Britain’s view of battle changed for ever during the Anglo-Boer South African War 100 years ago. Award-winning novelist Giles Foden on the war that reached a mass audience thanks to the reporters who became part of the story
If it were possible to trace the beginning of the modern era of the war correspondent to one particular place and time, it would be a bridge over the Blauw Krantz River on November 15 1899. Here the young Winston Churchill secured his reputation as an adventurer. As a correspondent for the British newspaper, the Morning Post, Churchill was a passenger in an armoured train that came under attack from the Boers. Hearing shooting, the driver of the train speeded up round a bend just over the bridge – and crashed straight into boulders the Boers had laid across the line.
Under fire, Churchill helped clear the tracks. “This,” he was heard to remark, “will be good for my paper.” The engine was able to reverse and take the wounded to safety. But Churchill himself, and 70 others, were taken prisoner. His reports describing his escape from captivity and daring trek across Boer territory would make him world-famous.
Churchill, and one or two other British war correspondents, would set the tone for much of what followed.
Almost a century after his capture, the Radio Times is gathering together the cream of the BBC’s foreign correspondents for a photo shoot. With John Simpson predominant, and a coverline reading “The Foreign Legion”, there they all are: Bridget Kendall, Kate Adie, Brian Hanrahan, George Alagiah, Fergal Keane, Ben Brown and more – every one a familiar face on British TV, every one more or less a celebrity.
Somewhere in between the two events, war correspondents became heroes. Sometimes they were tainted heroes, sometimes not. Whatever the individual case, the relationship between the military and journalists altered radically, and the media began not simply to have an impact on public opinion in Britain but to affect the course of war itself.
When General Sir Redvers Buller and his Army Corps sailed out to South Africa on the Dunottar Castle on October 14 1899, they were accompanied by the emergent press pack, 58 strong.
Spurred on by the prize of the diamond and gold fields of the Rand, the British government had, after months of duplicitous negotiation, decided to annex the two Boer republics, the Transvaal and the Orange Free State. The Boers made a pre-emptive strike and invaded British-held Natal. Generals and political leaders once again held power in the balance. But from the moment the Boer horsemen crossed the border, journalists too would have a certain importance in the history of human conflict.
The Anglo-Boer South African War (1899 to 1902) would prove to be the first mass media war. The newly literate masses of industrial Britain, serviced by advances in printing and distribution, turned out to be avid consumers of newspaper and magazine reports about the war. There was a demographic inevitability about this – between 1841 and 1900 the literacy rate shot up from 63,3% to 92,2% – and a corresponding inevitability that public opinion would begin to figure in military calculations. The British paper that was really to benefit was the Daily Mail. It launched in 1896 with about 400 000 readers; by 1900 it had nearly one million.
The conflict was also the first to be recorded in its entirety by the sharp lens of cinematography. The newly established Biograph and Mutoscope Company was represented by the pioneer cameraman William Dixon, who travelled to the Cape with Churchill (for the Morning Post) and The Guardian’s special writer, John Black Atkins.
>From behind the huge elm-wood box of his machine, Dixon and his assistant took film which – sent back regularly to play in packed London music halls – would give the British public a closer perspective on warfare than ever before.
As well as the big movie cameras, there were new hand-held machines which photographers such as Horace Nicholls used to procure more intimate pictures of the ordinary soldier in action – pictures with which people in Britain could identify more easily.
It was these journalists – Churchill, Atkins, Nicholls and Dixon – together with the Daily Mail’s George Steevens and Henry Nevinson (literary editor turned war correspondent of the Daily Chronicle) who would take the conflict home to Britain – and in doing so prepare the ground for the greater war to come in 1914.
There had been one or two great war correspondents before, in particular William Russell of The Times (who covered the Crimea and the Indian Mutiny with distinction) and in the United States, Stephen Crane (the American Civil War), author of The Red Badge of Courage. But improved communications – including the establishment of the telegraph cable and field telephone – and the massive expansion of the popular press gave the war correspondents an advantage over their predecessors.
In the early stages of the war, British journalists found themselves either shut up in towns besieged by the Boers – Ladysmith, Kimberley and Mafeking – or following the relief columns sent to liberate those inside. Henry Nevinson was one of those under siege. He recounted his experience in Ladysmith: The Diary of a Siege, an eyewitness account describing in powerful detail what it is like to spend 120 days under shellfire with little food. Read alongside Steevens’s From London to Ladysmith, it also gives a good picture of a war correspondent’s life 100 years ago.
So heavy was the bombardment, Nevinson tells us, that many townspeople were forced to hide in specially dug caves by the river. As the siege wore on and more houses were destroyed, these caves eventually became a kind of catacomb, with chambers and galleries and interconnecting tunnels.
There were other dangers besides shells, not least starvation. By the third month of the siege, the military commissariat which controlled food supplies under martial law in Ladysmith was forced to order the killing of cavalry horses – themselves already “walking toast-racks”, as one soldier’s sour caption to a cartoon of his own horse had it.
