‘Our Soldiers’ Widows’: Charity,British War Widows,and the South African War (1899–1902)

Charity before State Pensions

Working-class war widows faced simultaneously personal sorrow and economic hardship. Many were ‘so completely overwhelmed with grief that nothing could be done with them for weeks’. ¹⁵ The absence of a body (all soldiers being buried in South Africa) deprived them of the usual consolations found in working-class rituals of death. ¹⁶ Only the wearing of mourning dress was possible, and both the Patriotic Fund and Daily Telegraph paid widows immediate grants partly for this purpose, recognizing that ‘women of this class are very particular as regards mourning’. ¹⁷ Letters written by war widows to the Telegraph, rare examples of the widows’ own voices, typically strove for the matter-of-fact stoicism through which working-class women sought to ‘manage’ feelings of bereavement. ¹⁸ Indeed, perhaps the most straightforwardly emotional response was sparked not by sorrow but relief: ‘A week ago my heart was broken, for I was told that my husband was dead. I know now that he lives, thank God, and my heart is so full of joy that I scarcely know how to write. It is like a fairy story, but it is real.’ ¹⁹ Less fortunate women rarely referenced religion as a source of comfort, though some thanked God for the Telegraph’s help or called down His blessing on its subscribers. Nor was the language of patriotism much employed. A.G. of Nunhead’s reference to ‘soldiers sacrificed for our country’s needs’ seemed scarcely to endorse that sacrifice. Mrs P, in a letter ‘bearing every token of having been written at a moment of extreme anguish’, sought consolation in the knowledge that ‘my poor dear husband died while doing his duty to his Queen and country’ – but immediately admitted, ‘life at present seems very dreary to me, for the breadwinner has been taken from our home’. ²⁰

Many experienced motherhood and widowhood in quick succession, exacerbating both the emotional blow and economic predicament. Elizabeth Barney endured ‘great trouble … having been confined and losing my little one and my husband in a month’. Mrs P described how the news had been withheld from her on doctor’s orders until she recovered from a difficult childbirth: ‘To think I have got over one trouble and another one awaiting me!’ ²¹ Grief intermingled inextricably with economic anxiety and fears for the future:

I miss my dear husband very much, for he was always very kind to me, and he was in a good situation when he was called away, and now to think I will never see him again nearly breaks my heart … I am not a strong woman myself, but I will have to make the best use of what I get now that the breadwinner has been taken away. ²²

Julie-Marie Strange suggests that for working-class women ‘anxiety about finance … represented a public language of loss which expressed bitterness and desolation, yet was sufficiently impersonal to articulate to others’. ²³ Its emphasis here also, of course, reflected the widows’ position as beneficiaries of the Shilling Fund. Yet it was certainly well founded in an age when widowhood too often spelt poverty and dependence on poor relief, particularly for those facing the almost insoluble problem of earning a living ‘with baby in arms’. ²⁴ There seems no reason to doubt the sincerity of the many heartfelt expressions of gratitude for assistance received. As Mrs C of Hornsey put it, ‘Sir, I cannot find words enough to thank you for all you have done for myself and my five children. Really, Sir, my heart is too full of gratitude for to find words enough. I cannot.’ ²⁵

Of the three charities to which South African War widows could turn for help, the most important was the ‘quasi-official’ Royal Patriotic Fund. The Fund had been founded in 1854, during the Crimean War, to assist soldiers’ widows ‘unable … to support themselves’ and educate soldiers’ orphans. ²⁶ Originally a network of local ladies’ committees oversaw the welfare of widows and orphans. But by the late nineteenth century the Fund was run by a small group of peers and retired officers, with no real branch structure and no middle-class female involvement – an anomaly in a philanthropic world characterized by the use of ‘lady visitors’ and the Charity Organization Society’s emphasis on casework. ²⁷ It dealt with widows at arm’s length, communicating by letter and paying allowances quarterly in advance by postal order; its remoteness from the realities of working-class existence frequently blinded the Fund to the likely consequences of its decisions. In its emphasis on self-help and moral probity the Fund was typical of Victorian philanthropy: assistance was refused to widows who refused to work without good cause, or who ‘by profligate conduct dishonour[ed] the memory of her husband’. ²⁸ Victorian soldiers’ wives were stereotyped as drunken, immoral slatterns, and like most military charities the Patriotic Fund took for granted that working-class women were ‘moral minors’ who required supervision: it regularly received police reports on the conduct of individual widows. ²⁹ If this approach was largely uncontroversial in the nineteenth century, from the 1890s other aspects of the Patriotic Fund’s management generated persistent attacks from parliament and the press: its high administration costs, its lack of local committees, and especially its accumulation of large surpluses by hoarding funds rather than distributing them to the widows and orphans for whom they had been collected. The Fund’s strong corporate identity, however, armoured it against outside criticism and made it deeply resistant to change. ³⁰

The Patriotic Fund thus entered the South African War as a compromised organization. It immediately attracted new criticism by its curious decision to grant its secretary, Colonel Young, paid leave to organize the Red Cross in South Africa (he returned to the Fund only in April 1900). ³¹ Nevertheless, because of its semi-official status, it received all money donated for widows and orphans through the national war fund, the Mansion House Fund (MHF). The Patriotic’s controversial reputation did not immediately inhibit public giving. Of the four objects for which the MHF collected (widows and orphans, soldiers’ families, disabled soldiers, and the sick and wounded), widows proved by far the most popular, receiving nearly half the £921,000 earmarked contributions. ³² Initially all non-earmarked donations were also allocated to the Patriotic Fund. But in December 1899 these were diverted to other charities (losing the Patriotic Fund £215,760) after the under-secretary of state for war George Wyndham rashly predicted that the war would produce no more than 790 widows. ³³ In June 1902 subscriptions to the Patriotic Fund’s Transvaal War Fund (TWF) totalled £476,749. The majority (£441,100) had come through the Mansion House Fund. ³⁴ Of this, nearly 90 per cent had been received by the TWF by mid-June 1900. ³⁵ The fall in contributions thereafter resulted from a combination of factors discussed below: the (premature) announcement of state pensions; escalating criticism of the Patriotic Fund; and competition from alternative widows’ charities. It was certainly unfortunate that, as Table 1 shows, this calamitous decline in donations coincided with a deadly outbreak of ‘enteric fever’ among British troops in South Africa which added a thousand widows to the roll in two months. Despite employing extra staff the Patriotic Fund struggled to cope. By the war’s end the Fund had registered over 4,000 war widows: the task of supporting them long term, perhaps for 40 years or more, had long since exceeded the capacity of charity.

