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Whenever the Boer War is mentioned, the first thing many Australians think about is the 27 February 1902 execution by firing squad of Harry ‘Breaker’ Morant and Peter Handcock. 110 years after his execution, there is a move to have Morant pardoned. History editor Dr Glenn Davies reflects on the arguments for his innocence or guilt.
- Harry ‘Breaker’ Morant
31 MAY 2012 marked the 110th anniversary of the end of the South African War (Second Anglo-Boer War). The Peace Treaty of Vereeniging was signed on 31 May 1902 between the South African Republic and the Republic of the Orange Free State on one side, and the British Empire on the other. In Australia, the Boer War is often called Australia’s ‘forgotten war’.
Between 1899 and 1902, 16,000 men went from Australia to the Boer War in South Africa, with more than 500 of them dying there. Australians who served also included an unknown number of Aboriginal trackers. Six Australians received the Victoria Cross in South Africa, and many others received other decorations. Though the nation honoured its dead with ceremonies and monuments, the enormity of the following two world wars has overshadowed the legacy of this terrible and bloody conflict. In truth, it was a nasty, bloody affair. Cruelty abounded. British soldiers besieged in Kimberley refused to let Africans have meat or vegetables. Many starved to death or died of scurvy. In Mafeking, Baden-Powell left 2,000 Africans to starve or be shot by the Boers. The Boers flogged and shot Africans caught working for the British and did the same to white army scouts. Some units swore not to take prisoners.
Harry ‘Breaker’ Morant was born in Somerset in 1864 and moved to Australia when he was 19, finding fame as a horse-breaker, drover and poet in the 1890s. He earned a reputation as a charming scoundrel, but a heavy drinker and a womaniser. When war broke out in South Africa, he volunteered to fight with the English against the Boers. In 1901, his unit – the Bushveldt Carbineers – killed 12 prisoners of war and one German witness. The Bushveldt Carbineers had an Australian flavour, drawing on colonials who were accomplished riders, expert shots and well-adapted to the South African climate and terrain. More than 40 per cent of its 320 members were Australian. The killings of prisoners took place over four days and followed the death of the men’s commanding officer, Captain Frederick Hunt, in an assault on a Boer stronghold. Hunt was a close friend of Morant’s and the latter was reportedly enraged by accounts that his body had been mutilated. The men admitted to the shooting but it was not clear whether they had been ordered to kill the prisoners or not. The three never denied the shootings, but claimed it was accepted practice in the fog of war. They also maintained that Lord Kitchener, the commander of British troops in South Africa, had handed down secret orders not to take any prisoners.
A controversial aspect of Australia’s history in the Boer War was the trial and execution of Morant and another Australian army lieutenant, Peter Handcock, who both faced a firing squad on 27 February 1902 for killing 12 unarmed Boer prisoners. A third man, George Witton, was jailed for life. Some Australians were uneasy that the British army had punished these men. Still, they’d belonged to a British regiment, not an Australian one, and Morant had never considered himself Australian anyway. As news came out about the murders a consensus grew — shaped by a noisy campaign by Witton’s family — that Morant and Handcock deserved their fate, but Witton didn’t. Witton was released from prison after three years following a petition by 80,000 Australians to King Edward VII.
Morant and Handcock are the first and only Australians ever executed during war time. Their story attracted national attention in the early 1980s, following the publication of The Breaker by Kit Denton and the subsequent Bruce Beresford film Breaker Morant, starring Edward Woodward.
In one of the film’s best known lines, Morant describes the justice meted out during the Boer War.
“We applied rule .303. We caught them and we shot them under rule .303,” the character says, referring to the calibre of the standard issue army rifle of the time.
It is in this movie that Morant’s last words, as he faced the firing squad, are:
“Shoot straight, you bastards!”
Descendants of the three believe they did not receive a fair trial and have been campaigning for years to clear their names.
