I can mind him at the start ––
Easy seat and merry heart!
Said he, as he threw a glance
At the crawling ambulance:
'Some day I'll be on the ground
And the van will hurry round!
Doc will gravely wag his head:
"No use now! the poor chap's dead!"
'Every man must, soon or late,
Turn up at the Golden Gate:
When we weigh in –– you and I ––
How can horsemen better die!'
On that sunlit steeple course
He lay prone beneath his horse,
Never more his pal may ride
By that gallant horseman's side.
'Reckless fool?' What matter, mate?
All his time he'd ridden straight ––
Went (smashed 'gainst that wall of sod!)
Spurred and booted to his God.
Carve in stone above his head
Words that some old Christian said:
'Grace he sought, and grace he found
'Twixt the saddle and the ground!'
There are few figures in Australian history more controversial and, more than a century after his execution for the crime of murder by a British army firing squad on 27 February 1902, more divisive than the stockman and poet who called himself Harry Harbord Morant.
Born Edwin Henry Murrant in the English county of Somerset on 9 December 1864, Morant arrived in the northern Queensland town of Townsville aboard the SS Waroonga in 1883 and soon established himself as a larger than life figure in the Australian bush, as renowned for his gentlemanly manner and skills as a horseman –– talents which earned him the nickname 'The Breaker' –– as he was for his gifts as a poet and his reputation as a hard drinking ladies' man.
Morant had been living in adopted homeland for sixteen years –– telling assorted tall tales about himself and his family history, consorting with his fellow newspaper published 'bush balladeers' AB 'Banjo' Patterson, Henry Lawson and Will Ogilvie, and even finding time in 1884 to marry (and be thrown out by) future anthropologist Daisy O'Dwyer –– when, in October 1899, he dropped everything to enlist in the Second Contingent of the South Australian Mounted Rifles. The British Empire, of which South Australia was a directly controlled colony as was every other future state of the Commonwealth of Australia prior to the Act of Federation passing into law on 1 January 1901, was now at war with the Boer-controlled South African colonies known as the Republic of the Transvaal and the Orange Free State. As a loyal healthy Englishman who had a way with horses, joining up to help the Empire fight the independence-seeking rebels was viewed by Morant as the only honourable course of action open to him. Joining up would also allow him –– a man who never became an Australian citizen –– to return to England free of charge once he had served his country long enough to qualify for what was termed 'home leave.'
Morant and his regiment arrived in the Transvaal in February 1900 where his superior riding skills soon saw him selected to carry dispatches first for the war correspondent from the English newspaper The Daily Telegraph and then for Colonel Lowe, his Commanding Officer. He was soon transferred from Lowe's staff to that of General French, Commander of the Cavalry Brigade, under whom he saw action in Middelberg, Belfast and Barberton. (He had already fought at the Battle of Diamond Hill and several other locations while serving under Lowe.) Now promoted to the rank of Sergeant, he requested six months leave and returned to England where he befriended Captain Percy Frederick Hunt and allegedly became engaged to either Hunt's sister or the girl who was to be Hunt's future sister-in-law (sources disagree). It was Hunt who persuaded him to abandon his plan to quit the army and rejoin him in South Africa as an officer of a semi-guerilla unit known as the Bushveldt Carbineers, the unruly and nearly mutinous Squadron B of which Hunt had recently assumed command of.
Morant enlisted as a Lieutenant in this unit and along with his fellow Lieutenant, an Australian named Peter Handcock who hailed from the western New South Wales town of Bathurst, immediately set out to make it a disciplined, regulation obeying fighting force –– a plan which did not endear them to their men, several of whom were subsequently discharged after ambushing a consignment of rum being transported to Fort Edwards, the BVC's farmhouse headquarters located several miles north of its main garrison in the town of Pietersburg, by a third newly arrived 'upstart' Lieutenant. Morant's unpopularity did not prevent him from becoming an effective deterrent to the Boers or from becoming 'like a man demented' after learning that his CO and best friend Hunt had been killed during a tactically unsound attack on an enemy stronghold known as Duivelskloof [Devil's Gorge] on 2 August 1901.
Determined to avenge Hunt's death, Morant led a patrol which eventually caught up with the Boers a little before sunset. Impatient for revenge, he gave the order to fire on the enemy too early, warning them of his intention to attack and allowing all but one of them to escape. Floris Visser, the only Boer prisoner captured during the engagement, was wounded in the ankles during the ensuing exchange of gunfire –– a fact which did not prevent Morant from rigorously interrogating the man before forming a firing squad and executing him, citing the words of Lord Kitchener, Commanding General of the British forces in South Africa, as the justification for his decision. 'Take No Prisoners!' had been Kitchener's alleged proclamation to the Empire forces. Morant chose to take the General's words literally, ignoring the fact that Visser had technically been a prisoner of war after being captured, thereby making his execution an act of murder under military law.
