Millicent Garrett Fawcett, visited the (white) camps, confirmed Emily Hobhouse’s findings, and made some useful recommendations (such as the sterilization of linen). In November 1901 Salisbury ordered a relaxation of the farm-burning policy.

By this time the ruthless British tactics were slowly working and the Boer ‘bitter-enders’ came to realize the futility of further resistance. The British too were wearying of the war – even the Primrose League Gazette reported the feeling in the working-class areas that the war ought to have been over by now.

The Treaty of Vereeniging
The Boers signed the treaty of Vereeniging (at Melrose House, Pretoria) on 31 May 1902 and formally recognized the British annexation of the two republics. But it was not a total defeat for the Boers. The British had not gained total predominance in South Africa and it was widely recognized that the Afrikaners would have to be incorporated into an eventual political settlement. English was to be the official language, but Afrikaans was to be taught in schools if the parents wished it, and to be allowed in the law courts; the British government was to grant £3m towards rebuilding and restocking farms. By the time the treaty was signed the British had largely lost interest in a war that in its last phase was costing the government £1.5m a week and forcing large increases in duties and income tax. The politicians, too, tried to forget it. The Conservatives had presided incompetently over its conduct and the Liberals had exposed their deep divisions.

Reconstruction and Unification
Now based in the Transvaal, Milner embarked on the post-war reconstruction of a devastated country. He was assisted by a group of young Oxford graduates known as his ‘Kindergarten’. The most serious grievances of the mine magnates were removed and an efficient bureaucracy was established. His policy of bringing in white people of British descent to outnumber the Boers failed as the British preferred to go to Canada or Australia. But the acute shortage of African labour was resolved by the importation of 60,000 Chinese, despite the bitter opposition of white workers. By the time he left in 1905 he had established the infrastructure for the development of the modern South African state.

After the war the Boer landlords were encouraged to return to their farms and African hopes of land redistribution were dashed. They were effectively disarmed, systematically taxed for the first time, forced into segregated areas and denied the vote. The foundations of apartheid were laid during British rule.

By 1906-7 the British were sufficiently confident of the new order they had established to grant self-governing institutions to white males. In 1910 in accordance with the Union of South Africa Act of the previous year, South Africa was incorporated fully into the British Empire with the conciliatory Louis Botha as Prime Minister; power was devolved to the white minority in a Boer-dominated union.

The Labour movement

Socialism in Europe
Throughout Europe the period from the 1880s onwards saw considerable labour unrest – some of it violent - in the relatively advanced industrial regions. Much of this discontent arose out of the changes in industrial society: the growth of communications, transport, urbanization and the dissemination of news; newspapers were cheaper, the provincial and national press was growing, and deference was weakening; old craft unions now co-existed with newer unions of the unskilled.

To many workers and intellectuals Socialism – the organization of society on a more collectivist, humanitarian and egalitarian basis - seemed to provide a coherent and relevant alternative economic system. In the 1880s separate working class parties, largely Marxist in ideology, were formed. The German Social Democratic Party, the largest and most effective of the European Socialist parties, was founded in 1875, outlawed in 1878, and began to attract large numbers of votes in the 1880s. By 1890 it attracted nearly 1.5 million votes and elected 35 representatives to the Reichstag. In the elections of 1912 it became the largest single party in the Reichstag.

In 1889 French socialists issued invitations for two congresses in Paris (one for the Marxists the second for the others!), out of which came the Second International. Resolutions were passed in favour of the eight-hour day and the extension of the suffrage, condemning standing armies and advocating the celebration of 1 May by labour demonstrations. By the 1890s it was clear that the Second International was going to be firmly Marxist. From 1889 to 1914 socialist parties grew in strength in every country.

