Boer War

Abstract

All through his life Gooch stood up for peoples and groups which he believed to be persecuted, oppressed or threatened by the more powerful. Thus he felt the anguish of the Armenians at the hands of the Turks, of the Belgians overrun by the Germans in 1914, of starving peoples in Europe during and after the First World War, of the German Jews in the concentration camps. He not only helped the persecuted, but he gave them their friendship. To him the Boer women and children put into concentration camps in South Africa by the British authorities had a claim on his sympathy and practical help like the Armenians in that period and the German Jews later on. There was, however, a considerable difference for a British subject between helping, on the one hand, the Armenians under Turkish rule and, on the other, the Boers under British control, particularly in time of war. During the South African War Gooch had his baptism of fire in braving public wrath as the member of an unpopular minority, accused of being unpatriotic, which was also to be his fate to some extent in the First World War. Gooch thought very deeply about important issues of public policy.