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Harry 'Breaker' Morant (1864- 27 February 1902) was an Anglo-Australian drover, horseman, poet and soldier whose renowned skill with horses earned him the nickname "The Breaker". Articulate, intelligent and well educated, he was also a published poet and became one of the better-known 'back-block bards' of the 1890s, with the bulk of his work appearing in "The Bulletin" magazine.
During his service in the Boer War, Morant ordered the summary execution of several Afrikaner and African prisoners, which led to his controversial court-martial and execution for murder by the British Army; his death warrant was personally signed by the British commander in South Africa, Lord Kitchener.
In the century since his death Morant has become a folk hero in Australia. His story has been the subject of several books and a major Australian feature film. Even during his lifetime there was a great deal of conflicting information about this romantic but elusive figure, and many of the stories about him are undoubtedly apocryphal.
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Accounts of Morant's life before the Boer War vary considerably and it appears that Morant himself fabricated a number of these romantic legends. His full name was either Henry Harbord Morant or Edwin Henry Murrant; he was certainly born in England, probably in Devonshire; his date of birth is believed to have been around Christmas 1864 or sometime in 1865. He spent his early years in the Union Workhouse in Bridgwater, England, where his mother was employed.
Morant is often described as being 'well educated'. He claimed to be the illegitimate son of Admiral Sir George Digby Morant of the Royal Navy, a claim often repeated as fact by later writers, although the Admiral is said to have denied it. Other sources name his parents as Edwin Murrant and Catherine Riely. Although it is yet to be proven, Australian author Nick Bleszynski claims that there is 'strong circumstantial evidence' to suggest that The Breaker was indeed the son of Admiral Morant.
Through an unknown set of circumstances, the young Morant came into the care of a wealthy Scottish author, soldier, hunt-master and golfer, George Whyte-Melville. Regarded as the greatest British equestrian of his day, he is believed to have exerted a strong influence on Morant, who clearly flourished under his patronage, and learned the horsemanship for which he was to become famous.
Morant emigrated to Australia in either 1883 or 1884 and in settled in outback Queensland. Over the next fifteen years, working in Queensland, New South Wales and South Australia, the charismatic roustabout made a name for himself as hard-drinking, womanising bush poet and gained renown as a fearless and expert horseman.
Morant worked in a variety of occupations. He reportedly traded in horses in Charters Towers, then worked for a time on a newspaper at Hughenden in 1884 but there are suggestions that he left both towns as a result of debts. He then drifted around for some until he found work as a bookkeeper and storeman on the Esmaralda cattle station.
On March 13, 1884 Morant married Daisy May O'Dwyer, who later became famous in Australia as the anthropologist Daisy Bates, but the couple divorced soon after; Daisy reportedly threw him out after he failed to pay for the wedding and then stole some pigs and a saddle. He then worked for several years as an itinerant drover and horse-breaker, as well as writing his popular bush ballads, becoming known to and friendly with famed Australian poets Henry Lawson, Banjo Patterson and William Ogilvie.
At the time Morant volunteered for military service (in 1899), the formal federation of the Commonwealth of Australia was still two years away. Australia consisted of separate colonies, each of which was still subject to direct British rule, and because the population comprised such a high proportion of British migrants, most Australians still had strong ties to "The Mother Country". Consequently thousands of Australian men volunteered to fight for Britain in the Boer War, which pitted British colonial forces against rebellious Dutch Boer settlers in South Africa, which was then also a British colony.
Evidently seeing it as a chance to return to England, Morant enlisted with the second contingent of the South Australian Mounted Rifles. While in Adelaide, Morant was reportedly invited to visit the summer residence of the South Australian governor, Lord Tennyson; after completing his training he was promoted to Lance Corporal and his regiment embarked for the Transvaal on February 27, 1900.
