ROYAL ARTILLERY HISTORICAL SOCIETY
Autumn Meeting
Wednesday 17th October 2007, at Larkhill
A Presentation by Dr Rodney Atwood
‘So Single-Minded a Man and So Noble-Hearted a Soldier.’
Field Marshal Earl Roberts of Kandahar, Waterford and Pretoria (1832-1914)
The Autumn 2007 Meeting of the Society was held in the Newcome Hall, Larkhill, on Wednesday 17th
October at 11 am. 70 people attended the Meeting, 46 members of the Society, 17 of their guests and
seven others.
After the Secretary had given out the customary parish notices, the Chairman introduced the speaker,
Dr Rodney Atwood, a recently joined member of the Society. Dr Atwood had been a short-service
officer in the RTR from 1971 to 1974 and had ski-ed in the reserves at Her Majesty’s expense for
several years afterwards. He had then been a schoolmaster and headmaster for twenty-eight years. He
has been attempting to interest publishers in his draft biography of Roberts and Kitchener, but without
success, and is now trying to complete a shorter volume on 'The March to Kandahar'. His biographical
notes interestingly state that he used to be the world's expert on German mercenaries from Hessen,
1776-1783, but subsequently someone else published a new book. He was introduced to the Society by
Brian Pickford, and has greatly enjoyed being a member, the visit to Woolwich being especially good.
Dr Rodney Atwood
Dr Atwood started by explaining that the talk was based on one that he had given at the National Army
Museum in March 2006 and an article he had written for the Journal of Military Historical Research
Special Publication Number 16 (2007). He explained that he had been asked by the Secretary to say a
bit more in this talk about Roberts as a Gunner, but he emphasised that in reality, although
commissioned in the Bengal Artillery, Roberts was primarily a staff officer and it was as such that he
had achieved his fame.
“On the 4th of August, 1914 Britain declared war on Germany. On the afternoon of 5th August, the
octogenarian field marshal, Earl Roberts of Kandahar, Waterford and Pretoria (Fig 1), attended a
council of war convened by the Prime Minister Asquith to decide the deployment of the six divisions of
the British Expeditionary Force. Roberts, always a confident tactician and bold leader in the field, was
heard with respect when he suggested basing the BEF on Antwerp so as to strike in conjunction with
the Belgian armies the flank and rear of the invading Germans. Unfortunately, the navy could not
guarantee sea communications at such a distance, and the proposal was rejected.1
You might well ask why anyone aged nearly eighty-two should be heard with respect by the leaders of
the world’s greatest empire. But Roberts was no ordinary octogenarian, as a look at those at the
meeting would show. The commander-in-chief designate of the BEF John French, his corps
1
W S Churchill, The World Crisis (Foursquare Books, 1964), pp.145-6, amended by National Army Museum, Roberts
papers (henceforth ‘Bobs’) 7101-23-203-5, Lady [Aileen] Roberts’s correspondence with Churchill, March, 1930.
commanders Douglas Haig and Jimmy Grierson, and his deputy chief of staff, Henry Wilson, had all
played a part in Roberts’s epic campaign of early 1900, turning the tide in the South African War. The
First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, had been a young correspondent in South Africa, but
years before his father, Lord Randolph, had been responsible for making Roberts commander-in-chief
of the Indian Army. Most striking was the tall figure of Lord Kitchener, about to be appointed War
Minister and become (Fig 2) the most famous recruiting poster in history; he had been Roberts’s chief
comrade-in-arms and successor as commander-in-chief in South Africa. Also present was Ian
Hamilton, a particular protégé of Roberts, whom he had met many years before on a rocky hillside in
Afghanistan as a young Gordon Highlanders subaltern.
Even had he not been renowned as ‘Bobs Bahadur’ (Fig 3), ‘Bobs the Hero’ of the Second Afghan
War, author of the famous autobiography Forty-One Years in India, friend of Rudyard Kipling,
commander-in-chief successively in India, Ireland, South Africa and England, Master Gunner of the
Royal Artillery, the only man to hold the Victoria Cross, the Order of Merit and the Garter, Roberts
was known to a wide public in the years before 1914 as the untiring advocate of national service.
In the early months of the war, Roberts among others was concerned that Germany might try to invade
Britain. He offered himself as commander of Home Forces to defend the country. Even for a great
British hero, this was too much to ask for someone in his eighties. Instead, as regiments of the Indian
Army were soon to be deployed via Britain to the western front, Kitchener, in deference to Roberts’s
great reputation, gave him the post of commander of overseas forces in England, in fact a sinecure. In
November Roberts decided to visit the Indian forces in France, and accompanied by his elder daughter,
Aileen, he travelled there.
If there was one thing that Roberts liked even more than writing to the Times or making speeches in the
House of Lords on military questions, it was talking to soldiers. The old field marshal was in great
spirits. Leo Amery, journalist, conservative politician and army reformer, wrote in his diary: ‘I doubt if
[Roberts] ever enjoyed two days more…Meeting the Indians was a special delight to him and he
insisted on stopping his car and talking to every turbaned soldier he met, and visited them in their
hospitals…’2 On 12th November he called on another protégé, Major General Sir Henry Rawlinson.
Rawlinson was later to have the mixed distinction of commanding the Fourth Army on the BEF’s most
disastrous day in the First World War, the first day of the Somme; and also the most brilliant, 8th
August, 1918, ‘the black day of the German army’ in Ludendorff’s words. He wrote in his journal,
‘Lord Bobs and Aileen turned up to tea, both in the best of health and spirit. They went round the
Indians and the 6th Division, and I took him to see some of the wounded Indians who are in hospital
here.’3
On 13th November Roberts climbed to the top of the Scherpenberg next to Kemmel Hill near Messines
for a distant view of the trenches; the day was cold and wet and windy, and Roberts caught a chill. It
quickly turned to pneumonia, he fell very ill, and after a brief rally he died at 8 pm the next day, 14th
November. Henry Wilson, at whose mess he had dined two nights before wrote: ‘The story of his life is
thus completed as he would have wished, dying in the middle of the soldiers he loved so well and
within sound of the guns.’4 Rawlinson went to see his former commander on the 15th. His Division was
pinned in the Ypres salient, the men in liquid mud in the trenches; and those guns were German
2
J. Barnes & D. Nicholson, ed., The Leo Amery Diaries: volume I: 1896-1929 (London, 1980), pp.110-111.
Maj-Gen Sir F. Maurice, The Life of General Lord Rawlinson of Trent, (London, 1928), p.116.
4
C.E. Callwell, Field Marshal Sir Henry Wilson: His Life and Diaries. 2 vols. (London, 1927), I, pp.187-8; Bobs 7101-23205, Lady [Aileen] Roberts’s account.
