The Coup, the Poet and the Secret to Winning Wimbledon
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Rudyard Kipling is perhaps best known as the author of The Jungle Book, the story of the man-cub Mowgli, raised by animals such as Baloo the bear and Bagheera the black panther. Kipling wrote poems too. When surveys ask the British public for their all-time favourite poem, Kipling's If is routinely at the top of the list. If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you,

if you can walk with crowds and keep your virtue, if you can fill the unforgiving minute with 60 seconds worth of distance run, if is written in the form of paternal life advice from Kipling to his son. And what will happen if you do all the things Kipling recommends in the poem? Well, then you'll be a man, my son.

But when Kipling wrote this poem, he had a particular man in mind as his role model. That man was Dr Leander Starr Jameson. Dr Jameson is known today for two things. The first is inspiring Kipling to write If. The second is the utter fiasco that became known as the Jameson Raid.

The year is 1895, and Dr Leander Starr Jameson is all set to invade the South African Republic. He has a private army of fewer than 500 men at his command, but he reckons that will be more than enough to overthrow the country's government. Anyone could take it with half a dozen revolvers. I shall get through as easily as a knife cuts through butter. MUSIC

Rudyard Kipling wasn't alone in his admiration for Dr Jameson. By all accounts, the short and balding Scotsman had remarkable charisma. I suppose he must have done. A couple of decades earlier, fresh out of medical school and working as a surgeon at a London hospital, Jameson saw an advert for a doctor to join a practice in a fast-growing mining town in Cape Colony, then a part of the British Empire in what today is South Africa.

And now, here he is, no longer practising medicine, but leading a small army and casually plotting to topple the government of the next country over. You don't have that kind of career path unless you've got something about you. It had been, so far, a life filled with triumphs.

But triumph isn't everything, as Kipling reminds us in perhaps his poem's most famous line. If you can meet with triumph and disaster and treat those two imposters just the same, Dr Jameson was about to meet with disaster. I'm Tim Harford, and you're listening to Cautionary Tales. CAUTIONARY TALES

If you can meet with triumph and disaster and treat those two imposters just the same, those words are written above the entrance to Centre Court, Wimbledon. They seem to resonate with tennis players. Before one classic men's final, the BBC asked Roger Federer and Rafa Nadal to recite the poem for them.

Serena Williams likes the poem too. She recorded a version for International Women's Day and she brought Kipling's embarrassingly dated closing line into the 21st century. You will be a woman, sister. It's not hard to imagine why the All England Lawn Tennis Club might have inscribed that line about triumph and disaster above the entrance to Centre Court.

It reminds the players that it's bad form to gloat when you win or sulk when you lose. And yet, treat them just the same? We want to see both winners and losers behave with grace and magnanimity, of course, but we don't expect their reactions to be emotionally indistinguishable.

But there is another sporting sense in which those words fit better. Tennis matches are made up of sets and games and points. There's plenty of scope for mini disasters and triumphs as the match unfolds. And high-level sport is at least as much about mental fortitude as physical skill. Let's visit Wimbledon in 1993 for the women's final. Jana Novotna is facing off against Steffi Graf.

There's no doubt who's expected to win. Steffi Graf has established herself as one of the all-time greats. She's won 12 Grand Slams already, including four of the last five Wimbledon's. She's the top seed. Jana Novotna is seeded eighth. She's never been past the quarterfinals before. She might never get another shot at a Grand Slam title. The first set is closely fought.

The underdog, Novotna, takes it all the way to a tiebreak, which Graf only narrowly wins. This puts Graf in a strong position. She needs to win just one of the two remaining sets, while Novotna must win both. It would be all too natural for Novotna to get disheartened at this setback. She's played hard for over an hour and now faces a more difficult task than when she started. But there's a risk for Graf as well.

