BEGINNING OF BOER WAR

Press, Volume XCVI, Issue 28370, 31 August 1957, Page 3

BEGINNING OF BOER WAR

Alleged Effect Of Delayed Message (N-Z. Preu Association—CopvrigM) CAPE TOWN, August 29. A delayed telegram prevented Cecil Rhodes from stopping the Jameson Raid, which sparked off the Boer War, according to an 80-year-old man who was ■ telegraphist at the time. Controversy over the famous raid, led by Dr. Starr Jameson in 1895, flared up again yesterday when Mr Horatio Theodore Watson wrote to the "Cape Times" claiming that he delivered a telegram to Rhodes, who said: "My God, it has started!” Mr J. F. Rivers was, at ths time, a telegraphist at the St George street Cape Town, Post Office.

He said today that Jameson had sent a telegram to Rhodes, then Premier of Cape Colony, on the morning of Saturday, December 31, 1895, informing him that unless he heard from Rhodes within 24 hours he would enter the Transvaal Republic from the British territory of Bechuanaland and join the Britons who were in rebellion at Johannesburg against the Trasvaal Government.

The telegram, which was in code, arrived at Cape Town when the offices of the company to which all Rhodes's telegrams were delivered had closed. Mr Rivers said the decoding next morning was in the hands of two men—Mr Jack Stevens and Dr. Rutherford Harris. Stevens said Rhodes should see it at once, but Harris said there was no need for hurry. Rhodes did not get the telegram until the afternoon.

Mr Rivers s?id: “The simple explanation was that Rutherford Harris was in the plot and did not want Jameson recalled.” The raid ended in surrender. Jameson was gaoled for 15 months but rose to become Prime Minister of the Cape Colony from 1904 to 1908. A British Parliamentary select committee which investigated the raid "severely censured" Rhodes in its report. In 1911 Jameson was knighted. Reference books differ over the date on which the Jameson party crossed the border, but the "Encyclopaedia Britannica” gives it as December 31, 1895—the same day on which Mr Rivers says the telegram was sent