3
artillery pounding the BEF; his thoughts were of Roberts: ‘…one of the saddest days of my life. I went
in to pay my last respects to my dear chief. I could not believe that he was dead.’5
Wilson and Rawlinson had been Roberts’s men, advanced by his patronage. But there is other evidence
of how deeply his death was felt. Captain M D Kennedy of the Scottish Rifles (The Cameronians) was
leading his company with the battalion on a fifteen-mile march on rough, muddy roads when a motorcycle despatch rider was seen approaching rapidly. He halted, dismounted, saluted and explained to the
colonel that Roberts had died. Kennedy recorded that the Colonel’s face ‘assumed a look of incredulity
mixed with an expression as though some catastrophic disaster had occurred’.
What’s the trouble?’ someone called out.
‘Lord Roberts died yesterday,’ came the reply.
‘Lord Roberts died yesterday?
Bobs, the idol of the Army, dead? Why, it couldn’t be true!’ was the thought that came to everyone’s
mind as the news was passed from man to man. ‘Bobs’ dead? … And the battalion which had been
swinging along to snatches of popular song lapsed into gloomy silence.6 The Sunday night edition of
The Times of 15th November headed its front page ‘Sudden Death of Lord Roberts’. ‘A profound shock
of sorrow will be felt by the nation at the announcement of the death of Field-Marshal Lord Roberts…
One of the most famous and best beloved of British soldiers passes away in an hour of national trial, to
prepare for which he had exerted himself with unsparing devotion.’ His family received numberless
tributes, and on 20th November his younger daughter Edwina, married to Major Harry Lewin of the
Royal Artillery, replied on her mother’s behalf to an old friend Colonel James Dunlop-Smith, formerly
secretary to the Indian viceroy Lord Minto: ‘You are so kind & I know you loved Father; there was no
one like him and it is impossible to believe he is not there to tell all one’s troubles & joys to. But he
was so happy in France and his leaving was very perfect. No pain & so near the Army he loved.’ 7
Reporting Roberts’s funeral at St Paul’s, The Times recorded on 21st November that the oldest survivor
of the siege of Delhi during the Indian Mutiny was present and told interested readers that No. 2
Mountain Battery represented among the uniformed throngs had been raised in 1746 and had served at
Plassey. It claimed it had lost all but one officer and six men in the Black Hole of Calcutta.
Robert’s life did not quite go back to the Black Hole, but his career covered a remarkable span. He was
born at Cawnpore, on 30 September, 1832, the son of General Abraham Roberts (Fig 4), a long serving
officer of the East India Company, and his second wife. He came of an established family of Huguenot
descent in County Waterford in Ireland. Between them Abraham Roberts and his son Frederick served
nearly a century in the armies of India. The difference between father and son illustrates changes in
British society. Abraham Roberts’s first three children were all borne to an Indian woman, either wife
or mistress. One became a colonel in the army of the native ruler of Lucknow; another John a devout
Muslim known as Chhote Sahib manufactured gun-carriages there. These may have been used against
the British in the Mutiny. Abraham Roberts’s first English wife died after seven years of marriage, and
Frederick Roberts’s mother was Isabella, widow of Major Hamilton Maxwell. According to Geoffrey
Moorhouse, Isabella’s mother was a Rajput. There were thus mixed relations on both sides, not unusual
for those days. Roberts said nothing of these in his autobiography: in race-obsessed late Victorian
India, being dubbed a Eurasian could damn a man’s career. Isabella Roberts had two children from her
5
Maurice, Rawlinson, p.116.
Imperial War Museum, The 1912-1922 Memoirs of Captain M.D. Kennedy, OBE.
7
India Office Library [henceforth IOL], Eur Mss. F166/16, f.52.
6
first marriage. Frederick Roberts was the eldest child of the new marriage. By contrast with his father,
he was to be married to one woman, an archtypical memsahib, for fifty-five years. 8
Throughout his life close family was a constant theme. Victorian families in India knew separation and
early death. Roberts himself lost brothers and sisters in infancy and three of his six children. There is
no reason to doubt the affection of the boy for his parents. When father was fighting in the 1st Afghan
War, mother and children were home in Ireland; Roberts told of crowding round Mrs Roberts to hear
father’s letters read, and of how stories of Afghans and fighting were woven into his early memories.
He was small and delicate, and nearly died from an attack of brain-fever. Although he survived, he lost
the sight of his right eye.9 He was never more than 5’ 4” and would have failed a physical examination
for today’s army. Mrs Roberts did her best to provide young Fred with a good education, ensured that
he attended Eton in 1845, and wanted him to go to Oxford or Cambridge and enter the church. Roberts,
by contrast, said, ‘I had quite made up my mind to be a soldier, I had never thought of any other
profession.’ 10
Roberts’s career, apart from the last two decades, was inseparable from India, from his early
commissioning in the Bengal Artillery and service in savage battles of the Indian Mutiny, winning the
Victoria Cross in hand-to-hand combat, mentioned in despatches seven times, and soon known to his
seniors in the words of Captain Oliver Jones as ‘one of those rare men who, to uncommon daring and
bravery in the field, and unflinching, hard-working discharge of duty in the camp, adds the charms of
cheering and unaffected kindness and hospitality’. (Fig 5) Brigadier General Hope Grant commanding
the Moveable Column reported, ‘Lieutenant Roberts’s gallantry has on every occasion been most
marked.’11
After the Mutiny he remained on the Quartermaster-General’s staff, a shrewd career move, suggested
by his father because that department was in effect the operations staff of the army. In 1878 he left it as
Quartermaster General.12 He was at the centre of planning throughout the 1860s and 1870s, and able to
catch the eye of men in power.
His transformation into a national hero began with the arrival of Disraeli’s new Viceroy, Lord Lytton,
in 1876. Disraeli’s government was suspicious of Russian intentions in central Asia and Lytton was an
advocate of the ‘forward policy’, to control the border peoples and the mountain passes to Afghanistan
and ensure the ruling Amir was friendly to Britain (Fig 6). Roberts had long been a partisan of this
view.
He greeted Lytton on his arrival at Bombay. ‘His Excellency received me very kindly, telling me he
felt that I was not altogether a stranger, as he had been reading during the voyage a paper I had written
W.J. Bayley, ‘The Roberts family of Waterford,’ Journal of the Waterford and South-East of Ireland Archaeological
Society, ii (1895), pp.98-103; G. Moorhouse, India Britannica (London, 1983), p.184; W. Dalrymple, The Last Mughal,
Delhi, 1857 (London, 2006), pp.291-2; R. B. Saksena, European & Indo-European Poets of Urdu & Persian (Lucknow,
1941), pp.128-153. In 1911 Eurasians were officially dubbed ‘Anglo-Indians’.
9
It seems this was not widely known and was revealed to a wider public by the Daily Express of 28th October, 1930. See
National Army Museum, Ellison papers 8704-35-711.
10
Times, 30th September, 1932, p.13, ‘Field Marshal Lord Roberts – Field Marshal and Reformer -Some Personal
memories’ by Brig.Gen. H.F.E. Lewin.
11
Capt. O. Jones, Recollections of a Winter Campaign in India 1857-8 (London, 1859), p.80; Bobs 5504/64 item number
15, true extract letter of 8th Feb, 1858.