Socialism in Britain
Socialist ideas met with more resistance in Britain. Most British Socialists were not working class and were frequently hostile to the unions. Henry Hyndman, the Old Etonian who, along with Eleanor Marx (daughter of Karl), founded the Marxist Social Democratic Federation (SDF) in 1883, openly despised what he saw as their narrowly reformist agenda. Other middle-class socialists were William Morris, leader of the Socialist League and the anarchist Edward Carpenter. The Fabians, founded in 1884, were middle class intellectuals (George Bernard Shaw, Sidney Webb, Hubert Bland) with little contact with trade unionism.

On the other hand, the Liberal party apparently had much to offer the skilled artisan, nonconformist in politics and proud of his independence. The two first working-class MPs had been elected in 1874 as Liberals. Thomas Burt still revered Gladstone and believed that ‘labour’s’ most realistic chance of success was to function as a group within the wider Liberal Movement. After the 1885 general election there were 11 ‘Lib-Lab’ MPs. This being the case, one of the great questions of the period is why the Liberal party was unable to position itself as the party of ‘labour’.

1. Part of the answer lies in the failure of the Liberals to find seats for working men. The Corrupt Practices Act of 1883 had made elections cheaper but they were still very expensive. The middle classes were moving away from Liberalism and this made party organizations in the constituencies financially weak, if not moribund. Constituency parties were often dominated by minorities and wealthy candidates of good standing were preferred to working-class candidates without resources.
The Liberal party at the centre was acutely aware of the problem. Gladstone donated money for this purpose and proclaimed the urgency of increased labour representation at the Newcastle Conference of 1891. But in spite of all the efforts little was achieved. It was of critical importance in the establishment of the Independent Labour Party that in the late 1880s and early 1890s, men like Keir Hardie, Ramsay MacDonald (1866-1937), and Arthur Henderson (1863-1935) experienced rebuffs at the hands of local Liberal associations, and decided that their future lay elsewhere.

2. The Liberal party was equally slow and indecisive in adapting to the demands of labour measures. The demand for an eight hour day aroused an acute dilemma. Most Liberal employers opposed the demand and many Liberal parliamentarians had ideological scruples about state-imposed limitation of hours. By the time the National Liberal Federation met at Newcastle, the question had not been resolved. The ‘Newcastle Programme’ adopted at that conference put the emphasis on ‘old’ Liberalism: veto on the sale of intoxicating liquors, land reforms, public control of denominational schools, the extension of employers’ liability.

The ‘New Unionism’
Up to the late 1880s trade unions were almost entirely confined to the skilled craft workers. But between 1888 and 1891 a number of strikes demonstrated the future trend of labour politics.

In 1888 the Bryant and May match girls' strike aroused much public sympathy and involved figures of the Left like Annie Besant, now a Fabian Socialist.

In the summer of 1889 the gas workers and the London dockers (10,000 men) struck. The five-week London dock strike, conducted with great flair by John Burns (1858-1943), Tom Mann (1856-1941) and Ben Tillett (1860-1943), caught the public imagination. The dockers demanded four hours continuous work at a time and a minimum rate of 6d an hour (‘the dockers’ tanner). Organizations such as the Salvation Army ran soup kitchens for the strikers. Trade unions in Australia sent over £24,000. The dock strike ended in what Beatrice Webb called a ‘brilliant victory’, partly negotiated by Cardinal Manning. After it the dockers formed a new General Labourers’ Union, electing Tillett as General Secretary.

These events were manifestations of what the Webbs called the ‘New Unionism’ in which unskilled workers became prominent in the union movement. ‘The whole movement was a reflection of the growth of employment in large impersonal units, where there was a tendency for skill differentials to become obscured.’ The dock industry was particularly affected by the contrast between the relatively skilled and regularly employed stevedores and lightermen and large numbers of unskilled casual workers. In the coal areas there was a marked differentiation between those areas producing mainly for the home market and those producing for export, where sliding wage-scales were often in operation. In 1889 the regional mining unions came together in the Miners’ Federation of Great Britain. The development of unionism was also much affected by the attitude of employers, the degree to which they were prepared to grant recognition to unions and the extent to which they themselves were organized.