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Table 1.

Transvaal War Fund: Numbers of Other Ranks Widows Registered during the South African War.

Date	Cases Dealt With	Cases Outstanding	Total Cases
Feb 1900	295		295
May 1900	908		908
July 1900	1,531	374	1,905
Oct 1900	2,093	118	2,211
Dec 1900	2,318	172	2,490
Feb 1901	2,610	196	2,806
April 1901	2,867	177	3,044
July 1901	3,190	300	3,490
Nov 1901	3,450	132	3,582
Feb 1902	3,719		3,719
May 1902	4,010		4,010
June 1902	4,057		4,057

Source: TNA, PIN 96/13 and PIN 96/14, minutes of the Royal Patriotic Fund Executive and Finance Committee.

Those eligible for assistance from the Transvaal War Fund were the widows and orphans of soldiers who died while awaiting embarkation with their regiment, or during the voyage to South Africa; in South Africa from enemy action, disease, or accident during the war; or subsequently from the effects of wounds or disease contracted in South Africa. ³⁶ Despite persistent rumours to the contrary, the Fund made no distinction between widows married ‘on’ or ‘off’ the strength (that is, with or without the permission of the soldier’s regiment). Proof of marriage was normally required but the Patriotic Fund was sometimes surprisingly flexible, accepting soldiers’ fiancées, a woman ‘married’ in a gypsy ceremony, and an unwitting victim of bigamy, as well as children born before their parents’ marriage. ³⁷ In August 1899 the Patriotic Fund had received parliamentary authorization to assist soldiers’ dependants other than widows and orphans: by the end of the war the TWF had registered nearly 2,500 ‘other dependants’, mostly soldiers’ mothers. ³⁸

All Transvaal War widows were given ‘immediate relief’ from the Patriotic Fund of £5 plus £1 per child. Some soldiers’ mothers also received one-off grants. ³⁹ Most widows (but only a handful of ‘other dependants’) subsequently received a regular allowance at a flat rate according to the soldier’s rank. For a private’s widow the rate was five shillings weekly plus 1/6 per child – far lower than either the ‘moderate maintenance’ the Fund professed to aim at or the standard expected by donors. Since the charity supporting the dependants of living servicemen, the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Families Association, aimed to maintain families at their pre-war standard of living, widowhood entailed a steep drop in income. ⁴⁰ As always, the Patriotic Fund’s assistance was conditional upon continued good behaviour, sex and alcohol being the usual moral disqualifiers. In 1902 53 widows were struck off the Transvaal War Fund as ‘unworthy’, mostly on the basis of police reports: at one meeting alone a series were struck off for ‘immoral conduct’, ‘misconduct’, ‘cohabiting with a Bricklayer … & delivered of a child’, being ‘hopelessly addicted to drink’, ‘unworthy of an Army Pension’, and ‘delivered of a bastard child and leading an immoral life’. ⁴¹ As an economy measure the Fund decided to withdraw allowances permanently from Boer War widows who remarried. ⁴² Many South African War widows, typically in their mid-20s, naturally did marry again – most, as the Fund’s actuaries noted, ‘in the first few years following widowhood’. By 31 December 1902, 557 had done so. ⁴³ The remarriage rule thus led to a rapid diminution in the number of widows eligible to receive assistance from the Fund.

During the South African War old criticisms of the Patriotic Fund gained new traction. In February 1900 MPs repeated long-standing allegations that, despite the ‘great names’ associated with the Fund, it was actually run by ‘a small coterie, and that there is, therefore, maladministration’; and that the Fund was hoarding substantial surpluses rather than distributing assets to widows and orphans. ⁴⁴ At the same time the Fund attracted new complaints reflecting its failure to move with changing attitudes towards soldiers and their families. The Commissioners’ insistence that aid from the Patriotic Fund was ‘a charity’ not ‘a right’ jarred with a developing sentiment that the Fund’s allowances constituted ‘honourable debts’ owed by the nation to soldiers dying in their country’s service. ⁴⁵ Early in 1900 a series of Morning Post articles entitled ‘The Reward of Patriotism’ and ‘The Cruelty of Charity’ attacked the Fund for failing to treat widows with the respect and consideration they were now seen to deserve. Initially infuriated that the Fund had treated a ‘gentlewoman’ (the widow of a journalist serving with a South African volunteer unit) as though she were a pauper, the Post quickly came to argue that such treatment of any soldier’s widow was indefensible. ⁴⁶ As H.G. Wells commented, it had taken the experience of a ‘lady’ to expose to the middle classes ‘the brutal incivility … poor people habitually receive’. ⁴⁷ Her case became a mini-cause célèbre and the Morning Post’s crusade – backed by other periodicals, from Punch to the Pall Mall Gazette – helped pile pressure on the government to investigate the workings of the Fund. Press and parliamentary criticism of the Patriotic Fund also persuaded some potential donors to switch their support to the rival charities for war widows: the Imperial War Fund and the Daily Telegraph Shilling Fund.

