Grandad Williamson besieged in Ladysmith

The town stands where the railway from the Orange Free State and the one from the Transvaal join and then go on to Maritzburg and Durban. The holding of Ladysmith denied to the Boers the use of these two lines in any further advance into Natal and it looked to me that it was very necessary for our force to get back from Dundee for Sir George White to have a sufficient force to defend the place, for the force in there was very little stronger than ours.

After two days rest we again fell in at night to attack the main force of Boers which was closing in on Ladysmith, and we got into position just before dawn.  When the day broke we were found to be in the wrong position and we had to move over some open ground to fetch up in the right place.  We opened out in extended order, which was lucky for us for going across we came under some accurate gun fire.  Being extended we had light casualties and we reached our new position in quite good order.  We stormed up to the top of this ridge with the Mauser bullets zipping around like high velocity bees and we held that position until late in the afternoon when the order came to retire on the town.  This was done in an orderly fashion, one Company retiring leaving the other Company holding the position.  The retiring company took up a position in the rear then the holding company retired through it and this was carried out in an extended line of men roughly eight paces apart and although the Boer artillery kept firing at us we presented a very small target.  The lads were as steady as rocks and as I looked about I could see the other battalions retiring in the same orderly manner.

Entering the town we closed ranks and marched to our Station of Defence.  Again we had been outnumbered and outgunned but by no means beaten.  That ended the battle of Nicholson’s Nek and the siege of Ladysmith had commenced.

Now we had to build protective positions around the town.  Our battalion was allotted a ridge to the west called Observation West.  We could not dig trenches because of the rocks so we built Sangars.  As these were built to give us as wide a field of fire as possible they were sited on the ridge or just over it on the enemy side so the work had to be done at night for we were within rifle range of the Boer positions opposite.  What we did was retire over the ridge during daylight and return to work as darkness fell.  While we were doing this the Naval Contingent was building an emplacement for one of the two 4.7 naval guns behind us, so we were building our own protection and providing a protective screen for them.  How lucky we were that these two 4.7 guns got in to us before the Boers had completed the encirclement.  They were one answer to the big Boer guns.  At least one answer – I will tell you of another answer later on.  These Sangars were our home for nearly five months and from them all but five of us went to hospital with Enteric Fever or Dysentery or the grave.

There was a Roman Catholic convent on our side of the town which the Boers shelled.  It was being used as a hospital so the Boers agreed to the British command having a hospital sited five miles down the railway and to have our sick and wounded taken there.  They allowed one train per day each way.  The morning train took the sick and wounded down, the same train returned empty in the late afternoon.  As the hospital, named Intombi, was in the Boer occupied territory they were able to see that the conditions were kept.  However I reckon that it was a decent humane agreement and reflected great credit on the Boer command.

Grandad Williamson on the march to Ladysmith

General Yule had taken over command of the British Forces on the spot and must have come to the conclusion that holding onto any position there was hopeless and he decided to try and get back to Ladysmith and join up with Sir George White’s force there.  In the late afternoon our company commander got orders to take a number of mule wagons into the Army Service Corps yard in Dundee, which was then in No Mans Land between us and the Boers, and load up provisions to feed the force during the four days and four nights march back.  There was to be no smoking and no noise.  We soldiers obeyed but the native drivers “Ya-hooed” at their animals.  The Boers must have heard them but they took no action.  Naturally we realised the position we were in and worked hard to get the stores loaded up.  When we had finished, our officer in command told us we had 20 minutes to spare and to look round and pick up anything we could carry, but nothing heavy.  We dived into the officers’ tents and I picked up a Krop razor (I still have the blade). 

Falling in again the wagons had already gone to catch up the main body – we acted as the rear guard that night and the next day to the retreating column.  Getting away from there was one bit of luck.  The next night we had another bit.  We came to a Nek dominated by steep hills quite close to the track and I for one breathed a little easier when we were through.  If we had been held up there all the odds would have been against us.  We had no great amount of food or ammunition to make a prolonged stand and were too far from Ladysmith for the force there to give us any help.

Good fortune held with us on the third day’s march.  Again we were on rear guard and we crossed a river that was ankle deep, then we took up a position on the further bank to allow the main body, which had been delayed by the steep banks of the river, to get some distance from us.  It started to rain as we crossed and when we left the position we had taken up, two hours later, that river was twenty feet deep, quite a good moat between us and the enemy.