12
Bobs 7101-23-225, ‘Some turning points of my career…’
8
… a year or two before, on our military position in India, and the arrangements that would be necessary
in the event of Russia attempting to continue her advance south of the Oxus.’13
Roberts was given additional responsibility, became one of Lytton’s close advisors and was promoted
over the heads of senior officers to command one of three attacking columns in the 2nd Afghan War.
As a fighting general Roberts distinguished himself in three campaigns. In 1878 his was the smallest
column but saw most action. His victory in his first battle at the Peiwar Kotal (Fig 7) was the most
important of this phase of the war. He used tactics which were frequently to serve him well. Feinting
at the enemy’s front, he led a flanking force by a night march over precipitous mountain passes. The
Afghans were routed from a position which some of them may have regarded as impregnable, held by
superior numbers and with plenty of artillery.14
The first campaign of the war ended with the flight and death of the Amir Sher Ali, and with his son
Yakub Khan signing the treaty of Gandamak, pledging ‘to live in perfect peace and friendship’ with
India and to conduct his foreign relations in accordance with British wishes. An embassy was sent by
Lytton to Kabul, but on 3rd September, 1879 unpaid Afghan regiments rose in anger against the
foreigners and after heroic resistance against impossible odds Major Louis Cavagnari and his escort
were massacred. Once again Roberts was lucky, as his was the only body of troops still together who
could avenge the massacre. His force was small and his weak transport such that he could only move
half his men at a time. His brilliant march and victory on the Charasia heights outside Kabul enabled
him to occupy the city.15
Roberts was urged by the Viceroy to find the culprits behind the massacre of Cavagnari and his escort.
Lytton had been very close to Cavagnari, and his angry instructions to Roberts were explicit: ‘All such
persons captured and denounced by your informants should be promptly executed in the manner most
likely to impress the population… For, remember that it is not justice in the ordinary sense, but
retribution that you have to administer on reaching Kabul.’16
In reinforce these harsh instructions there was the scene of Cavagnari’s last stand with bloodstains on
the walls, bullet-holes, skulls and bones of mutilated corpses and signs of a desperate struggle.17 As a
young subaltern Roberts had unflinchingly watched mutinous sepoys blown from the mouths of
cannon, and he was only too willing to carry out Lytton’s orders. What happened next was the dark
side of Roberts’s part in the war, testimony to a streak of harshness. Lytton had expected evidence to
show the guilt of important men, but none could be found, no important men were executed except the
Kotwal (Chief Constable) of Kabul. So it was ordinary Afghans who were hanged on the tall gallows
which Roberts erected outside Kabul. The Official History recorded the trial of 163 and execution of
eighty-seven, but others were shot arbitrarily for resisting.18 Roberts’s chief of staff, Colonel Charles
Metcalfe MacGregor confided to his diary, ‘Bobs is a cruel blood-thirsty little brute,’ in contrast to
Bobs 7101-23-225, ‘Turning points’; Field Marshal Lord Roberts, Forty-One Years in India: From subaltern to
Commander-in-Chief. 2 vols. (London, 1897), ii, p.86.
14
B. Robson, The Road to Kabul: The Second Afghan War 1878-1881 (Staplehurst, Kent, 2003), pp. 80-6.
15
Lt. F.G. Cardew, The Second Afghan War. Abridged. 2 vols. (Calcutta, 1897), I, pp.210-6; Col. H. Hanna, The Second
Afghan War 1878-1879-1880. 3 vols. (London, 1899-1910) iii, pp.76-7.
16
Robson, Roberts in India, pp.119-122, Lytton to Roberts, 9th September, 1879,‘very confidential’
17
Howard Hensman, The Afghan War (London, 1881), p.54.
18
Robson, Road to Kabul, pp.142-3; Hensman, The Afghan War, pp.49, 165 et seq., and 277.
13
correspondent Howard Hensman and Surgeon Colonel Joshua Duke who commented on the proverbial
treachery of the Afghans and the mutilation of the bodies of dead Indian and British soldiers.19
In November, 1879, English newspapers in India began to protest. The Friend of India, a prominent
Calcutta journal, ended an article, ‘We fear that General Roberts has done us a serious national injury,
by lowering our reputation for justice in the eyes of Europe.’20 The repercussions spread to England.
Liberal politicians were among those who thought Roberts had gone too far. Even Lytton, who had
urged him on, was worried.21 Roberts, however, soon had other things to think about: a national
uprising of Afghans. His forces were driven back from the surrounding hills, and he wisely decided,
outnumbered as he was, to abandon Kabul and concentrate his men in an extended fortified camp
nearby, Sherpur. The Afghans, enraged by the executions and urged on by their holy men, hoped to
repeat the success of the 1st Afghan War when an entire Anglo-Indian army had been destroyed.
Roberts was equal to the occasion. At first light on the morning of 23rd December, 1879, he and his
men fired starshell to illuminate the thousands of attackers with assault ladders, then with well-directed
fire drove them back. Roberts sent out artillery to enfilade the enemy and cavalry in pursuit.22
The Afghan War, however, might have ended with Roberts in disgrace. In place of his patron Lytton,
Gladstone’s Liberal government appointed Lord Ripon who had criticised the Kabul executions. In the
spring of 1880 General Donald Stewart, Roberts’s friend and senior officer, marched from Kandahar to
Kabul to assume the chief command, to Roberts’s chagrin. Negotiations were already under way to
recognise Sher Ali’s nephew, Abdur Rahman, as Amir, and to evacuate the troops, when news reached
Kabul of the disastrous defeat of an Anglo-Indian brigade at Maiwand, west of Kandahar, on 27th July,
1880, by another claimant, Ayub Khan. Stewart unselfishly stood down, and the Viceroy Ripon told the
Indian commander-in-chief General Haines to direct Roberts to march to Kandahar with a picked
force.23
The famous three-hundred-mile, twenty-three-day march from Kabul to Kandahar and ensuing victory
over Ayub Khan made his reputation (Fig 8). The drama of the march, that ten thousand men
disappeared from public gaze and then re-appeared to save a beleaguered garrison and win a smashing
victory, caught the public’s imagination. Roberts’s use of the press was astute. The writing of war
correspondents formed Victorian public opinion of their soldier heroes. In his classic Ashanti
Campaign of 1873-4 Sir Garnet Wolseley had been accompanied by numerous correspondents. His
reputation as ‘the very model of a modern major general’ was well established when George Grossmith
appeared on the stage in 1879 in Pirates of Penzance aping his gestures.24 On the Kandahar march,
Roberts took three correspondents: Howard Hensman of The Pioneer, who had earlier defended him
for shooting hostages in reprisal for attacks on isolated patrols; and two from The Times, General
Luther Vaughan, a former Indian Army officer, and Major George White of the Gordon Highlanders, a
fellow Irishman, who won the Victoria Cross for courage and leadership, on Roberts’s
recommendation.