She might react to the mini triumph of winning the first set by getting lulled into a sense of complacency. Maybe that's what happens, because Graf proceeds to lose the next five games. Novotna easily takes the second set to level the match. In the final set, Novotna's brilliant play continues. Miss Novotna leads by four games to one. Final set.

There's nothing Steffi Graf can do. Novotna is inspired. She's cruising to victory. 40-30. If she wins the next point, Novotna will be just one game away from the championship. Novotna's first serve goes into the net. No matter, that happens.

Generally, a player will be more careful on their second serve to try to make sure they don't lose the point with a double fault. But this second serve is terrible. It goes both long and wide, missing not by a few inches, but by a good three feet. It's a double fault. In itself, it doesn't matter too much. It's just one point lost. Plenty more chances to come.

But this will later be called the most iconic double fault in the history of tennis because of what happens next. Sometimes a sports person just can't put it out of their mind when something's just gone wrong. Disaster compounds upon disaster. Every bad shot makes the next shot worse until they've somehow contrived to let the whole match slip away. There's a word for this, several phrases in fact.

getting the yips, bottling it, choking. When you get within sight of the winning line, then you inexplicably fall apart. Jana Novotna walks back to the baseline, looking faintly puzzled, wiping sweat from her cheek on the shoulder of her shirt. She is about to endure one of the most mortifying chokes in sporting history. Rudyard Kipling was a tennis fan.

When he lived in Vermont with his American wife, he built the state's first tennis court at his house. But he wasn't thinking about tennis when he wrote his poem, If. He was thinking about Dr Leander Starr Jameson.

Although, Jameson didn't always live up to the values the poem espoused. If you can wait and not be tired of waiting, Dr Jameson was very much tired of waiting for the green light to mobilise his army and ride into the South African Republic. But what exactly was he invading for? Bear with me for a bit of colonial history.

The South African Republic was run by Boers, descendants of Dutch people who'd come to southern Africa centuries before. And it was rich. In the last few years, vast deposits of gold had been found. A new town called Johannesburg had sprung up as fortune seekers rushed in. Many of those fortune seekers weren't Boer.

The Ootlanders, as the Boers called them, came from all around the world. From Britain and Australia, Ireland and America. This motley crew of gold hunters soon came to outnumber the Boers, but the Boers wouldn't give them a vote in how the Republic was run. The Ootlanders began to grumble. In their discontent, another man spied an opportunity, Cecil Rhodes.

In Southern Africa, the British Empire and Cecil Rhodes' business empire were much the same thing. Rhodes ran a company that controlled vast swathes of territory under license from the British government. His company employed police, in effect, a kind of private army. And in charge of a chunk of that army, Rhodes had put his great friend, Dr. Jameson. Rhodes and Jameson hatched a plan.

they'd quietly encourage the Uitlanders to stage an uprising. The Uitlanders would make a plea for help. They'd say that the dastardly Boers were threatening their women and children. Dr Jameson would just happen to be right on the border with 500 armed men. He'd ride to Johannesburg to rescue the Uitlanders, topple the Boer government and get Cecil Rhodes in on the gold mining action.

You may have noticed who's missing from this cast of characters: the African inhabitants of this resource-rich land. And if you're wondering when they're going to get a say in all this, I'm afraid they aren't. Neither the Boers nor the British cared much what the Africans thought. The uprising was scheduled for December 1895. But as the date grew near, the Oetlander conspirators began to get cold feet.

Cecil Rhodes was asking them to risk their lives in a fight against the Boers. But what exactly was he suggesting would happen if they won? Would the Ootlanders run a new republic? Or would it end up as another British colony? Why would the American Ootlanders in particular want to risk their lives for the British Empire? At the border, Jameson was getting more and more itchy. Delay, came the message, again and again.

Damn those dithering Ootlanders, thought Jameson. And then he had another thought. Perhaps I could spur them into action if I invaded anyway. We'll hear how that worked out after the break. AI might be the most important new computer technology ever. It's storming every industry and literally billions of dollars are being invested. So buckle up.

