Dictionary of National Biography, 1927 supplement/Roberts, Frederick Sleigh
ROBERTS, FREDERICK SLEIGH, first Earl Roberts, of Kandahar, Pretoria, and Waterford (1832–1914), field-marshal, the younger son of General Sir Abraham Roberts [q.v.] by his wife, Isabella, widow of Major Hamilton Maxwell, and daughter of Abraham Bunbury, of Kilfeacle, co. Tipperary, was born at Cawnpore 30 September 1832. Roberts was one of many distinguished soldiers whom Ireland has sent to the service of the Empire, his family having long been settled in county Waterford. He was brought home from India at the age of two; when thirteen he was sent to Eton; and after one year there he passed second into Sandhurst at the age of fourteen, joining in January 1847. His father, however, wished Frederick to follow his own example and enter the East India Company's service. Accordingly, after waiting some time for a vacancy, he went to the training college at Addiscombe, from which he was gazetted on 12 December 1851 to the Bengal Artillery.
Roberts landed in India in April 1852 and in the same year joined his father, who was in command at Peshawar, to serve both as aide-de-camp and as battery officer. He obtained an introduction to the problems of the North-West Frontier and to the character and customs of the tribesmen of the Himalaya, under his father, who had much experience of active service in India and was for a time in command of a brigade of native levies in Kabul, which he left a few months before the disastrous retreat from Kabul in January 1842. In 1854 Roberts gained the distinction, coveted by every young gunner, of the Horse Artillery jacket. He was serving in the Bengal Horse Artillery when, in May 1857, news reached Peshawar of the outbreak of the Mutiny at Meerut. A mobile column was formed in the Punjab, and Roberts became staff officer to its first commander, (Sir) Neville Bowles Chamberlain [q.v.], and to the latter's successor, John Nicholson [q.v.], who won his unbounded admiration and devotion. In June he joined the staff of the force on the ridge before Delhi, and there again during the last stage of the siege did double duty as a staff officer and battery officer. In the rough and tumble fighting around Delhi he had a number of narrow escapes, and was incapacitated for a month by a blow on his spine from a bullet, which was stopped from doing more deadly mischief by the leather pouch which he was wearing. Soon after the fall of Delhi he took part in the second relief of Lucknow under Sir Colin Campbell [q.v.], by whom he was chosen to guide the force attempting the relief from the Alumbagh to the Dilkusha palace. Roberts was then attached to the cavalry division of the force under (Sir) James Hope Grant [q.v.], and it was with it, in a cavalry charge at Khudaganj in January 1858, that he won the Victoria cross for saving the life of a sowar and capturing one of the mutineers' standards. He remained with Hope Grant, and served on the staff during the British siege of Lucknow, at which his great military contemporary, Major (afterwards Viscount) Wolseley, then commanding a company of the 90th Light Infantry, was also present. In April 1858 Roberts's health broke down, and he was succeeded in his staff appointment by the man whose place he was later to take as commander-in-chief of the British army. During a year of convalescence in England (1859) he met and married Miss Nora Henrietta Bews (died 1920), daughter of Captain John Bews, who had retired from the 73rd regiment. So began a married life of mutual devotion and comradeship.
Roberts returned to India in 1859 with his wife, and in the following year was promoted captain, receiving at the same time a brevet majority for his work in the Mutiny. In 1863 he had a short experience of active service on the North-West Frontier in the Umbeyla campaign against the Sitana fanatics, and five years later he went with Sir Robert Napier (afterwards Baron Napier of Magdala) [q.v.] to Abyssinia, as assistant quartermaster-general of the expeditionary force. He spent the campaign at the base, with the organization and control of which he was charged, and gained experience in the work of the quartermaster-general's department in which he was beginning to be recognized as an expert. As a reward for his services, Napier sent him to England with dispatches, and he was made a brevet lieutenant-colonel. In 1871 another of the perennial troubles of the Frontier resulted in an expedition against the Lushais. Here again the main problem was the organization of transport in a country presenting great natural difficulties; and for his work in overcoming them Roberts received the C.B. He had now made his name as a staff officer and was recognized as one of the leading figures in the quartermaster-general's department at the head-quarters of the army in India. In January 1875 he was promoted brevet colonel and became quartermaster-general with the temporary rank of major-general. In this position he came face to face with what was then one of the major problems of imperial defence. Russia's advance through Central Asia was continuous: she had seized Samarkand in 1868, occupied Khiva in 1873, and was making friendly advances to Shere Ali, the ameer of Afghanistan. The danger to India if Afghanistan became a dependency of Russia was obvious. The problem was how best to counter Russia's policy. One school maintained that the right answer was to make the Indus the northern frontier of India and to tell the Russians that any encroachment, territorial or political, in Afghanistan, would mean war with England. This policy would, it was argued, both relieve the Indian tax-payer and bring England's chief weapon, her sea power, into play. The other school argued that Afghanistan left without direct support would inevitably succumb to Russia, and that no pressure elsewhere would make India safe if Russia gained the control of the passes of the Himalaya. The policy of this school became known as the ‘forward’ policy and aimed at controlling the tribes and securing the passes. Roberts was from the first one of its foremost advocates. He gained the ear of Lord Lytton, who became viceroy in 1876, and of his successors; and the forward policy became, and still is, the defensive policy of India.
