Battle of Spion Kop, 1900: the acre of massacre above the Tugela

Few defeats shocked Victorian Britain like Spion Kop. Thousands of British soldiers ended up crowded onto a small rocky summit under fire they could not answer, while most of the army below did little, and at the end of the day both sides believed they had lost. Arthur Conan Doyle, writing his history of the war that same year, called it the grimmest soldier's battle since Inkerman.²

Background: the road to Ladysmith

In the first weeks of the Second Boer War, which began in October 1899, the Boers invaded Natal and shut up a British army in Ladysmith. General Sir Redvers Buller's first attempt to break through, straight up the railway at Colenso on 15 December 1899, ended in a severe defeat: by Buller's own returns more than 1,300 casualties and ten field guns left on the field.³ › Siege of Ladysmith, 1899

Reinforced by Lieutenant General Sir Charles Warren's 5th Division, Buller tried again further west, to go around the Boer trenches on the Tugela instead of through them. On 10 January 1900 he marched out with, by Doyle's count and Historic UK's, 19,000 infantry, 3,000 cavalry and 60 guns. Heavy rain had turned the roads to mud, and it took days to bring up the supplies.⁴

Buller's plan was to send Major General Neville Lyttelton across the Tugela at Potgieter's Drift to hold the Boers in front, while Warren crossed at Trichardt's Drift, five miles upstream, to turn their right flank. Warren began crossing on 17 January and then moved slowly. Doyle, writing in 1900, complained that two invaluable days were wasted; Professor C. J. Barnard, in his study of the Boer commander, describes a crossing that took three days with a baggage train fifteen miles long.⁵

Armies and commanders

The Boers on the upper Tugela were commanded by General Louis Botha, the victor of Colenso. He used the British delay to bring up men and dig them in on the hills facing Warren. On 20 and 21 January Warren's brigades pushed up the forward slopes of the Tabanyama range but could not break the main Boer line.⁶

The British commanders were an uneasy pair. Doyle called Buller a heavy, obdurate, inexplicable man, though one who could still inspire his troops; Barnard describes Warren as a self-assured and eccentric veteran who had openly criticized his chief. The man who would end up commanding on the summit, Alexander Thorneycroft, had raised his own regiment of mounted infantry, and Doyle and Historic UK both describe him as a huge, physically imposing officer with a reputation as a determined fighter.⁷

On 23 January Buller insisted that Warren act or withdraw across the river. Warren chose to take Spion Kop, the high hill at the angle of the Boer line, which seemed to command the whole position. The assault column, about 1,700 men, was made up of the Lancashire Fusiliers, most of the Royal Lancaster Regiment, two companies of the South Lancashires, Thorneycroft's Mounted Infantry and half a company of Royal Engineers, under Major General Edward Woodgate.⁸

The battle in phases

The climb in the dark

The column climbed in single file on the night of 23 January, in darkness and a fine drizzle, with Thorneycroft leading the way up the southwestern spur. Near the top a Boer picket of Vryheid burghers challenged them and fired, then fled from a bayonet charge. In the mist the British could not signal with lamps, so they gave three cheers, which the waiting gunners below heard at about 4 a.m. on 24 January.⁹

The sappers began to dig, but the summit was rock and the trench they managed was only a couple of feet deep. Worse, in the fog it had been laid out short of the true crest: Barnard puts the error at 50 to 200 yards, Historic UK at about 400. When the mist lifted between 8 and 8:30 a.m. the British found they held only part of the plateau, overlooked from Aloe Knoll, Conical Hill, Green Hill and the Twin Peaks.¹⁰

Under fire from three sides

The Boer counterattack began at once. Commandant Hendrik Prinsloo's Carolina burghers climbed the far side of the hill and fought the British at close quarters along the crest, while Boer riflemen on the surrounding heights poured fire onto the summit. Botha's handful of guns, five field guns and two pom-poms by both Doyle's and Barnard's count, were sited where the British batteries below could not find them, and shelled the crowded hilltop all day.¹¹

