March 19, 2013

Finest Hour 155, Summer 2012

Page 22

First Encounter

By Fred Glueckstein

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Mr. Glueckstein is a Maryland writer and a frequent contributor to Finest Hour. His most recent articles are in issues 151, 147 and 144.

On 25 October 1900, Churchill and Conan doyle found themselves as guest speakers at the annual dinner of the Pall Mall Club in london. The subject was the boer war, where doyle had served as a volunteer doctor in langman’s Field hospital at bloemfontein. Churchill was a war correspondent who had obtained national prominence when he escaped imprisonment from a boer POw camp in Pretoria, and was now Member of Parliament for Oldham, lancashire.

Chairing the evening dinner at the Pall Mall Club was its president, Sir herbert Maxwell MP. After a toast to The Queen, Sir herbert proposed the toast of “welcome home” for winston Churchill. Among many changes in modern warfare, he said, none were more revolutionary than the hospital service and the system of war correspondence. There were two kinds of war corre- spondents, Sir herbert said: those who wrote with military experience and a sense of responsi- bility, and those that felt the importance of their communication depended upon their reflections on the high command. Some communications from the front, he added, had made him blush, and to feel ashamed for the profession.

Despite Churchill’s reputation for reflecting on high command, Sir herbert apparently thought highly of him. WSC aspired to both pen and politics: to the audience’s laughter, Maxwell hoped his honorable friend would not be disappointed by the latter. Alluding to winston’s father, lord Randolph Churchill, he declared that one of the brightest fea- tures of the 1900 general election was the restoration of the name Churchill to the Parliamentary roll.

Churchill began by saying that he hoped he would not be indiscreet in talking of more serious matters than were usually discussed after dinner. A great deal had been said lately about press censorship in South Africa.The need for censorship was undoubted, not only for military reasons but to prevent the public from being needlessly tortured by morbid or hysterical letters written only to create a newspaper “boom.” Censorship was also necessary to ensure justice for officers, Churchill added:while a person slandered could defend himself in the field, there was nothing but censor- ship to protect the people at home. Churchill himself had indignantly denied recent descriptions by a correspondent about the “kid gloved british officer,” with “hee-haw manners, drawling speech, offensive arrogance, and worship of dress.” he had seen more of british officers in South Africa and elsewhere than the writer, he said, and utterly denied the truth or justice of those charges.

To the cheers of the audience, Churchill said that a man had a right to be judged by his peers, so let the british officer be judged by the fighting races that he trained.would buller’s Army, so often beaten, have fought its way into ladysmith if private soldiers believed their officers to be kid-gloved effigies or duffers or arrogant fools? Critics of british officers should ask the troopers of the imperial light horse and the South African light horse, brabant’s horses, Montmorency’s Scouts, and the officers of the Australian and Canadian contingents. Or ask the fighting races of india, or the black Sudanese, their opinion of “kid-gloved” officers.

All these brave fighting men, Churchill went on, would say such descriptions were foul and cruel slanders.The audience responded “hear, hear!” Finally, to cheers, Churchill said a glance of the casualty lists in the South African war showed “a glorious disproportion” of mortality between officers and men. That alone should convince the staunchest critic that the british officer had done much to preserve the honour of his country and the dignity of british manhood.

Mr. henniker heaton next proposed a toast to “Our guests” and to dr. Arthur Conan doyle, who began his remarks by saying that he had seen the british officer more in hospital than in action.what struck him was that when things were worst, british officers looked at death open-eyed and unafraid.They were absolutely brave men, whose nerve even disease could not shake.when he read reports of officer mis- behavior, doyle added, it made his blood boil, for he knew that at best the correspondent was generalizing from one case.

Conan doyle then adopted a Churchill tactic by saying a word on behalf of the enemy.The boers, he said, had been the victims of a great deal of cheap slander; those who had seen them in the field were far more generous toward them. A report of boers hoisting a white flag as a cold-blooded device for luring the british into the open was an absolute calumny.To discredit their valor, Conan doyle said, was to discredit britain’s victory.The boers had been noble and generous in restoring without parole prisoners of war whom they could not properly provide for. he had never heard of that in any other campaign.

Finally, Conan doyle expressed the view that with so much bitterness over the war, it would be better to fight it to the end than to have a premature peace.with the control of arms and ammunition and a great influx of british into the Transvaal, there would be enough force to keep the boers in hand.

Soon after their Pall Mall Club speeches, Churchill asked Conan doyle to chair his talk on “The war as i Saw it” at St. James’s hall on November 5th. Four months later, on 8 March 1901, Conan doyle was elected to the Athenaeum Club, com- prising notable men of inherited wealth and status, and of distinguished eminence in Science, literature, the Arts, and Public Service. Shortly after his admission, Conan doyle was invited to the Athenaeum by his new friend Churchill, who also asked him to join him at the house of Commons for a gath- ering of the “hughligans,” named after lord hugh Cecil, youngest son of Prime Minister lord Salisbury, a select group of young, backbench Conservative MPs dissatisfied with the leadership of Arthur balfour.Their subsequent acquaintance forged a professional relationship of mutual respect and admiration as each went on to establish his own mark in history.