Siege of Ladysmith (1899-1900): The 118-Day Siege in Natal

The Siege of Ladysmith was a 118-day Boer siege of a British garrison in the Colony of Natal during the Second Boer War, lasting from 2 November 1899 to 28 February 1900. About 13,000 British troops under Sir George White were trapped in the town, while a relief army under Sir Redvers Buller suffered a series of costly defeats on the Tugela River before finally breaking through. The siege and its relief were among the most closely followed events of the war in Britain.

Background

When the war began on 11 October 1899, Boer forces from the Transvaal and the Orange Free State, under Commandant-General Piet Joubert, invaded northern Natal. Ladysmith, a railway junction and the main British supply base in the colony, was the natural centre of the British defence.

The early fighting went badly for the British. They won tactical victories at Talana Hill on 20 October, where their commander Sir William Penn Symons was mortally wounded, and at Elandslaagte on 21 October, but had to fall back on Ladysmith. On 30 October, later called “Mournful Monday”, White’s attempt to strike at the Boers around the town failed, and nearly 1,000 British soldiers were forced to surrender at Nicholson’s Nek. On 2 November the Boers cut the railway and telegraph to the south, completing the encirclement.

Life under siege

The Boers ringed the town with commandos and artillery on the surrounding hills, including 155 mm Creusot guns nicknamed “Long Tom”. Shelling was regular but caused relatively few deaths; disease was far more dangerous. Typhoid and dysentery spread through the garrison and the civilian population, and a neutral hospital camp was set up at Intombi, outside the town, by agreement with the Boers.

As supplies dwindled, rations were cut and cavalry horses were slaughtered for food. Several hundred soldiers and civilians died during the siege, most of them from disease.

Besides the soldiers, the town held several thousand civilians: white settlers, Indian traders and workers, and African residents and refugees, who generally received the poorest rations. Several war correspondents were also trapped, including the celebrated Daily Mail journalist George Warrington Steevens, who died of typhoid in January 1900. Their reports, smuggled out by African runners or sent by heliograph and carrier pigeon, kept the siege in British newspapers.

Outside the town

The relief army included some well-known figures. Winston Churchill, who had escaped from a Boer prison in Pretoria in December 1899, joined Buller’s forces as a lieutenant in a volunteer cavalry regiment while still reporting for the Morning Post. In Natal, Mohandas Gandhi organised an Indian ambulance corps of more than 1,000 stretcher-bearers who carried wounded men from the battlefields at Colenso and Spion Kop.

The attack on Platrand

The Boers made only one major attempt to storm the town. Before dawn on 6 January 1900 they attacked the long ridge called the Platrand, held by the British at Wagon Hill and Caesar’s Camp. The fighting lasted all day in heat and a violent thunderstorm. The British held on, but both sides suffered several hundred casualties, and the Boers did not try again.

Buller’s relief attempts

Buller arrived in Natal to lead the relief himself. His first attempt, at Colenso on 15 December 1899, ended in defeat with more than 1,100 British casualties and the loss of ten guns. Among the mortally wounded was Lieutenant Freddy Roberts, the only son of Lord Roberts, who was soon appointed British commander-in-chief.

Buller’s next effort, a move west around the Boer flank, led to the disaster at Spion Kop on 23–24 January 1900, where British troops seized a hilltop but were caught in crossfire on its exposed summit. A further attempt at Vaal Krantz on 5–7 February was abandoned. Buller earned the mocking nickname “Sir Reverse”.

The relief

In the battles of the Tugela Heights from 14 to 27 February 1900, Buller’s army finally worked its way through the Boer lines, using closer coordination between artillery and infantry advancing in short rushes. The decisive attack on Pieters Hill came on 27 February, the anniversary of the British defeat at Majuba in 1881, and on the same day Piet Cronjé surrendered at Paardeberg far to the west.

The Boers withdrew north. On the evening of 28 February 1900 mounted troops of Lord Dundonald’s brigade rode into Ladysmith, and Buller’s army followed. The news, coming soon after the relief of Kimberley, caused great rejoicing in Britain, matched later only by the relief of Mafeking in May.

Timeline

• 1899, 20 October: Battle of Talana Hill.
• 1899, 30 October: “Mournful Monday” defeat and surrender at Nicholson’s Nek.
• 1899, 2 November: The Boers cut Ladysmith off; the siege begins.
• 1899, 15 December: Buller is defeated at Colenso.
• 1900, 6 January: The Boer attack on the Platrand is repulsed.
• 1900, 23–24 January: Battle of Spion Kop.
• 1900, 27 February: British capture Pieters Hill.
• 1900, 28 February: Relief of Ladysmith.

Why it matters

Ladysmith tied down a large British force and many Boer commandos for four months, and the struggle to relieve it exposed the British army’s outdated tactics against well-armed, entrenched riflemen. The lessons learned on the Tugela, and the reputations made and lost there, shaped the rest of the war and British military thinking before 1914.