Australians in the Unconventional Conventional War in South Africa, November 1899 to June 1900.

Most of us know that a squadron of New South Wales Lancers under Captain Charles Cox was the first Australian unit to arrive in South Africa in 1899 and the first to engage the enemy. That first engagement is usually taken to be Belmont, a small battle on 23 November 1899 during Methuen's failed push toward Kimberley in which a troop of lancers took part. But when Charles Cox wrote home that `I saw the first shot fired yesterday', he was writing from another theatre of war, the Colesberg district of Cape Colony, and he was referring not to a battle against the Boers but to an encounter with a handful of British subjects that took place a day before Belmont, an encounter that was more an act of policing than soldiering. (2)

Before dawn on 22 November 1899 Cox led a small patrol of lancers guided by a couple of Cape policemen to a group of farms at Jackalsfontein owned by the van der Walt family. Army intelligence had intercepted a letter written by a young man from one of the farms stating his intention to join the Boers, and the patrol was to arrest all the men and impound any arms and horses. The farms stood a hundred kilometres south of the border with the Orange Free State, well within British territory. But this was hostile country, where white farmers more often favoured the Boer cause than the British. As the patrol approached the farms they saw a man gallop off; they chased him but failed to catch him. They saw flashes of light coming from the direction of the main farmhouse; they took these to be signals to some rebel band. Cox was anxious to get the job done and get out before his patrol was ambushed.

At the main farmhouse the patrol stood two young men of the van der Walt family against a wall while they searched the house and gathered the horses. One bridle was missing, and it would be needed if every horse were to be taken. Cox ordered Jan Dolley, a Sotho servant of the van der Walts, to find it. The black man proved sullen and uncooperative, and refused to search a stable for the missing bridle. Peter Smith, one of the Cape policemen with the patrol, walked up to Cox and reported Dolley's refusal to cooperate. Smith was sure Dolley knew where the bridle was. `If he won't give you the bridle', Cox told Smith, then `give him a hole'. Smith walked back toward the stable, inserting a cartridge into the breech of his carbine. A few seconds later a shot rang out. Just after that awful sound, one lancer recalled, `the bridle turned up from somewhere'--not, apparently, from within the stable. The patrol saddled up hastily, their prisoners and horses in tow, and scampered back to their base, not daring to draw rein for some time lest they be overtaken by rebels. (3)

The patrol to Jackalsfontein and the shooting of Jan Dolley might seem too trivial an incident to include in the record of Australians in the South African war, let alone to confer on it the distinction of the first warlike act performed by an Australian unit in it. It isn't mentioned in P L Murray's Official Records of the Australian Military Contingents to the War in South Africa, published by the Defence Department in 1911, nor is it recounted in P V Vernon's 1961 history of The Royal New South Wales Lancers. It is mentioned, though, in G B Barton's thorough but unfinished chronicle of Australians in the war, published after his death as the second volume of the Australian edition of The Story of South Africa. (4) Barton was right to mention it. However trivial, and however brutal, the incident represents much of what Australians did in the war, even during the war's conventional phase that ran at least until the middle of 1900.

I'm not making the obvious point that much of the war's fighting even in its first year was small in scale, consisting more of patrols and ambushes and skirmishes than of battles. My point is that the conventional war against the Boer commandos was accompanied by an unconventional war against rebels and potential rebels in Cape Colony, against newly conquered peoples in the Boer republics and in Rhodesia, and on behalf of nervous civil administrations and beleaguered loyalists in districts where rebels held the upper hand. Australian contingents to South Africa were as often engaged in the police and garrison duties that this unconventional war entailed as they were in the skirmishes and battles that the more conventional conquest of the Boer republics entailed, and we can learn much about these duties from South African records, including published records available in Australia. From November 1899 to June 1900, Australians were as just as busy turning the pink bits of the South African map into a hearty red as they were shifting the red border south of the Limpopo and north of the Orange.