Of these, the Imperial War Fund (IWF) was by far the smallest. Founded during the 1882 Egyptian campaign by Lady Jane Taylor, wife of the adjutant-general, it was now run by Lieutenant-Colonel Thomas Tully (commanding officer of a volunteer battalion and previously permanent secretary of the Royal Military Tournament). When the South African War broke out Tully decided not to appeal for donations but to pay out all the IWF’s existing funds and wind it up. In practice it did receive additional money to add to its £4,500 nucleus, including £2,600 from the Mansion House Fund, £400 from the Daily Mail, £500 from Liverpool, and £200 from Clackmannan and Kinross, plus £1,250 from the Daily Telegraph earmarked for officers’ widows. The IWF gave other ranks widows a one-off grant of £10 plus £1 per child; fearing that working-class women would squander large cash sums Tully paid it through a middle-class trustee (such as an officer, JP, mayor, or clergyman). Tully explained that he did not in fact believe that relief should be uniform ‘because the conditions of the recipients are not equal’; he nevertheless gave all widows £10 because he felt that while inadequate it was the most the IWF could afford. ⁴⁸ He took a broad view of what constituted a war-related death, believing that for marginal cases ‘we ought to be liberal, and pay’: the IWF made grants in respect of soldiers ‘drowned in the Tugela River’, ‘killed by a bull at Stellenbosch’, and even ‘killed in railway accident, Waterloo Station’. The IWF had given grants to 98 widows by 28 December 1899; to 213 (39 per cent from Scottish regiments and 16 per cent from Irish) by 5 February 1900; and to 491 by the end of March. ⁴⁹ By mid-1900, when the Fund was wound up, 551 widows (with 648 children) had received grants and smaller awards had been made to 313 ‘other dependent relatives’ (mainly soldiers’ mothers) at a total cost of around £8,500. ⁵⁰

Far more important was the fund for war widows and orphans run by the Daily Telegraph in cooperation with the Scotsman. The South African War’s status as a ‘media war’ has long been recognized, with a substantial historiography devoted to war reporting, censorship, and the overwhelmingly pro-war press coverage. ⁵¹ In contrast newspaper funds for war relief have attracted almost no historical attention. ⁵² Yet they not only raised hundreds of thousands of pounds for British sufferers from the South African War but played an important role in shaping public reactions to the conflict. Following J.A. Hobson, Paula M. Krebs credits the turn-of-the-century ‘new journalism’ with the power to manipulate readers into such ‘very temporary spasm[s] of jingoism’ as Mafeking Night. ⁵³ Newspaper war funds, however, generated more substantial, prolonged, and meaningful responses from the British public. They encouraged, but also enabled, millions of ordinary people to make individually small but real contributions to the war effort and to military welfare, sustained over periods of months, even years. Reflecting the localism of Victorian society, and the blending of local with imperial patriotism by the provincial press during the Boer War, many were regional rather than national. ⁵⁴ All were dwarfed by the quarter-million-pound Telegraph/Scotsman Shilling Fund. (Even the best-known, the Daily Mail’s Absent-Minded Beggar Fund, raised only £175,000, of which £40,000 was contributed by the Mail’s proprietors. ⁵⁵ ) The Shilling Fund was also the most significant in its long-term impact, supporting hundreds of Boer War widows for decades after the war’s end.

The Telegraph of 1899 resembled the Mail in its Tory imperialism and large lower-middle- and middle-class readership drawn from shopkeepers, clerks, and ‘the great mass of villadom’. Unlike the Mail’s ‘new journalism’, however, the Telegraph positioned itself as a serious paper which was nonetheless ‘brighter’ than the Times. As a pioneering penny daily it had claimed the ‘Largest Circulation in the World’. Though now undercut by the half-penny Mail, it still commanded a circulation of 250,000; with established interests in African exploration, war reporting, and the army, it was well placed to capitalize on public interest in the conflict in South Africa. ⁵⁶ The Telegraph had long raised ‘shilling funds’ for good causes, six since 1895 alone, the largest for the 1897 Diamond Jubilee Hospitals Fund. ⁵⁷ Its imperial sympathies, military interests, wide readership, and track record in fundraising underpinned the Telegraph’s widows’ appeal. It was well complemented by its partner paper, the Edinburgh-based Scotsman: another penny paper, strongly Liberal Unionist and jingoist in its support for the war, with a Scotland-wide distribution and a circulation (over 60,000 by the late 1880s) ‘incomparably greater than that of any other morning paper published outside London’. ⁵⁸ This fund, however, would prove to be on quite a different scale, both in size and complexity, than any the Telegraph had previously undertaken. Its administration was entrusted to the long-time Telegraph journalist Joseph Hall Richardson, organizer of the Jubilee Hospitals Fund and the newspaper’s future general manager. The Fund relied on his ‘tidy mind’ and management skills, though his ‘awkward temperament’ rendered more difficult its relationship with competing charities. ⁵⁹

The ‘Shilling Fund for Our Soldiers’ Widows and Orphans’ opened on 26 October 1899. Its appeal tugged at the heartstrings in heavily gendered terms. The Telegraph represented working-class war widows as respectable and deserving, domestic and dependent, now ‘husbandless … bereft of breadwinners’. ‘Think’, it implored readers, ‘of the black trouble which must descend upon the humble home … the shattered hopes and household life destroyed … the weekly, monthly, yearly pinch of cruel poverty … enfeebling the wearied hands that must go on working in solitude and bereavement.’ At the same time the Telegraph put forward a new analysis of the relationship between the nation and its army. The war, it declared, had produced a ‘feeling of fellowship and pride and trust, never so strongly exhibited before, between the people at large and the soldiers of the QUEEN’. The Shilling Fund, to which all classes could contribute, would constitute not only a ‘memorial of the national sentiment’ but also ‘an enduring proof that the soldier is a citizen’. ⁶⁰ This constituted a significant shift in attitudes towards the rank and file. Though acclaimed in the abstract as heroic empire-builders, in practice late Victorian soldiers were still largely shunned by the ‘respectable’ of all classes. ⁶¹ The new concept that the soldier was a citizen, and that the nation’s obligations towards him included taking on his presumed role as breadwinner to wife and children, was encouraged by the high number of reservists engaged in South Africa. It would be boosted further by the enlistment of civilian volunteers after December 1899’s ‘Black Week’. Consistently promoted by the Telegraph, this view would become widely accepted during the war in parliament and the press, eventually producing a demand for state pensions for widows.

