Hero of the Empire: The Boer War, a Daring Escape, and the Making of Winston Churchill (35 page)

One of the many reasons Haldane and Brockie had not wanted to take Churchill with them was that he was well known within the prison not just for his aristocratic background but for his aristocratic tastes. Whether he was in Blenheim Palace or on a battlefield, Churchill expected certain amenities, and he saw no reason why he should not have them simply because he was in prison. The day he arrived in Pretoria, he had written to his mother asking her to ensure that his credit would be good in the Transvaal capital. “
Cox’s should be instructed to cash any cheques I may draw,” he had explained to her. “Their cheques are the ones cashed here easiest.”

Churchill had developed a taste for fine things seemingly from birth, with little concern for how much they cost. When he was just fifteen years old, he had written to his mother complaining bitterly because he had been forced to travel in the second-class compartment
of a train. “
I won’t travel 2d again by Jove,” he had railed. By the following year, his spending had become so extreme that his father had sternly reprimanded him for his lavishness. “
You are really too extravagant,” Randolph had written to his son. “If you were a millionaire you could not be more extravagant.”

Even after joining the army, Churchill had not outgrown his profligate ways. In India, like many young officers, he had turned to the services of moneylenders, even though they had all been warned against it.
Any money they needed “had to be borrowed at usurious rates of interest from the all-too-accommodating native bankers,” Churchill would remember years later. “All you had to do was sign little bits of paper, and produce a polo pony as if by magic. The smiling financier rose to his feet, covered his face with his hands, replaced his slippers, and trotted off contentedly till that day three months [later].”

When the barber arrived at the Staats Model School at 8:00 a.m. on December 13, he went straight to Churchill’s room, accompanied as always by a guard. Haldane tried to turn him away, telling him that Churchill would not need his services that day, but the barber was insistent. “
Unfortunately, he was an inquisitive, persistent fellow,” Haldane wrote, “who was unwilling to depart before earning his expected fee.”

After not finding Churchill in his room, the barber went up and down the hallways, the ZARP trailing behind him as he asked everyone he met if he had seen Churchill. “
Some gave him no answer, just looked him up and down,” Hofmeyr would later recall. “Others referred him to the most unlikely corners.” Finally, Tom Frankland, who had been captured with Churchill and was his roommate at the Staats Model School, stepped in, hoping to put the barber off by telling him that Churchill was bathing. The barber, however, was not about to give up so easily. Hurrying to the bathroom, he and the now mildly interested guard stood outside the door, patiently waiting for Churchill to emerge. After half an hour, the barber knocked, “
gently and apologetically” at first, and then louder. When there was
no answer, he and the sentry began pounding on the door. Finally, they decided to go in. The guard turned the handle and slowly, nervously pushed the door open, “inch by inch, peeping in gingerly,” Hofmeyr wrote. “Is the man perhaps dead? Has he cut his throat? What ghastly sight am I doomed to see? He opens the door a little more. There is no one.”

After frantically searching every inch of the tiny, eight-by-three-foot room, peering under a chair and behind the door, carefully examining bath towels and slivers of soap, the ZARP was forced to admit that Churchill was not there. What had at first seemed a minor mystery suddenly turned darker. “
Consternation is now changed into panic,” Hofmeyr wrote. “The gaoler is called; the guard is alarmed; there is bustle and confusion.” One by one, the prisoners were questioned. When did they last see Winston Churchill? Again and again, they gave the same answer: last night.

The widespread alarm that Churchill had expected now spread quickly, not just through the prison, but throughout Pretoria. The Staats Model School was soon swarming with government officials and police inspectors. One man, a field cornet who had raced to the prison when he heard that Churchill was missing, was, in Hofmeyr’s words, “
in a great rage.” Storming into Hofmeyr’s room with the jailers Opperman and Gunning in tow, he demanded to know when the clergyman had last seen Churchill. When Hofmeyr gave him the same answer as every other prisoner—“last night”—the man turned with a vengeance on Opperman and Gunning. “You must produce Churchill,” he hissed, glaring at them until they trembled with fear. “If not General Joubert will hang you!”

