Victoria’s Generals

Widely recognised as one of the most brilliant soldiers of his generation, George Colley had the distinction of passing out first from the Staff College at Camberley in only ten months instead of the usual two years with the largest aggregate of marks (4,274) ever obtained to that point. Moreover, finding the teaching undemanding, he had worked entirely on his own. Acquiring the habit of studying all manner of subjects in the early hours, he was also an accomplished water-colourist, played the flautina and became an authority on South African birds. Subsequently, as Professor of Administration and Law at the Staff College, Camberley, he wrote an influential article, ‘Army’, for the 1875 edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica. An excellent administrator and a writer of persuasive policy memoranda, Colley was considered by Evelyn Wood, ‘the best instructed soldier I met’. Colley’s mentor, Garnet Wolseley, also frequently referred to him as the ablest man he ever knew.² Yet, Colley’s intellectual pre-eminence was to serve him ill in the field, his controversial defeat at Majuba on 27 February 1881 during the Anglo-Transvaal War (1880–81), which cost him his life, betraying lack of military judgement in his first independent command.

The third son of the Hon. George Colley, a retired naval commander from an old established Anglo-Irish family, Colley was born in November 1835. After travelling with his parents in Europe, he was educated at Cheam and the Royal Military College at Sandhurst, passing out first and thereby receiving his first commission without purchase in The Queen’s Own Royal Regiment, the 2nd Foot, in May 1852. Regimental service in Ireland was followed by active service on the Cape Frontier, where Colley helped build a settlement for military pensioners being settled on the Kaffraria Frontier, surveyed the Transkei, and, still only 26, acted as a magistrate (administrator) for over 5,000 square miles of newly annexed territory. Colley rejoined his regiment when it was ordered to China for the Third China War in February 1860, being promoted to Captain in June 1860 and witnessing the capture of the Taku (Dagu) forts and the occupation of Peking (Beijing). En route home, he was detained at the Cape by the Governor, Sir George Grey, to resume his former frontier duties. Colley, however, wished to present himself for the Staff College entrance examination and declined a more permanent appointment at the Cape.

Chronology

1 November 1835	George Pomeroy Colley born in Dublin Educated at Cheam School and Royal Military College, Sandhurst
28 May 1852	Gazetted Ensign, 2nd Foot
1854–59	Service on the Cape Frontier
11 August 1854	Promoted Lieutenant
1860	Service in China
12 June 1860	Purchased Captaincy
1861	Service on Cape Frontier
1862	Attended Staff College, Camberley
6 March 1863	Promoted Brevet Major
July 1864	Appointed Brigade Major, Devonport
July 1871	Appointed Professor of Military Administration and Law at Staff College
15 May 1873	Promoted Brevet Lieutenant Colonel
17 December 1873	Joined Wolseley’s Asante Expedition
19 December 1873	Appointed Director of Transport in Ashanti
31 March 1874	Promoted Brevet Colonel
14 April 1875	Appointed Colonial Treasurer, Natal
12 May 1875	Promoted Substantive Major
4 February 1876	Appointed Military Secretary to the Viceroy
October 1877	Appointed Private Secretary to Viceroy
14 March 1878	Married Edith Althea Hamilton
26 May 1879	Appointed Chief of Staff to Wolseley in Zululand
24 April 1880	Promoted Major General and appointed Governor of Natal, High Commissioner for South-eastern Africa, and C in C of Natal and the Transvaal
8 May 1880	Assumed additional prefix surname, becoming Pomeroy-Colley
28 January 1881	Defeated at Laing’s Nek
8 February 1881	Defeated at Ingogo
27 February 1881	Killed at Majuba