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| LT HARRY MORANT, c 1899 |
The slaughter did not end with the death of Floris Visser. On 23 August Morant led another patrol which intercepted a group of Boer prisoners being taken to Fort Edward for questioning. He ordered the men to be lined up by the side of the road and shot, their deaths witnessed by the Reverend Carl August Daniel Heese, a South African born, German-speaking missionary. A week or so later, reports reached Fort Edward that Reverend Heese's corpse had been discovered on the road between the post and Pietersburg where he had supposedly gone to report Morant's activities to his superior officers. It was later revealed that Morant had either personally killed or ordered that Heese be killed before leading yet another patrol, co-led by Handcock and including a young Australian trooper named George Witton, which had been responsible for the executions of another group of disarmed Boer prisoners. A rare visit from Morant's CO, General Lenehan, resulted in Morant being sent to arrest a notorious Boer-Irish leader named Kelly whom he brought in alive following a successful two week search and capture operation. Morant then requested a fortnight's furlough so he could travel to the South African capital Pretoria to attend to the personal affairs of his deceased friend Captain Hunt.
Morant returned from Pretoria to find himself immediately placed under arrest and facing court martial charges arising from a letter, signed by fifteen of his own men, which accused him and several other members of the Bushveldt Carbineers of six separate atrocities including the executions of the Reverend Heese, more than a dozen disarmed Boer prisoners and even three children who had been part of a convoy approaching Fort Edward with the intention of surrendering itself to the British garrison. Morant was cast as the ringleader of these activities, with his Australian subordinates Handcock and Witton cast as his all too willing accomplices, and committed to stand trial for his actions in a Military Court of Inquiry.
The first phase of this trial began in Pietersburg on 16 January 1902, during which the damning testimonies of several of Morant's own men were heard and questioned by Major James Francis Thomas, another Australian who had been named defending counsel to the three accused soldiers. The trial was then relocated to Pretoria where Morant was tried on the most serious charge, the murder of the non-combatant Reverend Heese, of which he was found not guilty. But he, Handcock and Witton were found guilty of the other charges brought against them and unanimously sentenced to death, with the court decreeing that all three sentences should be carried out as soon as possible. Witton, the youngest of the convicted men, soon had his sentence commuted to life imprisonment by Lord Kitchener who refused to do the same for Morant and Handcock, signing their respective death warrants personally.
When Thomas tried to appeal directly to Kitchener he was told by the General's aide that the General was away and not expected to return to headquarters for quite some time. Thomas then pleaded for a chance to lodge an appeal with the King, only to learn that the Crown had already approved the death sentences and no power on earth was capable of rescinding them. While denying the convicted men the right to appeal was grossly unfair and probably illegal, it made no difference in the end. Morant, Handcock and Witton were granted permission to spend a final evening together on 26 February 1902, time which Morant mostly spent writing as Witton later recalled. Witton himself was removed in manacles at five o'clock the following morning for transportation to England where he was to serve his commuted sentence in Lewes Prison in the county of Sussex. He would serve a total of twenty-eight months in gaol before eventually being released on 10 August 1904.
A short time after Witton was removed from their shared cell, Morant and Handcock were led out to the yard and, both having refused blindfolds, executed by a firing squad consisting of troops selected from the Queen's Own Cameron Highland Regiment. Their bodies were buried side by side in a common grave in a Pretoria cemetery which lay neglected until 2002 when a small delegation travelled from Australia to South Africa to witness the placement of a new memorial stone, the inscription of which was taken from Chapter 10, Verse 36 of the Gospel of St Matthew: 'A man's foes shall be those of his own household.' (The verse is misquoted, appearing as 'And a man's foes shall be they of his own household' in the King James Bible.)
Was Morant a vicious cold-blooded killer or were he and his comrades Handcock and Witton what the latter described as a 'Scapegoats of Empire' in his controversial book of the same name published in 1907? Did Morant's grief at the loss of his friend Hunt –– 'The best mate I had on Earth' according to a note written on the eve of his execution –– justify the murders of what may have been upwards of twenty unarmed Boers, one of whom was a clergyman and at least three of whom were children? It needs to be remembered that Morant, for all his loyalty to Hunt and to King and country, was also something of a self-invented con man, as adept at running out on unpaid bar bills –– something he did several times in Australia and at least once in South Africa, causing a Cape Town hotelier to write to Admiral Sir George Digby Morant, a man Morant had falsely claimed to be his father, demanding restitution for services provided in the amount of £16 –– as he was at masquerading as a dashing well-bred gentleman. While this behaviour does not prove that he was a murderer, it does cast serious doubts upon his credibility and personal integrity.
