British officials considered launching a publicity campaign to cover up the true conditions of concentration camps in which thousands of women and children died during the Boer War, new documents have revealed. An archive of letters and photographs owned by Major Sir Hamilton Goold-Adams, a colonial official in South Africa, has come to light. The documents, to be auctioned this week, contain hitherto unknown confidential letters from Lord Milner, the man charged with sorting out the disastrous South African camps after news of their conditions had been exposed in Britain. The letters reveal that the black arts of media manipulation were not just a feature of the modern political age. In one letter, Milner appears to suggest that ways of playing down the horror of the camps. 'It is impossible not to see that, however blameless we may be in the matter, we shall not be able to make anybody think so, and I cannot avoid an uncomfortable feeling that there must be some way to make the thing a little less awfully bad if one could only think of it,' he wrote. In another letter Milner talks about trying to gather as many sympathetic statistics and figures as possible and passing them promptly back to the government to use in a media campaign. 'That's classic Milner - he was well aware of the need to manage public opinion. This is a very interesting archive,' said Dr Iain Smith, a South African history expert at the University of Warwick. The British Army created the concentration camps as part of a campaign against Boer guerrillas fighting against the takeover of their independent republic. Civilians were herded into the camps from their farms, but the insanitary conditions cost many their lives as hunger and disease ran rampant. Between June 1901 and May 1902, of the 115,000 people in the camps, almost 28,000 died, about 22,000 of them children. The death toll represented about 10 per cent of the Boer population. About 20,000 black people also died in other camps. 'It is an episode that British people very clearly want to forget and brush under the carpet. It was grim and reprehensible,' said Roger Westwood-Brookes, a documents expert at Dominic Winter Book Auctions, the firm that is selling the archive. Some of the correspondence reveals the horrific death rate the camps caused. One letter, written at the end of 1901, lamented the fact that the death rate among young children in the camps was still not dropping. 'The theory that, all the weakly children being dead, the rate would fall off is not so far borne out by the facts,' Milner wrote. 'The strong ones must be dying now and they will all be dead by the spring of 1903.' The tragedy was exposed by British campaigner Emily Hobhouse and caused a political scandal. She was labelled a 'turncoat' for her activities by politicians. Milner had been sent to South Africa to try to improve the situation, but the letters reveal some of the immense logistical problems he faced. Many of the camps were short of supplies because South Africa's railway lines and rolling stock were all taken up with supplying the troops. One letter from November 1901 showed that officials seemed powerless to stop the rising death rates. 'I thought that we had begun to turn the corner and that after having reached unparalleled heights of mortality in October we should now show a heavy decline. Unfortunately, the figures have risen again alarmingly,' Milner wrote. The archive has already generated interest from several institutions, including Oxford's Bodleian Library. 'In its entirety this collection is of historical importance. It makes a valuable contribution,' said Ian Shapiro, an expert at Argyle Atkins, which specialises in buying historical documents and is considering bidding.

