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Military History – South Africa – Europe – England 19th Century
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reporting of the defeats that, taken together, became known as “Black Week”.
The British War Office was taken by surprise at the outbreak of the war and had no arrangements
in place for the accreditation or control of journalists. The Secretary of State for War, Lord
Lansdowne, attempted to promote a censorship bill for total government control of the press in
September 1899, but this could not be enacted and the military depended on exploiting their control of
the telegraph lines. By the time the war was a few months old there were some seventy accredited
correspondents on the British side, serving some thirty or more newspapers. In addition, there were
artists and photographers. The written word reached Europe first, followed some weeks later by
visual material which was often used as reference imagery for romanticised engravings of heroic
deeds. Perhaps as many as 300 individuals were involved in news-gathering during the course of the
war. Buller was intolerant of journalists and suffered accordingly. Roberts was careful to gain their
goodwill and prospered in the public eye as a result.
The career war correspondent had come into being a few years earlier and in this war a number
of individuals were eager to create, or build upon, their reputations. Among them were Winston
Churchill, Leopold Amery and Bennett Burleigh from the British press, Julian Ralph from the United
States of America and A. B. “Banjo” Paterson from Australia. Churchill did much to praise Ian
Hamilton and Amery achieved the ruin of Sir Redvers Buller’s reputation so efficiently that his
questionable view remains popular even today. The dispatches read as eye-witness accounts even
when they were not. Burleigh was offered Amery’s condolences on missing Cronjé’s surrender at
Paardeberg but replied, according to Amery: “That’s all you know about it, my boy”. When Burleigh’s
report appeared in the Daily Telegraphit was “as complete, and as full of little touches suggesting an
eye-witness story, as any of the others”. This process was known as magic-carpeting, a report based
on interviews with witnesses but presented as if the author himself had seen it all.
In addition to the professional reporters, the work of other individuals appeared in the press,
either because a letter from a relative serving in South Africa was passed on or, in spite of
regulations that forbade it, when a soldier acted as a correspondent.
The correspondents themselves were exposed to danger. Churchill was captured when an
armoured train was ambushed and he also ventured to the top of Spioenkop during the battle. G. W.
Steevens, correspondent for the Morning Post,died at Ladysmith of enteric (typhoid) fever, bringing
his career to a close at thirty years of age.
See also:
Churchill, Winston Spencer; European Views of the War.
Reference:
Badsey, Stephen, “War Correspondents”, Boer War: Direction, Experience and Image,ed. J. Gooch
(London, Frank Cass, 2000); Lowry, Donal, “When the World Loved the Boers”, History
Today,May 1999; Ralph,
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