The unconventional war seemed necessary because hostility and potential hostility to the imperial cause was not confined to armed men from the Boer republics. A substantial minority of white settlers in Cape Colony were Afrikaners in ethnicity and culture, and from November 1899 to March 1900 two thousand or more from Cape districts that bordered on the Orange Free State--men like the van der Walts of Colesberg--rose against imperial rule as Boer commandos invaded, infiltrated or approached their districts. Milner, the imperial high commissioner in Cape Town, feared a general rising. There was no part of Cape Colony, he suspected, `in which the Dutch population are not rebels at heart, and would not rise against us if they saw a chance'. (5) Buller and Roberts, successive imperial military commanders during the first year of the war, were more concerned to conquer the Boer republics than suppress the Cape rebels. But some troops had to be allotted to the task, and most of the first wave of Australian contingents--those raised in October 1899 as the war was beginning--were occasionally deployed against rebels and those who might join them. Percy Ricardo's Queensland Mounted Infantry, John Hoad's Australian Regiment and John Antill's New South Wales Mounted Rifles squadron were sent to the rear of Methuen's division in December 1899, and in January 1900 they struck against rebels in the Prieska and Douglas districts, the latter strike involving the skirmish at Sunnyside and the first deaths in action by soldiers wearing Australian uniforms.

In February the first Australian contingents marched north in Roberts' invasion of the Orange Free State or helped Ralph Clements contain a Boer invasion of the Colesberg district. They were joined by two in three of the newly arrived second wave of contingents from Australia. The rest of this second wave--Henry Pilkington's 2nd West Australian Mounted Infantry, Charles Reade's 2nd South Australian Mounted Rifles, Arthur Riggall's drafts for the 1st Tasmanian contingent, and Sydenham Smith's A Battery from Sydney--were deployed in a gigantic, three-pronged westward thrust into what is now called the Northern Cape against rebels and infiltrating commandos in response to an imperial defeat near Prieska and renewed fears of rebellion. One, perhaps two, of the second contingents remained in the Northern Cape long after the sweep. Smith's A Battery formed part of an occupation force for nearly a year, and most if not all of the drafts for the 1st Tasmanians may have done the same. (6)

As the Boer capitals fell to Roberts--Bloemfontein in March, Pretoria in June--Roberts believed that police operations would largely suffice to secure imperial rule in the republics. Milner supported Roberts in this belief, hoping that police operations would be placed under civil direction rather than military. Well before the famous South African Constabulary was raised toward the end of 1900, provisional mounted police forces were formed in Bloemfontein and Pretoria to protect loyalists and intimidate conquered Boers. Colonial soldiers like the Australians were invited to be attached temporarily to the provisional police at ten shillings a day--twice what most were earning, though food and fodder costs would be deducted. The prospect of high pay, easy service and escape from unpopular officers or comrades ensured that applications far exceeded vacancies. Around seventy-five Australians joined the Bloemfontein provisional police. Probably a larger number joined the Pretoria force. (7)

It was not only white men who seemed to threaten imperial rule in southern Africa. In Rhodesia, a recent imperial acquisition, forty-nine in every fifty persons belonged to the Ndebele or Shona peoples who, three years before, had revolted against their white conquerors. Then there were the Afrikaners among the few white Rhodesians. The army was uninterested in Rhodesia's security beyond repelling Boer raids, but local loyalists and Cecil Rhodes' British South Africa Company, which had founded the colony and still partly administered it, demanded security and the raising of an occupation force--and Rhodes had a long purse and a loud voice. The War Office in London quashed the Company's plan to recruit an occupation force privately, but with Roberts' agreement it sent five thousand men to Rhodesia from among the vast wave of volunteers to the war that the defeats of Black Week were putting into in uniform. A Rhodesian Field Force was to be formed from these men to discourage rebellion and Boer raids simply by its strength. If all went well, it would then march south toward Pretoria. Untried troops were thought sufficient for this task, so all the third wave of contingents from Australia, the citizen bushmen as they were known, and two of the six Australian contingents from the fourth wave, the imperial bushmen, were landed not in Cape Town but at Biera on the east African coast whence they marched into Rhodesia to form the bulk of the force. (8) Edwin Tivey from Victoria noted that the bushmen were ready to prevent a black revolt. (9) But all went well after all. Local Afrikaners proved quiescent, as did the Ndebele and Shona, though some Imperial Yeomanry from Britain briefly went into action against one tribe. So the Rhodesian Field Force was slowly moved south, not against Pretoria as intended but into the northwest Transvaal around Mafeking. Still, few Australian bushmen reached the conventional war in the Boer republics before July 1900, and some Victorians were still in Rhodesia in 1901.