In many respects the terrain and climate of South Africa is remarkably similar to that of outback Australia, so Morant was in his element. His superb horsemanship, expert bush skills and educated manner soon attracted the attention of his superiors. South Australian Colonel Joseph Gordon recommended him as a dispatch rider to Bennet Burleigh, the war correspondent of the London Daily Telegraph; the job reportedly provided the debonair Morant with ample opportunity to visit the nearby hospital and dally with the nurses.
The statement of service Morant tendered at his trial is quoted, apparently verbatim, in Witton's book. According to that account, Morant was commissioned as a Lieutenant in the Bushveldt Carbineers on April 1, 1901; prior to that he had served in the South Australian Second Contingent for nine months with the rank of sergeant.
In March 1900 Morant carried despatches for the Flying Column to Prieska, under Col. Lowe, 7th D.G. He was in the general advance to Bloemfontein and took part in the engagements of Karee Siding and Kroonstadt, and other engagements with Lord Roberts until the entry into Pretoria. He was at Diamond Hill and was then attached to General French's staff, Cavalry Brigade, as war correspondent with Bennet Burleigh of the London Daily Telegraph. He accompanied that column through Belfast and Middleburgh to the occupation of Barbeton. He was promoted to a commission in the Transvaal Constabulary, but at this point he took leave and returned to England for six months. Here he became close friends with Captain Percy Hunt, and Morant and Hunt became engaged to two sisters.
A previously unpublished photo in Nick Bleszinksi's book, taken ca. 1900 (presumably while on leave), shows the 35-year-old Morant to have been a debonair and strikingly handsome man. His short dark hair, carefully groomed, surmounts chiselled features and piercing pale eyes. His left foot rests on a stone; leaning slightly to his left, his left arm rests across the raised leg, riding crop held between thumb and forefinger, a cloth cap dangling from his fingers. Immaculately dressed in an expensive tailored riding outfit, his right thumb is hooked nonchalantly in the coast pocket, a cigarette dangling between his first two fingers.
Following their defeats on the battlefield during 1899-1900, the Boer rebels embarked on a guerilla campaign against the British. In response, Lord Kitchener, the British commander in South Africa assembled and deployed a number of irregular regiments to combat Boer commando units and protect British interests in the region.
On his return from leave, Morant joined one of these irregular units, the Bushveldt Carbineers (BVC), a 320-strong regiment that had been formed in February 1901 under the command of an Australian, Colonel R.W. Lenehan. Following his friend's lead, Captain Hunt joined the BVC soon after.
The regiment, based in Pietersburg, 180 miles north of Pretoria, saw action in the Spelonken region of the Northern Transvaal during 1901-1902. The region was remote, wild and dangerous and was also in a particularly unhealthy malarial area, so the British had difficulty in finding troops; as a result many colonial soldiers were enlisted. About forty percent of the men in the BVC were Australians, but the regiment also included about forty surrendered Boers who had been recruited from the internment camps, and their presence was greatly resented by the Australians. The garrison was soon divided into two columns, one of which was under the command of Lt Morant, operating in the Strydpoort district, about thirty miles south-east of Pietersburg.
During the often savage guerilla campaign, there were numerous atrocities on both sides. Boer commandos took to stripping captured British prisoners of their khaki uniforms and using them to gain a strategic advantage in battle by masquerading as British soldiers; they also allegedly abused the white flag, blew up trains and murdered the survivors. Kitchener responded with equal ruthlessness, ordering the destruction of Boer farms and the mass internment of refugees and prisoners of war in order to deprive the commandos of their civilian support base. Kitchener foiled the train-wrecking by ordering the placing of Boer civilians on the front of trains.
Although unknown to the general public and denied by the Army during Morant's trial, it is evident that Kitchener did issue an order that British and colonial troops were to shoot any Boer commandos they encountered who were dressed in khaki. This secret order, confirmed in a cipher telegram sent by Kitchener to Lord Roberts, the British Secretary of War, on November 3, 1901, was to be Morant's undoing.