The Shilling Fund began as a simple scheme to collect and acknowledge donations before transferring them to the Mansion House Fund. But, discovering that such donations were being passed to the Patriotic Fund, the Telegraph, ‘upon the earnest representations of subscribers’, quickly decided to distribute the money itself. ⁶² Initially it aimed only to provide one-off grants: a substantial £20 per widow plus £3 per child. Unlike the Imperial War Fund, the Telegraph paid its grant to the widow herself, through her Post Office savings account. By July 1901 the Telegraph had paid out over £38,000 in immediate grants to 2,335 widows and their children; ultimately 2,394 widows would receive them. ⁶³

Within a few weeks of the Fund’s opening a significant new development was announced: widows would now also receive non-terminable lifetime annuities of £15 per year (5s 9d a week). ⁶⁴ Henceforth donors to the Shilling Fund were also subscribing to the concept that war widows deserved guaranteed life-long support, free from moral oversight and regardless of remarriage. This was a very different model than that operated by the Patriotic Fund; it would take another century before it was accepted by the British state. The Telegraph’s proprietor, Sir Edward Lawson, suggested that subscribers saw the annuity (costing £350 on average) as roughly equating to the payment a reservist’s widow would have received under the 1897 Workmen’s Compensation Act had he been killed in civilian employment. ⁶⁵ The Shilling Fund hoped it would in effect ‘give the widow free rent for life’ but saw it as supplemental to the Patriotic Fund’s allowance. The Patriotic, however, immediately halved its allowance to widows with Telegraph annuities. ⁶⁶ The first 100 annuitants were announced on 9 January 1900; ultimately 731 widows would receive annuities, though for later widows the sum was reduced to £10. ⁶⁷ The Telegraph originally intended to buy annuities for all Boer War widows; when in mid-1900 it became clear this would be impossible, the Shilling Fund prioritized widows living in those areas – notably London and Scotland – from which most of its financial support was derived. ⁶⁸

The Shilling Fund presented itself as the antithesis of the Patriotic Fund. Its resources were distributed to widows swiftly and in full, with no hoarding, capitalization, or administration costs. Its workings, unlike the shadowy operations of the Commissioners, were clear for all to see: details of every donation and each annuitant were published either in the Telegraph or the Scotsman. (The Telegraph’s own financial commitment to the Fund thus extended well beyond Sir Edward Lawson’s initial £500 donation. It not only bore all administrative expenses for a scheme far more complicated and long-running than originally contemplated: the 1,100 columns devoted to the Fund represented a sacrifice of ‘advertisement space … equivalent to thousands of pounds’. ⁶⁹ ) Again unlike the Patriotic Fund the Telegraph consistently spoke and acted on the principle that soldiers’ widows were prudent, responsible adults, ‘hardworking’, ‘frugal’, and saving – an approach that likely encouraged working-class contributions. ⁷⁰

Undoubtedly the Shilling Fund received enormous cross-class support. Raising its first million shillings (£50,000) took less than a month. Though the rate of donations decreased as the war dragged on, by 9 January 1900 it had raised £100,000; by 5 April, £150,000; by 28 July, £200,000. The Telegraph’s Fund formally closed on 31 December 1900 at £236,774, but the Scotsman continued collecting. At the end of June 1901 the grand total was £260,501; the final figure, on 1 January 1903, was £264,958, of which £55,889 had been collected by the Scotsman. ⁷¹ There were few major gifts from rich donors; instead the Fund became ‘a bi-metallic pyramid, with the silver of the middle classes above and a broad base of the people’s copper below’. ⁷² The Telegraph calculated that twelve million people had subscribed to the fund, the average donation being ‘considerably below the shilling’. ⁷³ Alongside numerous personal contributions came collections made by schoolchildren, at churches, Sunday schools and smoking concerts, in factories, offices and hospitals, in hotels and pubs, by servants and soldiers, in railway carriages, at family events (‘Auntie Ada’s silver wedding’), by freemasons and cycling clubs. ⁷⁴ The Telegraph’s subscription lists bear eloquent witness to the ways in which, through charity, the war permeated everyday life at home. Its core lower-middle-class readers – so often associated with jingo imperialism – were likely the Fund’s main donors. ⁷⁵ But the Shilling Fund also benefitted largely from regular workplace subscriptions from ‘gas workers, railway men, dock employees, telegraphists, postmen, shop assistants, newspaper printers, and workmen of a large number of leading firms’. ⁷⁶ Encouraged perhaps by the participation of reservists and volunteers, men embedded within working-class communities as friends, neighbours, and workmates, ‘the charity of the poor to the poor’ made an important contribution to war funds for soldiers’ dependants. ⁷⁷

Scottish support was crucial to the Shilling Fund: at times, the Telegraph acknowledged, it became primarily ‘a Scotch fund’. ⁷⁸ By the late nineteenth century imperialism had become a significant part of Scottish national identity. The empire provided an arena in which Scotland could demonstrate its equal partnership within the Union – not least through the martial valour of its regiments. ⁷⁹ Scotland’s military commitment in South Africa was extensive, including all Scottish infantry regiments. Casualties were high, the Highland Brigade bearing the brunt of early military disasters. The Magersfontein defeat, in particular, was experienced both as national tragedy and national humiliation. ⁸⁰ Most Scots (though not all) responded by rallying behind both their regiments and the imperial mission. The ‘passions evoked by the war’ – displayed through volunteering, public support for departing or returning troops, and celebration at moments of imperial victory – also found a focus in the Shilling Fund. ⁸¹ Scots – who made up only 10.7 per cent of the national population – had contributed 13.6 per cent of the fund when the Telegraph stopped collecting on 31 December 1900, and over 20 per cent when the Scotsman wound up its part of the fund in August 1902. ⁸² In return – partly because of the high proportion of married Scots among the war’s early fatalities – over 25 per cent of the Shilling Fund was spent in Scotland. ⁸³

‘Scottish contribution to British imperialism’, notes Richard Finlay, ‘was manifested in distinctly Scottish ways’. ⁸⁴ The same was true of the Shilling Fund. Indeed, the Fund tells us much about responses to the Boer War in Scotland and the integration of Scottishness and imperialism. A poetic plea published by the Scotsman combined invocation of the totemic Magersfontein disaster with an appeal to a shared Scottishness expressed through history, landscape and language:

