Six month rotations, and the Natal ‘Carabiners’

I recently had a rather bizarre discussion on Quora (is there any other sort?), after a gentlemen made this remarkable claim:

[in the] Second [Boer] war a good half of all Imperial troops were Rhodesians north and south, Natal Carabiners (sic) and white South African farmers, every bit the cradle to frontier riflemen as the Boers’.

I pointed out to him that this was, to put it mildly, far-fetched:

In total, 448,435[1] Imperial personnel served in the Boer War (not all at the same time, of course – max in theatre at any point was about 210,000). This number included regular British army, yeomanry, colonial units, Natal volunteers, Rhodesians, mounted police, town guards, DMTs, medical units etc etc.

Of those, 52,414[2] were ‘South Africans’ (ie. Natal, Rhodesia, Cape Colony, Transvaal etc). Additionally, the Australian contingent was about 16,000 strong, while those from Canada and NZ were about 6,000 apiece.

So it would really be stretching matters to claim that these ‘South African’ forces made up ‘a good half of all Imperial troops’.

As is normal, when it comes to discussions about the Boer War, he didn’t then say: ‘OK – thanks – I didn’t know that’, but instead, started changing his argument, as he wriggled on the hook.

His next claim was:

‘Yeah fair enough on the numbers. However imperial troops did make up more of the front line than those numbers suggest… Most British units rotated through six month deployments, often en-route or on-return from India. While African units stayed on for the duration. So of the 480,000+ British who served there, boots on the ground was far less… The manpower strength of front line units was made up increasingly of imperials, especially as the war dragged on and when we adopted the horsed riflemen tactics.’

This was, alas, no less far-fetched than his initial claim.

For a start, 480,000+ British troops did not serve in the war, so that can be dismissed.

Secondly, the idea that British troops ‘rotated through six month deployments’ is simply make-belief, and something he presumably just made-up, and hoped no one would challenge. In reality, once they had deployed to South Africa, the regular British infantry generally stayed until the end of the war, with most units remaining in theatre for the whole conflict, and only six leaving before the end of the war:[3]

The situation with British regular cavalry was similar, with only 5 regiments leaving South Africa before the war over:

The other thing worth noting is that there were only three British cavalry regiments in-country at the start of the war – one squadron of the 5th Dragoon Guards landed in Durban on the day Kruger declared war, but the rest of the regiment only arrived later that month. Similarly, the 9th Lancers disembarked in Cape Town in October 1899, but only some days after the war began. They were, for a time, the only regular cavalry available to Lord Methuen on the Cape Front. Again, if there had really been some sort of dastardly scheme to attack the republics (as the relentless propaganda of the Apartheid-era has convinced some people to believe), then it would be remarkable that the British army was planning to do with so few horsemen.

My entertaining interlocutor was right on one point, however: there were indeed some units which rotated through South Africa, but they were the volunteer units, specially raised during the Boer War – not those of the regular British army.

35,000 Britons volunteered for service in South Africa in the Imperial Yeomanry, for example, and were obliged to serve for 12 months (not six). Three contingents of Imperial Yeomanry were sent to South Africa, with the first arriving between January and April 1900, the second arriving in early 1901, and the third at the end of that year.

This policy of rotation was not a huge success, however, as, in April 1901, for example, Kitchener was ‘forced to lose many thousands of his veteran yeomanry, Australians and Canadians, whose terms of service were at an end’. The new recruits of the second contingent were almost totally green, and had to be trained from scratch.

The situation with the City Imperial Volunteers[4] was similar. The unit landed in Cape Town on 29 January 1900, and shipped home again on 22 August of that year; all very different from how the regular units were deployed.

And these relatively short rotations were also the norm for those volunteer units which deployed from the rest of the Empire:

As well as meaning that, by they time they gained some experience, these volunteers were replaced by green newcomers, this constant rotation of units also artificially inflates the total numbers of Imperial troops who served in the Boer War – much to the delight of those who love to scream that it took ‘half a million British troops to defeat 17 Boers’ (or whatever other random numbers they dream up after a few too many Klippies).

And in terms of his claims that ‘a good half of all Imperial troops were Rhodesians north and south, Natal Carabiners (sic) and white South African farmers’ and that ‘African units stayed on for the duration’, that is also not the case.