Most of the Australian contingents raised in 1899 and 1900, then, joined in the unconventional, police-like activities of suppressing rebels, intimidating potential rebels and supporting loyalists at some point during the conventional war. Few Australians were shot and killed in this unconventional war, with the notable exceptions of Victor Jones and David McLeod at Sunnyside. Outside the Sunnyside clash the unconventional war did not seem like real war, and Australians who had come to taste real war did not like it. `No kudos to be got out of this sort of thing' reported Sydenham Smith in charge of A Battery. (10) `Hard lines we can't go', wrote one of Riggall's Tasmanians in the Northern Cape when he learned that Pilkington's West Australians were leaving for the front line in the Free State. (11) `We do hope it is the back door to Pretoria and that we will see some of the [real] work', wrote a Queensland bushman when he learned he was headed for Rhodesia. (12) The Rhodesian deployment seemed offensive as well as tedious to some bushmen. They had expected to be deployed as scouts for the British army, not as garrison troops for Rhodes and his Company, the same gang who had launched the Jameson raid. Methuen informed Roberts, with some exaggeration, that all bushmen `look with the utmost disfavour on the Jameson Raid and Rhodes', and that Kenneth Mackay, commanding the largest bushmen contingent, had protested at finding himself under the command of Raleigh Grey, one of Rhodes' lieutenants. (13) Against the Australian reluctance for and even distaste at the unconventional war, we have to balance the popularity of service in the provisional police forces. And the Australians could at least console themselves with the knowledge that suppression and intimidation, however unspectacular and at times distasteful, equalled liberation for local loyalists--though not all English South Africans saw it this way. To liberals like John Merriman, treasurer in the Cape government until mid 1900, the unconventional war was a counterproductive campaign that deepened local divisions and made civil war likely. If such criticism irked Australian soldiers at the time and helped paint a black record of their deeds, it also helped produce a mass local records on the unconventional war that allows to see a new and sometimes controversial side to the Australian contribution to the South African war.

The shooting of Jan Dolley had a political significance that made it not just a typical episode of the unconventional war but also an important one. Dolley probably seemed an minor human obstacle to Charles Cox, a railway clerk from Parramatta who knew nothing of South Africa's complex social relations and political divisions. But Dolley was a trusted family servant, well known and much loved in his district. His shooting was seen as a cold-blooded murder by local white farmers, especially those with little love for what seemed to them an army of occupation. There were protests to the army and the Cape government, then an inquiry. There were denunciations in the Cape parliament, denunciations that informed the parliament's decision to create a special court to punish crimes committed under martial law--those by soldiers enforcing it as well as those by rebels resisting it. A trial for Jan Dolley's murder was listed as the court's first case. Milner prudently suggested to Roberts that Cox be shipped back to Australia beyond the court's reach. But a deal was struck between the army and the Cape government. Soldiers inside a zone declared to be under martial law, as Colesberg had been when Dolley was shot, would not normally come under the new court's jurisdiction. Cox appeared before the court in October 1900 and admitted giving an order that allowed Smith, the policeman, to shoot Dolley; but under the terms of the deal Cox and Smith walked out of the courtroom free men. (14) The deal which saved Charles Cox from possibly the same fate as Breaker Morant offended even the staunchest loyalists in Cape Colony. `The whole affair stinks in our nostrils', judged the Colesberg Advertiser, a local English-language newspaper. (15)

The Sunnyside skirmish of 1 January 1900 also ended in a court room in Cape Town. It began with a badly divided community. The expedition that brought on the skirmish was intended to rescue the loyalists of the Douglas district--women like Sarah Finlay, who had been threatened by two armed men outside her farm one day, and men like Rudolph Roessler, who had been told he must join the rebels within a fortnight or be shot by them. (16) The soldiers who rescued Douglas's loyalists were hailed as liberators by a community expecting exile or even death as the rebel cause prospered, and it and they were celebrated by newspapers around the empire for having beaten the Boers in a dark period following of the defeats of Black Week. The Afrikaner newspaper Ons Land saw the event differently, noting sourly that `a number of British troops took Douglas without opposition'. (17) The truth lay somewhere in between. At Sunnyside the enemy was not the Boers but a band of two hundred rebels armed with a variety of guns--a similar band in size and cohesion and sense of principle to the Victorian miners who defended the Eureka stockade in 1854. The skirmish was a one-sided affair, and when it was over Ricardo's Queenslanders not only pursued rebels who got away but also searched the rebels' camp for documents that would identify and incriminate them. Enough was found to provide evidence for a series of trials that ran intermittently until July 1900, which several officers from the Queensland Mounted Infantry and New South Wales medical corps attended as witnesses. (18) The trials were controversial, at least for Afrikaners and English liberals. John Merriman noted in his diary the day that `forty miserable creatures, some lads of sixteen, nearly all them paupers, who were captured at Sunnyside, were tried and sentenced for high treason, poor wretches'. A few days later he wrote to his mother that `I can never defend the prosecution of those forty paupers ... the case might well have been postponed and justice would not have suffered--if indeed such rank and file should ever be indicted'. (19)