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Cecil Rhodes and Leander Starr Jameson had carefully laid the ground for their invasion of the South African Republic. They'd persuaded some leading Uitlanders to put their names to a letter addressed to Dr Jameson. The letter was a plaintive appeal. Our women and children are at the mercy of armed Boers. The circumstances are so extreme that we cannot but believe that you and the men under you will not fail to come to the rescue.

They left the letter undated. Jameson would fill in the date, on the day he crossed the border. But when was that going to be? In early December, Jameson received a coded telegram from the conspirators in Johannesburg. The polo tournament here postponed for one week.

The British government wanted to give the impression that they knew nothing about the conspiracy. That would have looked terrible, because officially they were on friendly terms with the Boers. In reality, the British governor of neighbouring Cape Colony knew exactly what Cecil Rhodes was thinking, and so did his ministerial boss back in London.

The British government was surreptitiously trying to sound out the Oetlanders about just how much empire they might accept. What if you fly the Union flag but elect your own governor? Once again, a date for the uprising was set. Once again, the Oetlanders backed out. In desperation, Cecil Rhodes turned to the local reporter from the London Times. Won't you lead them? The journalist politely demurred.

At last, Rhodes bowed to reality. The uprising simply wasn't going to happen. The conspirators sent Jameson a message. The invasion's off. As Chris Ash vividly describes in The If Man, they hastily dispatched one of Jameson's friends to explain the situation...

The friend doesn't seem to have tried too hard to change Jameson's mind. He dutifully passed on the message to Jameson not to go, and then asked, So, what are you going to do? I'm going, replied Jameson. Thought you would. What are you going to do? Going with you. Thought you would. What on earth is Jameson thinking? Perhaps there's a clue in his love of high-stakes poker.

One evening, when he still worked as a doctor, he lost all his cash, then his house, his carriage, horses and finally his medical practice. He asked a friend to lend him some money and played on. By dawn, he'd won it all back and made a healthy profit. I knew I would be able to rely on my luck. Jameson was a gambler.

He'd gathered his men and dramatically produced the letter from the leading Utlanders. He'd filled in the date. Women and children needed them. Who would ride with him to Johannesburg? They'd get through without any fighting at all. Probably.

The invasion had been carefully planned out. Step one, cut the telegraph lines to Pretoria, the seat of the Boer government. It would take Jameson's men several days to ride the 170 miles to Johannesburg. He wanted the Boer leaders to hear the news of his attack as late as possible. But...

There were two telegraph lines, and Jameson's men cut only one of them. A rumour later went round that they'd mistakenly snipped a farmer's wire fence instead. In Pretoria, the Boers quickly heard what was happening. They mobilised their army, helped by another Jameson blunder. He'd invaded at Christmas, when men of fighting age who usually lived on far-flung farms had gathered in towns to celebrate.

The plan for the uprising called on the conspirators to make a surprise attack on the Boers' store of weapons, which was usually lightly guarded. But by the time the conspirators heard that Jameson was coming, so had the Boers, and they'd beefed up security. The Boer leader reached out to the Oetlanders. Let's talk about your grievances. He made some promises. The Oetlander leaders agreed to a deal.

Jameson, meanwhile, marched on towards Johannesburg, blithely confident that an uprising must soon be underway. Cecil Rhodes was in despair. "'Twenty years we've been friends, and now he goes in and ruins me!' The British governor of Cape Colony was equally horrified.

Sir Hercules Robinson, best name ever, worried that his own foreknowledge of the plan might come to light. Sir Hercules sent a messenger to ride through the night and catch up with Jameson's march. Tell Jameson and the officers with him that Her Majesty's Government repudiate their violation of the territory of a friendly state and that they are rendering themselves liable to severe penalties. Jameson debated with his senior officers what to do about this message.