In March 1878 Roberts was appointed to the command of the Punjab frontier force, in which position he at once became one of the chief agents of the policy which he had advocated. A few months later the ameer refused to receive a political mission headed by Roberts's old chief and friend, Sir Neville Chamberlain, and welcomed the Russian envoy. Three columns were at once formed for the invasion of Afghanistan, one to move from Quetta to Kandahar, one to demonstrate in the Khyber Pass, and the third under Roberts to occupy the Kurram and Khost valleys and thence threaten Kabul. In November Roberts moved up the Kurram and found a large Afghan force holding the Peiwar Kotal. Roberts turned the Afghan position by a skilful night march and routed the Afghans, who abandoned their guns and baggage, the loss to the British column being less than a hundred killed and wounded. Shere Ali at once fled to Turkestan, and his successor, Yakub Khan, signed on 26 May 1879 the Treaty of Gandamuk, which conceded all that the British government had demanded. At the end of 1878 Roberts was promoted major-general, and he received the K.C.B. and the thanks of parliament for the victory at the Peiwar Kotal. Roberts, who knew the Afghans well, was not satisfied that the British position in Afghanistan was secure, and his doubts were soon justified. In July 1879 a political mission led by Sir Louis Cavagnari [q.v.] went to Kabul, and in September Cavagnari with his staff and escort was treacherously murdered. Roberts at once returned to the Kurram, and led his force, which had been strengthened, on towards Kabul. No opposition was met until at Charasia, twelve miles south of Kabul, an Afghan army was found in position. On 6 October Roberts, aided by an attack against the Afghan left, gallantly and skilfully led by Major (afterwards Sir George) White [q.v.], turned the enemy's right and again routed them with trifling loss to his own force. He then occupied Kabul without further fighting. After arranging for the administration of the capital, he transferred his force in November to the cantonments of Sherpur in its vicinity, and here he was suddenly attacked on 11 December by masses of Afghans. After enduring a short siege he repulsed decisively a great assault on his lines (23 December), and this repulse broke the Afghan resistance. In the summer of 1880 Abdur Rahman was recognized by the British government as ameer, the war appeared to be at an end, and orders were issued for the return of the troops to India. Suddenly a fresh storm broke. In July a force of Afghans, which gathered reinforcements as it advanced, invaded Western Afghanistan from Herat, and on 27 July attacked and defeated a British brigade at Maiwand, nearly half the brigade being killed or wounded, while the Afghans captured large quantities of arms and ammunition. The small garrison of Kandahar appeared to be in danger, and Roberts at once proposed that he should lead a column from Kabul to its relief. Roberts had brought his transport to a high state of perfection, and he started from Kabul on 9 August with a picked body of 10,000 men. In the first fourteen days he covered 225 miles through difficult country, but encountered no opposition. He then learned that Kandahar was in no immediate danger and he completed the remaining 88 miles to Kandahar, which he entered on 31 August, at a more leisurely pace. On 1 September he met and defeated the Afghans outside Kandahar, and the pacification of Afghanistan was completed without further difficulty. The march to Kandahar and its triumphant conclusion appealed irresistibly to a public gravely perturbed by the disaster of Maiwand and racked with anxiety as to the fate of Kandahar. Roberts became at once a popular hero. He received the G.C.B. and a baronetcy, and was made commander-in-chief of the Madras army. The march to Kandahar was made possible by Roberts's prompt and bold decision, his careful forethought, the sound organization of his transport, and by the confidence in his leadership with which he inspired his men; but, as he always maintained, it was not as a military feat to be compared with his advance on Kabul in the previous year. The actions of the Peiwar Kotal and Charasia established his reputation amongst soldiers as a tactician; as an organiser of transport in a mountainous country he was without an equal; while his neat figure, fine horsemanship, charm of manner, and constant care for the lives and welfare of his men, won from them a devotion which was not the least of the causes of his success. The name ‘Bobs’ became one to conjure with in India.