Former Navy lawyer, Commander James Unkles says he was researching Morant’s lawyer, Major James Thomas, when he became convinced the soldiers were innocent. He became involved in this case in 2009 after watching the ‘Breaker’ Morant movie. He became concerned by the disregard for the rights of the accused to a fair trial, in particular a reasonable opportunity for their Australian defending officer, Major James Thomas to prepare a defence case for Lieutenants Morant, Handcock and Witton who had been charged with killing Boer prisoners during the Boer War.
“It became very apparent to me that a major injustice had been committed and the only way it was going to be addressed was by taking some action,” he said.
As with most controversies, this one is mysterious. Commander Unkles says many transcripts from the original trial are missing and there are all sorts of theories as to their whereabouts. He has also identified apparent defects in the court-martial procedure, including the fact that the defendants received inadequate legal representation and were denied access to certain evidence.
The case for pardons for Morant, Handcock and Witton is also strengthened by the British government’s decision in 2002 to pardon over 300 soldiers executed during World War 1 for offences such as cowardice and desertion. The soldiers came from many countries, including Ireland, Canada and New Zealand. Two of the New Zealand soldiers had been born in Australia.
Breaker Morant
In October 2009, Unkles forwarded two petitions for pardons, one to the Australian House of Representatives Petitions Committee and the other to Australia’s head of state, the Queen. In May 2010, he also sent a petition to the Australian Senate. As a result of his lobbying of Australian politicians and letters to the British government, he succeeded in having the matter heard before the House of Representatives Petitions Committee on the 15 March 2010, where a member of the Committee described the grounds of appeal as strong and compelling. However, in October 2010 the case for pardons was rejected by the British government. The British decision did not deter Unkles. Since then, he has produced compelling evidence that orders not to take prisoners were issued by senior British officers, who were not held to account while Morant, Handcock and Witton were prosecuted and two of whom paid the ultimate price.
On 21 October 2011, the then Australian Attorney General, Robert McClelland stated in writing,
‘I have been persuaded that this case does raise procedural fairness concerns. To this end I have asked my Department to prepare a submission to the British Secretary for Defence, the Right Honourable Dr Liam Fox, MP to draw his attention to the questions that exist in this regard.’
McClelland’s intervention was significant as it represented the first occasion in 110 years since these Australian veterans were tried that an Australian Minister, on behalf of the Australian Government, had raised the matter with the British government.
Boer War historian Craig Wilcox, author of Australia’s Boer War: The War in South Africa, argues Breaker Morant and Peter Handcock should not be honoured with a posthumous pardon for their war crimes.
He said:
“I’ve got a gloomy view of the man himself and his elevation as a folk hero. Those who don’t share that view are blind to his crimes”
“Lining up civilians by the roadside and killing them, that’s just not right.
“My gut reaction is that they shouldn’t be pardoned.”
Wilcox states the petition to pardon Morant and Handcock is feeding off their myth as folk heroes, instead of their reality as cold-blooded killers. After their death in 1902, the execution gradually took on the dimensions of martyrdom and his story mutated into a cautionary tale about what can happen when Australian soldiers’ lives are given over to foreign wars and foreign generals. Like the legend of Ned Kelly, Morant’s story sits comfortably with us today. But Wilcox argues that his deeds resemble Kelly’s only in so far as he was executed for murder and he died game. For Wilcox, Harry Morant was a war criminal.
No one has questioned Morant and Handcock’s guilt, including the petition’s authors. The petition argues their convictions were unjust, partially because the soldiers’ right to plea for mercy from an execution was denied and the Australian government was not told of the trial until after they were both killed. Historian Richard Scully from UNE agrees Morant and his fellows were certainly denied certain rights which would otherwise have been available to troops in their position. But he asks whether the lack of procedural nicety and due process evident in a 110 year old court case is a reason to pardon men whom everyone agrees shot and killed declared enemies who surrendered to them, and shot and killed at least one civilian who witnessed the atrocities. He states that pardoning them
“…would achieve nothing more than assuaging a false sense of wounded Australian pride, based on a supposed victimization by our former ‘imperial masters’.”
