Episode 107 - Churchill doubts Kitchener & Colonel Scobell butchers Lotter in a sheep shed

The Anglo-Boer War

It's early Spring 1901 and in England there are now serious doubts about how the British Army is going about its campaign in South Africa. Winston Churchill had been elected as an MP for Oldham partly because of his fame as a survivor of a Boer prisoner of war camp. He took issue with the manner in which the war office under Brodrick was going conducting itself in South Africa - it alarmed Churchill. He believed the military policy was wrong. It had started back on the 12 March 1901 - three weeks after Churchill’s maiden speech in parliament. Now the future British Prime Minister was involved in a series of debates over the army. Yet, by May Churchill began to oppose what he thought of as a mistaken policy, both in South Africa, and generally by the war office. The main idea presented by Brodrick was that the British army should be modelled on the Continental example. He wanted it bigger in order to respond more effectively to acute crisis situations. Such as the outbreak of war in South Africa. Churchill thought this was a bad half baked idea, and said so. He said it was contrary to the nature of the British to have a large standing army. Both sides debated about the Anglo-Boer war, with Brodrick believing that the small size of the army in Africa had meant the war had lacked progress - at least from the British point of view. Churchill said the problem in South Africa was not the number of British soldiers, there were other reasons including a lack of horses and failure to manage logistics amongst others. Don’t forget that Churchill was a conservative and his attack on Brodrick didn’t go down well with his party. By Mid-July Churchill had formed a parliamentary faction with four other young conservatives known as the Hughligans, alluding to its leader, Lord Hugh Cecil. The group held weekly debates, separate from their party. This began to sharpen Churchill’s mind still further, and he slowly shifted his political allegiance to the left both on the issue of the war in South Africa. Not that he supported the Boers, he fully supported Chamberlain the prime minister and Alfred Milner, the High Commissioner in South Africa. At the same time, individual officers were showing how they could lead a proper response to the Boers when given the freedom to do so. One was Colonel Harry Scobell of the 9th Lancers who was about to crush Lotter's commando at Groenkloof farm in the Tanjesburg mountains between Graaff-Reinet and Cradock in the Eastern Cape.