Appointed CB, 1874; CMG, 1878; KCSI, 1879

Passing out of Camberley and having been promoted to a brevet majority in March 1863, Colley spent five years as Brigade Major at Devonport, though this was enlivened by his appointment in 1867 as an examiner in military history and art for Camberley, Sandhurst and the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich. In 1869 Colley was offered the post of head of garrison instruction in England but it was vetoed on the grounds that he was too junior, and he then turned down the offer of military secretary to the C in C, Bombay.³ In July 1871 he was then appointed to the professorship at the Staff College, where he remained until summoned to join Wolseley’s Ashanti (Asante) expedition on the Gold Coast in November 1873. It is not clear when Colley and Wolseley had met previously, but they had clearly done so. Wolseley’s choice of staff and special-service officers was a mixture of men he knew – not least from his earlier Red River expedition in Canada in 1870 – recent graduates of the Staff College, and those who had established some kind of intellectual reputation, such as Frederick Maurice and Henry Brackenbury, respectively instructor in tactics at Sandhurst and professor of military history at Woolwich. Thus, Colley’s position at the Staff College would have been an obvious recommendation. Initially, Wolseley requested Colley’s services to command what might be termed a ‘special-service’ battalion but was compelled to take regular battalions off the normal service roster. Colley then came out as a special-service officer.⁴

Placed in charge of the expedition’s faltering transport arrangements immediately after his arrival in December 1873, Colley’s administrative skills helped salvage Wolseley’s need to get his force to the Asante capital of Kumase and back to the coast before the onset of the rains and before disease began to take its toll on his white troops. The problems had largely arisen from difficulties in first recruiting native carriers and then preventing them from deserting. Colley estimated that he needed 8,000 carriers to get the expedition to Kumase when there were only about 6,000 currently available. Part of the shortfall was found by converting the two West India regiments already deployed and an irregular native regiment commanded by Evelyn Wood into carriers. Colley reorganised the carriers into tribal companies and into regimental transport to accompany the troops and local transport to work on the lines of communication. Wolseley implemented a measure passed through local Judicial Assessors’ Court to permit the arrest of those refusing to be conscripted for labour, forcing them to work without pay and making them liable to flogging if they refused to work. Colley also began to raid and burn recalcitrant villages. The measures got the expedition to Kumase and back, though Colley believed it had been a near-run thing with only five days’ supplies to spare.⁵

The many newspaper correspondents accompanying the expedition differed in their opinions as to who was responsible for the initially chaotic transport arrangements, but all testified to the transformation wrought by Colley. Frederick Boyle, of the Daily Telegraph, wrote of Colley’s ‘astonishing activity which conduced so much to the success of the expedition’, while G A Henty, of the Standard, himself a former commissariat officer, wrote that Colley, ‘by his activity, energy, and untiring zeal, excited the admiration of all’. For Winwood Reade, of The Times, Colley was ‘an extraordinary man’. Reade noted that Colley constantly travelled back and forth along the tracks ‘infested by parties of the enemy’ but seemingly bore a charmed life. According to Reade, ‘To Colley it is due that Coomassie was taken when it was.’⁶ Wolseley’s own final dispatch recorded that Colley’s ‘great talent for organisation soon placed the transport upon a satisfactory footing’.⁷

Colley was one of a number of officers who Wolseley offered the governorship of the Gold Coast to at the end of the expedition. Few were keen to remain. Still only a substantive captain, Colley preferred ‘returning to my regiment as a captain till there is more soldiering to do’, though ‘it is pleasant to find that one’s work has been favourably judged by those over me’. He also declined to lecture on the expedition to the Royal United Service Institution on the grounds that he ‘only came when the uphill work was all over’, Evelyn Wood subsequently delivering the lecture instead. Colley wrote to his brother, Henry, that he would be ‘well satisfied’ with the complimentary notices he had received in the press ‘for I went out for fun and had my fun and a pleasant three months trip in a new country and a warm climate at government expense!’.⁸ In the event, Colley’s reward was the CB and promotion to substantive colonel. He spent the summer of 1874 visiting US Civil War battlefield sites and meeting a number of, mostly Confederate, generals.

Colley was now a key figure in Wolseley’s ‘Ashanti Ring’, accompanying Wolseley’s mission to Natal in February 1875, which was intended to persuade the colonists to accept inclusion in the proposed South African federation. Wolseley made Colley his Colonial Treasurer. Unexpectedly, however, when required to make a major speech to the Legislative Assembly in support of the bill to alter the Natal constitution on 20 May 1875, Colley’s nerves got the better of him and he lapsed into silence. Wolseley was astonished: ‘It was a curious case of nervousness, attacking a man who has had great experience in lecturing and who is gifted with a thoroughly logical mind and a very clear perception.’ Colley himself wrote that he had not been prepared for the courteous nature of the debate for ‘if they would only have made me angry I think I could have spoken’.⁹ The bill passed by a narrow margin, Colley then undertaking an extensive tour through the Transvaal, Swaziland and Mozambique.