Nevinson tells how the carcasses of these bony beasts were wheeled to the old railway sidings where, with bonfires lit under the steel trucks, they were boiled down for soup.
With the telegraph wires cut and the railway blocked, correspondents were reduced to using carrier pigeons or Zulu runners – paying the latter large sums, between 20 and 50, for each trip – to file their dispatches. The Boers soon grew wise to this, taking care to shoot both the avian and human messengers. Later on, use was made of the military heliograph, a device which reflected sunlight to flash Morse to outlying stations – but correspondents were rarely allowed to send more than 30 words at a time, and every one had to pass under the eye of the censor.
The British army also tried to keep a stranglehold on the transmission of news within the town – often not revealing setbacks in the advance of the relief column for fear of lowering morale, and frequently passing complete misinformation. It was in this context that Nevinson and Steevens contributed to a siege newspaper, the Ladysmith Lyre, which burlesqued the military propaganda machine by disseminating news which, as the masthead promised,”you can actually rely on as false”.
Some of their colleagues were falsifying for real, particularly the photographers and war artists. The need to get close-up human-interest film meant that events were restaged for the camera. Others simply never happened at all – setting the model for wartime fakes of our own time.
A famous painting of the relief of Ladysmith shows Buller (the relief column general) and White (in command of the town) shaking hands heartily. “Nothing of the sort ever happened,” Nevinson would later write, amused at finding prints of the painting on the walls of pubs in Britain after the war. The image’s ubiquity lay in the fact that the Bovril company, recognising its power, used it as a marketing tool: collect so many coupons and get your free Relief of Lady-smith print.
Print journalists less scrupulous than Nevinson were also twisting events to satisfy the political demands of their proprietors. The Guardian alone took a negative view of the war through the whole of the conflict – with the result that public opinion turned its hatred on editor CP Scott. Sales fell sharply. By the end of the war the paper had shed nearly a seventh of its circulation. It was still selling more than the pro-war Times (41 900 to 36 700), but in those days The Times cost threepence to The Guardian’s penny.
Anyway, there were more immediate things for The Guardian to deal with than dips in sales. Crowds were burning the paper in the streets and threatening to lynch the leader writers. Police had to guard the building, checking the compositors’ sandwich boxes to see they did not contain bombs.
Other papers had been less steadfast, but suffered all the same. The proprietor of the Daily Chronicle, which had been against the war when it begun, ordered a change of policy once sales declined. It broke the paper’s spirit. When Nevinson returned to London from South Africa he was dismayed to find that “the old staff, almost without exception, had resigned and were scattered”.
By the third month of the Ladysmith siege, more or less the whole town was subsisting on horsemeat and handfuls of rice. More significantly, typhoid was rife, the town’s water supply being full of human and equine excrement. More died from disease in the siege than from shellfire. The worsening conditions took their toll.
“I now know,” mused the Mail’s Steevens, considering his imprisonment and incubating illness, “what it is like to be a fly in a beer bottle.” In fact, luxuries like alcohol and tobacco had been nearly exhausted in the first month. Correspondents outside the Boer cordon fared better. Churchill’s luggage on the Dunottar Castle included 18 bottles of St Emilion, 18 bottles of scotch and six bottles of very old brandy.
There were, however, a few secret caches of booze left in Ladysmith – one of a bottle of champagne, from which Steevens, delirious from typhoid, would drink on his deathbed, surrounded by fellow journalists. The scene is reported in a number of accounts, and when it finally reached England, it was instrumental in a kind of journalistic martyrdom: in Steevens, the British discovered an early war- correspondent hero, the prototype of today’s John Simpsons and Kate Adies.
The reason Steevens was so celebrated was his writing style. He threw himself into giving a powerful sense that the thing described actually happened the way he was telling it. As one contemporary characterised him: “He was endowed with a curious faculty, an extraordinary gift for recording his impressions. In a scientific age, his style may be described as cinematographic. He was able to put before his readers, in a series of smooth-running little pictures, events exactly as he saw them with his own intense eyes.”
Another put it more succinctly: “What Kipling did for fiction, he did for fact.”
It was true, and it was important, too. Dramatised, impacted, self-involving, the Steevens style laid the ground for the New Journalism of the 1960s and, it could also be argued, TV news as we understand it today. Bigger literary names reported from the Boer War in their turn – Edgar Wallace, Arthur Conan Doyle, Rudyard Kipling himself – but Steevens was the one who changed the game.
With Steevens dead, the man who would really benefit from the explosion of public interest in the war was a larger-than-life figure gallivanting outside the Ladysmith perimeter. Churchill was already on a nice financial number, courtesy of his contract with the Morning Post. Together with earnings from books, this meant that by the time he returned to London he had a tidy 10 000 to put away – about 50 000 in today’s money. As WF Deedes – himself the model for the most famous fictional war correspondent, William Boot of Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop – remarked recently, these earnings were to be “the foundations of his political career”.