19
William Trousdale, ed., War in Afghanistan 1879-1880: The Personal Diary of Major General Sir Charles Metcalfe
MacGregor (Detroit, 1985), pp.101 and 111, 7 th and 19th October, 1879 and passim.
20
Hanna, Second Afghan War, iii, pp.149-150.
21
Robson, Road to Kabul, p.161.
22
IOL, Eur Mss C405, pp.290-4; L/MIL/5/682, no.8392 including Roberts’s telegraphed despatch..
23
Kandahar Correspondence: Sirdar Ayub Khan’s Invasion…military operations in consequence. 2 vols ( Simla, India,
1880-1),pp.68, 74-74a, 83-4; National Army Museum, Haines papers 8108/9-30, no.2, Haines to Ripon, 1st August, 1880;
Robson, Road to Kabul, pp.211-2.
24
R.T. Stearn, ‘War Correspondents and Colonial War, c.1870-1900,’ in J.M. Mackenzie, ed., Popular Imperialism and the
Military 1850-1950 (Manchester, 1992); Halik Kochanski, Sir Garnet Wolseley: Victorian Hero (London, 1999), pp. 64 and
73.
Ayub Khan’s army was soundly beaten, his thirty-two guns taken, his camp captured (Fig 9). It was
one of the foremost Victorian feats of arms, to rival the heroic soldiers’ battle of Inkerman and
Wolseley’s night march and attack at Tel-el-Kebir. British prestige was restored. Ayub however
bounced back next year, and had to be beaten again by Abdur before the latter was secure on the throne
and British India gained thirty-nine years’ peace with a strong and friendly Afghanistan. The
controversy between the ‘Forward School’ and ‘Masterly Inactivity’ continued.
The victory made Roberts (Fig 10). He was now a hero to stand beside Garnet Wolseley. Punch was
soon to dub him ‘our only t’other general’.25 As the discontented MacGregor wrote when Roberts rode
out of Kandahar at the war’s end, ‘What a lucky devil he is, two or three years ago he was a Colonel,
now he will be a peer a Lieutenant-General and Commander-in-Chief of one of the Presidencies.’ 26
MacGregor was right about the last. In 1881 Roberts became Commander-in-Chief at Madras of the
southern of three Indian armies. Then, in 1885, he succeeded his friend Sir Donald Stewart as overall
Commander-in-Chief. Roberts commanded the Indian Army for nearly eight years. His influence was
far-reaching, partly because of excellent relations with Viceroys Dufferin and Lansdowne, partly
because his successor was that George White who served under him in Afghanistan. After
MacGregor’s death in 1887, he became main spokesman of the ‘Forward School’, advocating building
strategic railways and defences and stationing troops on the north-west frontier against possible
Russian invasion.27 Thus Roberts’s measures to increase the efficiency of the Indian Army and to
recruit the best men, ‘the Martial Races of the north’ (Fig 11) now believed to be based on a mistaken
neo-Darwinism, but with a long-lasting influence, were directed against a war with Russia.28 He was
popular with soldiers both Indian and British, noted for his care for young recruits, but tough on those
two idols of the enlisted man, drink and sex. His attitude may have been partly due to his wife.
Years before, during the Indian Mutiny, Roberts had written to his partly crippled sister Harriet, ‘You
must look out for some nice girl with “blue eyes and yellow hair”…for me, Harriet dearest, who will
console me for having to return [after my leave] to the gorgeous East.’29
The girl whom Roberts wooed and married at Waterford Church, 17th May, 1859 was Nora Bews, the
tenth and youngest child of John Bews, retired Black Watch officer (Fig 12). She was twenty, he was
twenty-six, and they were together for fifty-five years. Nora’s first act of support for her husband was
to forego a planned three months’ extension of leave, which would have cost him his post in the
Quartermaster General’s department.
Although later the pain of childbearing, the loss of three of their six children in infancy, the climate of
India, and supporting her husband through thick and thin took the flush of youth from Nora’s cheeks,
early photographs30 show a comely enough young woman. In the winter of 1862-3, Lieutenant Owen
Burne, on the viceroy’s staff, recorded, ‘Fred Roberts [who] joined us as a Deputy Quartermaster-
25
Bobs 7101/1/139 volume 5, The Illustrated Naval & Military Magazine.
Trousdale, War in Afghanistan, p.244; Robson, Road to Kabul, pp.273-4.
27
S. Gopal, British Policy in India 1858-1905 (Cambridge, 1965), pp.215-6.
28
J. Keegan, ‘Better at fighting: How the “martial races” of the Raj still monopolize service in the Indian Army,’ Times Lit.
Supp., 24th February, 1995.
29
Letters written during the Indian Mutiny by Fred. Roberts. Afterwards Field-Marshall Earl Roberts (London, 1924),
p.119.
30
D. James, Lord Roberts (London, 1954), facing p.97 and Maj-Gen Sir O.T. Burne, Memories (London, 1907), facing
p.50.
26
General…had come to Simla to join the Headquarters Staff with a charming bride, who proved a great
accession to our select circle, as being not only handsome, but full of goodness and brightness.’31
Roberts’s diaries testify to his love of his family. At the great opportunity at the start of the Afghan
War, he wrote on 26 September, 1878: ‘Very sad saying goodbye to the dear children.’ And the next
day, ‘Parted from my own darling wife at 8 a.m.’32 As wife of the Commander-in-Chief India, Lady
Roberts’s main achievement was to begin Indian Army Nursing and establish ‘Homes in the Hills’, rest
homes for nurses at hill stations, doubling as nursing establishments for officers. The work of her
nurses, replacing ill-trained orderlies, was effective. In an epidemic of cholera, the chief medical officer
praised ‘the valuable services rendered to the cholera patients by the nursing sisters … Nothing could
exceed their attention and care of these patients….’33
Not all Lady Roberts’s actions won accolades (Fig 13). There was muttering about ‘petticoat
government’ because of her alleged influence. Her letters to Lord Minto suggest a more active role in
affairs than was expected of Victorian wives.34 Even the Queen had written in 1895 when Roberts had
an outside chance of becoming commander-in-chief in England that he was ‘ruled by his wife who is a
terrible jobber’ and that his candidature was impossible ‘on account of his readiness to listen to his
wife, & her notorious favouritism.’ Hugh Bixby Luard of the Indian Medical Service wrote in his
reminiscences, ‘it was said that any ambitious officer who wished to get on found it advisable to get
favour from Lady Roberts at Simla’. Luard mistrusted the story: ‘…[Roberts] was a good judge of
character, devoted solely to the public interest, and rarely made a bad appointment: but naturally out of
a host of equally competent officers chose those whom he knew most about: and that he exercised the
same discretion in considering Lady Roberts candidates or favourites.’35 But in September, 1888,
Rawlinson, a member of the commander-in-chief’s military family, wrote, ‘I can only regret that Lady
R. has any knowledge of the official patronage, which should be solely and entirely under Sir F.[’s]
own thumb.’36 Although doubtless an intriguer, today she would be a Virago Classic heroine, for she
spoke out for women and married officers against the redoubtable Kitchener, who deplored officers
with wives.37
The Robertses were a close-knit family with a good sense of fun, plenty of leg-pulling or ‘chaffing’ in
the contemporary phrase. It was said that Roberts’s love for a delightful home was deeper even than for
the army. Spenser Wilkinson, the military correspondent and historian, visited Roberts in India,
observed a happy family and enjoyed himself greatly. Years later, an account of a dinner party at
Ascot with the Robertses describes the girls teasing their mother and father teasing the girls.38
Roberts returned from India in 1893. Following the Duke of Cambridge’s retirement in 1895,
Wolseley’s ‘Ashanti ring’ held sway at the War Office, and Roberts succeeded Wolseley as
Commander-in-Chief Ireland, a backwater in which to finish his career. He was approaching
retirement, but still longed for command in the field. Urged by Rawlinson, he offered his services in
31
Burne, Memories, pp.48 and 50.
