A friend recently made me aware of this pamphlet, which was apparently written some years hence, by an American gentleman:
Alas, our American friend was clearly infected by the same mental illness that plagues certain South African academics, as – on the first page – he treated his readers to this utter nonsense:
Of course, the dusty old Defenders of NP Myth who still stagger about at Pretoria University will be furious that Hawkesbury let slip the Boer plan was ‘to drive the British to sea at Durban’; this goes against their preferred fiction of the invasion of Natal being ‘a defensive invasion’ and ‘only done to take up defensive positions, just over the border’ – and if you are stupid enough to believe any of that self-pitying nonsense, then I have a bridge I’d like to sell you.
But the True Believers might forgive Hawkesbury for telling the truth in this matter, as they will have loved his truly surreal claim that the invading Boers had ‘driven the British from the field four times in the last ten days’… especially as the claim is that these four (ahem) ‘victories’ were won at Talana, Elandslaagte, Rietfontein and Lombard’s Kop.
Even a broken clock is right twice a day, and no one would deny that Lombard’s Kop / Nicholson’s Nek was indeed a Boer victory, or that General White’s men were indeed driven back into Ladysmith… or, in the case of Colonel Carleton’s column, left to be captured.
But what about the other three battles, which Hawkesbury so gleefully (if brainlessly) trumpeted?
As far as Talana Hill was concerned, it was the Boers who were driven from the field: the men of Penn Symons’ brigade stormed the republican positions atop Talana Hill, while the Boers on the nearby hill of Impati sat passively, too afraid to move to the assistance of their comrades. Dundee was certainly abandoned a couple of days later, but the notion that the battle of Talana Hill ended with the British ‘driven from the field’ is so ridiculous, I doubt even the most thick-headed True Believer would claim that.
And Elandslaagte – fought the following day – was an even more emphatic British victory. Boers under General Kock disobeyed orders, and pushed south into Elandslaagte, cutting the railway between Dundee and Ladysmith. General White, commanding the Ladysmith garrison, ordered General French to drive them away, which he duly did, with the Devons fixing the Boers in place, and the Manchesters, Gordon Highlanders and Imperial Light Horse rolling up their flank, and routing them from the field. As the defeated and broken Boers fled away to the north east, two squadrons of British cavalry (one each of the 5th Dragoon Guards, and 5th Royal Irish Lancers) charged them, striking utter panic and pandemonium. Only a complete and utter imbecile could possibly claim that the British were ‘driven from the field’ at Elandslaagte.
At Rietfontein, General White again ordered a portion of his troops out of Ladysmith, to fight a delaying action in the area of Rietfontein Farm / Modder Spruit Station, with the object of preventing the Orange Free State forces from crossing the railway line, and interfering with the retreat of the troops from Dundee. The British infantry and artillery won the fire fight, pinning the Free Staters in place all day, and – once word reached General White that the Dundee column was safely past – he ordered a retirement back to Ladysmith. So, again, it takes a special sort of cretin to pretend that the British were ‘driven from the field’ at Rietfontein.
So what could possibly have motivated Hawkesbury to make such a false, and easily disprovable, claim? Why was it so important to him to pretend – against all evidence – that the opening battles of the Boer invasion of Natal were a string of republican victories? Did Hawkesbury really have new, previously unseen, evidence that the cavalry charge never happened? That the Gordons, Manchesters and ILH didn’t really rout the Boers from their positions? Or was he just playing the peanut gallery, and going with the flow, unthinkingly accepting the Apartheid-era myths, rather than calling them out for the utter nonsense they are?
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