Then we heard the guns at Elandslaagte and that gave us some comfort.  The Boers had sent a force down the railway, perhaps with the object of flanking us out of Ladysmith.  Sir George White’s forces turned out and gave this force a drubbing, capturing their artillery and paving the way for us to march in.

We still had a long way to go and on the last night’s march we were advanced guard.  We were going along in the pitch darkness, most of us half asleep, some fully asleep (a man’s rifle would come back and fall on the man behind him, then he would fall down fast asleep, his more alert comrades would pick the fallen one up, put his rifle in his hand and start him up again just like an automaton).  Well, as I was saying, we were on this track which had a donga on each side of it and a horse came galloping down the middle of us.  We dived or got knocked into the dongas from which we climbed muddied up.  Hearing voices on our left we fixed bayonets and charged.  Some sensible chap with us called out “Who are you?” 

 

“Natal Carbineers” came back the reply.  They had come out from Ladysmith to help us in if necessary.  It was a relief, that answer, for we had that 20,000 horsemen on our minds.

As day broke we could see Ladysmith and towards afternoon, dead tired and hungry, we marched in.

Grandad Williamson at Talana Hill

As I have said, we lay alongside the Dublins and a right old Irish crowd they were.  Their commanding officer was a strict disciplinarian – he had to be.  Often we would hear of the table at which he sat when administering justice being kicked up in his face when he had passed sentence.

In the town was a big public house kept by Barney Froomberg.  It had a stage in the big room and it was in this room that the Dublins (and our lads too) swallowed the stuff that got them into trouble.  On this stage Private McGuiness used to do turns and the drinks he used to get from his pals for entertaining them were chiefly the cause of his appearance before the C.O. on a charge.  When his commanding officer had done with him he would ask the sergeant of the guard to make him out a sick report and then McGuiness would be escorted to the hospital.  There the Camp Medical Officer, another Irishman, would not ask Mac what was the matter with him, he would ask, “How many days this time McGuiness? who would reply “8 days to barracks” or whatever the sentence was.  Then Mickey the Doctor would say, “Come inside” and McGuiness would do his punishment time in hospital, for this lad was the liveliest and wittiest of persons.  No doubt the Doctor thought having McGuiness inside would do his patients more good than medicine.

We were going along easily, both the officers and the other ranks having more or less a good time despite the darkening political situation when a middle aged, athletic-looking man came to take command of the troops in Natal.  His name was General Penn Symons and he, with Indian frontier experience, immediately commenced to waken us up to the dangerous situation before us and prepare us to fight energetically if war came.  All the peacetime fal-de-ral was scrapped and field training, shooting, night attacks were his ideas of how to soldier, with route marching to toughen us up etc.  In the matter of a few months he had taught us more than we had learned in years of barrack room soldiering and it is a pity that he did not live to see the results of his good work.  He was killed leading the attack on Talana Hill.

Sometime during the South African winter, perhaps in the month of June, we moved up to Ladysmith to relieve the Royal Irish Rifles, who were going to India, and in the late September we moved up to Dundee, a small mining town in Natal but on the Natal-Transvaal border.  Here we were joined by the Dublin Fusiliers, a battalion of Kings Royal Rifles and another battalion (I think it was the Liverpool Regiment).  That was the Infantry strength.  Then there were a regiment of Hussars and a battery of artillery.  That was our fighting strength.

One misty morning we stood to until the mist began to lift, then we stood down and went to our tents.  We had not shed our equipment when “Bang” and a shell sailed into the railway cutting about 40 yards past our tents.  We grabbed our rifles and made a beeline for cover.  General Penn Symons who was in the camp with us quickly got the attack going and made straight for the Boer positions on Talana Hill.  He, the General, was killed climbing the hill but the troops he had trained carried on and drove the Boers back to their frontier.  At night we returned to camp.  That scrap on Talana Hill and one at Elangslaagte a day or two later steadied the Boers somewhat, they did not seem quite so anxious to come to grips with us afterwards.  They were meeting soldiers trained quite differently to those their fathers defeated at Majuba Hill and Laings Nek in 1881.

The next day after Talana we were shelled out of our camp again, with guns sited in the direction of Laings Nek that could outrange any artillery we had.  With them they had a swarm of horseman estimated to number 20,000.  We retired back on to the coalfield where only the long range Creusots could reach us.  Previously our artillery had tried counter battery work, but owing to the height of the Boer guns on the Drakensburg slopes and also because they were able to knock out our guns miles before out guns could get in range, the suicide job was called off.