Bobs 7101-24-92-18, 26th and 27th Sept, 1878.
33
IOL, L/MIL/1715/5/1613, ‘Short Report…’, pp.121-4; see also IOR/L/2/1813 & 1814, both dated 17 th October, 1923,
Lady Roberts’s deed granting home estate at Murree to Indian government as a hospital.
34
National Library of Scotland, Minto papers.
35
IOL Eur Mss C262, pp.7-8. This is quoted without Luard’s qualification in the article from which this material comes:
I.F.W. Beckett, ‘Women and Patronage in the Late Victorian Army,’ History, volume 85 (2000), pp.478-480.
36
National Army Museum, Rawlinson papers 7212-6, 25th September, 1888.
37
National Army Museum, Birdwood papers, 6709-19-232, Birdwood to wife, 23rd October, 1900.
38
IOL, Eur Mss C206/312, Miss Dorothy M. MacNabb’s recollections; B. Collier, Brasshat: a Biography of Field Marshal
Sir Henry Wilson (London, 1961), p.75.
32
April 1897 to Lord Lansdowne, now Secretary of State for War, for command in South Africa if
increasing tension there led to hostilities. In August, 1899 he invited Lord Kitchener to Ireland.
Roberts’s son Freddie had served as ADC to ‘K’ in the Sudan campaign against the Dervishes. Roberts
and Kitchener got on well, and Kitchener made it clear that if Roberts were offered a command he
would be willing to serve as chief of staff.39 War in South Africa broke out on 11th October, 1899 (Fig
14). Roberts once again offered his services to Lansdowne, but General Sir Redvers Buller, one of
Wolseley’s ‘ring’, was earmarked for command. When Buller was beaten at Colenso, the third British
defeat of the infamous ‘Black Week’, he sent two very pessimistic telegrams to London and one to Sir
George White, besieged at Ladysmith. Members of the government lost confidence in him. Lansdowne
and the Prime Minister’s nephew Arthur Balfour played a key role in Roberts’s appointment
superseding Buller.40 The Prime Minister, Lord Salisbury, insisted that the forty-nine-year-old
Kitchener accompany the sixty-seven-year-old Roberts.41 On the day that Roberts prepared to embark
news arrived of the death of his son Freddie from wounds received at Colenso trying to rescue captured
guns. Two days before Christmas, 1899, when Roberts sailed on the Dunottar Castle, in top hat, dark
coat, black armband for Freddie, posthumously awarded the Victoria Cross, the hopes of Great Britain
went with the little field marshal. To his wife he wrote later, ‘I could not help thinking how different it
would have been if our dear boy had been with me.’42
Kitchener had told the Queen that it gave him ‘the greatest pleasure to serve under Lord Roberts, for
whom he has the highest admiration,’43 but nearly all contemporaries contrasted the two. Leo Amery’s
Times History of the War: ‘Rarely have characters so different combined, on the spur of the moment,
to form so effective and smooth-working a partnership… [Kitchener] was used by his chief not so
much as a staff officer, to work out his plans and convey his orders, but mainly as his right hand man,
on whom he could, with implicit confidence, devolve any important piece of organizing work that
turned up, or whom he could send round to “hustle”…’44
War had changed since the Afghan campaigns. The magazine-fed Mauser rifle and the Maxim gun
gave much greater firepower (Fig 15). The fighting in South Africa had revealed serious British
shortcomings. In mobility, initiative, shooting and field craft they were inferior to their Boer
opponents. Serious deficiencies in staff work, maps, intelligence and mounted troops had to be made
good if Roberts and Kitchener were to defeat a mobile enemy. They could not remake the army
overnight, but Roberts issued new tactical instructions, ‘Notes for Guidance in South African Warfare’
to counter the threat from smokeless magazine rifles and to operate more prudently in South African
conditions, employing careful reconnaissance and deploying in open order, making use of cover. He
added 3,000 Mounted Infantry to his force. His head of intelligence, Colonel G F R Henderson,
commandeered a parcel of Transvaal maps from a shipment intended for the Boers.45 An intelligence
department of local men and British officers was formed. Intelligence officers were attached to each
column.
39
Bobs 7101-23-61/7 & 8, 24th & 26th April, 1897; Sir P. Magnus, Kitchener: Portrait of an Imperialist (London, 1958),
pp.151-2
40
Lord Newton, Lord Lansdowne (London, 1929), pp.165-7; K. Surridge, ‘Lansdowne at the War Office,’ in John Gooch,
ed., The Boer War: Direction, Experience and Image (London, 2000), pp.21-40; A. Wessels, Roberts in South Africa, 18991902 (Stroud, Gloucester, 203) pp. 13-16.
41
Magnus, Kitchener, p.157.
42
The Times, 24th December, 1899; Roberts’s letter quoted T. Pakenham, The Boer War (London, 2000), p.326.
43
G.E.Buckle, The Letters of Queen Victoria: third Series. 3 vols. (London, 1930-2), iii, p.451, 28th December, 1899.
44
L. Amery, ed. The Times History of the War in South Africa, 7 vols (London, 1900-9), iii, pp.335-6.
45
Royal Commission on the South African War, Minutes of evidence, vol. 1, p.452.
Transport was also reorganised, the transport companies sent out to South Africa under Buller’s
painstaking arrangements being broken up and augmented by extra wagons which Roberts purchased in
Cape Colony, an additional 300 on the day of his arrival, and 400 later.46 Campaigning in South Africa
with its great distances, extremes of climate and rivers difficult to ford stretched the Victorian army to
its utmost. Roberts proposed to march nearly five hundred miles to seize Bloemfontein and Pretoria
and on to the furthest borders of the Transvaal. He took responsibility for the reorganisation in a
confidential telegram to Lansdowne, but it appears that both men were in favour of the change.
Kitchener loyally carrying out his chief’s wishes was blamed by many for implementing the new
transport system.47 If there was a mistake, it was in cutting the ambulance wagons to a bare minimum.