And what signal would go out to our soldiers today? That taking out unarmed civilians isn’t so bad after all, if you can somehow pass the buck to the Poms, the Yanks or whoever? But the guilty verdicts were the consequence of real crimes that could not be denied.
Jim Unkles argues in favour of the Morant legend that Morant, Handcock and Whitton were denied justice and, as is widely believed in Australia, they had been scapegoated to appease German outrage over the killing of a South African-born German missionary.
”Although Morant, Handcock and Witton admitted shooting Boer prisoners, they were not the only ones and were following orders – orders which, according to British military legal documents, did exist”
On the other hand, Wilcox and Scully contend the arguments put by the accused — merely following orders, merely avenging enemy barbarities, merely doing what other soldiers were secretly doing — were as bogus as they were inconsistent. Just because some other soldiers involved in the incident escaped punishment at the time didn’t make Morant, Handcock and Witton any less guilty.
In December 2011, McClelland was replaced as Attorney General by Nicola Roxon. In May 2012, she overturned the finding of her predecessor, expressing concern about “the morality of advocating on behalf of the three Australians”. But don’t discount the lingering power of the Morant legend. Politicians are busy people, with too little time to read enough history to establish an independent view about the past. But they do glance at the polls — and Jim Unkles insists ordinary Australians are as impatient as he is to rehabilitate Morant.
Unkles insists this is not the end of the road in the campaign to get justice for the three Australians. Although he has now exhausted all the possibilities and avenues of appeal with regard to the British and Australian governments and the Queen, he will now lodge an appeal in the British High Court in London. It will be interesting to see which side is accepted: that of the Morant legend and his ill-treatment at the hands of British generals, or the contention that he was guilty of war crimes and received a just punishment. As this controversy began in a court of law, perhaps it is only fitting that it should be resolved in a court of law.
(For more information about James Unkles campaign to get a pardon for Breaker Morant and brothers-in-arms, see his Breaker Morant blog.)
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Australia License
6 Comments
We, as Australians, tend to look at the Breaker Morant story from too narrow a perspective – we look at the legalities, at the stories of secret orders, whether justice was done or denied, whether they were war criminals, or, scapegoats etc.
But we usually miss the wider context, which is VERY RELEVANT today – especially to the concept of an “Indepedent Australia”.
The Boer War was about securing control of the mineral and mining rights in southern Africa, FOR THE EMPIRE, by any means, fair, foul, criminal or whatever.
That agenda has NOT changed — our mineral wealth, especially in WA, and in QLD, is still seen as part of a worldwide financial, trade and military empire, controlled from London. In other words, the Australian constitution, our status as a nation, means NOTHING in the eyes of the guys calling the shots in London.
They could not care less about us — their interest is in protecting their re-emerging empire, and their turf war with a rising German business empire.
Killing Boers, killing Australians, none of that matters to the guys making the decisions — they just trot out the royal family, the royal wedding, even the Queen herself and the promise of the odd knighthood, as props to make sure they keep the colonial workers in their “rightful place”.
‘Politicians are busy people, with too little time to read enough history to establish an independent view about the past. But they do glance at the polls’
That about sums it up – for the Morant case, and for the rest of us.
No, we shouldn’t be pardoning Morant or Hancock. Sorry to disappoint the ‘Aussie Aussie Aussie Oi Oi Oi’ club who’ve grown up with Kit Dentons fanciful version of the ‘Breaker’. Much like other Australian Military myths its grown out of a highly jingoistic version of our military history that came about in the 1970′s.