A million shillings make it,

Oh, land where Wallace bled …

For the hallowed Highland heather,

For the Lowland vales they trod …

For the brave who never faltered

In that Magersfontein hell,

Where the nearest and the dearest

And the best of Scotland fell

… give e’en a Scot’s last shilling

‘For the widow and the weans’. ⁸⁵

Like the Telegraph, the Scotsman mobilized cross-class support from ‘the legal, medical and ministerial professions’, businessmen, fishermen, crofters, millworkers (including women), colliery workers, and co-operative associations. ⁸⁶ The Scotman’s fund, however, disproportionately depended upon an ‘immense number of small sums received from persons little able to spare even a few coppers’. ⁸⁷ Its only substantial donation (£2,000) came from the surplus funds of another explicitly Scottish voluntary contribution to the war effort, the Edinburgh and East of Scotland private military hospital. ⁸⁸ Though the Shilling Fund never took off in Glasgow (which had its own influential press and important war fund), and was strongest in south-east Scotland, its geographic reach was impressive. Skye and its adjacent islands collected nearly £200 from over 2,000 individuals; even the ‘lonely islanders of St Kilda’ sent £3. ⁸⁹ ‘Scots abroad’ also rallied to the cause through the Caledonian societies of Australasia and the Order of Scottish Clans in the USA and Canada, and from those ‘regions of the Dark Continent imperishably associated’ with that Scottish imperial icon Dr Livingstone. ⁹⁰ The Telegraph having agreed that – given the number of Scottish casualties – Scotland would receive one-fifth of the Fund if it provided one-eighth, the Scotsman boasted of securing a good bargain from ‘the Scotch point of view’. ⁹¹ Though in England the Telegraph complained of the non-cooperation of local war funds, Scottish counties and boroughs proved willing to contribute to what was seen as ‘particularly a Scottish fund’. ⁹² So successful was the Scotsman at channelling this feeling that, as well as paying initial grants totalling over £10,000 to 344 Scottish widows with 462 children, the Shilling Fund was able to provide lifetime annuities (mostly of £15) for 198 of Scotland’s war widows. ⁹³

It was not only in Scotland, however, that support for the Shilling Fund arose from an integration of the imperial with the local. The Fund’s ‘most astonishing’ development, declared the Telegraph, was the London carnival movement. ⁹⁴ Between January and November 1900 – peaking in late spring/early summer as British victories mounted and disease fatalities soared – the capital hosted 54 carnivals in aid of the Shilling Fund. Beginning in Lewisham, the idea spread to Brixton and South London, the East End, and the North London suburbs before ‘the West End completed the scheme’. Involving 100,000 voluntary workers and collectors, the carnivals collectively raised £46,000, much in pennies. ⁹⁵ The local organizing committees combined businessmen and professionals with working-class representatives of trade unions and friendly societies. ⁹⁶ Elaborate spectacles with a distinctly imperial theme, the carnivals brought even London’s poorest districts onto the streets. The East End’s three-mile-long procession included twenty bands, men dressed as Kitchener and Baden-Powell, marching soldiers, and allegorical cars representing ‘Mafeking Fort’ and ‘Our Empire’s Defenders’. Seventeen hundred collecting boxes were filled: between them Bow, Forest Gate and Stratford, and Stepney and Bethnal Green raised over £3,000. Jonathan Schneer contrasts the limited local support given to the ongoing dockers’ strike with the enthusiastic backing of the East End (and its trade unions) for the Telegraph carnival – and thus, he suggests, for empire. ⁹⁷ The case is perhaps less simple, for other factors combined with imperial excitement to make the carnivals a success. Indeed, even professed ‘pro-Boers’ sometimes embraced the movement: Battersea’s Radical vestry voted almost two-to-one to support it because ‘helping widows and children was charity, not Jingoism’. ⁹⁸ Assisting the Shilling Fund could be seen as a form of working-class self-help – and, since the Telegraph had promised that funds would be spent in the district in which they were raised, a very localized and parochial form. As Dion Georgiou argues, the carnivals also served as vehicles for the assertion of local identity and were driven partly by competition (adroitly manipulated by the Telegraph) between localities. ⁹⁹ Brad Beaven’s suggestion that for many people, especially the working-classes, ‘the empire became significant only when imperial issues were fused with the local’ – or, as in Scotland’s case, the subnational – is well demonstrated by the localized nature of support for South African War charities. ¹⁰⁰

That imperial enthusiasm nonetheless constituted an important factor in the Fund’s appeal is shown by the key role played by British victories in South Africa in stimulating public donation. In the Telegraph’s words, ‘Ladysmith, Kimberley, Mafeking, Johannesburg – all made their influence financially felt … either by the prompting of individual tokens of joy … or the promotion of general schemes of celebration.’ ¹⁰¹ On the Saturday after the relief of Ladysmith almost every donation related to the victory. ¹⁰² The occupation of Pretoria in June 1900, apparently signalling the end of the war, sparked even greater festivities, especially in Scotland, and gave ‘fresh impulse’ to the Scotsman’s fund: collections at torchlight processions and firework displays brought in £1,000 within a fortnight. ¹⁰³ The financial importance of imperial celebrations to the Shilling Fund highlights an overlooked aspect of British responses to Boer War victories. Rowdy public crowds still spared a thought for the victims of war, while private individuals at home were also moved to donate. Many of the latter described their gifts as ‘thankofferings’, perhaps marking their gratitude for the safety of British troops (sometimes very personally felt, as in the ‘thankoffering for … Ladysmith, from two sisters of one of the garrison’), or their relief at British success after early military reverses. But most public collections had been gathered in the context of explicitly jingoistic celebrations, often involving the burning of Kruger in effigy. On these occasions at least the Shilling Fund became, as the Telegraph had hoped, an expression of ‘the Imperial spirit of the British people’. ¹⁰⁴