Morant's unit was very successful in eliminating roving bands of enemy commandos from their area, forcing the Boers to transfer their activities to the Bandolier Kop area, on the northern fringe of the Spelonken. In response, the Carbineers moved north under the command of a British officer, Captain James Huntley Robertson, and they established a command post in a farmhouse about 90 miles north of Pietersburg, which they renamed Fort Edward.
The other ranking officer at the Fort was Captain Alfred Taylor, a special officer with the Army's Intelligence Department. He had been selected and sent to Spelonken by Kitchener himself because of his knowledge of "the natives". Witton says that as far as the Africans were concerned,
"...he had a free hand and the power of life and death; he was known and feared by them from the Zambesi to the Spelonken, and was called by them 'Bulala', which means to kill, to slay."
He had the power to order out patrols and, according to Witton, it was generally understood that Taylor was the commander at Spelonken, and that Taylor admitted as much in evidence at the court-martial. He was, as Bleszynski notes, implicated in all the killings in the case, yet was aquitted of all charges. Taylor's role is one of the most problematic aspects of the case.
By all accounts, Captain Robertson had great difficulty in maintaining discipline and some of his troops ran wild — they looted a rum convoy, kept seized Boer livestock for themselves, and appropriated liquor and stills from the Boer farms they raided; according to George Witton's memoir, the situation was bordering on mutiny by mid-year.
On July 2, 1901 Captain Taylor received word of a disturbing incident — a few days earlier, a group of six Boers had approached the fort, apparently intending to surrender, but they were intercepted by a British patrol led by Sergeant Major Morrison and on his orders they were all shot. When this news reached Pietersburg, the Fort Edward detachment was recalled; after an enquiry, Robertson and Morrison were allowed to resign unconditionally. His squadron was replaced by a new one under the command of Capt. Hunt and which included Lts Morant, Handcock and Witton.
Like so much of his story, the exact sequence and nature of the events leading up to Morant's arrest and trial are still hotly disputed and accounts vary considerably. While it seems clear that some members of the Carbineers were responsible for shooting Boer prisoners and others, the precise circumstances of these killings and the identities of those responsible will probably never be known for certain. The following account is drawn mainly from the only surviving eyewitness source, the 1907 book "Scapegoats Of The Empire" by Lt George Witton, one of the three Australians sentenced to death for the alleged murders and the only one to escape execution.
With Hunt now commanding the detachment at Fort Edwards, discipline was immediately re-imposed by Lts Morant and Handcock, but this was resisted by some. In one incident, several members of a supply convoy led by Lt Picton looted the rum it was carrying, so they were arrested for insubordination and for threatening to shoot Picton. They escaped to Pietersburg but Capt. Hunt sent a report to Col. Lenehan, who had them detained. When the matter was brought before Col. Hall, the commandant of Pietersburg, he ordered the offenders to be discharged from the regiment and released. Witton explicitly accuses these disaffected troopers of being the people responsible for "the monstrous and extravagant reports about the Carbineers which appeared later in the English and colonial press."
Back at Fort Edward, the seized livestock was collected and handed over to the proper authorities and the stills were broken up, but according to Witton these actions were resented by the perpetrators and as a result Morant and Handcock were "detested" by certain members of the detachment.
Witton arrived at Fort Edwards on August 3 with Sgt Major Hammett and thirty men, and it was at this point that he met Morant and Handcock for the first time.
The pivotal event of the Morant affair took place two days later, on the night of August 5, 1901. Capt. Hunt led a seventeen-man patrol to a Boer farmhouse called 'Duwielskloof' (Devil's Claw), about 80 miles east of the Fort, hoping to capture its owner, the Boer commando leader Veldt Cornet Viljoen. Hunt also had several armed native African irregulars with him and Witton claims that although "those in authority" denied the use of African auxiliaries, they were in fact widely used and were responsible for "the most hideous atrocities".