In the autumn of 1880 Roberts came to England for a rest, and was received with all honour. As a firm believer in the forward policy he strongly advocated the retention of Kandahar, but was unable to persuade Mr. Gladstone's government to agree. While he was in England the news came home of the disaster of Majuba Hill (27 February 1881). He was at once sent to South Africa, but on reaching Cape Town he learned that Sir Henry Evelyn Wood [q.v.] had already arranged peace with the Boers. He therefore came straight back to England, and left for India again in the autumn of 1881 to take up his command in Madras. Four years later, when Sir Donald Stewart vacated the chief command in India, Roberts was universally recognized to be his natural successor. He continued to be the commander-in-chief until the spring of 1893. During the seven years in which he was the supreme military authority in India, his chief preoccupation was Russia's advance to the frontier of Afghanistan, and he regarded the threat of the invasion of India by Russia as the chief military problem of the British Empire. He revised the schemes for the defence of the North-West Frontier, and was engaged in a constant struggle to win from the Indian Treasury money for the improvement of communications leading into the Himalaya, and for the provision of adequate transport. He also devoted himself particularly to the improvement of the shooting, both of the infantry and of the artillery, and established a system of field-training which caused the India of his day to be recognized as the most practical school of training for the British army. He was not in agreement with the military reformers at home, and in particular was opposed to the introduction of the short-service system, which, at first, undoubtedly affected the efficiency of the British troops in India. The problems of India required the army to be in a state of instant readiness for war, while a frontier expedition did not involve losses so heavy that they could not be quickly replaced by drafts from home. The need for a reserve was not therefore obvious to one who had passed his military life in India, but later experience caused Roberts to revise his judgement of the reforms which Viscount Cardwell had initiated and Wolseley brought to completion. On 1 January 1892 Roberts was created Baron Roberts, of Kandahar, and early in the following year he left India for good amidst demonstrations of affection and respect such as have rarely been won by a soldier.
In England he had two years to wait for an appointment suited to one of his rank and reputation, and he devoted these to writing his reminiscences. His Forty-one Years in India (1897) is at once a stirring story, simply told, and a demonstration of the generous and frank character of its author. In May 1895 he was made field-marshal, and in the same year he became commander-in-chief in Ireland. In his new command he again set himself to improve the shooting and the field-training of the soldier, while Dublin society was soon convinced that the reputation which he had gained in Simla as a charming host was well deserved.
When, in October 1899, the British government's disputes with the Boers culminated in war, few anticipated a serious campaign requiring the services of a British field-marshal, and Sir Redvers Buller's long experience of South Africa marked him as the leader of the expedition to the Cape. In December the news that Sir George White was shut up in Ladysmith was followed quickly by reports of reverses to Sir William Gatacre at Stormberg, to Lord Methuen at Magersfontein, and to Buller's main force at Colenso. The country was deeply stirred, and heard with relief on 17 December that Mr. Balfour's government had appointed Roberts to the supreme command in South Africa with Lord Kitchener [q.v.] as his chief of staff. Roberts left England in his sixty-eighth year, carrying with him the confidence and affection of his countrymen, as well as their sympathy for the loss of his only son, Lieutenant Frederick Roberts, mortally wounded a few days before in a gallant attempt to save some of Buller's guns at Colenso. Lieutenant Roberts died before the Victoria cross, for which he had been recommended, could be awarded him.