For Opperman and Gunning, as for any guard who had shown the prisoners a moment’s leniency or kindness, it seemed as though the situation could not get any worse. Churchill was missing, but he would be found. Surely he could not have gone far. Then they found the letter.

Handwritten in Churchill’s small, distinctive script, it was addressed directly to the Transvaal secretary of state for war.

State Schools Prison

Pretoria

Dear Mr. de Souza,

I do not consider that your Government was justified in holding me, a press correspondent and a non combatant a prisoner, and I have consequently resolved to escape. The arrangements I have succeeded in making in conjunction with my friends outside are such as give me every confidence. But I wish in leaving you thus hastily & unceremoniously to once more place on record my appreciation of the kindness which has been shown me and the other prisoners by you, by the Commandant and by Dr. Gunning and my admiration of the chivalrous and humane character of the Republican forces. My views on the general question of the war remain unchanged, but I shall always retain a feeling of high respect for the several classes of the burghers I have met and, on reaching the British lines I will set forth a truthful & impartial account of my experiences in Pretoria. In conclusion I desire to express my obligations to you, and to hope that when this most grievous and unhappy war shall have come to an end, a state of affairs may be created which shall preserve at once the national pride of the Boers and the security of the British and put a final stop to the rivalry & enmity of both races. Regretting that circumstances have not permitted me to bid you a personal farewell, Believe me

Yours vy sincerely

W
INSTON
C
HURCHILL
,

Dec. 11th 1899

On the envelope, Churchill could not resist adding a small, smug postscript: p.p.c., or
pour prendre congé
. French for “to take my leave,” it was often used by members of the British aristocracy, who scribbled it on their calling cards, dropping them on a table or in the white-gloved hand of a butler as they walked out the door. The postscript,
as Churchill well knew, was exactly the kind of over-bred, aristocratic gesture that the Boers despised.

Although Churchill would later admit that he had taken “great pleasure” in writing the letter, it did not have the effect he had imagined it would. Far from being charmed by his cleverness or mollified by his compliments and wishes for a speedy end to this “grievous and unhappy war,” the Boers were outraged. The idea of being humiliated by the son of Lord Randolph Churchill was simply too much to bear. They were determined that nothing, not even the war, would prevent them from finding Winston Churchill.

In fact, the Transvaal government was so shocked and infuriated by Churchill’s escape that tracking him down suddenly became the first order of business. “
So great was the Government’s…desire to capture [Churchill],” Haldane wrote, that “the whole State machinery came to a standstill.” To Hofmeyr, the Boer officials appeared to be almost paralyzed with rage. “
It seemed to me,” he wrote, “that even the war was forgotten.”

Despite Churchill’s attempts to protect his friends, the Boers’ fury fell first on those closest to him. He had hoped that by referring to his “friends on the outside,” he would make it seem as though he had had no help from inside the prison, either from his fellow inmates or from the guards. The letter, however, had done more harm than good. It was immediately apparent to the men Churchill had left behind that life for them would change dramatically. “
Vengeance was now to be taken on us,” Hofmeyr wrote. “Everybody and everything was suspected.” They could no longer have visitors or walk outside after 8:30 p.m., buy newspapers or sleep on the veranda on the hottest nights. Nearly all of the privileges they had come to expect from the Boers were now stripped from them. “
We were subjected to many petty annoyances,” Haldane wrote, “which displayed to fine advantage the narrow-minded and malicious nature which actuated our warders.”

What worried Haldane and Brockie, however, was that it would now be a thousand times harder to escape.
Additional sentries were added not just to the enclosure but to the neighboring yards. Several
guards were accused of taking bribes and removed from the prison altogether. Even de Souza’s wife, Marie, believed that they were guilty, writing in her diary that Churchill “
must have bribed the guards, who are policemen!” The new ZARPs were angrier, more vigilant and less easily distracted than their predecessors. They were not about to be humiliated again.

The prisoners could also no longer count on any help or news from their small group of friends within Pretoria.
The Boers launched a massive search of homes, especially those with any English connections. Even Dr. Gunning, the assistant jailer of the Staats Model School, endured the humiliation of having his house ransacked by ZARPs because his wife was English. In a warrant, P. Maritz Botha, the first criminal
landdrost
, or magistrate, wrote that “
there is reason to believe that W. Churchill…is hidden in a certain house in this town inhabited by certain parties. You are hereby authorized in the name of the Government of the South African Republic to enter the said house during the day, and there thoroughly to search the house [for articles] of the said W. Churchill and in case of the said articles being found there to bring the same together with the party in whose possession they are found, before the Landdrost to be dealt with according to law.”