John Antill's New South Wales Mounted Rifles squadron entered Prieska the day after Sunnyside, on 2 January 1900. Prieska's loyalists, like the loyalists of Douglas, feared the Boers and the local rebels and hailed their rescuers enthusiastically. In Douglas, though, the warm welcome may have worn off. Antill's squadron stayed for two weeks, and raided houses and impounded arms, ammunition, food, livestock, furniture, a blacksmith's forge, even a bearskin rug which one soldier kept to sleep on with an enthusiasm and lack of discrimination that offended many locals. When the squadron fired into a house in which rebels were sheltering they blazed away at anyone who fled--including a black man, probably a servant and certainly a noncombatant, whom they shot four times. They took the man to a doctor, but as with Jan Dolley's shooting the incident was remembered by everyone who bore little love for the imperial cause. `These swashbucklers', complained John Merriman, `arrested inhabitants, drove off stock, and shot a few people without greatly caring who they were'. (20) When the squadron pulled out of Prieska in mid January they regretted that they had seen no real fighting. (21) The townspeople may also have had cause for regret. A local official reported that the occupation had made matters worse for the loyalists, for when the squadron withdrew the rebels returned and were determined to take revenge for what it had done. (22) Discontent over Antill's occupation of Prieska rose at the same time as the glowing reports of the Sunnyside skirmish appeared in the loyalist press, perhaps giving Australian soldiers a mixed reputation among Cape Colonists that varied according to political bias. Merriman recorded that his neighbour was `full of grievances against the Australians at Prieska, their kidnapping the inhabitants and lifting sheep, leaving women and children to starve on charity'. (23)

The death of Jan Dolley, the crushing of the Sunnyside rebels and Antill's occupation of Prieska show the dark side of the unconventional war and the Australian contribution to it--that is why they generated a wealth of records that allows us to see these episodes in such detail. But tact, mercy and deft competence were commonly employed in the unconventional war too, in civil as well as military situations, and praise from liberated loyalists and silence from civilians who barely noticed their army of occupation deserves as much attention from historians as do protests from angry Afrikaners. The lonely, frustrating garrison duties performed by A Battery in the Northern Cape showed notable diligence and discipline. So too the expedition in the second half of 1900 by Corporal John Malcolm, a thirty-year-old former detective who was attached to the Bloemfontein provisional police from the Victorian Mounted Rifles. In June that year Malcolm was sent to the Paardeberg battlefield in charge of some black labourers to dig for artillery said to have been buried there by the Boers when Cronje had been defeated four months earlier. After weeks of digging, Malcolm and his men unearthed two cases of shells, ten rifles, some ammunition, but no guns. Local intelligence suggested that some guns might be buried further west, but Malcolm suggested to his superiors that it would be more useful to sniff out rifles hidden by local farmers, and offer protection to white settlers from black marauders. He was ordered to keep looking for the guns. So he and his labourers trudged west, digging as they went. By October Malcolm was back in Bloemfontein, reporting that `I have made extensive inquiries, and so give it as my opinion that all guns ... that Cronje had in the laager were taken by Lord Roberts'. There had been one bright spot in all this fruitless digging and questioning. One day in August, Malcolm had received the delightful order, `Mr Peat with Lady Chermside and party arrive Paardeburg about Sunday. Place yourself at their disposal.' (24) We should place at ourselves at the diposal of the wealth of records that document the part played by Australians in the unconventional conventional war to learn more about how men like Malcolm helped secure imperial rule across southern Africa a century ago.

Craig Wilcox (1)

(1) I read this paper at the MHSA's biennial history conference in Canberra on 10 June 2000, and questions and comments I received shaped this printed version. I especially thank Ron Austin, Max Chamberlain, Peter Edgar, Roger Lee and Colin Simpson.

(2) G B Barton et al, The Story of South Africa in Two Volumes, vol. 2, The Despatch of Contingents from Australia and New Zealand and their Exploits on the Battle Fields, World, Sydney c. 1902, p 41.