State Pensions and After

Despite the success of the widows’ funds in mobilizing substantial, cross-class support, overall the experience of 1899–1900 revealed the inability of charity to cope with the casualties of a major war effectively and efficiently. Early in the war, with fatalities still low, middle-class commentators complained that, because of ‘overlapping’ between the three charities, working-class widows were receiving ‘excessive’ relief. In a cartoon of January 1900 a char told her fashionably dressed mistress,

‘Yes, mum, my ’usbing’s got killed fightin’ Kruger. But there, I’ve ’ad £6 from the Patriotic Fund, and £11 from the Imperial War Fund; and the Daily Telegraph Fund gives me £15 a year for life, and invested £50 for my child. Then the Patriotic Fund gives me 5s. a week until I marries again, and 1s. 6d. a week for the child. So I ain’t lost anythink’ (A fact.) ¹⁰⁵

By mid-1900, however, in the wake of the enteric epidemic, the escalating number of war widows posed a problem charity was increasingly unable to handle. As other funds closed women widowed later in the war found themselves wholly dependent upon the inadequately resourced Patriotic Fund. The concept – expressed directly in press and parliament and indirectly by public donation to the widows’ funds – that war widows were entitled to financial support had become widely accepted during the conflict. MPs and others now came to argue that such support should be provided by the state. ¹⁰⁶ In June this campaign received decisive support from the parliamentary War Funds Committee, set up in February 1900 in response to criticism of the Patriotic Fund.

Evidence taken by the committee between March and May 1900 had revealed all too clearly the multiplicity of war funds, including numerous local funds, and the lack of cooperation (amounting in some cases to active hostility) between them. Lord Chelmsford’s bullish testimony for the Patriotic Fund only confirmed the Fund’s image as arrogant, inflexible, and parsimonious. Chelmsford defended the Fund’s conduct in the case highlighted by the Morning Post and rejected any suggestion that it might modify its procedures. Asked how the Fund reconciled its stated principle of securing to the widow ‘a moderate maintenance, according to her class of life’ with its actual fixed-rate five shillings a week grants, he could produce no answer. On the basis that ‘the Patriotic Fund is the original war fund’, he insisted that any overlapping was the fault of other, newer funds. He freely admitted trying (unsuccessfully) to sabotage the Shilling Fund by getting the War Office to withhold information from it. ¹⁰⁷ For the Telegraph Richardson gave a detailed, somewhat defensive, account of the Shilling Fund’s methods which evidently impressed the committee. He also attacked the Patriotic Fund as a stone from which ‘it is very difficult to draw blood’; rival newspaper funds which failed to cooperate with the Telegraph as motivated by ‘journalistic jealousy’; and wealthy regional funds such as Manchester’s for refusing to contribute to the Shilling Fund despite making no permanent provision for local widows. ¹⁰⁸ Both Richardson and Colonel Tully of the Imperial War Fund strongly urged the introduction of government pensions for war widows: ‘it is the duty of the State’. ¹⁰⁹

The committee’s report, published in mid-June 1900, made two important – and related – interventions. First, since charitable funds were insufficient to provide for war widows, it advised introducing state pensions for the widows of ordinary servicemen. ‘If no such action is taken’, it warned, ‘there must not only be very many cases of distress, but also great inequality in the relief given’. ¹¹⁰ This recommendation was swiftly accepted by the government. ¹¹¹ Second, it condemned the Patriotic Fund:

unless [the Patriotic Fund Commissioners] radically change their present method of administration so as to make it at once more businesslike and more elastic and … ensure complete and cordial co-operation … with local funds, the public confidence, which has been rudely shaken, will never be restored, and thus the only central fund in the country for the permanent relief of the widows and orphans of soldiers and sailors will cease to exist. ¹¹²

The War Funds Committee inflicted major reputational damage on the Patriotic Fund, with concomitant effects on its finances. Though the announcement of state pensions depressed giving to both widows’ charities, between 14 June 1900 and the end of that year the Patriotic Fund received only £50,300 through the Mansion House Fund, while the Shilling Fund collected £62,515. ¹¹³ Many donors apparently now preferred to subscribe to the newer fund, perceived both as more liberal and more humane.

Nevertheless the Patriotic Fund dealt with the committee’s report essentially by ignoring it, making no perceptible changes either in procedures or attitudes. In December 1900 (prompted by genuine fears of running out of money) it suddenly cancelled its allowances to widows living in cities with substantial war funds, without warning to or consultation with either the widows or the local funds which were now to maintain them. Birmingham refused, protesting that its funds were already fully committed; after a very public dispute the Patriotic Fund had to back down. ¹¹⁴ At the same time the Fund abruptly withdrew its allowances from many widows with newspaper grants. Letters from these widows published in the Telegraph made clear the Patriotic Fund’s failure to consider or understand the effects of its policymaking upon those it existed to assist:

Sir, it was very hard for me at the last moment to receive the notice from the Patriotic Fund the night before I expected [the allowance], and having borrowed money to pay my way.

I was notified of that on Christmas morning, and it was a sad disappointment in my solitary Christmas, with nothing to live on.

It comes very hard for us all at this time of the year, when more of everything is needed … I expect … it means me parting with my home, which I think will be the breaking of me altogether. ¹¹⁵

Undaunted by the renewed criticism these episodes generated, Colonel Young then proposed a remarkable scheme to merge all war charities (including every local and newspaper fund) into the Patriotic Fund and make illegal by act of parliament the collection of war relief funds by any other body. ¹¹⁶ Greeted with a predictable hostility (the Scotsman described Young as a ‘modern Rob Roy’), its main effect was to cement the Patriotic Fund’s image as overbearing and out of touch. ¹¹⁷ Nevertheless, the Patriotic Fund became the sole widows’ charity to survive into the era of state pensions. The Edwardian years would see the development of a public–private partnership in war widows’ welfare in which, though the state took a major and increasing share, the role of the Patriotic Fund remained vital.