By now, they were more than halfway to Johannesburg. They knew the Boers would have mobilised behind them in the areas they'd passed, so they couldn't turn back without a fight. May as well keep going then. Jameson wasn't afraid of a high-stakes gamble. He later shrugged, ''If I'd succeeded, I would have been forgiven.''

A little further towards Johannesburg, another messenger arrived from an increasingly shrill Sir Hercules. Her Majesty's government entirely disapprove of your conduct. You are ordered to retire at once from the country and will be held personally responsible for the consequences of your unauthorised and most improper proceeding. It must have seemed to Jameson that all around him were losing their heads and blaming it on him. He sent a reply.

Of course, I'd like to obey Sir Hercules, but if we turned around now, we won't have enough supplies to last us through the journey back. We have to press on to Johannesburg, you see, if only to get the men and horses a bite to eat. With 30 miles to go, Jameson received his next set of messengers. Two men on bone shaker bicycles, which they'd ridden from Johannesburg. They were carrying three messages.

The messages don't survive, but their overall effect seems to have been confusing. One message correctly informed Jameson that there'd been no uprising and Uttlander leaders had agreed a peace deal. But another message apparently suggested that the Uttlanders might nonetheless send reinforcements to meet Jameson at Krugersdorp, a village they'd have to pass on the way to Johannesburg.

The men on bicycles, though, had just passed through Krugersdorp themselves and seen hundreds of Boer fighters, apparently lying in wait for Jameson to arrive. What to do? Charge straight into Krugersdorp in the hope of encountering the reinforcements? Or skirt around the side of Krugersdorp in the hope of avoiding the Boers? Skirt around the outside, said Jameson's second-in-command, an experienced military man.

What was it Kipling said about taking advice? If all men count with you, but not too much? No, no, said Jameson. Charge straight into Kruger's Dorp. So that's what they did. After losing 60 men, Jameson decided that perhaps they'd better skirt around the outside after all. As night began to fall, they suddenly heard gunfire in the distance. It was coming from Kruger's Dorp.

The reinforcements, said Jameson. We'll have to turn back and help them fight. But the gunfire hadn't been reinforcements at all. It had been yet more Boer fighters arriving to join the party and firing their guns in the air in celebration. By the time Jameson realised there were no reinforcements, he had no option but to stop where he was and camp for the night. Morning brought yet another messenger from Sir Hercules.

I do command Dr. Jameson and all persons accompanying him to immediately retire from the territory of the South African Republic on pain of penalties attached to their illegal proceedings. You can probably imagine how Jameson reacted to this. One last push to Johannesburg. It's only 12 more miles. Come on, we can do this. If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew to serve your turn long after they are gone...

Jameson's men weren't just using their hearts and nerves and sinews, but also their eyes and brains. They could see that they were surrounded now by boars and heavily outnumbered. Jameson stopped by a stream and got off his horse to take a drink of water. Standing nearby was an old African woman wearing a white apron.

When Jameson looked up from the stream, he was horrified to see his soldiers surrendering by waving that white apron urgently in the direction of the nearest Boers. It was over. The Boer commander sent a message to Jameson. Lay down your flag and your arms. I fight under no flag. My arms, I am prepared to surrender, but as I have never done so before, I don't know how to proceed about it.

Jameson had demonstrated many of the qualities that Kipling's poem extols, but those virtues weren't the ones that the situation demanded. The Jameson raid had been an unmitigated disaster. Portionary Tales will return after the break.

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Jana Novotna has just served a double fault, to miss the chance of getting within one game of winning the 1993 Wimbledon Championship. But she's still in a great position, well ahead in the deciding set. She serves again. Steffi Graf's return is weak, giving Novotna plenty of time to choose where to smash what should be a routine winner. But instead, she smacks the ball long, way past the baseline. Advantage, Miss Graf.

