On 20 December 1880, a week after the Transvaal Boers resolved to restore their republic, a Boer commando under Frans Joubert stopped a column of the British 94th Regiment near the Bronkhorstspruit, east of Pretoria. Lieutenant Colonel Philip Anstruther refused a demand to halt, and in a short, intense exchange of fire his men were shot down in numbers. The column surrendered. It was the first fight of the war that South Africans know as the Transvaal War of Independence, or the First Anglo-Boer War.
The Transvaal rises
Britain had annexed the Transvaal in 1877, and the Boer leaders' attempts to reverse the annexation by negotiation failed. In December 1880 thousands of Boers gathered at Paardekraal, near Krugersdorp, and elected Paul Kruger, Piet Joubert and Marthinus Wessel Pretorius as a triumvirate. On 13 December they resolved to restore the republic, and three days later they raised their flag, the Vierkleur, at Heidelberg.1
The British garrisons in the Transvaal were small and scattered. Anstruther, who had fought at Ulundi in the Zulu War, commanded the detachment of the 94th Regiment at Lydenburg, and when the rising began it marched for Pretoria. Nöthling's biographical notes say he did not heed warnings that he might be ambushed.2
Two minutes for an answer
Around midday on 20 December the column, with its band playing at the head, was about a mile short of the Bronkhorstspruit when a party of Boers appeared on a low ridge on its left flank. A messenger under a flag of truce brought Anstruther a letter, and said that two minutes were allowed for an answer. Anstruther replied that his orders were to go to Pretoria and that he would go on, though he did not wish to meet the Boers in a hostile spirit. Almost as soon as the messenger rode back, the Boers opened fire.3
Duxbury estimates that the Boer force grew to about 250 to 300 men during the parley, and Nöthling gives Joubert about 200. The heavy firing was brief. Duxbury reviews reports of between 7 and 40 minutes and settles on about 15. The Boers moved in on the wagons, and Anstruther, wounded, surrendered the column. Boer witnesses said the British soldiers had set their sights for 400 yards and did not lower them as the Boers came closer, so most of their shots went high.4
Whether this was an ambush is still argued. Nöthling writes that Anstruther was taken by surprise. Duxbury, who studied the eyewitness accounts, argues that the column had warning, was summoned to halt and returned fire, so the fight cannot fairly be called an ambush or a massacre.5
The cost
The British losses are given differently. Duxbury puts them at about 77 killed or died of wounds and 157 casualties in all, not counting prisoners, while Nöthling gives one officer and 55 men killed and 99 wounded. The Boers lost one man killed and one who died of wounds, with four or five wounded. Anstruther, hit five times in the legs, died on 26 December after the amputation of a leg. The women of the regiment cared for the wounded under fire, and three of them were later awarded the Royal Red Cross.6
Nöthling records that Joubert shook hands with the wounded Anstruther after the battle, and that the action earned Joubert the nickname Frans Held, Frans the Hero. The war went on into 1881, with British garrisons such as Pretoria under siege until the ceasefire in March. Its best-known battle has its own page: 27 February, Majuba Hill, 1881.7
Also on this day
- 1914: First Battle of Champagne. The French Fourth Army attacked the German 3rd Army in Champagne, one of the first Allied offensives after mobile warfare ended on the Western Front in the First World War.
