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Boer War Page 91j |
Rare Boer War Discoveries |
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More key items the Canadian Boer War Museum has added to its collections in its ongoing efforts to preserve important Canadian heritage memorabilia from this period.
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Lot of 11 Jugs Sold for $24,519 US
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Paul Kruger, the President of the Transvaal (South African) Republic, in the 1880s and 90s, was an object of derision in Britain but the symbol of proud independence among all the "little people" around the world who stood up for their rights against the mightiest political and military power in the world. When the Boer War broke out, Kruger was Public Enemy #1 in the British Empire and his money box wildly popular.
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| Canadian journalists mimicked their British counterparts and wrote articles about how ugly a man Kruger was. Soon Canadian mothers were warning their children to, "Go to sleep now, or Oom Paul Kruger will get you!" Gould's Kruger money boxes became as popular in Canada as anywhere else in the Empire. At the time, Canada was populated overwhelmingly - in the non-French-Canadian areas - with recent immigrants of British stock. During the Boer War - and a few short years later during World War I - they saw their destiny as "One with Britain," and Britain's enemies as their own. And Carruthers Gould's toby jugs found welcoming parlours in Canadian homes as well. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Lord Kitchener: The Lord Kitchener toby (top) was the first jug produced in 1915, and was limited to 250 copies. Kitchener also happens to have been the commanding general in South Africa during the final years of the Boer War. In World War I he became Secretary of War, the prime architect responsible for organizing Britain to conduct a successful war against the Central Powers led by Kaiser William II of Germany. He was doing it too, and would shortly be off on the cruiser Hampshire to visit the Czar of Russia and his generals to convince them to maintain the Eastern "Russian" Front against the enemy. Hence Gould has him holding a bowl of "Bitter for the Kaiser." But the Kaiser had the last laugh. In June 1916 this esteemed British soldier was lost off the north coast of Scotland when the cruiser HMS Hampshire, went down after hitting a German mine leaving only two or three survivors. Field Marshall John French: The second jug produced - in another lot of 250 - featured another famous Boer War General, John French right, who had made his reputation as the cavalry commander in that war below.
Believing that he could "ride" his way to victory again and also win the next war, French had been made Commander-in-chief of the British Army in France. Gould captures this sentiment wonderfully with his "French Pour les Français" medicine pot, in the General's hands. But all involved were decidedly lacking "horse sense"; horse liniment would not cure the beast this time. The choice was disastrous for British arms and men, because the premise to the appointment was wrong, not the man. For centuries indeed, the horse had won wars; it made cavalrymen the smuggest members of the military in every country. But it was not the horse that won the Boer War, but the concept behind it - increasing mobility. The British only turned things around against the wily Boer because they recognized - long after the Boers had - that the only way to wage a successful modern war and catch their fast moving enemy was to mount the British infantrymen on horses to make them just as quick as their quarry. Capturing lots of territory and holding it with infantrymen was not proving effective anymore because the "territory" kept moving on them - the Boer fighters, as well as the wives and the kids who nurtured and supplied them with sustenance and war material. But British military strategists - hampered in no small measure by the deeply ingrained traditional British love affair with the horse - were slow to take it all in properly. So it is no surprise that, after dismissing French, they chose badly - again.
Field Marshall Douglas Haig: British strategists didn't want to let go of the Boer War "French magic" entirely, when he was ultimately dismissed because the war was going badly with him at the helm, in 1915. So they picked to succeed him - who else - his right hand man during the Boer War, and his chief of staff during the cavalry campaign - Douglas Haig. Perhaps, military "intelligence" thought, picking the younger man with the magic would do the trick.
"This is not war!" one can hear Haig blustering. "I can remember when we rode across the veldt in glorious thousands, pennants flying, bugles calling... Charging through the Boers at Abon Dam! Five thousand horsemen! Relieved, in one stroke, the siege of Kimberley, and hardly lost a man. It was glorious! It was magnificent! But this smoking collection of creaking tin cans, is an abomination, not worthy of man or beast." One can hear him rephrasing French General Bosquet after Balaklava, "It is warfare; but it is not magnificent!" Perhaps, in a further sly aside Carruthers Gould has put an airplane propeller up his backside, perhaps suggesting that Haig was behind in harnessing modern technology - the noisy, coughing airplane was just beginning to make its mark in the war - and needed a boost in the derrière... to update his outmoded ideas on how to win modern wars.