Colley next took up an appointment as AQMG at Aldershot, but after barely a month there was offered the influential post of military secretary to the new Viceroy of India, Lord Lytton, in February 1876. He accompanied Lytton to India in March 1876, becoming a leading advocate of the so-called ‘forward policy’ within Lytton’s circle in the period leading to the outbreak of the Second Afghan War in November 1878. By the time the war began, he had become Lytton’s private secretary, having turned down the chance to return to Camberley as commandant. Sir Neville Chamberlain noted that Colley, always present at meetings with Lytton yet always silent, ‘has given the Viceroy the key to the discourse, and is his real military mentor’. Similarly, Wilfred Blunt wrote that Colley’s influence over Lytton was so strong that ‘he had persuaded the Viceroy that between them they could direct the whole detail of the plan of campaign from Simla’. Indeed, Colley’s ‘Memorandum on the Military Aspects of the Central Asian Question’, completed on 7 June 1876 while Colley was on the voyage out to Bombay, has been characterised as ‘the charter of Lytton’s defence policy’.¹⁰

In terms of the possibility of a wider war against Russia, Colley selected the route through Peshawar and Balkh to Tashkent as the best line of offensive operations since Tashkent seemed the real seat of Russian military power in central Asia. With regard to the defence of India, Colley regarded Kabul as the key since it controlled most of the main routes between Afghanistan and India and would also enable eventual offensive operations to be mounted into the Central Asian khanates. By contrast, the C in C in India, General Sir Frederick Haines, was no less an advocate of a ‘forward policy’ than Lytton or Colley, but regarded the route through Kandahar to Herat and Merv as the most suitable. Haines’s judgement was shared by his Quartermaster General, the then Colonel (local Major General) Frederick Roberts, though Roberts also appreciated the military significance of Tashkent. Colley, however, always believed that Herat lay beyond the realistic sphere of operations on logistic grounds, writing to one friend, ‘I am a firm believer in the old military maxim that the difficulty of an operation increases in the ratio of the square of the distance.’ Subsequently, Colley saw little point in retaining Kandahar after the conclusion of the Second Afghan War when Pishin appeared far more useful as a military base.¹¹

With the more immediate prospect of a war limited to Afghanistan in the autumn of 1878, Haines responded to a request to suggest appropriate measures to secure the Kurram Pass from Thal and to advance on Kandahar from Quetta by additionally recommending a demonstration of force in the Khyber from Peshawar. Winter, however, was approaching and Lytton only wished to exert pressure on the Afghan Amir, Sher Ali, to accept a British mission at Kabul. Consequently, Lytton declined to authorise creating any reserve for the forces being gathered at Quetta, Thal and Peshawar. Solid and steady, Haines never quite grasped that Lytton wished to avoid an occupation of Afghanistan and to make further political points in proving to London that India could sustain operations without recourse to reinforcements from home, and in proving to St Petersburg that no threat to India would draw British forces out of Europe. Colley was to describe one conference as 5 hours of ‘dull, stolid obstinacy such as I think I never witnessed before,’ as Haines continued to argue for what Colley subsequently suggested Haines envisaged as ‘a great campaign on the Oxus and a peerage’.¹²

Colley undoubtedly fed Lytton’s unfavourable perception of Haines. Haines’s frequent description of Colley, as ‘the finest theoretical soldier he had ever met’, is capable of more than one interpretation, while Haines also recorded on another occasion that Colley was ‘a greatly overrated man’.¹³ Haines certainly strongly deprecated Colley being sent in a supposedly private capacity to consult commanders on the Punjab Frontier on ways of dealing with incursions by the Jowaki Afridis in September 1877, seeing this as intervening directly between him and his subordinates, but Lytton angrily responded that he had not appointed Colley simply to compile his ‘household accounts’ and would use his personal staff unreservedly as he saw fit.¹⁴ For his services in India, Colley was rewarded with the CMG in 1878 and the KCSI in July 1879, having been judged initially not to have performed sufficient ‘signal’ service for a knighthood when first proposed by Lytton in 1877.¹⁵

