Spion Kop is one of those SA places that doesn’t translate. Just as Gansbaai can never become Goose Bay, Spy Hill sounds so Enid Blyton. Even thrusting an “e” into it seems an affront to the heroism on that hill 125 years ago.
Thomas Pakenham might agree. He called it “an acre of massacre” and spelt its name the old-fashioned way in The Boer War. Wikipedia still does too.
Raymond and Lynette Heron, two guardians of the spelling, retain the name in their Spion Kop Lodge, which is the centre of commemorating the 125th anniversary later this week. The enterprising couple have arranged a wreath-laying and lunch on the summit on Friday, to be followed by a formal dinner at the lodge in the evening. “There’s room for as many as can come,” says Lynette.
There might even be time for Raymond Heron to explain how a complex battle unfolded and share some of his anecdotes.
One of those stories concerns the cypress tree at the summit. The tree, planted seven years after the battle, is now so tall it allows Spion Kop to be identified from the N3 between Johannesburg and Durban as the highway nears the Ladysmith turn-off. It distinguishes the kop from the other hills along that part of the Tugela River in KwaZulu-Natal. The tree has elements of fact and mystery.
What is known is that it was planted in memory of Private HCO Sleigh of the Fifth Royal Irish Lancers, who died on the hill during the battle on January 24 1900. What is not known is why Sleigh was on the hill when his regiment was about 37km away, besieged by the Boers in Ladysmith.
Seven years after the battle, members of his family — believed to be his father and sister — sailed to SA, nursing a cypress sapling on a voyage that would have taken about three weeks. From Durban they took the railway to Colenso and from there by coach and wagon to the summit. They planted the little tree in the rocky ground, and against the odds and elements it began to grow, flourish — and survive. Hit by lightning, battered by winds, threatened by drought, it refused to die. Today it’s a natural sentinel among the graves of those who perished on a hellishly hot midsummer day.
“The tree ought never to have survived,’’ says Heron.
He’d heard the story of the soldier and the cypress in 1998 when he bought a farm on the opposite bank from Spion Kop on the Tugela River. It was told to him by a Mrs Bennett, who, as a little girl, knew the farm’s original owner, George Spearman. It is one of many stories that might have been lost were it not for the Herons, who bought the farm with the intention of restoring the area as a significant place in history.
Spearman’s farmhouse, requisitioned in 1900 by the British commander-in-chief, Gen Redvers Buller VC, for his headquarters is now the Herons’ HQ, Spion Kop Lodge. Also on the farm, on the southern side of the Tugela, is a small hill, about 180m above the river. The view from Mount Alice is “one of the most theatrical in the whole of northern Natal”, according to Pakenham. It was from there that Buller planned his attack to relieve Ladysmith, which the Boers from the Transvaal and Free State republics had besieged soon after war broke out in October 1899.
Heron often tells the story from the vantage points on Mount Alice and Spion Kop. He knows the ground, having walked it, talked it, and never gets tired of the telling of it. He can explain how a complex battle unfolded with Boer and Brit manoeuvring to reach the high ground of the kop and the hills about it.
The Boers got there first. By the time the British army arrived, they had been mauled in the battle of Colenso six weeks earlier and 65km away, losing 10 guns and among their dead a young subaltern, Freddie Roberts, son of the field marshal who had recently arrived in Cape Town to assume overall command of British forces in SA — including over Buller.
Buller, smarting from the setback at Colenso, was all for giving up. He wired London to suggest that George White, the British general holed up in Ladysmith, surrender to the Boers. Such defeatism did not go down well with Field Marshal Lord Roberts, who was aghast at the suggestion that his son might have died in vain; the posthumous Victoria Cross for the younger Roberts notwithstanding. Lord Alfred Milner, the political supremo as British high commissioner to Southern Africa, and a hawk of his time, would have sided with Roberts.
Buller was out on a limb, but Heron believes that if the two enemies had come to terms then — as unlikely as it might have been, since Johannesburg’s gold was the ultimate prize — SA’s later history would have been dramatically different. There would have been no scorched earth policy, which Roberts and his successor, Lord Horatio Herbert Kitchener, pursued from early 1900 to smoke out Boer guerrillas. That strategy worked, but at the cost of thousands of women and children, black and white, dying in the first concentration camps of the 20th century, and years-long animosity between English and Afrikaner.
