March 27, 2015

Finest Hour 127, Summer 2005

Page 28

By Major Frederick, Russel Burnham DSO

“All hell won’t keep him from being Premier some day.”


I was invalided home on the S.S. Dunottar Castle. On the voyage to England were many invalid officers, and some high in the councils of the Empire, who were called home because the political clouds had shifted from South Africa to Fashoda, China, and Constantinople. I recall a graphic review of the world’s condition given by young Winston Churchill, who even then had a clear premonition of the coming storm [World War I]. He explained to me why, in his thrilling escape from the Boer prison, he had been compelled to do certain things which I, as a scout, had criticized. His moves were restricted by the handicap of physical weakness which made a 20-mile run at night entirely beyond his power.

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But the thing that marked him in my memory for life was his solemnly calling a meeting in the cabin and demanding that such men as General Colville, Lord Bentinck, and others should be brought to trial for misappropriation of the sport funds. There was a great buzz throughout the ship, including the crew. Churchill was amply cursed as a bounder, an upstart, a silly ass, a swell-headed “Leftenant,” etc., etc. High Dignity appeared offended. Yet the trial had full attendance. Some of the famous legal talent on board was commanded to represent the accused.

This play was all new to me, a Western American. We abuse our gods quite often, but we do not torment them in just this jocular way. I had a creepy, goose-flesh feeling for Churchill, such as one might have for a child innocently gamboling before an onrushing herd of cattle. I was so sure they would turn the tables on him.

It was all wasted sympathy. The cabin was resolved into some sort of parliament and passed a vote of censure on the accused by a safe majority. It was either young Brooke (later Earl of Warwick) or Sir Byron Leighton who remarked to me, “Don’t you worry about Churchill. K. of K. sat on him to no purpose, and all hell won’t keep him from being Premier some day.”

Editor’s Notes:

The “trial” mentioned was all in fun, of course. “K. of K.” is Lord Kitchener of Khartoum, who had vainly tried to prevent Churchill from attaching himself as a war correspondent to Kitchener’s Sudan expedition, which resulted in Churchill’s 1899 book, The River War.

Frederick Burnham was a swashbuckling Californian whose adventures from the Arizona of Wyatt Earp and Geronimo to the Anglo-Boer War in South Africa (including this episode) bedizen his highly readable and exciting autobiography, Scouting on Two Continents (1926). His book was brought to our attention by CC Trustee Mick Scully.

Burnham, a scout under Field Marshal Lord Roberts, was presented with the DSO by King Edward VII. Like Churchill, he escaped from a Boer prison camp; but Burnham returned to British lines on a 20-mile run (hence his reference to Churchill, whose escape had involved the rather less strenuous tactics of hiding in a coal mine and taking a long train ride ensconced in bales of wool). Churchill and Burnham are both described by Richard Harding Davis in his famous 1906 book, Real Soldiers of Fortune.

Coincidentally, Churchill’s escape was aided by Charles Burnham (no relation), the wool merchant who hid Churchill on the goods train.

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