Sarah LeFanu - Something of Themselves: Kipling, Kingsley, Conan Doyle and the Anglo-Boer War

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Sarah LeFanu, 2020

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

ISBN 9780197501443 (print)

ISBN 9780197536018 (updf)

ISBN 9780197536070 (epub)

Names: Sarah LeFanu

Title: Something of Themselves

in mem. Stephen Hayward 19542015, friend and comrade

National Portrait Gallery, London.

National Trust Images/ John Hammond.

Image courtesy of the Kipling Society.

Image courtesy of Rice-Aron Library, Marlboro College, Rudyard Kipling Collection, and the Landmark Trust, USA.

Image courtesy of Durbach/ Kipling Collection, University of Cape Town Libraries.

Image courtesy of Durbach/ Kipling Collection, University of Cape Town Libraries.

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Image courtesy of David Erickson, Simons Town Historical Society.

Image courtesy of David Erickson, Simons Town Historical Society.

Image courtesy of Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine.

Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford (1900.39.70).

Image courtesy of Conan Doyle Estate Ltd.

Image courtesy of Conan Doyle Estate Ltd.

Illustrated London News, 2 June 1900. Image courtesy of Doug Wrigglesworth.

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Image courtesy of Conan Doyle Estate Ltd.

Image courtesy of Conan Doyle Estate Ltd.

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Image courtesy of the Council of the National Army Museum, London.

Black & White, 26 May 1900. Image courtesy of Bristol Museums, Galleries and Archives.

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South Africa

During the first months of the twentieth century three British writersRudyard Kipling, Mary Kingsley, and Arthur Conan Doylesailed separately to South Africa to participate in the war that had broken out between Britain and the Boer republics of the Transvaal and the Orange Free State. War had been declared in October 1899; the British public had been assured that it would be over by Christmas. It was pointed out that the Boers, after all, had no proper army. No one believed that 30,000 farmersfor the Boers were farmers, not soldierscould stand up for long against what the anti-imperialist Olive Schreiner bitterly called the greatest empire upon earth, on which the sun never sets, with its five hundred million subjects.

By Christmas, however, British confidence was badly shaken. A string of unexpected military defeats had resulted in shockingly high casualty rates. On top of that, hundreds of British soldiers had been taken prisoner, an unheard-of humiliation. Inside the British territories of Natal and the Cape, the towns of Ladysmith, Kimberley and Mafeking were under siege by Boer forces.

Rudyard Kipling had visited South Africa twice before, and was already on friendly terms with the big noises in British and colonial circles: with Sir Alfred Milner, high commissioner of the Cape Colony, and with the ambitious, eccentric, former prime minister Cecil Rhodes, who had been obliged to resign in 1896 for his involvement in the anti-Boer fiasco of the Jameson Raid. For Mary Kingsley and Arthur Conan Doyle, however, it was their first visit.

Mary Kingsley, traveller, ethnologist and campaigner for the rights of black Africans in Britains West African colonies, signed up with the War Office as a nurse; Arthur Conan Doyle, who ten years since had given up medicine for full-time writing, lifted his stethoscope out of its case and volunteered as a physician in one of the privately funded field hospitals being hastily organised; Rudyard Kiplings poem The Absent-Minded Beggar, published in the Daily Mail at the end of October, had raised over 250,000 for soldiers and their families. He set off for South Africa as propagandist-at-large and general morale-booster for the imperial troops.

When the war was eventually brought to a close, two-and-a-half years later, in May 1902, 22,000 British and colonial soldiers would have lost their lives, over half of whommore than 13,000would have died of disease, mainly typhoid.

The typhoid that devastated the British troops shaped the experiences of my three subjects. Conan Doyle had thought that he would be tending to the war wounded, but instead he found himself in Bloemfontein in the midst of deathand death in its vilest, filthiest form. Also in Bloemfontein, where he was acting as co-editor of a local paper commandeered for the British army, Kipling watched the hasty burials of corpses wrapped in brown army blankets for want of enough regimental flags to go round: Bloemingtyphoidtein a soldier calls it in Kiplings poem The Parting of the Columns. In Simons Town on the Cape Peninsula, 600 miles south-west of Bloemfontein, Mary Kingsley was nursing typhoid-stricken Boer POWs. Both Conan Doyle and Kipling were safely home in England by the summer of 1900, but Mary Kingsley never returned. She caught typhoid and died of its complications. On 4 June 1900 she was buried at sea, as she had requested in her final hours.