Grandad Williamson about Long Tom

Now to the shooting.  The enemy had on Gun Hill, among other guns, a very high velocity Creusot throwing something like a six inch shell.  So good was this gun that Sir George White decided to risk a sortie on it in order to destroy it and he sent Colonel Ian Hamilton with a party of Imperial Light Horsemen and some Royal Engineers for that purpose.  Now the Light Horsemen were mostly Britishers from Johannesburg and some of them could speak Dutch fluently.  They were able to answer a Boer sentry’s challenge in his own language; it being night he might see that their headgear was like his own and he was overpowered before he could give the alarm.  Anyway, they got in among the guns and destroyed the Creusot and several more, getting back without a casualty.

Then there was Long Tom on Umbulwana.  He was a gun of long range, but not a high velocity gun.  His objectives seemed to have been the destruction of military installations in the worn, one of which, the Observation Balloon, he had many a go at.  I never got to know if he destroyed it.  We used to watch his performance but never saw him get near.  It disappeared perhaps through the shortage of gas or more likely getting away in the darkness to join the forces of General Buller.

There was this about Long Tom, he did not use smokeless powder.  When he fired it warned the civilian people that a shell was on the way.  They had organised a watch and the sentries of this had whistles which, immediately they saw the smoke, they blew.  The inhabitants living near the Klip river had dug shelters in the steep banks and to these shelters they made a beeline on hearing the whistles.  Tom, too, had a terrible opponent, that was the 4.7 naval Gun behind us.  While the Navy had ammunition, Tom would fire once, and there would be five 4.7 shells coming for him, all in the air at the same time, from our quick-firing gun.

The main Boer position in front of us was on Surprise Hill, just beyond rifle shot range from our Sangars.  At the bottom of this hill we observed the night work the Boers were putting in.  They were building an emplacement and into this they brought an old mortar and one morning they opened fire.  Our artillery had been observing the operation too.  They allowed the old lad one shot then they blasted him.  The next shot it fired some days later was from the top of the hill.  It continued firing from there spasmodically.  It threw a round shell high up in the air.  When at its culminating point you could see the fuse burning.  It looked as if the thing would drop slap on top of you but it never did, scarcely ever did it come nearer than a hundred yards of us.  When the shell burst, sometimes in the air sometimes on the ground, it made an enormous noise but it proved harmless so the Artillery left it alone.