Despite the government’s assurance in June 1900 that ‘immediate steps’ would be taken to ‘frame a scheme’ for state pensions for war widows, it was another year before pensions were actually introduced. ¹¹⁸ Nor did the scheme eliminate the need for philanthropy. The state’s low pension rates (for the widows of privates only five shillings a week plus 1/6 per child, the same as the Patriotic Fund’s allowances) were explicitly set on the assumption that they would be supplemented by charity. Though the widows of reservists and volunteers were eligible for pensions, the widows of regular soldiers married without official permission (‘off the strength’) were denied them on the insistence of the War Office, despite lobbying from both the Patriotic Fund and the Telegraph. ¹¹⁹ The Telegraph nonetheless closed its fund at the end of 1900, after a final push specifically for ‘off the strength’ widows. The Scotsman’s fund closed on 1 July 1901, the date on which the first pensions payments were made. In practice both continued to receive donations for months thereafter. Nevertheless, the formal closure of the newspapers’ appeal left only the Patriotic Fund to make top-up grants to pensioned widows, support ‘off the strength’ cases, and assist other widows deemed ineligible for state pensions.

The state, in designing widows’ pensions, was strongly influenced by the Patriotic Fund’s approach and procedures, while the more liberal model of the Shilling Fund went ignored. In particular, the Fund’s restriction of benefits to those judged morally ‘worthy’ and its associated systems of moral surveillance were incorporated into the administration of state pensions in ways which would shape military welfare for decades to come. ¹²⁰ In the short term the state relied heavily upon the Pension Fund in introducing widows’ pensions. The necessary details allowing the War Office to identify and pay those widows and orphans eligible for pensions were provided by the Patriotic Fund. ¹²¹ Moreover, the Fund essentially paid out state pensions for April–June 1901 (the first quarter of the financial year), subsequently being refunded over £8,500 by the War Office. ¹²²

The Patriotic Fund now had to consider how state pensions should affect its own grants. In May 1901 the Fund announced its intention to give seven shillings a week to widows ineligible for state pensions, and an additional two shillings weekly to those with five-shilling pensions – in accordance with a recent recommendation by the Central Council for the Organization of the War Relief Funds. (As Rowntree in the same year named seven shillings weekly as ‘the minimum necessary expenditure’ for a single man or woman this was scarcely generous. ¹²³ ) Colonel Young warned, however, that some widows would receive nothing, and with the introduction of state pensions the Fund began more systematic means testing. In July 1901, 823 Transvaal War widows were receiving no allowance ‘as having State Pension, Daily Telegraph Annuities, or in Service’ while another 424 had nothing ‘as being provided for by local or Newspaper Funds’. ¹²⁴ By the end of 1902 only 1,203 widows were receiving allowances from the Transvaal War Fund for themselves and another 689 for their children only, and this number was soon reduced further as the Fund implemented a more general policy of removing grants from employed widows with state pensions. ¹²⁵

Meanwhile the War Funds Committee’s criticisms of the Patriotic Fund had not been forgotten. In July 1901 a Joint Select Committee appointed to consider how charity could best supplement state pensions recommended that the Fund should be abolished, its role and resources being taken over by two new boards, one military and one naval, which would also administer pensions. ¹²⁶ Instead the government left pensions payments to the War Office and Admiralty, and charity in the hands of a reformed Patriotic Fund. On 1 January 1904 the Royal Patriotic Fund Commission was reconstituted as the Royal Patriotic Fund Corporation. Membership of the Corporation was significantly expanded both to increase its local contacts (representatives of all Britain’s counties and major towns were included) and to reinforce government control (with members representing Treasury, Admiralty, and War Office). The new executive committee included the labour MP D.J. Shackleton and one of the old Fund’s most persistent critics, the Liberal MP Hudson Kearley. ¹²⁷ A new network of local ‘honorary agents’, most of whom were honorary branch secretaries of the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Families Association, finally brought some female input to the Fund. ¹²⁸ Nevertheless ‘a very strong family resemblance’ remained between the old and new Patriotic Funds, and there was much continuity in personnel, including the Fund’s secretary Colonel Young. ¹²⁹

One of the Corporation’s first actions was to issue a fresh public appeal for the Transvaal War Fund. Though an actuary’s report at 31 December 1902 had reported a credit balance of nearly £70,000 if neither the TWF’s beneficiaries nor its rates increased, in fact new widows and orphans continued to be registered. The Fund also hoped to place Boer War widows on the same scale as Crimean War widows, with increased grants in old age and renewal of the allowances of remarried widows on second widowhood: the estimated costs of these changes produced a minimum deficit of £231,000. ¹³⁰ But the appeal, made in July 1904, was a failure, raising less than £13,000, largely in transfers from local Boer War funds rather than new subscriptions. The Patriotic Fund blamed financial depression and competition from other charities: two years after the peace, apparently, the emotional appeal of the war widow had been superseded by other more ‘attractive philanthropic objects’. ¹³¹

The effects of the war on soldiers and their families, however, continued to be felt long after peace had been signed. The war left thousands of ex-servicemen with long-term post-combat conditions. During the war over 72,000 other ranks soldiers had been invalided home, most for disease or injury rather than wounds. ¹³² By May 1902, 14,398 soldiers had been awarded disability pensions as a result of their South African War service. ¹³³ Many veterans returned home only to die months or years later from conditions stemming from their war service. As Table 2 shows, by July 1904 the Fund had registered 574 new Transvaal War widows since the peace; by June 1907 the number was 825. If slightly fewer than one in four British other ranks Boer War veterans were married, some 3,500 servicemen had died as a result of the conflict in the five years since the war’s conclusion.

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Table 2.

Transvaal War Fund: Numbers of Other Ranks Widows Registered June 1902 to June 1907.

Date	Total Cases
June 1902	4,057
Dec 1902	4,269
July 1903	4,468
Dec 1903	4,539
July 1904	4,631
June 1907	4,882

Sources: TNA, PIN 96/14, minutes of the Royal Patriotic Fund Executive and Finance Committee; Transvaal War Fund Appeal, 15 July 1904; The Times, 19 July 1907.

