On 20 December 1880 a Boer commando under Frans Joubert stopped a column of about 260 men of the British 94th Regiment near the Bronkhorstspruit, east of Pretoria. Lieutenant Colonel Philip Anstruther refused to halt, and after a short, deadly exchange of fire the column surrendered. It was the first battle of the First Boer War.
Battle of Bronkhorstspruit
20 December 1880 · 145 years ago
The Transvaal rises
Britain had annexed the Transvaal in 1877, and many Boers never accepted it. In December 1880 thousands of them gathered at Paardekraal, and on 13 December they resolved to restore their republic, the South African Republic, under a provisional government. Its leaders were a triumvirate of Paul Kruger, Piet Joubert and Marthinus Wessel Pretorius, who set up their government at Heidelberg.1
The British garrisons were small and scattered across the country, and the Boers at once laid siege to them. To strengthen Pretoria, Anstruther was ordered to bring in most of the 94th Regiment's detachment at Lydenburg, and he set out with about 260 men, a few soldiers' families and a long train of ox wagons. On the way he was warned that armed Boers were moving against him, but he did not believe they would attack.2
A letter under a flag of truce
In the middle of the day on 20 December the column, with its band playing at the head, was nearing the Bronkhorstspruit, about 60 kilometers (37 miles) east of Pretoria, when about 150 mounted Boers appeared on a rise to its left. A Boer rider under a flag of truce brought Anstruther a letter telling him to stop where he was, since any further advance would be taken as an act of war. Anstruther answered that his orders were to march to Pretoria with all possible speed, though he had no wish to meet the Boers as an enemy. As he hurried back to his men, the Boers, who had meanwhile closed in, opened fire.3
Estimates of the Boer force differ: the National Army Museum and Nöthling give about 200 men, Duxbury 250 to 300, and Bellairs, writing for the British side, nearly 1,000. The fight was over in minutes; Bellairs gives about ten, Duxbury about fifteen. Caught strung out along the road, the soldiers fired back uphill, and their fire did little harm. Anstruther, hit five times in the legs, had the ceasefire sounded and surrendered the column.4
Whether this was an ambush is still argued. Bellairs and Nöthling describe a column taken by surprise. The historian G. R. Duxbury, who studied the eyewitness accounts, argues that the column was summoned to halt and returned fire, so the fight cannot fairly be called an ambush or a massacre.5
The cost
Bellairs and Nöthling both count one officer and 55 men killed on the spot, and the National Army Museum gives 56 killed. About 100 were wounded, and so many of them died later that the death toll rose to about 77. The Boers said they had lost two killed and five wounded; Duxbury gives one killed, one died of wounds and four or five wounded. Anstruther died on 26 December, after a leg was amputated.6
The soldiers' wives with the column nursed the wounded, and one of them, Mrs Fox, was herself badly wounded. The war went on into 1881. The besieged British garrisons, Pretoria among them, held out until an armistice in March. The war's best-known battle has its own page: 27 February, Majuba Hill, 1881.7
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