Imperial lesson
J. Enoch Powell
Jameson's Raid Elizabeth Longford (Weidenfeld and Nicolson £12.50)
Lady Longford is an accomplished writer. She can unfold a narrative tidily and attractively. If she has a weakness, it is to succumb to the temptation to slickness. 'The Committee met in Westminster Hall, not of course under the hammer beams of its roof, (no hammer blows were destined to be struck by the South Africa Committee,) but in the adjoining Grand Committee Room'; 'It was the last session before the Easter recess. Harcourt was more than ready to return to the daffodils of Malwood, his home, and Chamberlain to Highbury in the charm of its spring- flowering shrubs'. Of these examples the First is a non sequitur, and the second a col- ourful presumption presented as fact.
In this her first book, originally publish- ed in 1960, Lady Longford faced head-on one of the severest dilemmas of the historian. Is he to narrate events as they were perceived happening and then cover the ground again, revealing the network of causes and effects as they were known only to some of the actors, and that imperfectly? Or is he to decide for himself from the outset 'how it really was' and narrate the events as God might have watched them?
The Jameson Raid presents that crux in a specially acute form, because appearances and realities were exceptionally remote from one another. Either horn of the dilem- ma has its awkwardness. Lady Longford chose the first — to narrate the events and then turn the coat inside out to show the lin- ing. Probably she made that choice because the Raid had its sequel in the enquiry, two years later, which purported to uncover the truth but did not.
I do not think that, presentationally, her attempt quite succeeds, because, willy-nilly, the seamy side exposed later keeps in- truding into the narrative of events as the raiders and the watching world experienced them at the time. This was probably unavoidable, but should not the historian still make the attempt to 'tell it how it really was', even if that means running two or more lines of narrative in parallel, as near as may be simultaneously? A consequence of Lady Longford's choice is that the fiasco of the Parliamentary enquiry, which ought to be, in a sense, the climax or catastrophe of the whole story becomes, instead, an anti-climax, and the book runs out into the sand.
All the same, the establishment of the Falkland Islands enquiry has made the book suddenly topical. It will be salutary reading for politicians and public while they are awaiting the report of that curiously constituted body.
Chamberlain became Colonial Secretary in June 1895. By then Cecil Rhodes, Prime Minister of Cape Colony and Chairman of the Charter Company which controlled Rhodesia, had decided to use the Company's forces from Bechuanaland to seize the adjacent Boer Republic of the Transvaal. By then, also, the rising tension between the Republic and its resident alien population threatened an internal revolt which would invite intervention and perhaps annexation by either the Company or Britain. Chamberlain ceded to the Com- pany the frontier strip of Bechuanaland to enable a railway to be built by-passing the Transvaal, and a Company force under Dr Jameson, the administrator, was located there. It is in my judgment impossible to suppose that Chamberlain was unaware either of Rhodes's intentions or of the pro- spective revolt in the Transvaal.
By the end of 1895, however, the Boer Republic had made substantial, if precarious, concessions to the Uitlanders, and the revolt had 'gone off the boil'. At this juncture, in defiance of Rhodes's in- structions, Jameson plunged into the Transvaal hoping to reach a rebellious Johannesburg in three days. The plan was botched, there was no rebellion and the whole force was surrounded and captured 30 miles short of the city. Rhodes and Chamberlain instantly repudiated Jameson; but were they culpable? In July 1896 Chamberlain had to move for a parliamen- tary committee of enquiry, of which he was himself a member as well as a witness. The Report a year later found Rhodes responsi- ble for the circumstances leading up to the Raid, though not the Raid itself, and then went on to conclude that neither Chamberlain nor the Colonial Office 'received any information which should have made them or any of them aware of the plot during its development'. That a committee which included the Radical Labouchere and the Liberal leader Har- court could have allowed itself to be bam- boozled by the flagrant withholding or refusal of evidence, so as to be able to reach such a conclusion, is one of the curiosities of parliamentary annals.
This second edition of Lady Longford's book has had the advantage of material which has appeared in the 24 years since she completed her researches for the first. The largest single element of that material is the work done by C. M. Woodhouse and Lord Blake on the Rhodes archives at Oxford; but the author also secured the windfall of a letter of August 1895 from Rhodes to Belt, spelling out his appreciation of the whole operation. No doubt there is still more evidence to emerge yet, but not such as to modify the verdict that the Secretary of State knew — and yet did not know: I wonder, when Galtieri's Raid was preparill how many Ministers knew — and yet di" not know. I wonder, too, if we are going rd find out.
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