Part of Colley’s wider agenda in India had been a complete reorganisation of the Indian army with the abolition of the three existing presidential armies and the substitution of four corps, and also bringing the whole of the North-West Frontier under a single trans-Indus authority wielding military and political power.¹⁶ Wolseley was the obvious candidate for the latter if not the supreme military command in India. Colley’s efforts to create an opening for Wolseley, however, were frustrated through the opposition of the army’s C in C, the Duke of Cambridge.¹⁷ At least Colley was able to achieve another part of the reform agenda by overseeing the establishment of a military intelligence department in India, meeting Colonel Robert Home of the War Office Intelligence Department while in London in March 1878 to settle a division of geographical responsibilities between the two.¹⁸

As one of Wolseley’s protégés, and in seemingly intriguing to get Wolseley the chief command in India, Colley had fallen foul of Cambridge. The Duke had rejected the notion of Colley for the command at the Cape in 1878 and was equally opposed to Wolseley securing Colley’s services as chief of staff when Wolseley was sent to take over the direction of the Zulu War in May 1879. In the event, through appealing to the Secretary of State for War, Frederick Stanley, Wolseley did secure Colley’s services but only in the rank of Brigadier General rather than Major General as Wolseley wanted. Colley proved invaluable, Wolseley recording that he was ‘so clear-headed & hard-working: he is never idle for a moment & works unremittingly’. Indeed, it has been suggested that Colley was the real architect of the political settlement that Wolseley imposed upon Zululand in that dividing the territory between thirteen compliant chiefs answerable to a British Resident resembled Indian security concepts. The renewal of the Second Afghan War in September 1879, however, saw Colley recalled to India.¹⁹ In April 1880, however, Wolseley succeeded in seeing Colley appointed his successor, Colley being promoted to Major General on 24 April and made Governor of Natal, High Commissioner for South-eastern Africa and C in C in Natal and the Transvaal. Though uncertain whether he should do so when matters remained uncertain in India, and being delayed in any case, Colley took up his appointment in June 1880. He hoped, as he wrote to Wolseley, that he could ‘do my master credit’.²⁰ In theory, and for reasons that remain unknown, Colley had assumed an additional prefix surname on 8 May 1880, becoming Sir George Pomeroy Pomeroy-Colley. It would appear, however, that he preferred to remain known as Sir George Colley and no one seems to have referred to him in any other way.²¹

The new Governor often appeared shy and modest and was certainly prey to self-doubt. Slight in stature, Colley’s receding hairline gave greater prominence to a strong brow, usually taken as a sign of his intellect, though the eyes were said to be soft. For the last three years of his life, he was bearded. His biographer, William Butler, wrote of Colley as having a face ‘beautifully modelled, a strong countenance developed to the utmost and informed with thought’. Musing upon his own career in 1876, Colley remarked that, in his early years, he had ‘worked for ambition’ but, when professor at the Staff College, he had been stimulated by work for its own sake and ‘the influence I felt one could exert upon others by keeping them up to the mark’. Indeed, he still believed work well done gave him greater satisfaction than perceived success. Interestingly, Colley reminded some of the manner of Robert E Lee, and, significantly, Lee was his own ‘greatest military hero’, Colley writing of Lee’s ‘mixture of gentleness and everything that was sweet and tender with the grandest military personal qualities’.²²

In his later years, Colley appears to have been much influenced by his wife, Edith Hamilton, daughter of Major General Henry Meade ‘Tiger’ Hamilton and fifteen years younger than Colley. Edith’s brother, the future Major General Bruce Hamilton, acted as Colley’s aide-de-camp during the Anglo-Transvaal War. The marriage in March 1878, when Colley was 43, had taken many by surprise.²³ All recognised Edith’s lively intelligence and Colley was to write from Natal that she ‘seconds me splendidly, and rows or laughs at the people who come to her with long faces or absurd stories’.²⁴ Yet she was also highly ambitious. Evelyn Wood noting in a letter on the very day on which, unknown to him, Colley had been killed, that her ambition for her husband ‘obliterates apparently every thought of the personal danger which he has undergone’. In fact, Edith Colley wrote letters to her husband on both 15 and 24 February 1881 that suggest she did not ‘care a rush for any such rubbish as work or success’ and wished only to see him safe home again.²⁵ Nevertheless, it was widely believed that she had written to Colley after Laing’s Nek and Ingogo to urge him into further action, the letter mysteriously disappearing after his death.²⁶ It was certainly much remarked that when the first train arrived at Pietermaritzburg in October 1880 following completion of the line from Durban – no gold had yet been discovered on the Rand to speed the development of railways in southern Africa – Colley stood on the footplate, but, symbolically, Edith was at the engine’s throttle.²⁷