Woodgate was mortally wounded early, and other senior officers fell. A message reached Warren: "Reinforce at once or all is lost. General dead." At Buller's suggestion Thorneycroft, that morning a lieutenant colonel, was put in command of the summit.¹²

Around 1 p.m. some exhausted Lancashire Fusiliers raised a white flag. Thorneycroft ran forward and told the Boers that he commanded on the hill and would allow no surrender, though well over a hundred men were led away as prisoners. Warren's only answer to the crisis was to send more men up: by Barnard's reckoning some 4,500 troops in all were ordered onto a summit that could barely hold a fraction of them, and Doyle wrote that the reinforcements added more to the casualty lists than to the defense.¹³

The Twin Peaks

Late in the afternoon one of Lyttelton's battalions, the 3rd King's Royal Rifles, climbed the Twin Peaks east of Spion Kop and drove off their Boer defenders, at the cost of about a hundred casualties including their colonel, Buchanan-Riddell, who was killed. It was the one British success of the day, and Buller ordered the battalion back after dark. Both Doyle and Barnard judge that holding the peaks might have won the battle.¹⁴

Turning point: the night retreat

The battle was decided in the dark. Thorneycroft had received no orders beyond his appointment and no word of what was being done to help him; messages between the summit and the generals below had gone astray all day. At nightfall, his men without water and his officers dead or wounded, he decided to take them down. Winston Churchill, then a war correspondent, climbed the hill after dark to tell him that naval guns and working parties with sandbags were on the way, but by Churchill's own account the decision had already been taken. "Better six good battalions safely down the hill than a mop up in the morning," Thorneycroft told him.¹⁵

The Boers had been close to giving up too. Many burghers left the hill that evening, exhausted and unsure of the morning. Doyle, writing from British information, believed that Botha regarded the affair as hopeless by 3 a.m.; Barnard, from the Boer records, shows Botha convinced that the British would withdraw and rallying his wavering commandos through the night. At dawn on 25 January Boer scouts on the empty summit waved their hats to their comrades below, and the hill and the battle were theirs.¹⁶

Aftermath

A truce let both sides collect the wounded and bury the dead on 25 January. Among those carrying the British wounded off the hill were the stretcher bearers of the Indian Ambulance Corps, and with them a young lawyer named Mohandas Gandhi.¹⁷

The figures differ widely. Doyle gave at least 1,500 British killed, wounded or missing on the hill, and Boer losses of some 50 killed and 150 wounded. Barnard cites the official British list of 68 officers and 976 men, which he thinks incomplete since the Boers counted 650 British dead on the summit, and gives the Boers 59 killed, nine died of wounds and 134 wounded that day. Historic UK gives 322 British killed or died of wounds, 563 wounded and 300 taken prisoner, against 95 Boers killed and 140 wounded.¹⁸

Warren's force recrossed the Tugela, unmolested by the Boers, and by 27 January it was back where it had started ten days before. Doyle asked of the battle the question a Fusilier had shouted on the summit, "Where are the bosses?", and Barnard concludes that Botha proved more than a match for the wavering generals Buller and Warren. Buller tried again at Vaal Krantz in February and finally broke through to Ladysmith at the end of the month.¹⁹

Legacy and memory

Three men who were on or around the hill that day, Gandhi, Churchill and Botha, would become world-famous leaders, a coincidence that both Historic UK and South Africa's Sunday Times have dwelt on. The military lessons were argued over for years; Ken Gillings of the South African Military History Society has argued that the use of artillery at Spion Kop was a curtain-raiser to the indirect fire of the twentieth century.²⁰

The name lives on far from Natal. In 1906 Liverpool Football Club built a new terrace at Anfield that was christened Spion Kop, after the battle in which so many Lancashire soldiers had died, and Liverpool fans are still known as Kopites.²¹

Visiting the battlefield today

The summit of Spioenkop is open to visitors. Apart from the graves of the soldiers and the memorials to the British regiments and the Boer dead, the hilltop is much as it was in 1900, and walkers can follow the battlefield on foot with the help of markers. The site lies a short drive off the N3 highway, about half an hour from Ladysmith.²²