Dan Snow's History Hit - Conan Doyle, Kipling and Kingsley in the Boer War
Episode Date: August 2, 2020In early 1900, Rudyard Kipling, Mary Kingsley and Arthur Conan Doyle crossed paths in South Africa during the Anglo-Boer War. Motivated in various ways by notions of duty, service, patriotism and jing...oism, they were each shaped by the theatre of war. Sarah LeFanu joined me on the podcast to explore the cultural legacies, controversial reputations and influence on colonial policy of these three British writers. Subscribe to History Hit and you'll get access to hundreds of history documentaries, as well as every single episode of this podcast from the beginning (400 extra episodes). We're running live podcasts on Zoom, we've got weekly quizzes where you can win prizes, and exclusive subscriber only articles. It's the ultimate history package. Just go to historyhit.tv to subscribe. Use code 'pod1' at checkout for your first month free and the following month for just £/€/$1.
Transcript
Discussion (0)
Hi everyone, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit.
During the Boer War, some of Britain's best-known writers headed down to South Africa at the end of the 19th century, early 20th century,
to take part in, to watch, to report on this great imperial conflict that was going on on the southern tip of Africa.
Arthur Conan Doyle, Rudyard Kipling, Mary Kingsley, they all went there and they all had fascinating experiences down there,
which Sarah Lefenu has gathered together. It is such an interesting story, this. These three very
different authors with very different motivations going to this huge theatre of conflict and the
experiences they had down there. And how those experiences shaped their subsequent writing
and the world. Fascinating stuff, guys. You're going to love this episode. If you want to
go to History Hit TV to get the new Netflix for history, you just go to historyhit.tv, use the
code POD1, P-O-D-1. Then you get a month for free. And then you get a second month, just one dollar,
pound, euro, you name it. That gets you access to hundreds of history documentaries, hours of audio,
lots of good stuff. Head over there and do it right after listening to this podcast. Enjoy. Thank you very much for coming on the podcast.
It's my pleasure. This is such an interesting idea, looking at these three most famous and
celebrated novelists at the time all go out to South Africa during the Boer War. What were they
doing there? Yeah, well, it is kind of extraordinary, really.
When I embarked on this project, I didn't realise that these three were in South Africa
during the Boer War at exactly the same time.
So it was just amazingly serendipitous
and seemed to grow kind of richer and richer
the more that I looked at.
So the three writers are Rudyard Kipling,
Arthur Conan Doyle and Mary Kingsley and they
were there at the same time but for different but overlapping reasons. So Kipling was there
very much because he was very invested in the Boer War, he was very invested in the imperialist
vision that was one of the motivating forces behind it.
He'd been to South Africa before and he'd become very friendly with,
he'd become very close to Cecil Rhodes.
Now Cecil Rhodes at that point was hugely important in South Africa
and it was his imperialist vision that set things under train to a certain extent.
So Kipling was there for those political reasons. Conan Doyle
was there for similar but slightly different reasons because although the war, you know,
one of the motivating forces behind the war was an imperialist vision which was to kind of expand
across South Africa and later across the whole of Africa, the reason that Conan Doyle was there was he wished to defend and stand up for
the quite large numbers of foreign people and British people who had been attracted by the
gold mines in the Witwatersrand in the Boer Republic of the Transvaal. They'd been there
for some time. They'd been, to a certain extent, protesting for greater rights as citizens in the Transvaal.
And their position was, I think, used as an excuse for the prosecution of the war, because it was felt by some people that it was unfair that they shouldn't have the same political rights as Boas did.
rights as Boers did. That was really why Conan Doyle went. He was full of a kind of patriotic fervour and he wished to stand up for the people that he saw as the underdogs. This was not
something that was kind of generally accepted in Britain and in fact Conan Doyle was at great odds
with his mother who was very against the war. In a similar way Kipling was at great odds with his mother, who was very against the war. In a similar way, Kipling was at great odds with his aunt, Georgie Byrne-Jones,
who thought that it was a horrific imperialist war
and that he shouldn't have anything to do with it.
So that's the two of those.
How old are the two men at that time?
Arthur Conan Doyle was 40.
And is he pre-Sherlock Holmes?
No. He's in the middle of Sherlock Holmes.
He's already got rid of Sherlock Holmes once.
So seven years previously, he chucked him over the edge of the Reichenbach Falls
and thought, right, I'm free of him forever.