That's two bizarre errors in two points. Graff wins the next point and the game. Game, Miss Graff. Miss Novotna leads by four games to two. Final set. It should have been 5-1. Instead, it's 4-2. At this point, any sports psychologist would tell Novotna to forget what just happened. She's played a few bad shots, but she hasn't suddenly become a bad player. But Novotna seems to be struggling to refocus.

Graff wins the next game, 4-3. And the next. And the next. Miss Graff leads by five games to four. Final set. Novotna now has to win the next game just to keep the match going. 15-30. But it's not going well. She whiffs a backhand into the net. 15-40. A weak lob, and it's all too easy for Steffi Graff to smash the championship-winning point.

Game, set and match is wrapped. It's only when Novotna is receiving the runner's up trophy that the enormity of her choke sinks in. How on earth did she lose that? She takes the silver plate from the Duchess of Kent, a minor British royal. Don't worry, says the Duchess, you'll win it one day. Novotna starts to well up. The Duchess reaches out a comforting arm. Novotna puts her head on the Duchess's shoulder.

and sobs. What happens when a sports person chokes like Jana Novotna? Psychologists have a few theories. One is that playing high-level sport demands all your attention. And if you start attending to other thoughts instead, "I'm so close to winning!" or "It's all going wrong!" you can no longer perform at your peak.

Another theory is almost the reverse. It holds that high-level sport depends on skills that are so well honed you don't have to think about them. And when you choke, you trip yourself up by consciously analysing the kind of split-second decisions that are usually automatic. Whichever theory is right, Kipling told us how to avoid it. If you can meet with triumph and disaster and treat those two imposters just the same...

It's great advice for the heat of a battle on centre court. You win a point, you lose a point, you should play the next point in just the same way. That's not easy. But as soon as we step out of the sporting arena, I don't think it's great advice for life. Far from it. Generally, when you have a disaster, you don't want to shrug it off and plug on doing the exact same things. You want to ask why the disaster happened and what you might learn from it.

We'll hand you over to the government in Pretoria, said the Boer fighters to Dr Jameson. They can decide what to do with you. They confiscated a bag of documents that Jameson was carrying. It contained not only the coded messages from the conspirators in Johannesburg, but also the codebook to decipher them. The conspirators were not happy to find themselves being rounded up and joining Jameson under lock and key.

Back in Britain, though, the nationalistic public didn't see Jameson as a blundering incompetent. They thought he was a plucky hero. The Doctor had erred, said the Times of London, only through excess of zeal for empire. The poet laureate rushed out some verses. There are girls in the Gold Reef City. There are mothers and children too. And they cry, hurry up, for pity. So what can a brave man do?

In Pretoria, the Boer leader resisted demands to make Jameson face a firing squad. There was no point creating a martyr.

Instead, he passed Jameson on to the British authorities in the nearest colony, and they put him on the first boat back to London, where he was lionised. He received many offers of marriage, including one from an attractive and wealthy widow who explained that she had two marriageable daughters, and the gallant doctor might make his choice of the three.

Veterans of Jameson's raid would work the pubs of London, collecting money and the odd glass of whiskey in exchange for vivid tales of their adventures. Not just veterans, either. One newspaper archly noted that South African dress was easily obtained from theatrical suppliers, adding that there are more felt-hatted, high-booted individuals now working the public houses of London than ever saw Krugersdorp.

The hero worship of Jameson and his raiders gave Britain's government a headache. He might be popular, but Jameson had invaded an ostensibly friendly state. They had to put him on trial. But they also knew Jameson had incriminating messages from Sir Hercules Robinson, showing that the government had been well aware of the plan to foment an uprising. Sir Hercules sent his deputy to talk to Jameson.

"Well," said Jameson, "I have made a nice mess of it. I suppose you've come to reproach me." "Certainly not," came the reply. "But I want you to help your country out of the mess." "How could Jameson do that?" "Go to prison with your mouth shut," he was told. Jameson did, stoically taking all the blame despite some skeptical questioning.