The nearly-disastrous loss of 176 ox-carts and their supplies at Waterval Drift to the daring Boer
commando leader, Christiaan de Wet, early in the campaign was the result of poor staff work, not the
reorganisation.48
Roberts visited hospitals to see their preparedness. At a convalescent home at Capetown he went to the
room of Captain Walter Congreve, who with Freddie had tried to save the guns at Colenso. Roberts in
public had kept his grief in check, but when Congreve gave him eyewitness details of his son’s heroism
and fatal wound, he broke down. ‘It was a most dreadful interview,’ wrote Congreve in his
diary.’[Lord Roberts] sat on my bed & sobbed as tho’ his heart was broken & I could do nothing for
him except tell him of Freddie’s bravery.’49 Roberts wrote to Lansdowne, ‘What would I not give to
have [my dear boy] with me now.’50
Roberts’s plan meant first a western thrust to relieve Kimberley, and then across to Bloemfontein.
Elaborate measures of deception were undertaken, and reinforcements sent to General French to make
it seem it was proposed to cross the Orange River by the direct line over Norval’s Point. On 10th
February Roberts summoned senior officers of the Cavalry Division to the Modder River and spoke to
them: ‘…I am going to give you some very hard work to do, but at the same time you are to get the
greatest chance cavalry has ever had. I am certain you will do well….’ 51
The cavalry did extremely well in trying conditions of heat, dust and thirst, bursting through the Boer
skirmishers to relieve Kimberley and then turning back to cut off General Cronje and over 4000 men
on the Modder River at Paardeberg. Cronje was caught between French on one side and the hard
marching British infantry divisions, hustled forward by Kitchener and their divisional commanders. He
dug in along the river. On the day battle was joined, however, Roberts was ill, and Kitchener in
command was no tactician. British attacks on Cronje’s well-defended laager were driven back with
bloody losses. When Roberts arrived he called off proposed attacks and settled down to a siege.
Kitchener went back to deal with threats to the lines of communication. But while the press and critics
reverberated with stories of Kitchener’s bull-headedness, Roberts’s caution was to reap an even more
bitter harvest after his men filled their water-bottles with ‘dead horse soup’52 as Tommy Atkins called
water from a Modder polluted by Cronje’s dead animals, killed in the British bombardment. Roberts’s
army was delayed at Bloemfontein six weeks by an epidemic of enteric fever (typhoid).
46
Amery, Times History, vi, pp.387-8.
WO108/399, p.176 No.269B, R to Lansdowne, 7th June, 1900. It was usual for a commander to accept responsibility for
his staff’s actions.
48
B. Bond, The Victorian Army and the Staff College 1854-1914 (London, 1972), p.190.
49
Royal Greenjackets Museum, Winchester, Hants, Congreve diary, 12th January, 1900.
50
British Library, unclassified Lansdowne correspondence, 2 nd Feb, 1900.
51
Amery, Times History, iii, pp.371-2.
52
The Marquess of Anglesey, A History of the British Cavalry 1816-1919, 5 vols (London, 1980-6), iv, p. 144.
47
Nonetheless, the surrender of Cronje on Majuba Day, 27th February, (Fig 16) with a tenth of Boer
strength, marked the first major British victory, a turning point of the war. The press exulted. ‘Taffy’
Gwynne, chief correspondent of Reuters, wrote to Lady Violet Cecil, daughter-in-law of the Prime
Minister, ‘… Now the man for me, parexcellence [sic], is Bobs, gallant Bobs, plucky Bobs,
magnificent Bobs. How splendidly he has managed the whole thing and what tremendous risks he has
been willing to run.’53
Lansdowne wrote to Roberts, that the news had ‘filled us all with joy. Nothing could have been better
done, and we all look forward to a vigorous prosecution of these admirable tactics.’54 After a pause the
advance continued. Bloemfontein capital of the Orange Free State was occupied on 13th March. Buller
was able to advance in Natal. The strategic initiative had passed to the British, nine weeks after
Roberts’s arrival and four weeks after the start of his offensive.55
He renewed his advance on 3rd May, into the Transvaal, and occupied Johannesburg on 31st May and
Pretoria on 5th June (Fig 17). After a final battle at Diamond Hill on 12th June, the Boer forces
dispersed. Komati Poort, on the border with Mozambique, was occupied on 24th September. Transvaal
President Kruger had fled to Europe. The Orange Free State had been annexed on 28th May and the
Transvaal on 1st September. In nine months Roberts had advanced 500 miles, defeated the main Boer
armies, and occupied their capitals.
This was a remarkable achievement for a sixty-seven year old. It lost nothing in the telling, thanks to
Roberts’s management of the press and his ability to write exciting and readable despatches and release
them before the correspondents got theirs off. At Bloemfontein he closed down the anti-British
newspapers Express and the Friend of the Free State, and with the help of Colonel Eddie Stanley, his
press censor – later the Earl of Derby, the ‘uncrowned king of Lancashire’ – established The Friend,
inviting Rudyard Kipling and Dr Arthur Conan Doyle among others to write.56 The annexation of the
Orange Free State was filmed by an early motion picture camera (‘The Biograph’), the film shown
throughout Europe and savagely hissed at the Folies Bergere in Paris.57 The Times always praised
Roberts, and by the end of the summer of 1900 was saying that the war was all but over and would
have been already, but for a small band of irreconcilables.58
These Boer irreconcilables had met at Kroonstad on 17th March, 1900. At first in despair, they decided
to change tactics, and concentrate on destroying enemy communication lines; their forces to be in
smaller units and abandoning slow-moving wagons.59 The first harbingers of new warfare were De
Wet’s (Fig 18) brilliant successes against British forces at Sannah’s Post and Reddersburg. But General
Louis Botha and the main Boer army continued to fight conventionally until Roberts’s forces reached
Komati Poort and Lieutenant-General Archibald Hunter in the mountains near the Basutoland frontier
had captured an even larger Boer force than that taken at Paardeberg. The Boers could no longer win,
for with a Unionist victory in the ‘Khaki Election’ Britain would not give up through war-weariness.
53
Bodleian library, Violet Milner papers 55, 9th March, 1900. I am grateful to Dr J. Beaumont for this reference.
British Library, uncatalogued Lansdowne papers.
55
Wessels, Roberts and the War in South Africa, p.34.
56
D. Judd and K. Surridge, The Boer War (London, 2000), pp.254-5; S. Badsey, ‘War Correspondents in the Boer War,’ in
Gooch, ed., Boer War, p.198.
57
E. Holt, The Boer War (London, 1958), pp.226-7.
58
J. Beaumont, ‘The Times at War’, in D. Lowry, ed., The Boer War Reappraised (Manchester, 2000), p.77.
59
De Wet, Three Years War, pp. 79-80; Wessels, Roberts and the War in South Africa, p.54.