However, as you know, Sherlock Holmes was resurrected
and that happened fairly soon after Doyle got back from South Africa.
And then how about Kipling?
So Kipling was younger. Kipling was 36, perhaps. So they were
young men. And Mary Kingsley was of an age as well. They were young men, kind of in the primes
of their life. And Kipling was, you know, hugely famous and very much seen as being an important
part of the war effort. When war broke out in October 1899, he wrote a poem called The Absent-Minded Beggar,
which was published by the Daily Mail
and was used to raise money for the soldiers' dependents,
for the girls they left behind them, for their wives and children,
the soldiers who were sent off on a shilling a day to South Africa.
And it raised an enormous amount of money.
It raised a quarter of a million pounds in those days.
So, you know, an enormous amount of money now. And he became of a million pounds in those days. So, you know, an enormous
amount of money now. And he became hugely famous and was very, very popular with, as it were,
the rank and file soldiers who saw him as a man of the people and, you know, and somebody who was
kind of easy with them. So when he got to South Africa, he spent a lot of time visiting the
wounded in the hospitals and writing letters
that they dictated and handing out tobacco and tins of cocoa and blankets and things like that.
Mary Kingsley was the opposite in many ways. She probably knew Africa better than both those two
gents put together, did she? She most certainly did. But South Africa wasn't her main concern.
Her main concern was West Africa, where she'd spent a considerable amount of time in the 1890s, travelling, exploring, being an ethnographer, writing about the customs, the
laws, the religious beliefs that she came across, and trading with the people who lived there. And
for her, West Africa was a kind of place of freedom that she hadn't found in England, and she yearned to go back there.
And she wasn't particularly interested in what was going on in South Africa.
I think she saw it as, you know, a war that had been confected
by the politicians in Britain,
and with the backing of the politicians in South Africa,
Cecil Rhodes and Alfred Milner, who was High Commissioner there,
and that was the kind of world that she wished to dear clear of.
It was a world that made her feel constrained and unhappy.
So in a way, her going to South Africa,
what she hoped to do was to return to West Africa
after she'd been in South Africa.
However, she didn't manage that because she died in South Africa
and she died of typhoid,
which affected all three of them, Kipling and Doyle, but Mary Kingsley fatally.
She died in June 1900 and was buried at sea off Cape Point.
She was extraordinarily tough. She did first ascents of various mountains and things like that, didn't she? I mean, was she in South Africa like the other two to write or was she there to play
a more active part? I think that all three of them were there being writers, all three of them
were there partly to write. You know, those kinds of writers who any experience, they then have to
write about it either at the time or afterwards. I mean, Conan Doyle, in fact, was writing his
history of the Great Boer War while it was unfolding
and had to kind of add on bits after it had been published,
as it went on for much longer than anybody had realised it was going to go on for.
So they were all three there to write.
She was also there. She was also a natural scientist.
She looked for and collected specimens of flora and fauna to take back to the Natural History Museum in London.
So she went with there in premature as well.
They were all of them there for multifactorial reasons.
And perhaps the other thing that I should say is they all three of them
had personal reasons for going there.
Mary Kingsley had become very involved in something called
the hut tax crisis in Sierra Leone,
in which the colonial government, the British government,
decided to impose a hut tax on the people who lived in Sierra Leone.
And she campaigned vigorously against it
because she saw how it militated against every tradition
of how property was seen in West Africa.
And in fact, the hut tax did indeed lead to the hut tax war
with bloodshed on either side
and the raising of whole villages by the colonial administration.
And she began to feel that all her arguments were falling on deaf ears.
I think she felt disappointed by the way that she was a lone voice
standing up for the rights of the people of West Africa.
To a certain extent, she was keen to get out of England.
She was keen to flee England.
But I mean, I think everybody, whenever they go anywhere to war or anywhere,
there's always some kind of personal element to it too.
Everybody has their own kind of private reasons for travelling
or for getting away or for going to experience something new,
new adventures.
What did they do when they were there?
Were they, in a modern sense, war correspondents?
Did they embed, they follow the troops around
or did they just report completely independently?
Land a Viking longship on island shores scramble over the dunes of ancient egypt and avoid the poisoner's cup in renaissance florence each week on echoes of history we
uncover the epic stories that inspire assassin's creed we're stepping into feudal japan in our
special series chasing shadows where samurai warlords and shinobi spies teach us the tactics and skills needed
not only to survive, but to conquer.