Colley was certainly devoted to Edith, writing a touching last letter on 26 February 1881 ‘in case I should not return’. He lamented that he did not believe in an afterlife but concluded, ‘Think of our happiness together, and our love – not a common love I think – and let that be a source of comfort and light to your future life, my own loved one, and think lovingly and sadly, but not too sadly or hopelessly of your affectionate husband.’²⁸ Wolseley, however, subsequently believed that she had married Colley as a matter of convenience rather than love, a conclusion reached in the light of her second marriage, and swift and financially productive separation in 1891.²⁹

When Colley arrived in South Africa in June 1880, the most pressing problem appeared to be implementing Wolseley’s political settlement of Zululand. Moreover, the Administrator, another Wolseley protégé, Sir Owen Lanyon, misled Colley as to the deteriorating political situation in the Transvaal. British politicians had sought to improve security and commercial integration and progress in southern Africa by correcting the politically fragmented nature of the region through confederation of the white colonies and subjugation of the Zulu kingdom. Wolseley had secured the half-hearted support of the British colonists in Natal for federation in 1875 and a Transvaal bankrupted by a disastrous war with the baPedi had been annexed in April 1877. By assuming protection of the Transvaal, the British had inherited an existing frontier dispute between Boer and Zulu that provided a pretext for the Zulu War. The end of the Zulu threat, however, had not reconciled the Boers to confederation as had been anticipated. Boer resentment had been exacerbated by Lanyon’s strenuous efforts to collect taxes and by the alleged indiscipline of the small British garrisons in the Transvaal. Lanyon simply never realised the extent of Boer dissatisfaction, though the Boers in turn seriously underestimated the willingness of Gladstone’s new Liberal government to make concessions once it took office in April 1880. Indeed, the Cabinet was split between Whigs such as Lords Hartington and Kimberley, determined to retain the Transvaal within the empire, and radicals such as John Bright and Joseph Chamberlain, who wished to be rid of it.³⁰

As late as 11 December 1880 Lanyon’s assessment was that the Boers were ‘incapable of any united action’ and such ‘mortal cowards’ that ‘anything they may do will be but a spark in the pan’.³¹ Two days later, a Boer meeting at Paardekraal resolved to re-establish an independent republic, though the proclamation could not be printed for several days. On 16 December shots were fired at British troops in Potchefstroom and, on the following day, Lanyon received a copy of the proclamation: he declared a state of rebellion on 18 December. On 20 December, the Boers ambushed a column of the 94th Foot at Bronkhorstspruit when it was moving towards Pretoria as part of a consolidation there. Of 273 men in the column, 57 were killed, over 100 wounded and all survivors captured. Colley, therefore, found himself faced with a rebellion by over 7,000 armed Boers. Since the British military presence in South Africa had been rapidly reduced after the end of the Zulu War, Colley had only 1,772 men available in Natal. Some 2,839 men from 3 different battalions and a cavalry regiment had been divided between 9 different garrison posts in the Transvaal in August 1880 before Colley initiated a consolidation, abandoning 3 posts and withdrawing 5 companies to Natal prior to the outbreak of hostilities. The six remaining garrisons at Pretoria, Standerton, Lydenburg, Rustenburg, Marabastad and Wakkerstroom were all now besieged by the Boers, together with a small detachment at Potchefstroom.³²

Colley’s dilemma was whether to wait for reinforcements, or to try to relieve the garrisons with the resources he already had available. This in itself might enable him to secure a victory sufficiently decisive to deter the Orange Free State from joining in common cause with the Transvaalers, and also to discourage any native disturbances while British forces were distracted since there was continuing unrest among the Basutos (baSotho) at the time. As Colley wrote to Wolseley on 17 January 1881, ‘I would much like to know whether you at home are blaming my slowness in not moving forward earlier & with a smaller force, or think me rash in attempting to move with so small a one & without waiting for the reinforcements now coming out.’³³ In particular, Colley was concerned by the weakness of the British position at Potchefstroom, which he believed could not hold out beyond mid-February.³⁴ Accordingly, he decided to act before the arrival of reinforcements despite wet summer weather that made all movement difficult. As it happened, the 200 or so defenders of Potchefstroom held out for 95 days until forced to surrender through starvation on 21 March. This in itself was a result of deceit on the part of the local Boer commander in not communicating the terms of the armistice following Colley’s death, concluded on 6 March, which provided for re-supply of the besieged garrisons.³⁵

