On 2 November 1899 the Boer guns opened the bombardment of Ladysmith, with the siege gun known as Long Tom firing from Pepworth Hill, the last train out ran a gauntlet of Boer rifles, and at two in the afternoon the telegraph went dead. Inside the ring of hills was Lieutenant General Sir George White's Natal Field Force, which the National Army Museum puts at about 13,500 troops, together with some 7,500 civilians. For 118 days they lived under shellfire, beat off a desperate Boer assault on Wagon Hill and ate their own horses, while General Sir Redvers Buller's relief army was beaten again and again on the Tugela River. On the evening of 28 February 1900 his first horsemen rode into the town.
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, while a detached column under Lieutenant Colonel Frank Carleton was cut off at Nicholson's Nek and surrendered after its mules stampeded with most of the ammunition. Arthur Conan Doyle counted 800 prisoners; John Rickard writes of close to a thousand. The British remembered the day as Mournful Monday. Their one piece of luck was a naval brigade, some 280 sailors with six long-range guns, which arrived 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 Captain Hedworth Lambton's naval guns answered. That day General John French, the cavalry commander, caught the last train to Durban. It got through under rifle and artillery fire from Boers on both sides of the line, and Doyle says the passengers rode on the wrong side of the seats. History Hit adds that Douglas Haig was on the same train. At two o'clock the telegraph stopped in the middle of a dispatch. “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
According to the National Army Museum, about 13,500 troops, most of them British regulars, and 7,500 civilians, 2,500 of them Indians, were trapped. It adds that the Boers in the siege lines rarely numbered more than 5,000 and that they opened their bombardment with 17 field guns. History Hit gives a smaller figure, about 12,000 men under White, and White himself, in a message to Buller in December, wrote of “12,000 men here”. 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, about five miles out on the railway to Colenso, for the sick, the wounded and non-combatants, supplied from the town by a daily train under a white flag. 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 shattered the legs of 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, but he died in the night. 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. History Hit sums up his answer as a vow to hold Ladysmith for the Queen.7
Christmas under the guns
On 22 December, Pearse wrote, a shell from Bulwana hill fell on the Gloucesters' camp while the men were at breakfast, killing six and wounding nine; the army schoolmaster W. H. Gilbert, whose diary for 19 and 22 December is held by the National Army Museum, described the same shell bursting on a sangar among the breakfasting Gloucesters, killing seven and wounding ten. Gilbert also noted that provisions were getting very scarce, coffee, tobacco, jam and pickles among them.8
On Christmas Day the Boer gunners sent a different message. Their shells did not explode, and when they were dug up, Pearse wrote, they held rough imitations of plum pudding, with each 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, which the Boers called Platrand: 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 ranges so close that, 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, aged 23, 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. 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 Doyle describes the Devons, led by Colonel Park, charging through the rain to sweep the Boers off the crest. The assault had failed. Doyle gives 420 British killed and wounded, a total repeated in the edition of Pearse's letters. Doyle adds that 80 Boer bodies were handed back from the ridge alone and judged that Boer losses could not have been less than 300 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 1 February, Pearse noted, horseflesh was boiled down into a meat extract named Chevril, and every man was issued a pint of Chevril soup a day. S. A. Watt writes that 70 horses and mules were slaughtered daily for beef tea for the sick. History Hit adds that the Boers had taken the town's water supply, leaving the muddy Klip River to drink from.13
Watt counts 10,673 admissions to the Intombi hospital by the end of the siege and 583 soldiers dead, 382 of them of enteric fever and 109 of dysentery. Doyle reckoned that about one man in ten of the garrison died of wounds or disease, and that some 16,000 shells fell within the town.14
Relief, 28 February 1900
Buller learned from his defeats and began to coordinate his infantry and artillery closely. After the fighting on the Tugela Heights the Boers gave way on 27 February, which Pearse's book notes was the nineteenth anniversary of Majuba. On the evening of 28 February Lord Dundonald rode in with an advance guard of colonial horse, including Imperial Light Horse and Natal Carbineers; Pearse counted 170 men. History Hit notes that the young Winston Churchill was among the relief troops.15
Townspeople and soldiers crowded round White, who told them: “I thank God we have kept the flag flying”. Pearse reported that only four days' full rations were left and 800 sick and wounded lay in hospital. Buller rode in the next morning. Doyle puts the relief army's losses over the whole campaign at more than 5,000 men. South African History Online and Doyle count the siege as 118 days; Pearse wrote of 119 days of close investment.16
The news was celebrated across the British Empire after months of defeats. 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
On 2 November 1914 the British cruiser HMS Fox arrived off Tanga in German East Africa, ahead of the troop transports carrying Indian Expeditionary Force B, nearly 8,000 men under Major General Arthur Aitken. The first troops went ashore that night; the National Army Museum dates the landing to 3 November, and by 5 November Aitken's force had been driven back to its boats and re-embarked. According to the Western Front Association, the British were beaten by about 1,000 German-led askaris under Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck, while swarms of angry bees stung both sides, and lost nearly 400 killed.18
In 1943, in the early hours of 2 November, Rear Admiral A. Stanton Merrill's Task Force 39 met Rear Admiral Sentaro Omori's cruisers off Bougainville and stopped them from reaching the American landing in Empress Augusta Bay. The Japanese lost the light cruiser Sendai and the destroyer Hatsukaze.19
