The Churchill Series – Apr. 23, 2007

(One of a series of weekday posts on the life of Winston S. Churchill.)

In the fall of 1899, the twenty-four year old Winston Churchill, no longer a serving officer in Queen Victoria’s Army, was preparing to sail for South Africa, where he would cover the Anglo-Boer War as a correspondent.

Most people thought the fighting would be brief, with the British professional army soon besting the largely untrained Boers. Churchill worried the fighting would be over before he reached South Africa.

He was wrong. The war lasted three very bloody years. And Churchill, who after arrival secured a commission in a South African cavalry unit, took part in the war as both a correspondent and an officer. His writings, his heroic actions in battle, and his escape as a prisoner of war made him one of the most popular heroes of the war. Churchill used that popularity to great advantage in his first successful campaign for Parliament.

But Churchill didn’t know any of that on October 10, 1899 when he wrote a brief letter to a friend, George Sandys:

Dear George,

I am sorry we missed each other.

I sail on the 14th for the Cape, but the actual fighting will begin before the week is out and may by over before the main army arrives. I shall hope to meet you again somewhere.

Yours sincerely,

Winston S. Churchill

George Sandys and Churchill did meet again often. They served together as Members of Parliament. And in 1935 Churchill’s daughter Diana married Sandys’ son Duncan.

A century after Churchill wrote Sandys their granddaughter, Celia Sandys, published an account of Churchill’s South African years in which she included a facsimile of her maternal grandfather’s October 1899 letter to her paternal grandfather.

We never know.
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Material for this post is found in Celia Sandys’, Churchill: Wanted Dead or Alive. (Carroll & Graf Publishers) The letter facsimile is on page 19.