Another foundation in that respect was Churchill’s celebrity after his escape from the Boers. “Now you’ve heard of Winston Churchill/That’s all I have to say,” went one music-hall ditty around London, “He’s the latest and the greatest correspondent of the day.”
Here too a seed was being sown for the future: the journalist not just in the story (Ernest Hemingway, Norman Mailer) but the journalist as the story. A few war correspondents today are pure media commodities: CNN’s Christiane Amanpour is reputed to earn in the region of a $1- million a year.
The dramas of individual correspondents in the war took place within the larger arena of European and world politics – an arena in which the media was already becoming an increasingly powerful weapon. To many foreign observers, Britain at that time wore roughly the same mask as the United States – as seen by militant Islam and some quarters of the left – does now: the world’s bully boy. The annexation of the Boer republics became both a liberal cause and a stick with which other European powers could beat John Bull and his evil empire.
As Tabitha Jackson explains in her informative book, The Boer War, “the wave of virulent anti-British sentiment in the German and French press” prompted a sharp reaction from their British equivalents. The Birmingham Mail declared: “Stalwart Englishmen armed with good horsewhips should go to France and administer a severe castigation to the vulgar crowds … The Parisian, like a dog, barks loudest in his own kennel.”
The jingoistic fervour whipped up by British papers took a knock in the week beginning December 10 1900, when Buller’s forces suffered defeats on three fronts. Then came the battle of Spion Kop, of which The Guardian’s John Black Atkins memorably wrote: “I shall always have it in my memory, that acre of massacre, top of a rich green gully. The Boers have three guns playing like hoses on our men.”
The mounting casualties began to have an effect on public opinion in Britain. More than ever, the British generals needed to get the press on their side. The appointment of the irascible Kitchener, who saw journalists as at best a necessary evil, was probably not a useful move. Kitchener was a man who could “get things done”, but the tactics he employed – burning farms and rounding up Boer women and children into concentration camps – came at a terrible cost.
It was one The Guardian weighed up in full. Atkins called the farm burning “a kind of domestic murder”. Before she was deported from South Africa, Emily Hobhouse, campaigning sister of Guardian leader writer Leonard Hobhouse, began to send back gruelling reports of conditions in the camps, where Boers and blacks were dying from a typhoid epidemic and famine.
The death toll in the camps points up another factor in the war: the role played in it by black South Africans – the tens of thousands who fought, and died, on both sides, a number whose existence was ignored by British and Boer alike. It would be left for historians, not journalists, to restore this void to light.
At the time, it was white deaths only that were counted, and even the pro-war papers balked as the camp mortality figures went over 20 000. Kitchener began to feel that the journalists were on the Boer side. Britain became the pariah of Europe. As would happen with the Vietnam War 70 years later, this was a conflict which had to end if the government was to stay in power. And it was images and words, as well as military tactics, that would – on May 31 1902 – bring it to its belated conclusion.
In World War II, Churchill was poacher turned gamekeeper, instrumental in the prosecution of the conflict as a total media offensive. But as a former journalist himself he knew that the best way to use the media was to feed it rather than to starve it.
Churchill’s efforts to concentrate the minds of all on winning the war were centred on the BBC and the newsreel companies whose bulletins played in cinemas: the influence of the former abroad and the latter at home was colossal. In both these spheres, and in newspapers too, British management of war reporting was corporate – unified and controlled in a sense which left less space for individual flair. It would be the Americans, Hemingway in particular, who would reinvigorate the role of the war correspondent as maverick hero.
The transformation of the war correspondent into the ambiguous figure we know today – at once calling and dancing to the government’s tune – took place during the subsequent half-century. By 1997, Lady Thatcher was able to say to Miles Hudson and John Stanier, interviewing her about the Falklands for their book War and the Media: “Don’t be too hard on the media; some of their people are good!”
Post-Falklands, post-Gulf, post-Kosovo, other agendas come into play. The presence of TV and live satellite feeds in an era of mass audiences creates further pitfalls, for governments and journalists. Every harrowing picture calls into question not only the justness of the conflict but also the moral stance of those presenting it. Is objective coverage simply an illusion? In any case, is striving for balance always the right approach?
It was in this context, in the aftermath of Bosnia, that the distinguished BBC war correspondent, and future MP, Martin Bell wrote a controversial whistle-blowing article. Attuned to how the television image affects what it reflects, he said he believed in making good that same intervention, proposing in place of the (apparently) dispassionate practices of the past what he called “the journalism of attachment”: “By this I mean a journalism that cares as well as knows; that is aware of its responsibilities; and will not stand neutrally between good and evil, right and wrong, victim and oppressor. We in the press, and especially in television, do not stand apart from the world. We are a part of it.”
This position – which Bell would no doubt be the first to acknowledge the difficulty of putting into practice – recognises the post-modern conditions in which war correspondents must now operate. Against it must be set CP Scott’s famous dictum about keeping the supply of news untainted: “Comment is free, but facts are sacred.”
Ladysmith, Giles Foden’s novel about journalists under siege, will be published by Faber and Faber