(3) National Army Museum 6807/159 (Cavalry Division war diary) vol. 1, part 1, 22 November 1899; Cape Archives AG 2071 (Cape Police correspondence on shootings of natives) box 1, folder 29 and box 2, folder 1; Melbourne Age, 5 December 1900, p 11.

(4) Barton, The story of South Africa, p 41.

(5) K T Surridge, Managing the South African War 1899-1902: Politicians v. Generals, Royal Historical Society and Boydell Press, Woodbridge Suffolk, 1998, p 79.

(6) Australian War Memorial AWM1 (Australian defence records predating Great War) 4/2 (reports from Smith); J Bufton, Tasmanians in the Transvaal War, Loone, Hobart, 1905. p 217.

(7) Free State Archives PMP1 (Provisional Mounted Police personnel files), PMP13 (Provisional Mounted Police miscellaneous files), PMP17 (Provisional Mounted Police chief intelligence officer's letterbook); Transvaal Archives MGP3 (Military Governor of Pretoria inward correspondence) file MGP 596/00, MGP7 (Military Governor of Pretoria inward correspondence) file MGP 596/00.

(8) Public Record Office CO417/306 (Colonial Office correspondence with War Office), CO417/308 (Colonial Office correspondence with British South Africa Company), WO105/30 (Roberts papers, cables from War Office), WO105/31 (Roberts papers, cables to War Office).

(9) Australian War Memorial 3DRL/3058 (Tivey papers) folder 2, Tivey to mother 7 September 1900.

(10) Australian War Memorial AWM1 4/2 Smith to Assistant Adjutant General 7 April 1900.

(11) Bufton, Tasmanians in the Transvaal War, p 140.

(12) L Harvey, Letters from the Veldt: an Account of the Involvement of Volunteers from Queensland at the War in South Africa (Boer War) 1899-1902, McTaggart, Harvey Bay Qld, p 48.

(13) Public Record Office WO105/25 (Roberts papers, confidential papers)_folder 52, Methuen to Roberts 22 September 1900.

(14) P Lewsen ed., Selections from the Correspondence of John X Merriman, vol. 3 1899-1905, Van Riebeeck Society, Cape Town, 1966, pp. 118, 174-5; Cape Colony Annexures to the votes and proceedings of the House of Assembly, 1900 vol. 1, no. A5 (magistrates' reports on enemy occupations and martial law); Cape Archives, AG 2071 box 1 folder 29, box 2 folder 1; South Africa Conciliation Committee, Martial Law and Conciliation: being the Experience of Two Members of the Cape Parliament, Cape Town, c. 1900, pp. 4-5; Bodleian Library MS Milner (Milner papers) dep. 175, Milner to Roberts 16 July 1900; Cape Colony Supreme Court Reports, vol. 17, pp 561-8; Melbourne Age, 5 December 1900, p 11.

(15) Colesberg Advertiser, 2 November 1900, p 2.

(16) Cape Archives 1/DGS (Magistrate of Douglas/Herbert) 1/4/1/1 (high treason case affidavits) affidavit 501, 1/4/1/2 (high treason case affidavits) affidavit 59.

(17) Cape Argus, 4 January 1900 p 4.

(18) Cape Argus, 15 January 1900 p 5, 17 January 1900 p. 5, 18 January 1900 p 5, 8 February 1900 p 5; Cape Times 24 April 1900 p 7; Cape Archives AG 2067 (Cape Police correspondence on Sunnyside rebels) folder 10.

(19) Lewsen, Correspondence of John X Merriman, pp 188, 198.

(20) Lewsen, Correspondence of John X Merriman, p 139.

(21) Australian War Memorial AWM1 4/8 (reports from Antill), Antill to Assistant Adjutant General 7, 16 and January 1900, 8 February 1900; Barton, Story of South Africa, pp 59-62; F Wilkinson, Australia at the Front: a Colonial View of the Boer War, Long, London 1901, pp 55-9.

(22) Cape Colony Annexures to the Votes and Proceedings of the House of Assembly, 1900 vol 1, no A5, pp 149-52. See also Cape Archives 1/PKA (Magistrate of Prieska) 4/1/7/7 (miscellaneous letters received), Frankel to civil commissioner 25 January 1900, and Van der Merwe to resident magistrate 31 January 1900.

(23) Lewsen, Correspondence of John X Merriman, p 142.

(24) Free State Archive PMP1 folder 71 (Corporal Malcolm), PMP15 (Provisional Mounted Police miscellaneous files) file C122 (hidden arms at Paardeburg); PMP17 ff 192, 200.