Up to the time of Lord Roberts's arrival at the Cape (10 January) two fundamental mistakes had been made in the conduct of the campaign. Reliance had been placed mainly upon the British infantry, and offers of mounted troops both from South Africa and from the Dominions were treated coldly; the consequent lack of mobility in dealing with enemy forces in which every man was mounted was a fatal handicap. Further, the provision of transport was so limited as to tie the lines of advance to the few railways. This indicated clearly to the Boers the general nature of the British plan. Roberts at once encouraged local levies of mounted men, greatly increased the number of mounted infantry, and, profiting by his long experience of transport difficulties in India, with the help of Kitchener completely remodelled the transport system. He also saw at once that the situation demanded the earliest possible invasion of the Free State from the Cape Colony, and, while reinforcements from England were on the way to him, prepared his plans with the utmost secrecy. To these plans he resolutely adhered, despite urgent calls for relief from Kimberley, the failure of Buller's third attempt to relieve Ladysmith and his despairing suggestion that he should abandon it, despite also the first flicker of revolt in Cape Colony. Disposing his troops so as to indicate a direct advance on Bloemfontein from Naaupoort, he transferred them rapidly to the Modder river on the road to Kimberley, and on 11 February began a movement round the left flank of the force with which General Piet Cronje was at once besieging Kimberley and opposing Methuen. On 15 February the cavalry division of Major-General (afterwards Earl) French at Klip Drift, on the Modder, galloped through a gap in the Boer lines and rode on into Kimberley. Cronje, finding his communications with Bloemfontein threatened, began a retreat along the Modder. Roberts's infantry hung on to the Boer rear-guard, and on 17 February French, returning in haste from Kimberley, prevented Cronje from crossing the Modder. On the 18th the Boer laager at Paardeberg Drift was attacked by the British infantry divisions under (Sir) Thomas Kelly-Kenny [q.v.] and Kitchener, but this attack was repulsed with 1,270 casualties. Roberts, who had been detained at Jacobsdal by a slight illness, arrived the next day and decided not to renew the attack but to engage in a siege of the laager. Within a week the Boer position in the bed of the river had become desperate, and on 27 February, the anniversary of Majuba, Cronje surrendered with 4,000 men. The effect of Roberts's manœuvre was immediate. The Free State commandos left Natal to defend their own country, and Ladysmith was relieved on 28 February. Deficiency of transport and supplies, due largely to a successful raid by General Christian De Wet upon a large transport column, made an immediate advance on Bloemfontein impossible, and the Free Staters gathered a force to oppose Roberts's farther advance. At Poplar Grove on 7 March they succeeded in evading serious attack, but three days later they stood at Driefontein and were severely handled. This proved to be the last attempt of the Boers to offer battle in the Free State, and Bloemfontein was occupied on 13 March without opposition. After a pause in the Free State capital in order to restore railway communications and get up supplies, Roberts began an advance on Pretoria at the beginning of May. Moving on a broad front and turning the flanks of the Boers whenever they attempted to stand, he reached Kroonstad on 12 May; here a further halt was necessary, to enable the railways to be repaired. During this halt the news arrived that Buller had cleared Natal of Boers, and that Sir Archibald Hunter and Colonel (Sir) Bryan Mahon, moving north from Kimberley, had, in conjunction with a force under Colonel (afterwards Lord) Plumer, coming south from Rhodesia, relieved Mafeking, the last of the besieged garrisons.
The advance from Kroonstad was begun on 22 May and the Vaal was crossed two days later. On 31 May Roberts entered Johannesburg and, after overcoming a feeble resistance, occupied Pretoria on 5 June. On 12 June the main Boer force under General Louis Botha [q.v.] was defeated at Diamond Hill, and it appeared that organized resistance was at an end. President Kruger had removed his government to Machadodorp on the Delagoa railway, and there held some 4,000 British prisoners of war. An advance eastwards to Komati Poort, on the frontier of Portuguese East Africa, seemed all that was needed to complete the subjugation of the Transvaal, and this task was made easier by the junction of Buller's force advancing from Natal with Roberts's main body in the Transvaal in the first week of July. It was true that De Wet and the Free State leaders had been actively engaged in guerrilla warfare in their own country, but at the end of July a large body of Free Staters was surrounded on the border of Basutoland, and their commander, Prinsloo, surrendered with 4,000 men. Before this Roberts had begun his final advance, and on 28 July captured Machadodorp after some stiff fighting. Buller, pursuing the retreating Boers, occupied Lydenberg (6 September), French seized Barberton (13 September), and Major-General (Sir) Ian Hamilton entered Komati Poort (24 September). There was then no Boer town of importance which was not in British hands. Kruger fled to Lourenço Marques and on 11 October left Africa on board a Dutch vessel. The formal annexation of the Transvaal on 25 October, following that of the Free State (28 May), created the general impression that the War was at an end. Roberts was needed at home to succeed Wolseley as commander-in-chief, and he came back to England just in time to be received by Queen Victoria, one of the last of her acts being to reward him with the Garter and an earldom.
Roberts's generalship had changed a dark and doubtful situation in South Africa, with a rapidity which was almost startling, into one which, when he left that country, seemed brilliant. He had achieved the apparently impossible in converting the slow, lumbering columns of the early days of the War into bodies of troops which could manœuvre as swiftly as could their active enemy, and above all, he had at once struck his blow in the right direction. He is open to the criticism that he did not complete his task. Influenced by his desire to save the lives of his men, and probably also by his experience of the effect of turning movements on Asiatics, he continually manœuvred the Boers out of their positions, and rarely brought them to battle. Possibly he underrated the stubbornness of the Boer character, and attached too much importance to the occupation of their towns. If so, he was not alone in holding such opinions; and though he left to Kitchener a legacy far more burdensome than he had anticipated, the issue, when he handed over the command in South Africa, was never in doubt as it had been when he took it up.