Sir Hercules must have known of your planned invasion. Wouldn't it have been the proper thing for you to have told him? Indeed it would, said Jameson, but if I was concerned about doing the proper thing, I wouldn't have been planning the invasion in the first place. For Rudyard Kipling, Jameson's cheerful willingness to trash his own reputation was deeply impressive. If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken, twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools...

Jameson served his time in prison, then went back to southern Africa. He stood for Parliament in Cape Colony and soon worked his way up to be Prime Minister. A demonstration of astonishing incompetence, it seemed, was no impediment to success in British politics. Some might wonder how much has changed. But what had Jameson learned from the disaster of the Jameson raid? If there's an answer to that question...

We don't know it. Jameson never talked about it. When his friends asked, he'd simply laugh that he'd made a bloody fool of himself. It's hard for us today to see Dr Jameson through the admiring eyes of Rudyard Kipling. What, after all, was the Jameson raid about? Not right or wrong. Not some deep point of principle.

No, it was about which set of white men would get to exploit the minerals of black Africans. Which very rich man, the British businessman Cecil Rhodes or the Boer leader Paul Kruger, would get richer still? It's clear to us that this is all beside the point. What matters is the inequality, the exploitation. But for Jameson, it seems, gaining territory was little more than a game.

So perhaps it's no coincidence that the famous line about triumph and disaster feels so well suited to playing games. And I don't think that's the only line from Kipling's poem that's brilliant advice for sports, but terrible advice for life. If you can make one heap of all your winnings and risk it on one turn of pitch and toss and lose and start again at your beginnings...

Pitch and toss is a simple, silly gambling game. Jameson would probably have loved it. But I can't help feeling that it's generally a good idea not to risk everything you own on one turn of pitch and toss if you can help it. In sport, you can't help it. And if the risk doesn't pay off, then exactly the right response is to start again at your beginnings and never breathe a word about your loss.

Or how about that line about knaves twisting the truth to make a trap for fools? It's a common enough problem nowadays. But is the right response really to bear it?

I'm not so sure. Again, except for sport. You'll often see a cunning player fool a referee into giving an unfair decision. The best response for the opposing player is generally to suck it up and stay coolly focused on winning the match. You can complain about the refereeing standards when the match is over. And when the match is over, then you can ask what you can learn from it to stand you in better stead for next time.

That's what Jana Novotna tried to do after her defeat in the Wimbledon final of 1993. Novotna said later, I'm always trying to take only the positive things from that final and put it in a good way for the future. Novotna got to the final of Wimbledon again five years later. Once again, she walked onto centre court under the words about treating those two imposters just the same. This time,

She won. There again to present the trophy was the Duchess of Kent. Before she handed over the big gold plate, not the little silver one, she warmly clasped both of Novotna's hands in hers and said, I'm so proud of you. Treat those two imposters just the same while playing? Yes. But Novotna had learned from her disaster. You couldn't begrudge her enjoying the triumph. MUSIC

The key source on the Jameson raid is Chris Ash's book, The If Man. For a full list of our sources, please see the show notes at timharford.com. Cautionary Tales is written by me, Tim Harford, with Andrew Wright. It's produced by Alice Fiennes, with support from Edith Ruslow. The sound design and original music is the work of Pascal Wise. Julia Barton edited the scripts.

It features the voice talents of Ben Crow, Melanie Guttridge, Gemma Saunders and Rufus Wright. The show wouldn't have been possible without the work of Jacob Weisberg, Ryan Dilley, Greta Cohn, Leet Almalad, John Schnarz, Carly Migliori and Eric Sandler.

Cautionary Tales is a production of Pushkin Industries. It was recorded in Wardall Studios in London by Tom Berry. If you like the show, please remember to share, rate and review. Go on, you know it helps us. And if you want to hear the show ad-free, sign up for Pushkin Plus on the show page in Apple Podcasts or at pushkin.fm slash plus.

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