Moving quickly through the town, ZARPs knocked on one door after another, looking for Churchill or any sign of him. For the rest of her life, Catherine Holmes, who was six years old at the time, would remember waking in the middle of the night and listening to the tense voices of her parents as they discussed the escape. “
As there was a 7 o’clock curfew nobody could be out late,” she wrote years later. “My cousin had crept through the windows of the houses to warn us all that the Boer soldiers were coming to search the houses for Sir Winston.”

When the Boers reached the home of one English family, the family’s daughter, who spoke Dutch, whispered to her father to stay silent and still. Opening the door, she calmly addressed the men before her in High Dutch. “
Well gentlemen,” she said, “what can I do for you?” One of the ZARPs told her that an English prisoner
had escaped, and they had reason to believe that he was hiding in her house. “So in the name of the State,” he barked, “we demand an entrance.” After turning to her father to explain to him in English what was about to happen, she opened the door wider and said, “Follow me gentlemen.” The ZARPs searched every inch of the house, thrusting their swords through nightgowns, stripping beds, emptying drawers, pushing aside bookcases to peer into their shadows and climbing into the attic, from which they emerged, to the girl’s delight, covered in dust. There was no indication that Churchill was or had ever been in the house, or in any of the houses in Pretoria, but still the search continued.

Although many Pretorians suffered in the wake of Churchill’s escape, some even forced out of the Transvaal, no one endured more suspicion and hostility than the man to whom Churchill’s letter had been addressed: Louis de Souza. Already considered highly suspect as a Catholic and the husband of a woman with English parents, de Souza was an easy and immediate target for the Boers’ fury.
As soon as Hans Malan, the loathed ZARP who was President Kruger’s grandson, read Churchill’s letter, he flew into a rage, accusing de Souza of aiding Churchill in his escape. Although de Souza angrily denied the accusations and did all he could to help in the investigation, the rumor, prompted by Malan, quickly spread. Finally, de Souza was forced to defend his honor before the president himself. “
Louis had an awful row with Monsieur le P[resident],” Marie wrote in her diary that night. “Louis made up his mind to send in his resignation but he thought they might perhaps say he was a coward.”

It was Churchill, however, that the Boers wanted to demean. It would not be enough to recapture him. They were intent on humiliating him in the process. Rumors quickly spread that he had escaped by dressing as a woman. A wanted poster was printed that not only offered a reward for his capture, “dead or alive,” but described him in the most unflattering terms the Boers could think up. Beyond just giving a basic description of Churchill, his height, complexion, hair color, the poster included details that were clearly calculated to humiliate the arrogant young Briton. Churchill had a “stooping
gait,” the poster read, “almost invisible moustache, speaks through his nose, cannot give full expression to the letter ‘s,’ and does not know a word of Dutch.” An earlier description, in a telegram sent by the commandant general’s department the day after the escape, had also mentioned that Churchill “occasionally makes a rattling noise in his throat.”

Finally, in a desperate attempt to protect its fiercely guarded reputation and stem the potential damage, the Transvaal government claimed that, before Churchill’s escape, it had planned to let him go. Although for weeks everyone from Reitz to Joubert had adamantly denied Churchill’s constant requests for release, ordering instead that he be closely guarded until the end of the war, after his escape Joubert suddenly produced a letter that gave Churchill his freedom. Claiming that he had known nothing of the correspondent before seeing the glowing accounts of his defense of the armored train in the newspapers, Joubert shrugged and said that if Churchill denied these accounts, he would have to take his word for it. “
If I accept his word, then my objections to his release cease,” he wrote. “I have no further objections to his being set free.” The letter was carefully dated December 12, the very day Churchill had climbed over the fence of the Staats Model School, and released the following day. “
It is certainly an odd coincidence,” Churchill would later write, “that this order should only have been given publicity
after
I had escaped.”