THE JAMESON RAID

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume LXIV, 3 January 1931, Page 12

THE JAMESON RAID

THIRTY-FIFTH ANNIVERSARY TWO SURVIVORS IN AUCKLAND MEMORIES OF WILD VENTURE There are two men in Auckland. Messrs C. Kirk and L. Grieveft who participated in the Jameson Raid, Uio 3511: anniversary of which fell on 29th December. It is remarkable that out of the survivors of a force of only 640 men gathered from the ends of the earth, two should be found in this city (says the “Herald”), There were only two New Zealanders in the raid, Mr Kirk and Mr Monk, whose father was an Auckland l,nember of Parliament. The majority of the men had served in the Bechuanaland Border Police and had been transferred to the police of the British South African Chartered Company of Rhodesia when the raid was being secretly planned. It was a very cosmopolitan body. There were ex-Army and Navy officers, discharged soldiers, sailors (Mr Kirk, although only 20 years fo age, had already been twice round the Horn in a sailing ship) and the type of wanderer that is found on the outposts of civilisation. Amone them was a nephew of the late Mr Gladstone. “PROTECTION OF WOMEN AND CHILDREN.” “We did not know much about tho plan,” said Mr Kirk in describing the raid. “We were assembled with three field guns and several maxims on galloping carriages—the first maxims ever used in action- —■ and ordered to march on Johannesburg, from which a message had come appealing for assistance for the protection of women and children. On the Transvaal border at midnight on 29th December, 1895, we were told that if any man wanted to withdraw he could do so. None did so. “We were told that in the morning a force of 1000 Australians would join up with us at Pitsanipothlugo and we imagined that Johannesburg was ours. But instead of the reinforcements there were Boers on the kopje and they ‘collected’ the half troop sent up to meet them. WORN OUT AND CAPTURED “I was afterwards through the Matabele War, but experienced nothing so arduous as that forced march of 140 miles to the outskirts of Johannesburg. We had no sleep except what we got in dozing in the saddle, aiul horses and men were done when in terrific rain our laager was hemmed in at Dornkop within sight of the smoke-stacks of the town. There was a swamp behind us and kopjes in front and the Boers held tho kopjes. They fired on us all night and when it was seen that we had no chance through having been completely ambushed a white flag was sent up. Commandant Cronje’s reply was: ‘I shall spare you and yours.’ If it had not been for the promise of that good man we probably would all have been shot. I shall never forget him. He wore a billy-cock hat and had enough bandoliers around him to supply ammunition for a troop. “After the surrender we slept where we lay until kicked up and sent on the 24 hours’ journey to Pretoria, where we received the hoots and jeers of the populace. We were not popular. It- was not surprising. But no one eared. We were saddle-chafed from thigh to calf and were a sorry-looking crowd. The ranks were sent to England and the officers by another boat under escort.

WILLOUGHBY THE MILITARY LEADER

“Dr. Jameson, the friend of Cecil Rhodes, who organised the raid, was really a civilian. The actual leader was Sir John Willoughby, a trained soldier. His lieutenant was Colonel Raleigh Grey, formerly of the 3rd Dragoons, who had commanded the Beuchanaland Border Police. It was commonly believed that the leaders had an understanding with the late ’Joseph Chamberlain but who knows the whole history of the anair. The raid was not the cause of the South African War, hut one of the symptoms of the unrest with which it culminated. In the early part of the century the BoerS, having been forbidden to hold slaves and receiving what they believed to be inadequate compensation, trekked north of the Orange River, a kind of no man’s land, and their settlements became the republics of the lransvaal and the Orange Free State, which finally established their independence in 1881 after Majuba. , , With the discovery of gold there began a steady inflow of foreigners and foreign capital. It was mainly British capital, but the holdings of Germany and France soon became considerable, and men of all nations formed the growing community of the Uitlanders.

GRIEVANCES OF UITL ANDERS These Uitlanders had very real and pressing grievances. They were forbidden the franchise, except in cases where men had been 14 years in the republics. They were heavily taxed and provided seven-eighths of the revenue. I hey had no voice in the choice or payment of officials, who were far from just. Official salaries were equal to £4O a head of the whole Boer nopulation. they had no control in education and while paying seven-eighths of the cost of Boer schools received practically nothing for the schools of their own children. They had built towns, but had no power in municipal government, and primitive sanitation turned a salubrious climate into a place of a high death rate, there was despotic government in the matter of the press and the right of public, meeting. There was disability from service upon a jury. Monopolies were created for the benefit of Boers at the expense of the mining companies. These things were the cause of the quarrel that culminated in war four years after the raid, although, of course, the raid helped to fan the fires of hate. So bitter was the feeling that when the Boers were threatening to hang the leaders of the Jameson Raid a bearer was sent from a farmhouse at Cookhouse Drift to Pretoria, so that the Englishmen might die on the same piece of timber on which some Dutchmen had been executed in 1816 for maltreating slaves. The point of view of the Boers, who might have absorbed the foreign community by a libera] policy earlier, was that the foreigners had come for gold and had obtained it profitably; that they need not stay if they did not agree with the policy; that if they were given the franchise they would dominate the

Rand and elect their own president, who migh adopt a policy abhorrent to the original inhabitants. The president was Paul Kruger, an old man who, as a bov. had belonged to the great trek north, who represented the old hatred of (he British and who believed in the right of the rifle. lie also represented a religious code that was severely intolerant, and his attitude of mind may be judged from the opening of one of his public addresses: “Burghers, friends, thieves, murderers, newcomers’ and others.'’ Now South Africa is part of the Empire and the Prime Minister, who is a Boer, upon his recent return from (ho Imperial Conference, astonished the Nationalists, who stand for the old grudge, by his abandonment of the separatist idea. There has been a marvellously rapid turn in tho wheel of things since the Jameson Raid which, as Mr Kirk remarked, was only yesterday.