Whether you're preparing for Assassin's Creed Shadows
or fascinated by history and great stories,
listen to Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hits.
There are new episodes every week.
Mary Kingsley went, although I've said that she went as a natural scientist and as a writer,
she primarily went as a nurse. I mean, she was actually officially appointed by the War Office to be a nurse. when she arrived in Cape Town she was posted to a
hospital for Boer prisoners of war. It was quite soon after one of the early battles of the war,
the Battle of Paderberg, which was the first battle in which the Boers were trounced. They'd
spent 10 days dug into the banks of the Modder River with Lord Kitchener kind of raining hellfire
on them and they were weakened, they were starved and typhoid was rife. So she was sent down to a
place called Simonstown which is just on the south side of the peninsula from Cape Town to look after
them. That was her posting and that was what she did and she wrote about her experiences there and
that was where she caught typhoid and she knew very well that that was what it was that she had got.
Conan Doyle tried to enlist in Britain because he felt that it was his duty to go,
but was turned down, probably because he was 40, and he was quite large as well.
He was 16 stone, and they said, thank you, but no thank you.
So then he picked up his stethoscope and applied to one of the field hospitals.
There were a number of private field hospitals that were being organised.
And he applied to one of them, which was run by an old friend of his called John Langman.
And he went out as one of the surgeons with the Langman's field hospital.
And they were posted up to Blomfontein, the capital of the Orange Free State,
which had just fallen to the British in the middle of March.
And he arrived in Blomfontein.
He just missed meeting up with Kipling there by about 12 hours,
because Kipling had been there working as one of the editors on a newspaper
that had been taken over by Lord Roberts, who was C&C of the
Imperial troops, and turned into a newspaper for the army. And he'd been up there for the last
fortnight, having a huge amount of fun. I mean, Kipling had worked as a journalist before when
he was a young man in India. He'd spent what he called seven years hard as a journalist.
But he hadn't done it since then
and he loved the camaraderie that he found there
and he loved the smells of the ink and the dust
and the joy of writing little stories to cheer up the wounded troops
so they were both in Don Fontaine
one as a journalist, one as a surgeon
while Mary Kingsley was five or six hundred miles away working as a journalist, one as a surgeon, while Mary Kingsley was 500 or 600 miles away working as a nurse.
Did any of the three change their opinions,
which they had held upon going to South Africa,
after viewing evidence on the ground?
I think that Mary Kingsley definitely became more sympathetic
to the Boers and to what the Boers wanted.
She recognised very early on that they saw the
british as basically wanting to steal their land and she was very interested in questions of land
and how important it was for the people who lived on it she'd seen that in west africa
i think she hadn't been aware of that before she arrived in South Africa. And that
was what she learned from the Boer patients that she was nursing. Well, it's quite interesting,
really. I mean, because in one way, he became increasingly jingoistic. He became increasingly
a warmonger. But at the same time, he was absolutely horrified by the way that the war
was being prosecuted in terms of how the army was structured
and both he and Conan Doyle became extremely critical of the kind of old style you know
gentleman's mess, colonels in their frock coats. I think that Doyle later wrote about the gold lace
and the frippery and how the army needed to be reformed away from that kind of 19th or even earlier kind of 18th century idea of gentlemen going to war you know it was obvious to
anybody who was there that that kind of old style army didn't work terribly well against this new
kind of enemy that is the bows who were basically running a guerrilla campaign against the British
and were extremely well armed and extremely mobile whereas
the British army was lumbering around over terrain that it didn't know moving goods and material up
on single track railways whereas the Boers were running circles around them on their little South
African ponies that they'd grown up with. It was an eye-opener for both those men. However, Kipling remained invested in it
and he became very, very bitter.
The deal that was done, the Treaty of Veroniging,
at the end of the war,
because he saw it as basically giving into
or rewarding the Boers who he had seen as traitors.
So they actually bolstered their aggressive imperialism,
also in the case of Kipling. I think in the case of Kipling, yes. A lot of the dispatches
that he wrote, I mean, some of the dispatches that he wrote, you know, being Kipling,
they were marvellously descriptive of landscape and so on. But a number of the dispatches that
he wrote, which were increasingly angry against the Boers and against the way that he thought that
the British were kind of falling over themselves to be nice to them.
They weren't terribly well received back in Britain.
I mean, people thought that he was becoming hysterical about it.