Hunt had been told that Viljoen had only twenty men with him, but this appears to have been a ruse and Viljoen was lying in wait with eighty men. The Boers surprised the British as they approached and during the ensuing skirmish Viljoen was killed, as was one of the troopers, Sgt Eland, the son of a local Boer farmer. Witnesses later testified that Capt. Hunt was wounded in the chest while firing through the windows and had to be left behind, but that he was still alive when the British retreated. Another trooper, Yates, was captured by the Boers, held prisoner for two days, stripped of all his clothes and possessions and was so badly beaten that after his rescue he had to spend several weeks in hospital.
When news Hunt's death reached the fort, it had a profound effect on Morant — Witton says he became "like a man demented". He immediately ordered every available man out on patrol, broke down while addressing the men, and ordered them to avenge the death of their captain and "give no quarter".
Hunt's body was recovered the next day. It had been found lying in a gutter, naked and mutilated — the sinews at the backs of both knees and ankles had been severed, his legs were slashed with long knife cuts, his face had been crushed by hob-nailed boots. According to Kit Denton, he had also been castrated, but Witton makes no mention of this.
Hunt's battered body was taken to the nearby Reuter's Mission Station, where it was washed and buried by Rev. J.F. Reuter and Hunt's native servant Aaron, who corroborated the troopers' statements about the condition of the body. Significantly, Morant did not see Hunt's body himself — he arrived about an hour after the burial. He questioned the men about Hunt's death and, convinced his friend had been murdered in cold blood, he vowed to give no quarter and take no prisoners. Morant declared that he had on occasion ignored Hunt's order to this effect in the past, but that he would carry it out in the future.
The following day, after leaving a few men to guard the mission (which the Boers threatened to burn in reprisal for harboring the British) Morant led his unit back to the Viljoen farm. It had been abandoned, so they tracked the retreating Boers all day, sighting them just on dusk. As they closed in, the hot-headed Morant opened fire too early and they lost the element of surprise, so most of the Boers escaped. They did however capture one wounded commando called Visser.
The next morning, as they continued their pursuit, a native runner brought a message that the lightly manned Fort Edward was in danger of being attacked by the Boers, so Morant decided to abandon the chase.
At this point he searched and questioned Visser and found items of British uniform, including a pair of trousers which he identified as Hunt's; he then told Witton and others that he would have Visser shot at the first opportunity. When they stopped to eat around 11am Morant again told Witton that he intended to have Visser shot, quoting orders "direct from headquarters" and citing Kitchener's recent 'no prisoners' proclamation. He called for a firing party and although some of the men initially objected, Visser was shot.
On the return journey to the fort, Morant's unit stopped for the night at the store of a British trader, Mr Hays, who was well known for his hospitality. After they left, Hays was raided by a party of Boers who looted everything he owned, even dragging Mrs Hays' wedding ring from her finger. When they arrived back at Fort Edward, they learned that a convoy under Lt Neel had arrived from Pietersburg the previous day, just in time to reinforce Capt. Taylor against a strong Boer force that attacked the fort. During the encounter one Carbineer was wounded and several horses were shot and it was at this time that Taylor had a native shot for refusing to give him information about the Boers' movements. Neel and Picton then returned to Pietersburg and
Other killings followed; on 23 August Morant led a small patrol to intercept a group of eight prisoners from Viljoen's commando who were being brought in under guard; Morant ordered them to be taken to the side of the road and shot.
About a week later, reports began to circulate that a German missionary, Reverend Predikant C.H.D. Hesse, had been found shot along the Piersburg road about fifteen miles from the fort. Shortly afterwards, acting on a report that three armed Boer commandos were heading for the fort, Morant took Handcock and several other men to intercept them and the Boers were shot.
Later the same day, Major Lenehan arrived at Ford Edwards for a rare visit. Morant persuaded Lenehan to let him lead a strong patrol out to search for a small Boer unit led by Field-Cornet Kelly, an Irish-Boer commando whose farm was in the district. Kelly had fought against the British in the main actions of the war and after returning to his home he had become a commando rather than surrender.