54
But predictions of the war’s end were premature (Fig 19). Roberts had defeated but not destroyed the
enemy, and the commandos dispersed to fight on. Roberts himself wrote to the Queen on 4th October
that fighting continued and that ‘the ubiquitous General De Wet is still at large’.60 The last of Britain’s
Victorian colonial wars turned into the first of the people’s wars of the Twentieth Century, and the
methods of the future, farm burning, hostages, concentration camps, were started by Roberts and then
introduced full-scale by Kitchener, who succeeded Roberts and finally ended the war in May, 1902.61
Roberts’s strengths and limitations were summarised by the High Commissioner, Sir Alfred Milner,
writing in October, 1900: ‘As a leader of men in the field he is, I believe, without equal….He is head &
shoulders above every Englishman in S.A. today. But, when it comes to a most complicated problem,
half military, half political, & wholly unprecedented, he is out of his depth. And he is 60 & very
fatigued. Impossible to set a man, whose gifts are quick perceptions & prompt action, with diminished
powers, to tackle a job, wh. needs above all to be most carefully and elaborately thought out.’ 62
Nonetheless, Lord Salisbury’s election victory followed the announcement of Roberts’s annexation of
the Transvaal, and Roberts returning to England at the start of 1901 could claim his rewards: the
Garter, £100,000, and the top job he had coveted, commander-in-chief of the British army in
succession to his rival, Wolseley. Installed in the War Office he wrote encouragingly to Kitchener,
who was chasing Boer commandos with mobile columns of mounted infantry and trying to fence them
in with lines of blockhouses. Roberts defended his successor against attacks by cabinet ministers,
pressed Kitchener’s claim for the Indian command, and finally sent out Ian Hamilton as chief of staff.63
Dispatched to co-ordinate operations in the western Transvaal Hamilton was able to pull off a victory
on the stony hillside at Rooiwal which helped convince Boer leaders to seek peace.
Meanwhile, as Commander-in-Chief, Roberts found that he had little of the scope offered in India.
Useful reform was achieved; for example, introducing the eighteen-pounder field gun and a new rifle,
the magazine-fed Lee-Enfield. Roberts took a keen interest in the Staff College: his protégés
Rawlinson and Wilson both proved outstanding commandants.
With his lengthy experience on the Indian Army staff, Roberts was keen to create a General Staff, and
set Lieutenant Colonel Gerald Ellison to work. The Committee established under Viscount Esher to
reform the War Office took over Ellison’s work and finished it, the difference being the name they
gave to operations staff; ‘General Staff’, rather than ‘Quartermaster General’s Staff’, as Roberts would
have had it following Indian Army practice. Ellison wrote, ‘The credit of creating a General Staff
belongs to the Esher Committee, but to Lord Roberts is due the initiative which gave us a staff system
in 1914 so widely at variance with what had obtained in the Boer War.’64
As part of their reforms, Esher’s Committee abolished Roberts’s post of Commander-in-Chief, and his
removal was tactlessly handled, but Roberts never harboured bad feelings.65 Esher continued to be
impressed with the energy and vision of a man over seventy years old. In January, 1910 he found him
Buckle, ed., Victoria’s Letters, 3rd series, iii, p.601.
S.B. Spies, Methods of Barbarism? Roberts and Kitchener and Civilians in the Boer Republics January 1900-May 1902
(Cape Town & Pretoria, 1977), pp.44-5, 103-4, 108-9, 147-151 and 302.
62
Bodleian library, Ms. Violet Milner adds. 2, ff.12-14, 26th October, 1900.
63
PRO30/57/20, R’s letters to K, especially 18th Jan and 8th November, 1901.
64
Letter from Lt-Gen G. Ellison to the Times, 3rd October, 1932, p.10, and ibid., ‘Lord Roberts and the General Staff,’ The
Nineteenth Century and After (December, 1932), pp.722-732.
65
National Army Museum, Ellison papers 8704-35-621, Harris to Ellison, 31st December, 1934.
60
61
ageing a little, ‘but wonderfully open-minded and virile for so old a man. He is full of modern ultra
radical ideas about the army and tactical fighting….’66
Roberts’s last years were spent campaigning in vain for compulsory service and working, behind the
scenes, to prevent the army being employed to coerce the Ulster Protestants. On the outbreak of the
First World War, the Irish crisis was temporarily forgotten. In four months Roberts and many others
were dead.
At the time, he was a hero of empire, but the terrible losses of 1914-1918 far overshadowed his
achievements in Afghanistan, India and South Africa. He was, however, lucky in his reputation. The
public remembered the marches to Kandahar and Pretoria when the gallows of Kabul and the epidemic
of Bloemfontein were forgotten. Roberts had, after all, thrice restored British arms after defeat or
disaster.
He had great charm and retained a not entirely deserved reputation for kindness throughout his life. He
took exceptional pains with people, and was astute in assessing human nature. Ian Hamilton, his chief
protégé wrote, ‘The quickness of his one eye was astonishing and disconcerting. He could come into a
room and in a moment he could see that two of his Generals were conspiring and that another was
making love to somebody else’s wife. His sense of hearing was so acute that he could hear what Lady
Bobs was saying to her neighbour at the far end of a long dinner table.’67 He helped those who helped
him, Kitchener, Hamilton, Rawlinson and Wilson. He cultivated a patriotic press. At a time when
courage, duty, the empire, the family were revered, he seemed to epitomise British ideals. His small
stature and his famous nick-name endeared him to many, and on his death his reward was burial at St
Paul’s Cathedral, resting place of Wellington and Nelson. Viscount Esher, who knew Roberts well and
shared his intense patriotism, wrote a stirring passage in his journal:
‘I first saw Lord Roberts thirty-five years ago…. He had returned from Kandahar, covered with
renown… In late years I saw much of him. It was a high privilege to know so single-minded a man and
so noble-hearted a soldier. His love of his country was a passion. His constant thoughts were directed
to the welfare of England and the security of the Empire ... ‘His attachment to the Army was deep, his
love for a delightful home was perhaps deeper still, while his fidelity to the friends who loved him, and
to those who served him, was as profound as his ever-ready sympathy, and was given with all the
loyalty of his great little heart.’68
Dr Atwood concluded his talk by thanking the members of the Society for the information that they had
sent him and wanted in particular to give the Revd Michael Gilman and Major Douggie Goddard an
opportunity to elaborate on their contributions to the talk.
The Revd Michael Gilman
The Revd Michael Gilman referred to a bust of Lord Roberts that had been in his family for many years
and was shown in the slide (Fig 20) next to his, the Revd Gilman’s, aunt.
66
M. V. Brett, ed., Journal and Letters of Reginald Viscount Esher. 4 vols. (London, 1934-8) i, p.432.
For charm and trouble over people, see esp. Maj-Gen Sir George Younghusband, A Soldier’s memories in Peace and
War, London, 1917, pp.228-9; I. Hamilton, Listening for the Drums (London, 1944), pp.165-8; Wilkinson, Thirty-Five
Years, pp. 141-2 and 154-5; Gen. Sir B. De L’Isle, Reminiscences of Sport and War (London, 1939), pp226-7. The quote is
in Hamilton, Listening for the Drums, pp.159-160.
68
Brett, ed., Letters and Journals of Esher, ii, pp.196-7.