The story of Australia in the Boer War is one that has never really been told to the Australian people properly. I’ve always felt that the ‘ANZAC’ spirit was actually born on the veldts of South Africa and it was those veterans that took it with them to the shores of Gallipoli 14/15 years later. People don’t really realise that the dislike of the British Officer corps started in South Africa and it was so bad that when Morant and Hancock were executed not only were Australian troops not told they were also confined to barracks and had their weapons taken away from them.
Right from the outset of the war Australia and Australian soldiers were treated as inferior. Australian units were broken up and used peace-meal wherever the British saw fit to put them. No Australian high ranking officers above Major were allowed commands. Famous victories like Elands River (where Morant, Hancock and Whitton’s lawyer distinguished himself) were ignored, especially after more famous British generals left them to die, can’t have the Colonials showing us up eh wot?
After the big battles ended earlier in the war the Australian troops excelled in the more mobile guerrilla campaign that dominated the war. Their great riding and shooting skills came to the fore. But due to the nation of their work they came more and more into contact with the Boer families and found they had far more incommon with the local farmers they were sent to kill and harass than their British Officers. Many colonial units felt similar feelings.
In the end, Morant and Hancock did get punished for their own actions. But, saying that, just in the Bushveldt Carbineers alone there should have been plenty of other British Officers sitting beside them in front of that firing squad that morning. But conveniently they had left the service or quickly posted out of the country and avoided prosecution. This does not absolve Morant or Hancocks guilt. Not at all. But as I said others should have been shot with them.
But we learnt from that and we learnt from the Boer War. When WW1 started we refused to break up our units, we refused having our soldiers suffer under British Military Justice. We had our own officers and the Australian Government remained determined that what had happened in South Africa would never happen again.
Whoops…forgot to mention:
Morant wasn’t a ‘larrakin’ nor a ‘scallywag’ or ‘bastard son of son lord’. He was a common drunk, thief, liar, cheat…basically he was an arsehole. He forged checks, stole horses, stole property, gambled and was chased out of one country town after another in the years he was in Australia. His only real claim to fame was he penned a few versus in a time that the Bushman Poet ruled the publishing world in Australia. He plied that trade when every bloke with a horse or swag was sending in verse after verse into Australian periodicals.
This a complex matter. A source of history, intrigue, politics, national agendas and how history is reviewed in contemporary Australia. Much of the debate about the Morant matter has been lost, manipulated and subjected to self serving agendas. Sadly, what constiturtes the ‘truth’ will probably never be known. One so called expert after another has populated their theories as to what happened over 100 years ago. From my experience, personal and organisational agendas have been hard at work to ensure this case never receives Government support for review and pardons. Many have raised dubious claims about Morant and the Bushveldt Carbineers. The so called evidence by dubious reaserch protocols has consisted of generalisations without credible sources or evidence.
What I have attempted to do is represent the interests of the descendants of the accused who have lived with shame of the way these men were treated during their trials and the gross injustice of being denied their right of appeal. It should be remembered that these men were denied an opportunity to communicate with their relatives and the Australian Government prior to their sentencing. The descendants of these relatives ask for a fair opportiunity for the merits of the case for pardons to be judged by an independent inquiry, one divorced from the petty politics, vested interests and the flamboyant egos of those who purport to know all that there is to know about the case.
Late in 2011, the then Attoreny General for Australia, Robert McClelland, MP made an histroical determination. He was persuaded by the evidence that serious procedural errors had been made in the trial and sentencing of the accused and he would make a submission to the British Government about the matter and ask for an independent inquiry,
In ny view, in the face of criticism from entrenched interests who fear embarrassment for the British Government, McClelland recognised that there was a need for a fearless examination of the issues in this case after 110 years of controversy and doubt that these men received fair trials and were denied the right to appeal their death sentences. The passing of time and the fact that Morant, Handcock and Witton are deceased does not diminish the possible errors in the administration of justice. Injustices in times of war are inexcusable and it takes vigilance to right wrongs and address injustices to honour those unfairly treated and to demonstrate respect to the rule of law.
