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Military History – South Africa – Europe – England 19th Century
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Graspan. Some 1,400 men were ashore at any one time.
The men in the field were supported by the Army Service Corps, the Royal Army Medical
Corps, the Royal Engineers, the Army Ordnance Department and various other services, some in the
front line and some in depots and supply centres.
The troops raised to supplement the regulars came both from within South Africa and from
overseas. Many of the uitlanders,the non-Boer inhabitants of the Boer republics, left for Natal or the
Cape and joined such formations as the Imperial Light Horse. Canada sent troops as did the
Australian colonies (Australia as such had not yet come into existence). In proportion to its
population, New Zealand sent more men than any country.
Two additional groups within South Africa supplied men to the British – the Boers and the black
Africans. Many men of Dutch ancestry within the British colonies, and citizens of those colonies,
declined to join the republican Boers and became members of such formations as Brabant’s Horse.
They were regarded as traitors to the Boer cause, as were the “joiners”, Boers of the republics who
joined the British to form such units as the National Scouts and the Orange River Volunteers. Piet De
Wet, brother of Chief-commandant Christiaan De Wet, was one such and lived out his life after the
war an outcast in his own country.
How many black Africans served with the British is impossible to determine. They worked as
servants and as ox and mule drivers, but also as scouts and as armed guards on the block-house lines
and in the concentration camps that were vulnerable to Boer attack. Their service was ignored when
the time came to negotiate the peace.
See also:
Artillery, British; Bergendal, Battle of; Elandslaagte, Battle of; Graspan, Battle of; Horses;
Joiners; Karri Davis, Major Walter; Kimberley, Siege of; Ladysmith, Siege of; Rifles; Appendix:
British Forces.
Reference:
Barthorp, Michael, “The Mounted Infantry”, Soldiers of the Queen,no. 99, 1999; Bennett, Will,
Absent-Minded Beggars (Barnsley, Pen & Sword, 1999); Hall, Darrell, ed. Fransjohan
Pretorius and Gilbert Torlage, The Hall Handbook of the Anglo-Boer War (Pietermaritzburg,
University of Natal Press, 1999); Hall, D. O. W., The New Zealanders in South Africa 1899–
1902 (Wellington, Department of Internal Affairs, 1949); Jeans, T. T., ed., The Naval Brigades
in the South African War 1899–1902 (London, Sampson Low, Marston & Co., 1901, reprinted
by The London Stamp Exchange Ltd.); Reid, Brian A., Our Little Army in the Field: the
Canadians in South Africa (St Catherines, Ontario, Vanwell Publishing, 1996); Wallace, R. L.,
The Australians at the Boer War (Canberra, the Australian War Memorial and Australian
Government Publishing Service, 1976).
British Opposition to the War
Although the popular press and the majority of the public were strong in their support for the war, a
significant minority, including some Members of
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