World War One and the People of South Africa. Bill Nasson
‘England declared war on Germany for no other reason than self-interest’.22
On that basis, an impressive range of organisations and influential bodies of individuals started off well as the war got under way. Those who were gunning for war included English and loyalist Afrikaner rifle associations, riding clubs, small-town business chambers of manufacturers and retailers, large mining and factory industrial combines, trade federations, progressive farmers’ associations, engineering works and sports groups. From these, individuals or deputations hastened forward to offer money, supplies and fit men for the war effort.
While these were free acts, there was also an occasional element of what might be termed conscientious bribery or patriotic inducement. Leading banks, such as the Standard Bank, assured clerks and other younger married male employees that if they volunteered for army service as ‘Botha’s Boys’, their spouses and children would be taken care of, and would be spared ‘any serious financial loss’.23 Several other larger businesses across the country promised to continue paying men their wages, or at least a portion of their earnings, if they volunteered for service in the UDF, thus offering to supplement their army pay. Like so many others in the early days and weeks of hostilities, they also shared the delusion that the war would be short.
In a few other instances, smaller companies and merchant dealers dangled the carrot of a prize or a fee to encourage office workers to volunteer. Shortly before he died at the end of the 1990s, one of the last surviving South African veterans of the expeditionary effort in France recalled that in September 1914, one Johannesburg brewery was offering to reward employees who agreed to enlist with a box of beer and a hearty lunch. ‘Under the circumstances’, he remembered wryly, ‘it really was quite cheap of them’.24
Elsewhere, continual local activity consisted of a mixture of patriotic cheering from the side and the rear to actually joining up for one or other kind of service. In an emotional identification with Germany’s victims, municipal orchestras in several larger cities took up the playing of coarse versions of the Belgian and the Russian national anthems, while Anglican cathedral choirs tried their throats at singing ‘La Marseillaise’. However subtly, and this time in reverse, these countries were once again speaking to more traumatic aspects of one another’s history. In the early 1900s, anti-British imperialist Russian, French and Belgian supporters of the Boer republican struggle had made a show of flying the symbols, and even of sounding the popular folk songs, of the Transvaal and the Orange Free State. In 1914, some of the Russian soldiers who marched off to war were singing not only music from Prince Igor but also, astonishingly, ‘Sarie Marais’.
The sound of choirs and the clash of cymbals were not the only appeals to patriotic conscience in the charged political atmosphere of the spring of 1914. Civic authorities in numerous Cape and Natal towns ran up the Tricolore and the flags of other European Allied countries, with mayors and their municipal officials hastening to offer hospitality and to extend speaking invitations to French and Belgian consuls. The only fly in the diplomatic ointment was the occasional British radical or socialist critic in Johannesburg and Cape Town who, with dripping irony, pointed out that the saintly diplomat from a stricken Belgium actually also represented a colonial power responsible ‘for heinous slavery’ and other atrocities in its ‘oppressive reign in the Congo’.25
The emphasis on the desperate need of continental Europe was often far more than accidental or simply a straightforward response to German invasion and the violation of Belgium’s neutrality. In places, it may well have been quite conscious or politically tactical. For wavering Afrikaner residents of rural towns in parts of the Cape that were largely loyalist, what was more effective? It was easier to get them behind a war to end the agony and the suffering of Belgium than one that was about backing a belligerent South Africa, which was part of the British Empire, or about defending that empire itself.
Thus, by October 1914, the councils of localities such as Worcester and Robertson were able to declare them ‘soundly patriotic’. By then, the busy mayors of an avowedly ‘Patriotic Riversdale’, a ‘Patriotic Porterville’ and a ‘Patriotic Villiersdorp’ were urging their citizens to do something to oppose German militarism, and were pledging to provide a range of loyal services to assist ‘the Union Government and that Great Empire of which the Union forms no inconsiderable part’.26
More widely, some of those who exemplified aspects of the volunteer war service they had in mind included artisan, mechanic and other tradesman bodies, such as the Society of Automobile Mechanics of South Africa, which swiftly supplied volunteer members for the mechanised transport and aviation sections of the UDF. Similarly, if the military needed the skills of welders and fitters, the Boilermakers’ Society of South Africa was ready with men of the right calibre. Working-men’s darts clubs and middle-class tennis clubs arranged raffles to raise war funds; wealthy riders from the polo and hunt clubs of northern Johannesburg and Cape Town’s southern suburbs staged fundraising gymkhanas and resolved to donate any spare horses to the Mounted Rifles of the UDF, and so on.
Furthermore, in the leafy grounds of well-heeled suburban white schools, enterprising patriotic teachers set up charity stalls and public donation posts for a variety of war collections and relief funds, including the prominent Governor General’s Fund, and gathered goods for weekend bazaars that sold war badges, emblazoned tin mugs and other rousing patriotic trinkets. Leading girls’ boarding schools, like Rustenburg School for Girls in Cape Town, St Andrew’s School for Girls in Johannesburg, and Grahamstown’s Diocesan School for Girls, were drawn into war crusading, with exhibitions of nourishing solidarity with brothers and other male relatives. Schools opened their gates after hours to ‘little bands of ladies’, mothers and older sisters who knuckled down alongside schoolgirls in domestic handicrafts to do their bit for a masculine world of war. That bit included knitting socks for UDF soldiers, baking for Belgian refugees, hemming groundsheets, stitching clothing for ‘those in France in dire want’ and ‘knitting warm garments for the Mother Country’.27 Although the war did not intrude into these female spheres in the powerful military way that it did in Europe, where British women, for instance, were called on to make gas masks for soldiers, here it also acquired a lively domestic presence.
Predictably, some of the most potent – and rhetorical – expressions of a pro-war spirit emanated from Edwardian South Africa’s nest of collegiate boys’ schools, those sylvan little Englands of the veld or the mossy suburbs. As volunteers left their dormitory beds under the approving gaze of common rooms to become soldiers, here, as in the elite schools of Britain and the other Dominions, the pull of the ‘Great War’ became an immediately ‘inescapable presence in the public schools’.28 It was there, perhaps as much as anywhere, that the idealistic ethos of volunteering, as a selfless merging of individual identity and culture with the first great cause of the newly born white nation, was at its most pervasive.
In practice, it meant rising to the war in a mannered English way, so that, say, the Dutch-Afrikaner boarders at Diocesan College, Rondebosch, or at Rondebosch Boys’ High School were as blue, red and white in their patriotic instincts as were their English counterparts. When it came to loyal duty to Union and Empire, the Maasdorps and the Cloetes of Cape Town and the Scots-Afrikaner Campbells or Andersons of Johannesburg or Bloemfontein were as one with any Attwell or Walker.
For a whiff of this middle-class schoolroom world and its misguided early complacency, one need not go much further than the South African College Magazine, a Cape Town grammar school equivalent of Australia’s Scotch College Melburnian or the New Zealand School Journal. Its September 1914 issue acclaimed the outbreak of hostilities of Europe as a good thing for a country that needed a kick up the pants to learn the desirable lesson of overcoming divisions and making progress on a mutual basis, ‘Europeans together, side by side’. Thankfully, ‘the blaze of war has put to shame the pale splutterings of individual and party interests’, while mobilisation was helping to knit together fresh threads of Union loyalty and a consciousness of national being. These ties were being warmed by ‘great gusts of fellow feeling’.29
In seeking out the desks and benches of the pre-Union, white, colonial ‘old’ schools such as SACS and Diocesan, or Hilton, Selborne and Grey, the war stirred elite aspirations of nation-building by reconciling the country’s English and Dutch pedigrees. The optimistic