67
The terracota bust was inscribed K T Pratt (Keith or Kenneth, probably Keith) and dated 1 June 1900.
K T Pratt was the son of the Pratt family who made pots. The bust had belonged to the Revd Gilman’s
grandfather who had escaped a life of drudgery in the Potteries by joining the Oxfordshire Light
Infantry, rising to the rank of corporal. On retirement in 1893 he had become the gateman for F & R
Pratt. The son had modelled the bust and when it was fired, it had come out lopsided, whereupon his
grandfather told him to refire it and it came out straight. The question was why K T Pratt had made a
model of Lord Roberts and the Revd Gilman speculated that it may have been the result of his
grandfather’s military influence.
The statue was known in the Gilman family as “Lord Roberts” rather than “The Statue of Lord
Roberts”. It now resided in the Hanley Museum.
Major Douggie Goddard
Major Goddard explained that when he retired from the Army in the 1950s he had joined the staff of
the Institute of Building in London, eventually becoming the Deputy Chief Executive. In 1971 the
Institute decided that they should move out of London to the country, the only constraint being that it
should be within 30 miles of London. After a search he found Englemere, Lord Roberts’ house at
Virginia Water (Fig 21), which, at £120,000 and with 60 rooms and 14 acres of grounds including
tennis and squash courts, was ideal for the Institute. Robert’s housekeeper had told him that when Lord
Roberts occupied the house it had had a staff of thirty, high mass was celebrated in the entrance hall,
that his many Indian friends were entertained there and that a maharajah had presented two elephants
that were kept in the grounds. Roberts had a laager, recreating the Boer encampment at Paardeberg,
and the elephants were leaguered there. Unfortunately this was broken up in the Second World War.
After Roberts death it had been bought by the Governor General of South Australia, been used for flats
for the Princesses Helene Victoria and Marie Louise (daughters of Queen Victoria) and an
Ambassadors residence and as an Officers Leave Centre.
Englemere had been a wise choice for the Institute as at todays prices it is worth £6 million.
The Chairman thanked Dr Atwood and said that there was time for questions.
Questions
Clive Reynard: Tell us about the Lord Roberts Workshops.
Speaker: They still operate in Scotland and you can find out about them on their website.
Nick Allen: Why did Roberts introduce concentration camps in South Africa? They seem a very unBritish way of conducting warfare.
Speaker: One must remember that the Boer columns were very mobile and that the Boer farms were
a sanctuary. The Boers were not above concealing weapons in the beds of pregnant women. The
concentration of the Boer farmers into camps was originally designed to help the one fifth of Boers
who had decided the cause was lost and supported the British – the “Hands Uppers” (as opposed to
“Bitter Enders” – and protect them from bitterness and reprisals. The practice was not new, nor
British; it had first been used by the US Army in the Philippines and would more properly described as
internment camps. What is not known is that there were also concentration camps for blacks and that
as many blacks as whites died from neglect and disease. They were used to house hostages taken by
the British as reprisals for the killing of civilians on trains. It demonstrates Robert’s robustness first
seen in Afghanistan and is described without embarrassment in his book. The Prime Minister
Campbell Bannerman described the practice as barbarous, but the practice was carried on by Kitchener.
Roger Ayers: Disease and neglect was also the cause of the death of many British soldiers.
Speaker: This was largely the result of the incompetence of the Medical Services. [Post-meeting
note: the losses generated much controversy. The best account is in an as yet unpublished Ph.D. thesis
from the Institute of Commonwealth Studies, London University, by the American M.S. Stone, The
Victorian Army: Health, Hospitals and Social Conditions as Encountered by British Troops during the
South African War, 1899-1902.]
Will Townend: Both Roberts and Wolseley had a reputation for their concern for the lot of the
ordinary soldier; can you comment upon his work to improve the welfare of the ordinary soldier?
Speaker: Roberts indeed had well deserved reputation for concern for his soldiers – this started in
India where he was concerned with the conditions of both the British and Indian soldiers. His
particular philosophy was that young soldiers will make mistakes and that there should be a more
forgiving attitude; they should be allowed to make mistakes as long as they didn’t repeat them. He was
especially critical of flogging, which he felt made a good soldier bad and a bad soldier worse, probably
based on his own observations as a young battery officer.
The Chairman brought the Meeting to a close by thanking the Speaker for a lecture that was a veritable
tour de force and that so many members had been able to attend to hear it. He was also pleased that the
Speaker felt he had got his money’s worth from his subscription. He commented that everybody has
heard of Bobs and that the presentation had really brought him to life as a character. He mentioned a
photograph he had seen recently of a parade held on the Front Parade at Woolwich with a diminutive
figure among the soldiers of Q Battery (of Sanna’s Post fame) being presented with a figure which on
closer examination is a model of Armed Science. That was an indication of the esteem in which he was
held by all ranks of the Regiment.
The Meeting finished at 12.30 pm and the members moved to the RA Mess for lunch.
(Afternote. Dr Atwood has found a publisher – Pen & Sword: “The March on Kandahar” will be
published in 2008)
Select Bibliography:
Roberts Papers at the National Army Museum, Chelsea.
Adams, R.J.Q., ‘Field Marshal Earl Roberts: Army and Empire,’ in J.A. Thompson and Arthur Meija,
Edwardian Conservatism: Five Studies in Adaptation. London, Croom Helm, 1988.
Hamilton, Ian, Listening for the Drums. Faber & Faber, London, 1944.
Heathcote, T.A., The Afghan Wars 1839-1919. Osprey, London, 1980.
Ibid., The Military in British India: the development of British land forces in South Asia, 1600-1947. Manchester
University Press, Manchester and New York, 1995.
James, David, Lord Roberts. London, 1954.
Menezes, LtGen S.L., Fidelity and Honour: The Indian Army from the Seventeenth to the Twenty-First
Century.. Viking Penguin, New Delhi, 1993.
Pakenham, Thomas, The Boer War. Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, 1979.
Roberts, Field Marshall Lord, Forty-one Years in India: from Subaltern to Commander-in-Chief, 2 volumes.
London, Richard Bentley and Son, 1897.
Roberts, Fred., Letters written during the Indian Mutiny by Fred. Roberts. Afterwards Field-Marshall Earl
Roberts. With a preface by his daughter Countess Roberts.London, 1924.
Robson, Brian., ed. Roberts in India: The Military Papers of Field Marshal Lord Roberts 1876-1893. Army
Records Society, Stroud, Glos., 1993.
Spies, S.B., Methods of Barbarism? Roberts and Kitchener and Civilians in the Boer Republics January 1900 –
May 1902. Human & Rousseau, Cape Town and Pretoria, 1977.
Trousdale, William, War in Afghanistan 1879-80: The Personal Diary of Major General Sir Charles Metcalfe
MacGregor. Wayne State University Press, Detriot, 1985.
Wessels, Andre, Lord Roberts and the War in South Africa 1899-1902. Sutton Publishing Company for the
Army Records Society, Stroud, Gloucestershire, 2000.