His period of service as commander-in-chief of the British army was disappointing. He reached England with an unrivalled reputation, and the public, which the events of the War had at last made aware of the defects of the British military system and training, expected great things from him. In his own special sphere of training troops for war Roberts certainly effected important reforms, and under him a new spirit of keenness and earnestness pervaded the army. A service dress was introduced, and shooting and field-training became of greater importance than pipe-clay and ceremonial, but his endeavours to reform the military system were ineffective. He found himself confronted with an intricate organization, with which, owing to his long service in India, he was little acquainted. As commander-in-chief he had no organized general staff to support him, and he did not know how to set about getting one.
The royal commission on the South African War (1903) pointed out the anomalies in the position of the commander-in-chief, and its report was followed in the autumn of 1903 by the appointment of a commission, under the chairmanship of Viscount Esher, on the organization of the War Office. This commission recommended the abolition of the office of commander-in-chief and the creation of an Army Council. Its findings were accepted by Mr. Balfour's government, and in February 1904 Lord Roberts left the War Office. He continued for a time to be a member of the Committee of Imperial Defence which Mr. Balfour had instituted, but he found himself in disagreement with the government's policy of defence, and in an article in the Nineteenth Century (December 1904) he advocated national service for home defence. In November 1905 he resigned, and for the next ten years devoted himself to the cause of national service, becoming in 1905 president of the National Service League. Mr. Balfour's government having been succeeded in 1905 by that of Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, Mr. (afterwards Viscount) Haldane, the new minister for war, brought in important measures of army reform which included the formation of the territorial force and the officers' training corps; but Lord Roberts, while agreeing that these were great steps forward, insisted on their inadequacy. The weakness of his own scheme was that what was needed was not a great army for home defence but an increase in the number of troops which could be employed abroad, while there was grave danger that the drastic change which he advocated in the constitution of the military system would injure for many years the efficiency of the voluntary regular army at a time when British relations with Germany were becoming more and more strained. Mr. Haldane had therefore no difficulty in finding, in the War Office, hostile critics of Lord Roberts's proposal; while in 1910 Sir Ian Hamilton, at that time adjutant-general, published a volume on Compulsory Service in which he strongly advocated the voluntary system. To this Lord Roberts replied, with the help of two anonymous contributors, in his book Fallacies and Facts (1911). Though the controversy continued, Mr. Haldane persevered with his plans; and it was not until the European War had raged for nearly two years that compulsory service became the law of the land. But Lord Roberts's campaign, begun at the age of seventy-two and continued into his eighty-second year, did much to awaken the country to a sense of the dangers with which it was confronted in 1914.
On the outbreak of war with Germany Mr. Asquith summoned Lord Roberts to the first war council which settled the destination of the original British expeditionary force; and when India dispatched an expedition to France the King made Roberts its colonel-in-chief. Feeling that he must go and hearten the men of the country which had been so long his military home, he left for France on 11 November 1914, caught a chill at once, and died at St. Omer on 14 November, as he would have wished, in the midst of an army on active service. His body was brought back to England, and he was buried with due pomp in St. Paul's Cathedral.
Roberts had six children, of whom three died in infancy. His title devolved by special remainder upon his elder surviving daughter, Lady Aileen Mary Roberts; his second daughter, Lady Ada Edwina Stewart, who is the heir presumptive to the title, married in 1913 Colonel Henry Frederick Elliott Lewin, of the Royal Artillery, and has one son.
A portrait of Roberts by W. W. Ouless was painted for the Royal Artillery in 1882. A bust painting by G. F. Watts, executed in 1898, is in the National Portrait Gallery. A portrait by J. S. Sargent, painted in 1904, is in the possession of Lady Roberts, who owns another by P. A. de Laszló; a second portrait by Laszló is at Eton College. Another portrait, by C. W. Furse, belongs to Lady Hudson. A statue of Roberts by Harry Bates (1894) is in Calcutta; there is a copy in Glasgow, and another, without the pedestal, on the Horse Guards Parade, Whitehall. Busts in bronze by C. W. Roberts and Sir Hamo Thornycroft are both dated 1915, and one by W. R. Colton was exhibited in 1916. There is a bust by John Tweed in St. Paul's Cathedral (Royal Academy Pictures, 1882, 1894, 1915, 1916).
[Lord Roberts, Forty-one Years in India, 1897; Letters written during the Indian Mutiny, by Fred. Roberts, afterwards Field-Marshal Earl Roberts, 1924; H. Hensman, The Afghan War of 1879–1880, 1881; The Anglo-Afghan War 1878–1880, Official Account, 1881; Sir J. F. Maurice and M. H. Grant, (Official) History of the War in South Africa 1899–1902, 1906–1910.]