Though pensions were most usually awarded for gunshot wounds, ¹³⁴ the Fund’s records suggest that early death in veterans commonly resulted either from tuberculosis, in its various forms, or from ‘heart disease’. ‘Soldier’s Heart’ was a recognized condition in the Victorian army, attributed in the South African War mainly to long marches across the veldt carrying heavy equipment and to rheumatic fever caused by prolonged exposure to cold and wet. ¹³⁵ Suicides noted in the Fund’s records suggest psychological traumas also resulted from the war. ¹³⁶ These long-term consequences of war service, though noted by medical historians, have been ignored in the social history of the South African War. Yet, as the Patriotic Fund put it, these delayed deaths were ‘perhaps the saddest’ cases, ‘of long suffering and illness, exhausting the slender resources of the family’. ¹³⁷ Writing to the commander in chief, Lord Roberts, Annie Jardine of the Liverpool Transvaal War Fund particularly emphasized the hardships of ‘phthisis’ cases, ‘as this disease is so protracted, and still worse, leaves the little children with tainted health and the widow worn out with long nursing’. The widows and orphans of soldiers who died more than two years after receiving the fatal wound or disease were ineligible for state pensions. Jardine, publishing her correspondence with the War Office in The Times, hoped ‘this great injustice may become known and public opinion compel a more liberal treatment’ of soldiers’ dependants – but without result. ¹³⁸ These cases remained wholly reliant on charity, usually the Patriotic Fund.

Largely because of this burden, five years after the peace the Patriotic Fund’s Transvaal War Fund was facing financial crisis. Thereafter, however, a progressive expansion of the state’s responsibilities, both for war widows and for social welfare more broadly, significantly mitigated the Fund’s obligations. In 1907 the Fund appealed successfully to the government to increase the eligibility period from two years to seven ‘in view of the certainty of a considerable number of soldiers … dying within the next few years from wounds or disease contracted’ in the South African War. Though these pensions were payable only from 1 October 1907, with no back-payments either to widows or to the TWF, this saved the Fund over £5,000 in the first year alone. ¹³⁹ The introduction of Old Age Pensions, from 1 January 1909, had a limited effect on the Patriotic Fund’s finances because of its peculiar decision to disqualify eligible widows from receiving OAPs by raising their allowances to just above the maximum income level, to relieve ‘the burden of the taxpayer’. ¹⁴⁰ (This prioritization of taxpayer interests over widows’ welfare suggests the reformed Patriotic Fund retained a good deal of that worldview so strongly criticized in the 1890s.) Nevertheless, an actuary’s report at 31 March 1910 calculated that with these two factors plus a diminution in the numbers of eligible orphans (as they grew up) and widows (as they remarried) the TWF now had a £98,000 surplus. ¹⁴¹ Widows’ allowances were increased (raising expenditure by £2,500 in 1910), and the TWF began funding the education and maintenance of female orphans at the Royal Victoria Patriotic School. ¹⁴² In 1912 the TWF was extended to the widows and orphans of soldiers who had served in the South African War but died from other causes. ¹⁴³ The First World War eventually brought major changes. In 1918 the state pension for Boer War widows – which had remained at five shillings since 1901 – was raised to match Great War pensions (13s 9d); a further raise in 1920 brought it to £1 a week, or 26s 8d for widows with children or over 40. Although between 1918 and 1924 state pensions to South African War widows were reduced by the amount of any grant made to them from funds ‘raised by public subscription’ (including the Patriotic Fund), these increases made a dramatic difference both to the widows themselves and to the Fund. Moreover, in 1922 state pensions were finally extended to Boer War ‘off the strength’ widows. ¹⁴⁴ The shift from voluntarism to the state in the financial support of war widows was now almost complete. However, because of the 1912 decision to pay service-based pensions, the Patriotic Fund continued to take on new Boer War cases until the 1940s. The last remaining Transvaal War Fund widow died, aged 96, only in 1981. ¹⁴⁵

Conclusion

Andrew Thompson suggests that the long debate over the extent to which the South African War was ‘popular’ in Britain has distracted historians from the more basic question of ‘how different parts of British society became caught up in it’. ¹⁴⁶ As this article confirms, one answer to this question concerns the working-class families who lost menfolk temporarily or permanently to the war in South Africa; another is in the dense network of philanthropy dedicated to the British victims of war. Some 200,000 soldiers’ families required charitable support during their main breadwinner’s absence on active service. ¹⁴⁷ Thousands of wives suffered wartime bereavement, or welcomed back the husband and father only to see him die from combat-related conditions after months or years of illness. For most bereavement meant penury, most desperately for those left pregnant or ‘with baby in arms’. The military safety net in the South African War was provided largely by private philanthropy. Yet the case of soldiers’ widows also revealed the limits of voluntarism. The existence of three competing charities compromised the efficiency of aid distribution, while the Patriotic Fund failed to command the confidence of press, public, or parliament. The introduction of state pensions, in part reflecting a new understanding of the soldier as citizen, also represented a recognition of charity’s inability to support at an adequate level the escalating number of war widows and orphans. Henceforth the state would become the main provider of financial aid to war widows, charity’s role reduced to filling the – still substantial – gaps in state provision.

Underpinned as it was by sober appreciation of war’s human costs, war philanthropy brought the conflict home to ordinary Britons in ways more significant and enduring than dramatic but short-lived flashes of jingoism. Newspaper funds integrated the war and its domestic impact into the everyday, as readers tracked the funds’ progress and beneficiaries alongside news from the front. Fundraising brought the war into daily life, at work and leisure, school and church, in private families and through large-scale public spectacles. The importance of working-class donations to the widows’ funds, especially the Shilling Fund, raises the wider issue of how working people responded to empire. Helping widows could be dissociated from support for an imperial war, as some ‘pro-Boers’ insisted. As a campaign to assist working-class women and children the Fund appealed to class and community solidarity. The importance of victory celebrations as a trigger for donation, however, suggests the imperial factor should not be underplayed. Imperial culture, as Beaven argues, was not monolithic: rather it was ‘multi-layered and recast to capture the concerns of a locality’. ¹⁴⁸ From the London district to the Scottish nation, the Shilling Fund succeeded by focusing a diffuse and uneven imperial patriotism through more concrete loyalties of class and region.