At first the numerical increase in trade union membership was dramatic. At the TUC in 1889 nearly 885,000 members had been represented; in 1890 nearly 1½ million, and though it dropped back in the face of aggressive actions by employers, it then steadily recovered.

A new generation of working-class activists, many of them socialist, challenged the old TUC establishment, represented in Henry Broadhurst, a man totally identified with the Liberals. He resigned his position as secretary of the TUC’s Parliamentary Committee in 1890.

Keir Hardie
The new activism was represented politically by one of Broadhurst’s critics, the former miner, James Keir Hardie (1856 - 1915), the illegitimate son of a servant from Lanarkshire. In 1886 he was appointed secretary for the Scottish Miners’ Federation. In 1888 he stood as the ‘Labour and Home Rule’ candidate for the mining constituency of mid-Lanark, and finished bottom of the poll; the Liberal won, but with a good deal of working-class support going to the Tories.

Following mid-Lanark, Hardie declared:

‘If the Liberal Party desired to prevent a split, let it adopt the programme of the Labour Party.’

He put forward this view at successive meetings of the TUC, and made the eight-hour day the centre-piece of an independent Labour programme. This created ideological problems for the Liberals and for those in the Labour movement who found it difficult to accept a statutory limitation of hours for adult male workers. The idea of an independent Labour programme and representation found support in many parts of the country, particularly in the north of England.

1892 was a general election year. Hardie decisively abandoned the Liberal party and stood as independent candidate for the constituency of West Ham. His appeal to the voters was deliberately broad. Little was said about socialism (which would have alienated the Irish Catholic vote), but a great deal about unemployment (a newly coined word). The strength of support was such that the official Liberal candidate, a Liberal, withdrew immediately before polling day. Hardie thus had a straight fight with a Unionist and won 57% of the vote. (The election was financed in part by a donation from Andrew Carnegie.) His entry into the Commons caused a sensation because he wore a deerstalker (not, as is often wrongly reported, a worker’s cap), which was to become his trademark in public life.

His most striking contribution to parliament was his speech made on the occasion of the birth of the future duke of Windsor in the summer of 1894. It drew emotional force from the fact that the Salisbury government had refused a request from Hardie to propose a motion of condolence for the relatives of 250 miners who had been killed in a colliery explosion a few days earlier. Hardie wrote an angry newspaper article and on 28 June outraged parliament by what he later called his ‘Royal Baby Speech’. Even the Liberal radicals were unable to support him openly, though in private they agreed with him.

The Independent Labour Party
In January 1893, following the bitter Manningham Mill strike in Bradford, 120 delegates from various local socialist societies, mostly with working-class memberships, came together in Bradford to form the Independent Labour Party (ILP). Though the word ‘socialism’ was not in the programme (and it was unanimously voted not to call the new party the Socialist Labour Party), the party committed itself ‘to secure the collective ownership of the means of production, distribution, and exchange’. This was a much more socialist programme than the one put before the West Ham electors. But like the Fabians, the ILP were gradualists, seeking to win power through the ballot box. Their ‘ethical socialism’ was very different from the revolutionary Marxism of Hyndman, Eleanor Marx or William Morris. Significantly, the ILP included many husband and wife partnerships: the Pankhursts, the MacDonalds, the Snowdons, and was committed to women’s suffrage. Its leaders, Keir Hardie and Tom Mann, realized that to capture power at local and national level they would have to link up with the wider trade union movement.

In 1895 the ILP had 35,000 members. However in the 1895 general election it put up 28 candidates, but won only 44, 325 votes. All its candidates finished bottom of the poll, including Hardie. Greatly humbled, ILP strategists determined that future success depended on drawing more substantial support from the trade unions. As a result it began to be successful in local elections and in 1898 it joined with the Social Democratic Federation to make West Ham the first local authority to have a Labour majority. At local level, the ILP was doing a good job in pressing for the reform of public services, but parliamentary success was still elusive.

