On 2 November 1899, in the Second Boer War, Boer guns opened the bombardment of Ladysmith in Natal and its last rail and telegraph links were cut, trapping Sir George White's British garrison. The siege lasted 118 days, until Sir Redvers Buller's relief force broke through on 28 February 1900. In 1943 the US Navy won at Empress Augusta Bay.
Mournful Monday and the last train
The Second Boer War began on 12 October 1899, when the two Boer republics invaded Natal and the Cape Colony after Britain rejected their ultimatum. White's force fought the invaders at Talana and Elandslaagte on 20 and 21 October, then drew together at the garrison town of Ladysmith. On 30 October White struck at the Boers closing in on the town and was beaten at Lombard's Kop. A detached column of about a thousand men under Lieutenant Colonel Frank Carleton, Royal Irish Fusiliers and Gloucesters, was cut off at Nicholson's Nek and surrendered after its mules stampeded in the night with most of the reserve ammunition. Soldiers remembered the day as Mournful Monday. The one piece of luck was a naval brigade with long-range guns under Captain Hedworth Lambton, which arrived by train as the battle was ending and helped cover the retreat.1
On 2 November the trap closed. Long Tom, a 15-centimeter Creusot gun on Pepworth Hill, opened fire soon after six in the morning, and Lambton's naval guns answered. That day General John French, the cavalry commander, caught the last train to Durban, which got through under fire; Doyle says its passengers rode on the wrong side of the seats. At two o'clock the telegraph went dead. “Blink the fact as we may,” wrote Henry Pearse, the Daily News correspondent, “it must be admitted that Ladysmith is under siege”.2
A town in a ring of hills
The National Army Museum puts the trapped force at about 13,500 troops, most of them British regulars; White himself, in a message to Buller in December, wrote of “12,000 men here”. Many of the town's civilians stayed with them. Doyle puts the perimeter at fourteen miles, running through Caesar's Camp and Wagon Hill on the ridge south of the town.3
The Boer commander, Piet Joubert, agreed to a neutral camp at Intombi Spruit, a few miles out of town, for the sick, the wounded and non-combatants. Many townspeople stayed and sheltered from the shells in the deep banks of the Klip River.4
The first loss that shook the garrison came on 2 November itself. A Long Tom shell hit the naval battery and mortally wounded Lieutenant Egerton of HMS Powerful. Pearse records him saying “My cricketing days are over now”; Doyle gives the words as “There's an end of my cricket”. Nevinson wrote that in the afternoon he was sitting up, drinking champagne and smoking cigarettes; he died within a day. Up on Caesar's Camp, Nevinson found the Manchesters building stone sangars without much spirit. “We're surrounded, that's what we are,” they kept saying. “Thought we was goin' to have Christmas puddin' in Pretoria”.5
Black Week and a refusal to surrender
The Boers also besieged Kimberley and Mafeking, and in December they beat the British at Stormberg on the 10th, Magersfontein on the 11th and Colenso on the 15th, the defeats that became known as Black Week. At Colenso Buller's own attempt to cross the Tugela and reach Ladysmith was thrown back, a battle told on our 15 December page.6
Buller then suggested that White should consider surrendering. In the message Doyle prints, Buller asked how many days White could hold out and suggested “firing away as much ammunition as you can, and making best terms you can”. White answered on 16 December: “I can make food last for much longer than a month, and will not think of making terms till I am forced to.” In the same message he warned that enteric fever was “increasing alarmingly”, with 180 cases in a month.7
Christmas under the guns
On 22 December a shell from the Boer gun on Bulwana burst among the Gloucesters while the men were at breakfast. The eyewitness counts differ: Pearse wrote of six killed and nine wounded, Nevinson of eight dead and nine wounded, and the army schoolmaster W. H. Gilbert, whose diary is held by the National Army Museum, of seven killed and ten wounded.8
Over Christmas the Boer gunners sent a different message. Some of their shells did not explode, and when they were dug up they held plum pudding, with the case engraved “With the Compliments of the Season”.9
Wagon Hill, 6 January: the storm
Joubert decided to take the town before Buller could try again. Before dawn on 6 January 1900 picked volunteers of the Heidelberg and Harrismith commandos, many of them barefoot, climbed the long ridge south of the town: Caesar's Camp at its eastern end, Wagon Hill at its western. At both ends the outposts were taken by surprise, and the fight went on all day at very close range; in Doyle's words, “a stone or a taunt” could be thrown across.10
On Wagon Hill, Lieutenant Robert Digby-Jones of the Royal Engineers and Trooper Herman Albrecht of the Imperial Light Horse led the men who retook the top of the hill at a critical moment. The citation credits Digby-Jones with shooting the leader of the three foremost Boers and Albrecht with shooting the other two, and Pearse reported the fight the same way. Both were killed that day, and the London Gazette of 8 August 1902 announced that both would have been recommended for the Victoria Cross had they survived. Doyle gives a different version, in which Albrecht shot the Boer leader de Villiers and Digby-Jones shot the man who had killed Albrecht.11
At about four in the afternoon a thunderstorm broke over the ridge, and the Devons, led by Colonel Park, charged through the rain and swept the Boers off the crest. The assault had failed. Doyle and the edition of Pearse's letters both give 420 British killed and wounded.12
Horseflesh and fever
Buller was beaten again at Spion Kop on 24 January and then at Vaal Krantz. In Ladysmith, sickness and hunger forced horsemeat into the rations. From February horseflesh was also boiled down into a meat extract the garrison called Chevril.13
Enteric fever and dysentery swept the garrison and filled the hospital camp at Intombi.14
Relief, 28 February 1900
After the fighting on the Tugela Heights the Boers gave way on 27 February, the anniversary of Majuba, as both Nevinson and Pearse noted. On the evening of 28 February Lord Dundonald rode in with an advance guard of colonial horse, including Imperial Light Horse and Natal Carbineers.15
Townspeople and soldiers crowded round White, and Pearse heard him tell them: “I thank God we have kept the flag flying”. South African History Online and Doyle count the siege as 118 days; Pearse wrote of 119 days of close investment.16
The war turned within weeks: Lord Roberts took Bloemfontein on 13 March and Pretoria on 5 June 1900. It still went on as a guerrilla war until the Treaty of Vereeniging on 31 May 1902.17
Also on 2 November
In 1943, in the early hours of 2 November, Rear Admiral A. Stanton Merrill's Task Force 39 met Sentaro Omori's cruisers and destroyers off Bougainville and turned them back from the American landing in Empress Augusta Bay. The Japanese lost the light cruiser Sendai and the destroyer Hatsukaze.18
