Herbert Stewart was still unconcerned when sending a signal at 0930 to the effect that the Boers were wasting ammunition and Colley showed little interest when Ian Hamilton reported to him that the Boers were working their way up the hill, pinning down defenders who showed themselves with accurate musketry. Subsequently, Colley, Stewart and Commander Romilly of the Naval Detachment did go to look down the hill at about 1100, at which point Romilly was mortally wounded but, when Hamilton again went to report to Colley at about 1300, the latter was taking a short nap and could not be disturbed. By 1330, however, the Boers were reaching the edge of the rim of the plateau and, when Hamilton requested permission to charge, Colley responded that he would wait until the Boers were advancing before ordering a volley and charge. In reality, whether or not a charge would have worked, the moment had been lost and, with no defensive line prepared, some of the defenders began to fall back to the centre of the plateau. According to Carter, there was a ‘sudden piercing cry of terror’ and the British line broke.51
Colley was seen moving forward and firing his revolver while shouting encouragement to his men. There were some later suggestions that Colley committed suicide, was shot in the back while running or killed while waving a white handkerchief in surrender. The most reliable account suggests he was shot at close range above the right eye while still advancing on the Boers.52 Evelyn Wood subsequently obtained Colley’s helmet and wrote to Edith Colley that it showed clearly that Colley had been shot while facing the enemy, to which she replied tersely that the position of her late husband’s head when he was shot was of no interest to her as she had ‘never heard him charged with any fault in regard of personal courage except having it in excess’.53 In all, Colley’s force suffered 275 casualties, including 92 officers and men killed, 131 wounded, an additional 50 men captured and 2 missing; the Boers reputedly lost only 2 dead and 4 wounded. The prisoners from the 92nd included another future general, the then Lieutenant Hector MacDonald.
Colley’s body was brought down from Majuba to be buried in the small cemetery at Mount Prospect on 1 March. One officer of the 92nd, the Hon. John Napier, suggested that Colley’s defeat was ‘the result of a series of inexcusable blunders in the art and practice of war’. The Duke of Cambridge concurred, being particularly critical of the mixed composition of the force. Redvers Buller, shocked by Colley’s death, felt Colley had been ‘lost to over confidence’. One young officer in the 83rd Foot, who reached the front only after Majuba, reported that ‘the feeling amongst the troops here is very strong for the poor fellows who were murdered through the ambition and incompetence of our Colley – a politician but a theoretical and paper General’ and that his memory was ‘roundly’ abused.54 Certainly, be it carelessness bred of over-confidence, the failure to entrench, the lack of cohesion within the force, a failure of command on the summit or a combination of all, Colley had paid with his life.
With the Irish Land Bill a more pressing concern for many in the Cabinet, Wood was now directed by the government to obtain an armistice. This was concluded on 6 March with eventual agreement being reached on 21 March 1881 to restore self-government to the Transvaal under the vague formula of retaining the Queen’s suzerainty. The agreement was signed on 23 March. On 24 March the latest reinforcements under the command of Roberts arrived at the Cape and were immediately ordered home: some 16,000 men were in or on their way to South Africa at the time the peace was signed. Wolseley was refused the command himself because the Secretary of State for War, Hugh Childers, said ‘that he could not spare me, that he wanted me here to help him through his reforms etc., and that he had a high position in store for me’. Wolseley was never to forgive Wood for not avenging Colley’s death, though he apparently persuaded Butler to remove ‘two or three pages of vituperation’ of Wood from his biography of Colley.55 Roberts and his coterie were also lastingly critical because they had been equally frustrated in continuing the campaign.56 Certainly, Majuba remained a stain on its honour that the army was determined to remove. Thus, in the first engagement of the South African War on 20 October 1899 British soldiers were urged to ‘Remember Majuba’. A day later at Elandslaagte, with Ian Hamilton in command, Highlanders carried a Boer position with cries of ‘Majuba’. It was then on Majuba Day, 27 February 1900, that Roberts took the surrender of the main Boer field army at Paardeburg.
As for ‘Poor Colley’, as most contemporary soldiers referred to him thereafter, a premature death had brought a highly promising career to a sudden close. The loss of Colley and later of Herbert Stewart, mortally wounded at Metemmeh in the Sudan in February 1885, were blows that Wolseley felt especially keenly. In a way, both men represented the advantages and the disadvantages of the ‘Wolseley Ring’ and its imitators. Wolseley himself was generally successful in co-ordinating the diverse talents of his chosen subordinates in way well suited to colonial campaigning. The problem was that improvisation was no substitute for a proper general staff. Wolseley’s capacity to manage affairs decreased in proportion to the growth in the scale of operations, while the way he operated also militated against the development of initiative in his subordinates and, without him, they sometimes floundered.57 Colley was an outstandingly able strategist and administrator and, while he may have been unlucky, such talents did not make him a great soldier.
Edith Colley first approached J A Froude to write her husband’s biography but, on Wolseley’s advice, he declined. In the event, the task was taken on by another of Wolseley’s adherents, Lieutenant General Sir William Butler. Butler’s The Life of Sir George Pomeroy-Colley (London: John Murray, 1899) remains the only biography and makes reference to Colley correspondence that has apparently not survived elsewhere. The Anglo-Transvaal War, however, has been the subject of a number of modern works. Brian Bond chose to cover the war himself in Brian Bond, ed., Victorian Military Campaigns (London: Hutchinson, 1967), while Joseph Lehmann, The First Boer War (London: Jonathan Cape, 1972) has now been substantially updated by John Laband, The Transvaal Rebellion: The First Boer War, 1880–81 (London: Pearson/Longman, 2005). Majuba is covered in ‘popular’ accounts by Oliver Ransford, The Battle of Majuba Hill: The First Boer War (London: John Murray, 1967) and Ian Castle, Majuba 1881: The Hill of Destiny (London: Osprey, 1996), while there is a booklet from the Boer perspective, V E d’Assonville, Majuba (Weltevredenpark: Marnix, 1996), available in both English and Afrikaans.