The current AG, Nicola Roxon has taken a different view and announced in May 2012, that the Australian Government would not be making any representations to the British Government. The differing views of two AG’s, is puzzling as it is controversial. Here we have the AG Department creating two different advices for two AGs! I suspect there has been pressure brought to bear on Government not to support any move to have this case reviewed and now McClelland is no longer AG, the first Australian Minister in 110 years who was prepared to take a stand in this matter, the opponents to the case for pardons can rest easy. However, the case for review will not desist, the descendants and all who believe in a ‘fair go’and respect for the rule of law will continue to press for justice to be done. If this matter must be reviewed by an appeal court in England then so be it, however, I am still advocating for an impartial inquiry to review the evidence that I say establishes these men were not afforded trials and due process according to the law of 1902. I have also uncovered evidence of orders not to take prisoners, the complicity of British officers in the giving of such orders and British soldiers who carried out the orders. I do not wish to press this evidence, but it does explain why these men were made an example of, to deflect any culpability of senior command and to appease the tension between Britain and Germany at a time when peace negotiations were underway to bring an end to the Boer/British war.
I am confident that the democratic principles that feature in the histories of Australia and Britain will feature in the review of this case before a court of law. I am not alone in this case, I have received support from many MPs, judicial officers and legal practitioners who agree that there is a case for independent review.
It remains to be seen if such a review, that so many appear to fear, will finally answer the question, were these men tried according to law and was justice served as a consequence? For the descendants it will mean closure, that their concerns have been addressed.
Details of the case for review, http://www.breakermorant.com
A comment concerning Richard Scully statements as asserted by Dr Davies; Richard Scully from UNE agrees Morant and his fellows were certainly denied certain rights which would otherwise have been available to troops in their position. But he asks whether the lack of procedural nicety and due process evident in a 110 year old court case is a reason to pardon men whom everyone agrees shot and killed declared enemies who surrendered to them, and shot and killed at least one civilian who witnessed the atrocities
Scully’s reference to procedural nicety and due process is a shameful reflection on what matters in civilised communities. If due process is not significant, then why are principles of law cherished by organisations such as the United Nations and the International Criminal court?
Denying these men their right of appeal can hardly be described as a procedural nicety. Even the standards of law in 1902, rights were enshrined in law, including the Army Act to ensure due process. This remains a pillar of justice in national and international law in 1912.
If we accept Scully’s comment, why bother with trials at all, just use due trial process at all? If standards are not adhered too, our judicial system and the protection it offers suffers whether in the present or as it did 110 years ago.
Richard should also know that Morant and Handock were acquitted of the shooting of the civilian, Heese. The evidence of guilt was not clear and they were rightly acquitted. The matter should remain just that instead of being used to bolster the argument against pardons. Richard’s comment, And what signal would go out to our soldiers today? That taking out unarmed civilians isn’t so bad after all, if you can somehow pass the buck to the Poms, the Yanks or whoever? The case for pardons is not about following illegal orders. It is about due process and I would think current military ethics would celebrate any case that reinforces the principles governing the rule of law and that all accused enjoy the presumption of innocence and may exhaust all their rights, including appeal without suffering excessive penalty and appeal to the Crown merely to serve ulterior agendas. This case maybe about punishing the guilty, but it is also about uncovering abuses of the trial processes that existed in 1902 and sending a challenging message in today’s world of injustices committed in name of expediency and abuse of power. An inquiry independent of Government will test whether these men were denied justice and I am sure this would be a development welcomed by those currently serving in the military, to know that regardless of the seriousness of allegations , the rights of an accused remain paramount, the corner stone of civilised nations and should never be compromised.
[...] previously reported military lawyer Jim Unkles was unsuccessful at securing a pardon for Breaker Morant, however all [...]
[...] previously reported military lawyer Jim Unkles was unsuccessful at securing a pardon for Breaker Morant, however all [...]