In the later war the German military strategists grasped the "mobility principle" and would extend this concept into Blitzkrieg, still largely on the tank model in concert with attack planes and bombers. The Japanese would do the same at sea, by developing a carrier, instead of a battleship fleet, and using its highly mobile air arm to deal an unexpected, and devastating naval defeat on the mightiest military power in the world at the US's Battleship Row at Pearl Harbour. This toby jug does not summarize the rightful military legacy for Douglas Haig. He should really be shown perched atop a mound of British and Canadian corpses. As much as his mentor, French, this Victorian soldier kept, far too long, to the old style method of fighting a war, technological advances be damned. He thoughtlessly sent hundreds of thousands of men to a futile death because he believed the key to victory was still with lots of men charging, in groups, against enemy lines, machine guns notwithstanding. Just send more men.Think "Butcher Haig" every time you read the dozens of names on the First World War cenotaphs in every small Canadian town. His tactics are largely responsible for killing some 750,000 British men, leaving 160,000 British women widows, and 300,000 children without fathers.
Prime Minister David Lloyd George: DavidLloyd George was Britain's Prime Minister during most of World War I (1916-1922). As a Welshman and MP in the House, he had been the conscience of Britain during the Boer War 1899-1902, vehemently opposing that conflict on many grounds. As a populist and pacifist he was the Best of Britain playing Devil's Advocate in an age dominated by privilege and war mongering. He thundered that Government ministers were lying about starting a war to extend the franchise to the Uitlanders - the British guest workers in the Boer Republics in South Africa - saying bluntly that what they were really after was the "45% dividends" from the gold field stock certificates, not ballots. What hypocrisy to allegedly start a war over voting rights in South Africa when Britain itself did not even have universal male suffrage... And war expenditure was a gross abuse when the social safety net for common British workers and their families was a generation behind that of Germany. He directly accused the Colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain for complicity in war profiteering since his family munitions manufacturing company received many lucrative government contracts.
He anti-war speechifying almost got him lynched in Birmingham, only escaping by posing as a policeman.
To those who think the Shell above reflects his war service, it could also be Carruthers-Gould's sly reminder that Lloyd George was accused of selling peerages and titles to wealthy businessmen - money is often the only merit that rich people have - in exchange shelling out donations to his party's coffers. In the unkindest cut of all, only months before he died in 1945 he was elevated to the House of Lords, though he never sat in a place where he would have been one of the very few who ever got their titles by merit alone. But then, what kind of merit is that... He was probably just as happy to go to the Other Place than have to take a seat among the very people that had opposed his life's work to improve the lot of the common British man, woman, and child... Lloyd George had a wife and, apparently, the odd mistress. Very odd, indeed, as the song famously hints "Lloyd George knew my father; my father knew Lloyd George." Which begs the question, but did he know his wife? Whatever, it seems that Lloyd George was just your typical Englishman... Probably not your typical Welshman... Right, Admiral David Beatty of World War I fame. He's the missing guy; there are two of Lloyd-George in the collection, top. |
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c Goldi Productions Ltd. 1996 & 2000
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Great Canadian Heritage Treasure
Probably the most magnificent memorabilia ceramic items ever made were the 11 Toby jugs of World War I political and military leaders crafted between 1915-20 by Wilkinson after designs by Sir Francis Carruthers Gould (right)
These toby jugs are a stupendously glorious creation that makes the ubiquitous decorator Royal Doultons, and other Staffordshires, slink away with embarrassment. The colours are deep and glow wondrously; the cartoon stylizations are wonderfully humorous; the faces are amazingly lifelike and true to character.
But Haig was also - like his mentor - a "horse" man at heart. Gould has really given him the unkindest cut of all by mounting him on top of the latest technological advancement in warfare, the tank. Haig would clearly have preferred being seated, for posterity, on a horse. Now the artist has him squatting, for all time, atop a smelly, noisy, and decidedly unromantic mechanical monstrosity.
Actually Haig is sitting on the key to success in modern warfare, but he doesn't know it. It was not the horse before; it is not the tank now. It is mobility, by whatever means. In the short term, the tank turned the war around for the allies and cavalry regiments became tank units - horses with armour plating for protection against machine gun fire. In the next war the airplane, already showing promise, transformed the mobility principle to a new high, sounding the death knell for the nineteenth century's main engines of war: the horse and the battleship. Even a century later the principal fighting ship of World War II - the aircraft carrier - remains little more than a garage and launching platform for airplanes of all kinds. Haig would never have believed it; certainly he never foresaw it.
He also loudly denounced the British generals for ruthlessly neglecting their own wounded after battles, and for the deaths of so many Boer women and children. And he denounced the cost of the war for killing when thousands of British workers and their families were living in dire poverty in the industrial and mining towns.
Lloyd George was a pacifist till war broke out in 1914, when he came on side. He became Prime Minister in 1916, taking Britain through the rest of the war. He wanted Germany to be punished for the cost of the war but he was a voice of moderation compared to the French who wanted Germany crushed absolutely.