Though Roberts had a high opinion of Colley’s abilities, he did suggest after Majuba that Colley was ‘one of those men who believes that one Englishman is equal to 3 of any country’. Colley had also once remarked that ‘a British regiment, 1,000 strong, armed with Martini-Henry rifles, ought to be able to march at will through the length and breadth of Afghanistan, when once clear of the Khyber and Kurram Passes’ and there is no doubt that Colley underestimated the Boers’ military capacity.³⁶ Consequently, he believed that his improvised field force of twelve infantry companies drawn from four different battalions and a handful of seamen landed from HMS Boadicea – no more than six companies were engaged in any of the subsequent actions – would be sufficient. A small mounted force was improvised by mounting some of the infantry and drawing upon the Natal Mounted Police since, despite the lack of mounted troops, Colley declined to employ any volunteers against the Boers in the belief that to do so would lead to an unacceptable escalation of the conflict. Certainly, from his Indian experience he was well attuned to political considerations. Thus, he had counselled Roberts strongly against imposing severe reprisals for Louis Cavagnari’s murder once Kabul was reoccupied in October 1879, his judgement that Roberts had no ‘political head’ being entirely justified by the controversial executions Roberts had instituted. Similarly, Colley urged his troops to recognise that the Boers were ‘actuated by feelings that are entitled to our respect’.³⁷

The only practical route into the Transvaal was through the pass over the Drakensbergs at Laing’s Nek, which the Boers promptly blocked with 2,000 men. Establishing his forward base at Mount Prospect, Colley attempted to ‘try the Boers mettle’.³⁸ However, a frontal assault on 28 January was repulsed with 197 casualties. In some respects, Colley was unlucky in that the planned advance by his improvised mounted force on the Boers’ left flank was launched prematurely, veered in the wrong direction and was not supported by a second line. The infantry, principally the 58th Foot, was left exposed to Boer fire as it advanced up a steep slope and lost heavily: it was the last occasion on which regimental colours were carried into action. Colley also lost several members of his own staff whom he allowed to lead the troops into action.³⁹ When setting out for Majuba, indeed, Colley was to decline to wake his sleeping brother-in-law, Bruce Hamilton, on the grounds that there was ‘a kind of fatality’ about his staff.⁴⁰ Writing later to Wolseley, Colley admitted that the assault had been hazardous without an adequate mounted force but that anything was ‘better than standing still’, though he also suggested that, if faced with the same situation, he would conduct the battle in exactly the same way. He felt keenly the loss of ‘good men & personal friends’ and the effect that the delay would have on the besieged garrisons.⁴¹

Characteristically, though perhaps unadvisedly, Colley addressed his force, taking the blame for the losses and suggesting that he would now await reinforcements, one observer remarking that Colley ‘was a great hand at making speeches’.⁴² On 8 February, however, Colley was compelled to attempt to reopen his line of communications back to Newcastle when the Boers placed a force across it at Ingogo (Schuinshoogte). Colley found himself surrounded on a small plateau by a more mobile Boer force and suffered another 150 casualties before withdrawing under cover of a violent thunderstorm. It was a chastening experience with more of his staff killed, Colley writing to his sister that, ‘I have to look cheerful and I dare say am thought callous, and to-day am presiding at some races and sports, but sometimes it is hard not to break down.’⁴³

Evelyn Wood, who had agreed to serve as Colley’s second in command, though senior in rank, disembarked at Durban on 12 February and arrived at Newcastle with a small column five days later. Colley, who rode back to meet Wood, made it clear that he wanted to take the Nek himself, but promised to wait until Wood brought up further troops. It was a decision he also conveyed to the Duke of Cambridge, indicating he felt no decisive success could now be obtained without cavalry.⁴⁴ Apparently believing that he must restore British prestige, however, Colley resolved upon seizing Majuba, a commanding height comprising a plateau some 2,000ft above Laing’s Nek that seemed to dominate the Boer positions, though actually so high as not to threaten them directly.