With Conan Doyle, when he came back, OK, he felt that it was his duty to relieve people of their misconceptions about what had been happening.
people of their misconceptions about what had been happening. And he was particularly incensed by the way that so many European countries had basically been on the side of the Boers and had
seen the British as being greedy bullies, I think you could probably say. So he did spend a certain
amount of time trying to persuade them otherwise. But he was a man whose mind quite capacious and he liked to move on from one thing to another
thing and he fairly soon found other causes into which to put his energy the cause of a young
mixed-race lawyer who lived in Shropshire who had been falsely accused of various hideous crimes
involving horses and it was fairly obvious well certainly obvious to Conan
Doyle that he'd been framed and that the police were closing ranks the man's name was George
Adalji and Conan Doyle threw himself into a campaign to clear his name which took a long
time but he was eventually successful so that was the first thing that he did and then the second
thing that he really put his energies into was the Congo Reform Association, which had been set up by a friend of Mary Kingsley's called E.D. Morell and involved other friends of hers,
an Irish historian, a nationalist called Alice Stopford Green.
And both of those people were to a certain extent, I believe, inspired by Mary Kingsley's legacy. And then Conan Doyle wrote this short book pamphlet,
The Crime of the Congo,
using the evidence brought back by Roger Casement,
and it had an enormous effect in opening people's eyes
to what was going on in the Congo
under the regime of King Leopold II of Belgium,
that is, the atrocities, the torture and the massacres.
So Kingsley's legacy becomes entangled with Conan Doyle's,
but of the three writers,
who do you think leaves behind the most important legacy?
Obviously Kipling goes on to become very important
during the First World War,
but do you think Conan Doyle and Kingsley's legacy
has proved more enduringly important?
I think that probably Kingsley's legacy
and Conan Doyle's legacy in terms of what he did for the Congo Reform Association is more important.
Kipling's legacy, I think, is a really important one, but I don't think that it way that so many of his words and phrases have entered
into our language so that we use them without even knowing about them. Many of his opinions
were hideous. And in fact, somebody, one of the Kipling critics, said that Kipling was a great
hater, and he was. And I don't think that haters leave a great legacy like that so I think that
his legacy really is a literary one. I would say that Conan Doyle's legacy I mean he believed that
his legacy was his involvement with the cause of spiritualism because he had been interested in that
for a long time when he came back from South Africa, he became increasingly interested in that
and he spent the latter part of his life, having resurrected Sherlock Holmes, he nonetheless spent
the latter part of his life travelling around giving talks about the other side, about contact
with the other side. And indeed, he returned to South Africa where he was a little bit shocked to see for example the
monuments to the thousands of Boer women and children who had died in the British concentration
camps and realised that the Boers actually blamed the British for that and he was thinking you know
what's all this it was something that had never really occurred to him but he was back there
talking about spiritualism,
and spiritualism, he thought, was the reason that he was put on this earth.
Now, of course, most people nowadays think that the reason Conan Doyle was put on this earth
was so that he could create Sherlock Holmes
and entertain us all for centuries afterwards.
And I think that I kind of rather agree with that.
It feels like Kingsley was the one that was on the right side of history.
I think she was. Perhaps it was because she was less trammeled by being a respectable man
in late Victorian England. I think that possibly those kind of ideals of masculinity that were
around then perhaps blinkered one's view a little bit
and she was outside that kind of society she was a woman there wasn't space for her and maybe that
allowed her to see a bit more clearly the way that things were going in the way that they could go
which is not to say that she was not an imperialist herself they all all three were. It was just that she had ideas about how people
should be allowed to create the structures of their own societies. Well, thank you very much
indeed. Really, really fascinating story. Your book is called? My book's called Something of
Themselves, Kipling, Kingsley, Conan Doyle and the Anglo-Boer War. And it's published by Hurston Co.
Fantastic. Thank you very much for coming on the podcast.
Well, it was a real pleasure. It was really nice to talk to you. Thank you.
Hi everyone, it's me, Dan Snow. Just a quick request.
It's so annoying and I hate it when other podcasts do this,
but now I'm doing it, and I hate myself.
Please, please go onto iTunes, wherever you get your podcasts,
and give us a five-star rating and a review.
It really helps, and basically boosts up the chart,
which is good, and then more people listen, which is nice.
So if you could do that, I'd be very grateful.
I understand if you don't want to subscribe to my TV channel.
I understand if you don't want to buy my calendar, but this is free.
Come on, do me a favour. Thanks.