In reality, and like the British Territorial Force and Yeomanry of the period, the pre-war volunteer forces of Natal (including the Natal Carbineers, he mentions) were not allowed to serve outside the colony, and so started to be demobbed as soon as the invading Boers had been driven out. One should bear in mind that all of the men of these units (Natal Carbineers, Natal Mounted Rifles, Border Mounted Rifles, Umvoti Mounted Rifles, Durban Light Infantry etc) were only part-time soldiers, and had jobs, farms and businesses to return to; with so much of the white male population called out to resist the Boer invasion, the economy of Natal had essentially ground to a halt, and the Colony had to request an emergency loan from London. It should thus come as no surprise that 800 Natalian troops were released almost immediately, and by 1 October 1900, all Natal forces were stood down, ‘other than 300 who instead chose to transfer to the Natal Volunteer Composite Regiment and continued the fight in the republics until the end of the war’.

Similarly, when talking of the pre-war volunteer units of the Cape Colony, they ‘were employed chiefly in garrison duty and in guarding the Cape to Kimberley railway. It has to be borne in mind that at the commencement of the campaign neither the Cape Government nor the British generals encouraged the idea of employing the Cape Colony Volunteers at the front. The view taken was to keep them on the railways or about their own towns; some corps, indeed, do not seem to have been even embodied. The consequence of this discouraging policy was, as has been pointed out in ‘The Times’ History, that an immense number of the best men in the Colony Volunteer forces joined the South African Light Horse, Roberts’ Horse, Kitchener’s Horse, and other irregular regiments. For example, the Army List of December 1900 showed that 4 officers from the Cape Town Highlanders, 5 from the Duke of Edinburgh’s Volunteers, and 1 from the Cape Garrison Artillery, were serving in Kitchener’s Horse alone.’

Of course, the men of four permanent regular ‘South African’ units (the Cape Mounted Rifles, plus the paramilitary British South Africa Police, Cape Police and Natal Police) served throughout the war. And, as mentioned above, some of the ‘South African’ irregular regiments – which were raised with great urgency in response to the Boer invasion (like the Imperial Light Horse, South African Light Horse, Kitchener’s Horse etc) – did indeed remain in action for the remainder of the war, and proved to be hard-hitting and effective units. But the idea that these few units made up a majority of the Imperial forces in South Africa is ridiculous.

Besides, other units of ‘South African’ irregulars were demobbed during the war: the Imperial Light Infantry, for example, were raised in December 1899, and stood down in June 1901. The Rhodesia Regiment and the Rhodesian Horse[5] were raised just prior to the war, but their 12 months of service expired in September 1900, and the regiments were disbanded. Similarly, the Protectorate Regiment – which played such an important role in defending Kimberley – was disbanded by the end of 1900.

And other ‘South African’ units did not fight throughout the war as they were only raised relatively late in the piece: Kitchener’s Fighting Scouts,[6] the Rand Rifles, and the Johannesburg Mounted Rifles[7] were all founded in December 1900, for example.[8] The Scottish Horse, which recruited men of Scots ancestry – mainly in Natal but also through Caledonian Societies across the Empire – only took the field in February 1901.

Like most things about the Boer War, it is well worth doing some actual research and reading, before making pronouncements about six month rotations, or claims that South African troops made up ‘a good half of all Imperial troops’.

NOTES:

[1] Maurice, History of the War in South Africa, 1899-1902, Vol.4, p.674

[2] Hall, Hall Handbook of the Anglo-Boer War, p.79

[3] The charts in this article have been drawn using the Hall Handbook of the Anglo-Boer War, p.71-84 as my reference

[4] The Lord Mayor of London, Alfred James Newton, was approached by Colonel Boxall, who proposed that the City of London should sponsor a volunteer unit for service in South Africa. Newton quickly reached agreement with various City livery companies, bankers, merchants and the Court of Common Council to support and fund the venture. A corps of Imperial volunteers to be raised and equipped by the City of London was authorized by Royal Warrant dated 24 December 1899 with the name City of London Imperial Volunteers. The corps included an infantry division, a mounted infantry division, and a field battery (artillery) division. The infantry and mounted infantry divisions were composed of about 1,400 men recruited mainly from existing volunteer regiments in London and Middlesex (units which were not allowed to serve outside the Motherland), while the artillery division was composed of about 150 men recruited from the Honourable Artillery Company and the City of London Artillery forming a battery of four 12½ pounder quick-firing guns, manufactured by Messrs Vickers’ Sons & Maxim.

[5] Also referred to as the Rhodesian Volunteers

[6] Raised from volunteers from Natal and the Cape Colony

[7] The Tommies quickly claimed that JMR actually stood for: ‘Jews – Mostly Russian’

[8] Obviously, there would have been some troops who joined these newly established regiments having previously served in other such irregular units, or one of the Cape or Natal pre-war volunteer regiments