Sidelined as he was as commander of the Natal field force only, Buller resigned himself to taking Spion Kop. It was the key to the relief of Ladysmith, where about 13,000 British soldiers were effectively cooped up while the rest of the army struggled to come to grips with a war on the veld that was very different from what they had been used to. Pakenham tells of John Atkins, a British war correspondent who was overwhelmed by the vast scale of the landscape that “could swallow up 30,000 or 40,000 men and make nothing of them”.
The British were also applying old conventional tactics, honed by years of fighting in Europe, the Americas and India, against Boers who were quickly developing guerrilla tactics to replace their almost Middle Ages version of siege warfare, for which they were ill equipped.
Spion Kop would be one of the last battles of the SA War of 1899-1902 where the Boers applied artillery to devastating effect, along with elements of guerrilla warfare, sniping from behind rocks and enfilading British troops on the kop from adjacent hills.
From where he sat on Mount Alice it was clear to Buller that Spion Kop, more than twice as high as Mount Alice, was a formidable obstacle; its sheer, south-facing slopes, scarred with rocks, making it difficult to climb. But the British army, with a history of never coming across high ground it did not want to frontally assault, rejected an outflanking attempt that almost succeeded. The Earl of Dundonald, Col Douglas Cochrane, commanding a cavalry brigade, probing the Boer line, found a weakness at the western end near Acton Homes, a nearby settlement in the foothills of the Drakensberg. Turning it would have opened the road to Ladysmith, but before he could exploit it, he was ordered back by Buller’s second in command, Gen Charles Warren, who wanted the horses to guard the oxen.
The irony of Warren’s decision was that Buller then ordered him to carry out the frontal attack and was forever afterwards blamed for the subsequent British defeat.
It was in the heat of that battle that three characters emerge who would later occupy global roles: Mohandas Gandhi, the London-trained barrister, having been refused enlistment in the British forces then formed a stretcher-bearing unit; 23-year-old Winston Churchill, a celebrity in Britain after escaping from Boer custody in Pretoria and now occupying the ambiguous role of belligerent with the SA Light Horse Regiment, a galloper for Warren, and a war correspondent — at an extravagant salary — for London’s Morning Post; and Louis Botha, commander of the Boer forces and beginning to show his dynamism as a military leader.
None of the three met, but it’s safe to say Gandhi would have found the imperialist Churchill disagreeable. The Mahatma would go on to help win India its independence from the empire, while Botha and Churchill would fight on the same side in a world war just 14 years later.
Heron wonders what would have happened in history had any of those three perished on the kop.
Churchill has left us with a poignant memory of the battle. While on the summit after the battle during the truce to collect the wounded and bury the dead, he came across the body of a British soldier killed by Boer artillery. Close by lay a pair of binoculars with a name on it: McCorqoudale. He put the name and the face together: “That’s McCorquodale. He was at Harrow with me.” The 24-year-old Hugh Stewart McCorquodale, a member of the gentry who loved fox hunting and was guaranteed a privileged life in the family printing business, had enlisted in Thorneycroft’s Mounted Infantry seeking adventure. Thanks to an old school chum, he got a grave of his own rather than the massed one, which filled the huge trench with many unidentified soldiers. His great-grandson will attend the commemorations this week.
McCorquodale’s widowed mother arranged for a small marble cross to be put on the grave. A short distance away is another individual grave, for Burger (the equivalent of “private” in the Boer army) G Mills. George Mills and his brother had come to SA from England about four months before the war broke out, says Heron, and decided that if they threw in their lot with the republics and the Boers won, they’d be in the pound seats. It did not work out that way, but the surviving brother married a local woman after the war. Their descendants, fully Afrikanerised, have visited the battlefield and Spion Kop Lodge. The family’s new patriarch was clear about which side the Mills family was on: “Ons kan Engels praat, maar ons sal nigh.”
The Battle of Spion Kop no longer evokes such strong emotions, but Raymond and Lynette Heron are not allowing the heritage and history to die. Meanwhile, the graves of McCorquodale and Mills, along with all the cemeteries from the war, are still carefully maintained by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission. Not so much the battle sites, many of which suffer from neglect, none more so than Colenso, where, in the 1920s, the railways built a huge power station. Were it not for such desecration, Heron believes, Colenso could have become SA’s Gettysburg, the immaculate restoration of a battlefield from the American Civil War that paved the way for a Union victory over the Confederacy. At least SA still has Spion Kop — and its lodge keepers.
• For information on the Battle of Spion Kop commemorations, contact lynette@futurenet.co.za or info@spionkop.co.za or 082-573-0224.
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