In my book, Utterly Immoral, I look at Robert Keable’s time as a chaplain to the South African Native Contingent, a group of black labourers who volunteered to travel to France to support the war effort during the First World War. I cover the efforts he made to recruit for the contingent, his experience in France and the appalling treatment the black labourers suffered. And I also look at the affair he had with a 19-year-old lorry driver.

But how did he see his role as a chaplain?

Reading Peter Houston’s article, South African Anglican Military Chaplains and the First World War, published in 2016, I was intrigued by his suggestion that most chaplains in the South African military were torn between seeing their primary role as pastoral (the duty of caring for all people), or prophetic (the duty of speaking truth to those in power or abusing power). 

Peter Houston does not look at the two Anglican chaplains who served with the SANLC but I am not convinced Robert Keable would have seen the need to prioritise one over the other, and as far as he could he sought to do both.

Pastoral Role

In his book Standing By published in 1919 Robert Keable conceded that he was attached to a SANLC company to provide ‘discipline and rations’, but he also stressed that he believed his job was to cater spiritually, with two other colleagues, for 2,000 men in four camps whatever their choice of Christianity. He wrote:

Even I, although carefully fencing round the administration of the Sacraments to my boys, take my turn in the conducting of somewhat varied services in which we can all unite, chiefly because — at least so it strikes me — there is nothing very definite about them. As for the Sacraments of the Presbyterian, Congregationalist, Baptist, French Protestant, Zionist, Salvation Army, Wesleyan Methodist, Dutch Reformed, and Seventh Day Adventist, …they all join happily and holily in one for the ministrations of my two devoted colleagues of the Wesleyan Methodist and Congregationalist bodies respectively. Thus, despite my exclusiveness in some matters (my sorely worried conscience being unheard) we attain to a measure of unison, and certainly to much affection.

But he complained that the authorities did everything they could to prevent him from providing services:

…camps are always cleaned up on Sunday, extra parades and inspections are always arranged for Sunday (‘Very sorry, Padre, but we couldn't help it‘), and the men are always on the verge of breakdown on a Sunday, so that it is a shame to allow more than twenty minutes for a service. Or chaplains are given large areas to cover, and then find it all but impossible, and in any case heart-breaking, to get about, thanks to the difficulty of movement orders and the fact that petrol is so scarce that it cannot be spared for us.

Blocked from offering services he ended up doing his fair share of ‘standing by’. As he explained:

…for padres, well, it is commonly supposed that they stand by six days out of seven, and the greater part of the seventh when it comes. Of course, with his company working 12-hour shifts more standing by has fallen to my lot … even than to most padres, because paradoxically, less standing by has fallen to my flock... In one sense, natives in the Army give fewer opportunities for a padre’s work than most units, especially natives who work as ours worked. You cannot play games and stand around smoking with them quite as Tommies.

There was, of course, much more pastoral care work Robert Keable could do besides offering services. He confirmed that chaplains were given all the odd jobs, asked to ‘be mess-president…, censor these letters…, get up some sports for us …, find out the local talent and arrange a concert.’

He described going to an SANLC chaplains’ conference:

First the O.C. congratulates us on the work we have done in keeping the boys fit and cheerful … then we fell into discussion – whether it would be better to purchase magic-lanterns than cinematographs; bands; marquees; organs; gramophones; night schools; our financial relationship with the society that provides us with material, the food, address and accommodation of native chaplains and so on.

He helped to organise schools and concerts, and to help look after the welfare of the men by co-ordinating the ‘flow’ of comforts and warm clothing (17,000 woollen mufflers amongst other things) that came from groups like the Committee for the Welfare of Africans in Europe.

Robert Keable only spent one Christmas in France and he did his best to make it special for the men who had followed him to France by organising a midnight mass (at 7.00am on Christmas Eve) and by taking three dozen of his boys out of the camp and over to the Catholic Church in town to say the rosary in Sesotho and say some prayers around the crib.

He described the tensions within the camp on that Christmas day.

I was round at 2.30, to find somewhat of a commotion on foot, for a party of drunken soldiers had called to the boys over the barbed wire and asked them why they did not come out and enjoy themselves like the rest. When these had been moved on, the sergeants had to deal with an excited camp, ready for anything, and arguing against the compound system heart and soul. The black and white question cropped up, and my service came as a happy intervention.

Another role for Robert Keable was visiting the sick and, he regularly visited the SANLC hospital in Dieppe.

One rides to it up the beautiful little river-valley, with the great woods on the left and the high ridge crowned by the ancient castle on the right. … It is, of course, trim, clean, and neat, and from the pole in the midst of the careful little garden droops the Union Jack and the Red Cross.

What is clear is that Robert Keable had plenty of spare time once he had completed his duties. He did volunteer to go up to the front to help at an Advanced Dressing Station but felt helpless in a barn full of wounded soldiers. Disillusioned, he did not volunteer to support members of the regular army in his spare time again.

