How much was the general public at home allowed to know
about what was happening in South Africa? All press correspondents
had to be licensed by the army, and all letters and telegrams
to their newspapers were liable to be censored before dispatch.
A report by the press censor, Colonel Stanley, in July 1900
argued that war reporters were there to stay 'owing to the
very justifiable demand of the public for news', and that
'for the future every force in the field will be accompanied
by a certain number of correspondents, and an endeavour
should be made to weed out the undesirables'.
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The Daily
Mail
The dispatches of the Commander-in-Chief of the British army
were regularly printed in The Times, which, in general
terms, urged support for the war and those fighting it. Yet
the circulation of those papers that were read by the elite
of 'opinion-shapers' was tiny. Less deferential was the mass-market
Daily Mail, which sometimes described the immediacy
of combat in words that might have come from the lips of a
modern TV reporter - 'the rifle-firing sounds like the frying
of fat or like the crackling and snapping of green wood in
a bonfire'.
The Daily Mail attacked War Office mismanagement
and urged vigorous prosecution of the war: an editorial
of 7 July 1901 condemned 'this precipitate anxiety on the
part of the British authorities to negotiate
Let arms
decide what no amount of talk can settle'. The editor of
the more sober Westminster Gazette accused the Daily
Mail's owner, Alfred Harmsworth, of warmongering to
boost circulation.
In June 1901, the Daily Mail ran a story claiming
that the Boers had shot wounded British prisoners in an
action at Vlakfontein. This was denied in Parliament by
the Secretary of State for War, William Brodrick. However,
General Kitchener acknowledged in confidence to the War
Office that there was some evidence that prisoners had been
shot. On July 27 the Daily Mail published a leaked
telegram from Kitchener on the subject, and in response
the War Office imposed a news blackout on the paper and
stripped Edgar Wallace, the Mail's reporter in South
Africa, of his accreditation. In turn, the Daily Mail
accused the War Office of 'suppressing facts and prevarication'.
On 9 August Kitchener told Colonel Stanley that the 'Daily
Mail has in my opinion prolonged the war three weeks
or a month more than it would have lasted otherwise. Harmsworth
can calculate from casualty lists what he is responsible
for. I think you should institute press censorship at home'.
By mid-August, however, an accommodation had been reached
with the press baron, although the following year the Daily
Mail was so keen to break the news of the peace settlement
that it evaded censorship controls by sending coded telegrams,
purporting to be about investments.
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