Morant's patrol left Fort Edward on September 16 1901 with orders from Lenehan that Kelly and his men were to be captured and brought back alive if possible. Covering 130 miles in a week of hard riding, they left their horses two miles from Kelly's laager and went the rest of the way on foot. In the early hours of the next morning Morant's patrol charged the laager, this time taking the Boers completely by surprise; Morant himself arrested Kelly at gunpoint at the door of his tent. A week later they returned to Fort Edward with the Kelly party and then escorted them safely to Pietersburg. The British commandant, Colonel Hall personally sent Morant a message congratulating him on the success of his mission, after which Morant took two weeks leave.
Then, in mid-October, the Spelonken detachment was suddenly recalled to Pietersburg and Fort Edward was abandoned until March 1902. On 24 October 1901 Colonel Hall ordered the arrest of seven members of the Carbaniers. Four were Australians: Major Lenehan and Lieutenants Handcock, Witton and Hannam; the other two, Captain Taylor and Lt Picton, were English. When Morant returned from leave in Pietersburg he too was arrested, although no charges were laid at the time. A Court of Enquiry into the affairs of the Bushveldt Carbaniers followed and the War Office subsequently stated that on 8 October, 1901 some members of the Carbineers who were discharged at Pietersburg on the expiration of their service had reported the irregular actions of the officers at Fort Edward over the preceding months.
The men were held in solitary confinement within the garrison, in spite of vigorous protests by Lenehan; he even wrote directly to Kitchener to ask that he be allowed to inform the Australian government of his position but Kitchener ignored the request. Meanwhile the Court of Enquiry held daily hearings, taking evidence from witnesses about the conduct of the Carbineers and two weeks later the prisoners were finally informed of the charges against them; in December they were again brought before the panel and told that they were to be tried by court-martial. Curiously, in the cases of Hannam and Hammett, the panel found that there were no charges to answer.
On hearing of the arrests, Kitchener's Chief of Police, Provost Marshall Robert Poore remarked in his diary: "... if they had wanted to shoot Boers they should not have taken them prisoner first" — a view later ruefully echoed in his book by George Witton. With hindsight, while it is fairly certain that Morant and others did kill some prisoners, their real mistake — in terms of their subsequent court-martial — was that they killed the Boers after they captured them. As Poore noted in his diary, had they shot them before they surrendered, the repercussions might well have been considerably less serious.
According to a recent book on the case by Australian author Nick Bleszynski, Poore's diary confirms that there was indeed a standing order from Kitchener to shoot Boer commandos caught wearing khaki — a claim vehemently denied by the prosecution when the defence tried to argue that Visser, the first Boer Morant had executed, was wearing khaki.
Poore in fact specifically noted that: "... Most of De Wet's (the Boer commando leader's) men were dressed in our uniform, so Lord K. has issued an order to say that all men caught in our uniform are to be tried on the spot and the sentence confirmed by the commanding officer."
Ominously, just before the court-martial, Colonel Hall was suddenly removed from his post at Pietersburg and transferred to India. The Carbineers were disbanded and replaced by a new troop called the Pietersburg Light Infantry. On 15 January, 1902 the accused were finally given copies of the charges against them and informed that they would be defended by Major J.F. Thomas, who in civilian life had been a solicitor in Tenterfield, New South Wales. The court-martial began the following day.
The court-martial of Morant and his co-accused began on 16 January 1902 and was conducted in several stages. Two main hearings were conducted at Pietersburg in relatively relaxed conditions; one concerned the shooting of Visser, the other the 'Eight Boers' case. Soon after the second hearing, the prisoners were suddenly thrown in irons, taken to Pretoria under heavy guard and tried on the third main count, the killing of a the German priest Reverend Predikant Hesse. Although acquitted of killing Hesse, Morant and his co-accused were quickly sentenced to death on the other two charges and Morant and Handcock were shot within days of sentencing; Witton's sentence was commuted to life imprisonment by Lord Kitchener. The death warrants of Morant and Handcock were personally signed by Kitchener, but the Field Marshal absented himself on tour when the executions took place.
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