Prophetic Role

Robert Keable was fully aware that as a Captain in the war, (a title all white chaplains in the SANLC were given) he could not easily stand up to those in authority. He pointed out that in the army you can observe what you like, although cameras were banned; record what you like, although your writing would be censored; and do as you please as long as you didn’t break any regulations

He had a reputation for trying to stand out against injustice. An old friend wrote:

I once heard …that he had left the Mission and was serving in the Diocese of Basutoland, where it was said that he killed a white man who was ill-treating a native. This, though probably an exaggerated tale, I can well believe, for he was always on the side of the ‘under-dog’, and he did not always have his temper under control… I heard he was serving as a chaplain in France. Here he got into further trouble as he was against military authority.

Robert Keable got into trouble through his writing. Other officers in the SANLC were happy to offer fulsome praise for their work. For example, at the end of the war, one of the chaplains, Capt (Rev) Wally Hallowes, summed up the work of the chaplains in the SANLC:

You can honestly say that the Chaplains have been really useful.... I have been allowed to do all kinds of work and to help materially towards the well-being and efficiency of our natives .... A missionary has a peculiar influence with the South African Natives, even with the heathen and in large bodies of undisciplined men, such as ours. This influence is of real weight in keeping the natives happy, loyal and hard working. 

Robert Keable however was prepared to criticise. During the war he wrote two articles for the religious magazine, The East and the West, in which he postulated that the training which black chaplains who joined the SANLC had received had been poor. The main thrust of his articles was to criticise black chaplains for disassociating themselves from the labourers. He argued that the black chaplains had been poorly trained since the point of their training seemed more about trying to turn them into Europeans, or even Englishmen, than preparing them to go out among their people. In his article, Keable gave examples of how their training seemed to draw future priests away from their roots and he complained that they were taught to be ashamed ‘of tribal custom and social rite’.

Most strikingly, in his second article, African Priests in France, Keable was willing to discuss the racism he witnessed when he arrived at Rosebank:

…we white chaplains, together with the native priests, found ourselves, in the great majority of cases, up against white officers who had no experience of native priests, who disliked ‘educated natives’ and who particularly disliked natives in clerical dress. Their whole attitude was an attempt to deny all privileges. Black was black, and a boy was a boy, however dressed, educated, or entitled. It was the old story. One must expect it: perhaps on the whole it was a pleasant surprise to meet a few who did not share it, even in the higher places. But there it was. And one could not help feeling that religious sentiment accentuated it. ‘Now we shall see what these blessed padres of yours will do when “properly treated”, said one officer to me.’

Robert Keable’s comments were not appreciated in South Africa.  Letters in South African newspapers were uniformly favourable about the treatment of black men in the SANLC and Keable’s comments were criticised from all quarters. Captain Hertslet, a medical officer to the SANLC, wrote a long letter condemning Keable’s article and concluding:

Mr. Keable has a long way to go, he is inexperienced and unwise, he has gone out of his way to malign his ministerial brethren, he has through his stupidity done considerable damage to the cause of his own church and incidentally condemned himself.

Even during the war Robert Keable was prepared to speak out against the South African government. At an afternoon meeting in the Trevelyan Hall, when he was on leave from France he spoke about the fears of Bosotho saying:

… the white man looked over the wall at their country with a covetous eye. It was said that there were minerals there, but the soul of the black men were more precious than gold of diamonds. The Government had given its word of honour that the country should be left intact. The danger was that when the war was over the Government would treat its promise almost as a scrap of paper, and endeavour to make it part of the Union of South Africa.             

He had real reasons for his concern about Basutoland (now Lesotho). After the war he defended his men from Basutoland:

Basutoland is the one native territory left in South Africa in which the native is honestly, on the whole, his own master. In the war the Basuto raised the equivalent of £55,000 voluntarily for War funds. They sent 2000 boys to France… Yet an officer in France with the South African Native Labour Contingent, in an applauding [officer’s] mess declared to me that it was the ‘plague spot of South Africa’. I have heard it deliberately said that the Basuto are growing too well educated and too numerous and ought to be ‘thinned out’.

Despite the negative reaction to his two articles Robert Keable decided to write a history of the SANLC which he called The First Black Ten Thousand. He intended to publicise the poor treatment of the men. However, the book was never published. The Director of the Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge (SPCK) wrote in 1959:

Mr Keable’s manuscript of The First Black Ten Thousand came to us …. When it had been set up in proof, the censorship refused permission for publication, without giving any official reason. We destroyed all proofs in our possession and distributed the type, because the book would have been unsaleable if we had waited until after the war. The manuscript we returned to the author.

No copies of the manuscript have survived. It would not have been the only book written about the SANLC and the role of black men in the First World War. Sir Harry Johnston’s The Black Man’s Part in the War was published in 1917, as was F. Z. S Peregrino’s His Majesty’s Black Labourers: a Treatise on the Camp Life of the SANLC.  These books were propaganda plugs aimed at extolling the virtues of the experiment and the excellent work of the SANLC. Keable’s book had been critical of the treatment of the men. The Church Times suggested years later the book was censored because it ‘described with unusual power the native, and particularly the Christian native, behind the lines in France.’  A few years later in a book called Nonsenseorship, Keable stated that The First Black Ten Thousand had been ‘censored out of existence’ because ‘he had given slight hints of the truth about the racial situation in South Africa.’

*

I have received permission from the Imperial Museum to use the photograph of SANLC labourers accompanying this blog on the back cover of my book Utterly Immoral. ©Imperial War Museum (Q7827)