The truth is that Morant was never the gentleman he pretended to be. He was the son of the Master of a workhouse, a place where the indigent and those who forfeited on their debts were sent by local English authorities to 'earn their keep' by doing menial, often backbreaking work for which they were 'rewarded' with substandard food and a bed of loose straw. While there is no doubt that Morant's case was bungled by the British Army, there is also little doubt that he ordered and/or directly participated in the deaths of Visser, Heese and many defenceless Boer prisoners.
The other significant thing about Morant, of course, is the posthumous status he has gained in Australia as an authority-defying folk hero. As his defense counsel Major Thomas reminded readers of The Sydney Morning Herald in a letter written to that newspaper in June 1923, the man he unsuccessfully defended in 1902 '…was not Australian, he was an Englishman who came to this country for "colonial experience".' This fact is often overlooked by Morant's idolaters, as is the fact that he returned to England, not to his adopted homeland, after completing his first tour of duty in South Africa and apparently had every intention of remaining in England until he was persuaded to return to the war by his friend Hunt.
Like his predecessor the Irish-Australian bushranger Ned Kelly –– somebody else misleadingly portrayed as an 'innocent victim' of English oppression who was 'driven' to a life of crime and eventually to murder by 'cruel circumstance' rather than by temperament and opportunity –– Morant's treatment at the hands of the British (his own countrymen) became a focal point for the resentment harboured by the 'Young Country' of Australia for the 'Old Country' of Great Britain. Morant was and is viewed by many Australians as the prototypical 'lovable larrikin' who ran afoul of 'the Poms' and paid the ultimate price for following the contradictory orders handed down by his superiors. The view of him as an 'innocent' victim of circumstance continues to serve as effective propaganda for those who wish to see him exonerated for his crimes and pardoned by the Crown despite strong evidence which suggests that he was, in fact, guilty of every offence he was charged with and perhaps several more into the bargain.
While Morant's death by firing squad may have made him a martyr in some eyes –– thanks in large part to Witton's 1907 book and the 1978 play Breaker Morant: A Play in Two Acts by Kenneth Ross which was successfully adapted into the popular and award-winning Australian film Breaker Morant two years later –– it remains a highly romanticized image of a man who, while capable of producing fine and sensitive art in the form of poetry, was clearly not above committing criminal acts against unarmed civilians during wartime. Morant was not the first person to embody these contradictions and nor, sadly, is he likely to be the last. He seems to be the perfect example of a desirable myth supplanting an undesirable reality, a phenomenon enhanced by his work as a poet which, while reasonably popular in its day, does not appear to have stood the test of time as well as that of his more famous contemporaries AB 'Banjo' Paterson and Henry Lawson. It remains unlikely that the truth about Morant and what really happened out on the veldt in 1901 and 1902 will ever come to light, despite the many books which have been written about him since the success of Breaker Morant made his case a cause célébre in a nation so bereft of homegrown heroes that it felt compelled to make one of a convicted English war criminal.
In prison cell I sadly sit,
A d––d crest-fallen chappie!
And own to you I feel a bit ––
A little bit –– unhappy!
It really ain't the place nor time
To reel off rhyming diction ––
But yet we'll write a final rhyme
Whilst awaiting cru-ci-fixion!
No matter what 'end' they decide ––
Quick-lime or 'b'iling ile,' sir?
We'll do our best when crucified
To finish off in style, sir!
But we bequeath a parting tip
For sound advice of such men,
Who come across in sailing ship
To polish off the Dutchmen!
If you encounter any Boers
You really must not loot 'em!
And if you wish to leave these shores,
For pity's sake, DON'T SHOOT 'EM!!
And if you'd earn a DSO,
Why every British sinner
Should know the proper way to go
Is: 'ASK THE BOER TO DINNER!'
Let's toss a bumper down our throat, ––
Before we pass to Heaven,
And toast: 'The trim-set petticoat
We leave behind in Devon.'
Use the link below to read more poems by British horseman, bush balladeer, soldier and war criminal HARRY HARBORD 'BREAKER' MORANT:
https://www.poemhunter.com/harry-breaker-harbord-morant/
You may also like to visit Breaker Morant: Justice Denied, a website operated by Australian barrister, solicitor and author JAMES UNKLES who continues to try to obtain pardons for MORANT, HANDCOCK and WITTON from the British Government after an apology was issued to their descendants by the Australian House of Representatives on 12 February 2018 acknowledging that an injustice had been perpetrated against them during their trial.
This followed the rejection of an appeal submitted by UNKLES to the British Crown in 2010 and a decision made in May 2012 by NICOLA ROXON, the then-serving Attorney-General of Australia, that the Australian Government would not be pursuing the matter with the British any further. In a letter to UNKLES, she explained that 'Despite the time that has passed… I consider seeking a pardon… could be rightly perceived as glossing over very grave criminal acts.' The debate remains ongoing.
You might also enjoy:
Poet of the Month 006: HENRY LAWSON
Poet of the Month 016: WB YEATS
Poet of the Month 001: WALTER RALEGH
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