The Labour Representation Committee
In the final years of the 19th century the ILP faced a stark choice. Either it could combine with the SDF or it could back-pedal on its socialism by linking with the trade union movement. Circumstances favoured the latter option. Many trade unionists were worried about the long-term prospects of the movement in the wake of more aggressive attitudes on the part of employers, who were increasingly resorting to lock-outs. Some unions, notably the miners, already had their sponsored Lib-Lab MPs, but others needed little persuading to vote for the resolution at the TUC Congress of 1899 that ‘a better representation of the interests of Labour in the House of Commons’ was desirable. The resolution went on to call for a special congress of unions and socialist societies to secure that objective. Significantly the resolution came from the Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants, which was still struggling for recognition and was aware that many directors of railway companies sat in Parliament.

The congress convened on 27 February 1900 at the Farringdon Street Memorial Hall, and established the Labour Representation Committee (LRC). The key resolution stated that ‘a distinct Labour Group’ should be established in Parliament, ‘who should have their own Whips and agree upon their policy’. There was no mention of socialism, and no ‘Marxist’ slogans about nationalization of the means of production, distribution and exchange. The LRC was thus an uneasy compromise between trade unions, who were mostly suspicious of socialism, and the three socialist societies, the ILP, the SDF and the Fabians. But the unions were bound to win arguments and votes: there were about 1.2 million trade unionists affiliated to the TUC (25% of adult male manual labourers), while the socialist societies had tiny memberships.

The newspapers were taken up with the Boer War and gave little attention to the congress. Most of the miners and cotton operatives boycotted it, and most regarded the new body as ephemeral. ‘That it turned out differently was mainly due to the work of Ramsay MacDonald, who became the first secretary to the Committee, and to the Taff Vale decision .

The Taff Vale Judgement
In July 1901 the House of Lords handed down their decision in the Taff Vale case. A South Wales railway had successfully sued the Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants through its officials for damages sustained through picketing in the course of a strike in August 1900. The decision was reversed by the Court of Appeal, but reinstated by the Law Lords. When the damages were finally settled in January 1903 they amounted to £23,000. This reinforced working-class opinion that the law was something imposed from above.

The case gave the LRC a boost. Ramsay MacDonald told the unions, pointing that their very existence was at stake and that this made a Labour party in Parliament ‘an absolute necessity’. By early 1903 the number of affiliated unions had risen to 127, with a membership of 850,000. A parliamentary fund was set up based on a penny levy per affiliated member.

There were still many tensions. The SDF withdrew from the LRC over Labour’s refusal to accept the doctrine of the class war. The ILP remained within the LRC but continued to argue for full-blooded socialism, while MacDonald wanted to maintain contacts with the Liberals.

This seemed a realistic strategy as the Liberals were beginning to stand aside in elections for Labour candidates. Already in August 1902 a Labour MP was returned unopposed for Clitheroe. In March 1903 Will Crooks, sponsored by the Woolwich Trades Council, captured the Conservative seat of Woolwich. Two months later the President of the Ironfounders’ Union, Arthur Henderson, who was to be the leader of the Labour Party from 1914-22, was returned for Barnard Castle.

In the spring of 1903 negotiations began between MacDonald and Herbert Gladstone, the Liberal Chief Whip. In the summer they reached an informal (and secret) understanding that each party would use its influence to prevent the running of ‘wrecking’ candidates’ whose intervention would risk handing seats over to the Unionists. It was provisionally agreed that in 23 seats Labour should be given a free run. Was the pact a grave mistake for the Liberals, allowing Labour a toehold inside Parliament in the next general election?

Click here for James Connell's socialist anthem, The Red Flag.

The horrors of nineteenth century warfare

This isn't really related to our course but the photograph is so striking I thought you'd like to see it. It is what was left of Richmond, Virginia, the capital of the Confederacy, after the southern army had left.

See here for a fine selection of Civil War photographs.