Gladstone’s government had begun negotiations with the Boers secretly and without informing Colley even before the action at Laing’s Nek. The reverse there and at Ingogo strengthened the hands of the radicals, who favoured continuing negotiations even from a position of weakness, whereas the Whigs within the Cabinet would have preferred attempting to achieve further leverage through success. On 16 February, therefore, Colley was instructed to offer an armistice and an inquiry by a Royal Commission into Boer grievances, but given discretion to act as he felt fit, with the proviso that ‘we are anxious for your making arrangements to avoid effusion of blood’.⁴⁵ Understandably, Colley enquired whether he was intended to leave Laing’s Nek in the possession of the Boers and to abandon his garrisons, to which the government replied that the garrisons should be enabled to provision themselves but Colley should not march to their relief or occupy Laing’s Nek. On 21 February Colley indicated to the Boers that hostilities would be suspended if they were prepared to accept an armistice and a Royal Commission, adding in effect a 48-hour ultimatum to the terms being offered on his own initiative. No reply was received as President Kruger was travelling within the Transvaal without having delegated authority to anyone else to act on his behalf: he was only to receive Colley’s offer on 28 February. With no reply received, Colley felt free to initiate the decisive move that he believed would end the war with a minimum of bloodshed by seizing Majuba as a legitimate means of improving British leverage. Moreover, as he wrote to Wolseley, he wanted to reverse the ‘deep & permanent injury’ to British prestige stemming from Laing’s Nek before the government could end the campaign.⁴⁶

Majuba, 1881

Colley’s interest in Majuba was first noticed on 26 February by Thomas Carter, the war correspondent of the Natal Times, who saw him and his new Chief of Staff, Herbert Stewart, observing it intently through their field glasses. It might be noted in passing that, compared to some other commanders, Colley had a relaxed view of the presence of the press in the field.⁴⁷ In fact, Colley had undertaken a mounted reconnaissance with Stewart two days earlier, in which they had rode well to the west into the Transvaal to observe the other side of the mountain. The Boers were further entrenching at Laing’s Nek but Majuba was as yet unoccupied save for a picquet during the day that was withdrawn each evening.

Colley chose 2 companies of the 58th, 3 companies of the 3rd/60th Rifles, 2 companies of the 92nd and a naval contingent, the whole including staff totalling 30 officers and 568 men.⁴⁸ En route to the summit, Colley detached 2 companies of the 3/60th and 1 of the 92nd to guard his line of communication, reaching the top with 19 officers and 383 men. No artillery or machine-guns were taken due to the precipitous nature of the terrain and it is doubtful if rocket tubes would have proved any more useful. Presumably, Colley took a mixed force in order to allow all to share in the expected victory, though some suggested that it was also intended to give as much prominence to the short-service recruits of the 58th as to the long-service veterans of the 92nd, who had been landed in South Africa while on their way back home from India, where they had served for thirteen years. Lieutenant Ian Hamilton of the 92nd certainly thought so: ‘Well then, let the tiny force be so thoroughly well shuffled and mixed up that the Devil himself would be unable to say what these victorious troops were – long-service or short-service, soldiers or sailors.’⁴⁹ Certainly, the impact of short service, introduced as part of the Cardwell reforms between 1868 and 1872, was still hotly contested between conservative elements such as Cambridge and reformers like Wolseley. The composition of the force meant, however, that it lacked cohesion.

After an 8-hour climb to the summit on the night of 26 February 1881, Colley felt his men too tired to entrench and, although the extent of their fatigue was questioned subsequently, in any case, he and Herbert Stewart believed the position impregnable. Colley is said to have remarked, ‘We could stay here for ever.’ Carter of the Natal Times asked one man why he was merely piling a few stones on top of each other, to be told, ‘Oh, it’s all right sir, it’s good enough for what we shall want up here.’⁵⁰ As the light improved about 0500, several Highlanders stood on the edge, gesturing at the Boers below, and a few shots were fired to Colley’s annoyance. Some Boers began to break camp but at about 0700 some 200 other Boers began to scale the heights. Eventually, some 450 Boers were involved in storming the British position, while 150 others rode round the bottom of Majuba to cut off the force on the summit, making skilful use of a considerable amount of dead ground.

Chapter 4

George Colley

Ian F W Beckett

Chronology

Majuba, 1881