Gumburru and Daratoleh
1903 Somaliland Campaign
Captain Charles Maurice Dundas Bruce, Royal Field Artillery
Gordon's School, Woking, Surrey
Captain Herbert H. de Bohun Morris, East Kent Regiment
Bedford High School
Captain Herbert E. Olivey, Suffolk Regiment
St. Mylor's Church, Mylor, Cornwall
Lt.-Colonel Arthur William Valentine Plunkett, 2nd King's African Rifles
Manchester Cathedral
Captain Herbert C. Vesey, 2nd Sikhs
St. Augustine's, Kohat, Pakistan
Two years after their abortive first attempt to contain the forces of Mohammad Abdullah Hussain, also known as ‘The Mad Mullah’, the British tried again. As Hussain was moving his people between British Somaliland and Italian Somaliland the British this time attempted to get the assistance of the Italians, but the latter were reluctant to become involved, and limited themselves to offering the British use of the port of Obbia (now Hobyo, one of the main centres of Somali piracy).
Using Obbia the British planned to occupy a line between that port and Berbera to the north, controlling all the water holes and thus forcing Hussain’s forces, who were all desert nomads accompanied by families and livestock, to give themselves up. The obvious problem was that the British did not know the desert as well as Hussain and his men did, depending instead on unreliable guides, and they did not know all the waterholes, especially when the seasonal rains came.
However that was in the future. By the end of March 1903 British forces under General William Manning , mostly King’s African Rifles made up of East African troops, with a number of Sikh troops, had occupied the line of wells and moved on the offensive, heading for where Manning believed the Dervish herds were. Having established a camp at a well called Galadi, where there was ample water, Manning sent out a detachment of five hundred and sixty men, with camels and Maxim guns, to search for the herds believed to be at Gumburru, forty miles west. This detachment was under Lieutenant-Colonel Alexander Cobbe, with twenty other British officers commanding the native troops.
On April 16th two patrols that Cobbe had sent out from Gumburru returned reporting that they had encountered an enemy force and had come under fire, having one officer killed and three infantrymen wounded. As Cobbe prepared for battle a water convoy arrived, escorted by forty-eight men of the 2nd Sikhs under the command of Captain Robert Vesey. Cobbe’s force now totalled over five hundred men.
The following day, the 17th, Cobbe sent out two more patrols. One encountered no resistance, but the other, under Captain Robert Olivey, reported at eight o’clock that enemy forces were advancing on him, and that he needed reinforcements. Cobbe sent out a force of over two hundred men under Major Arthur Plunkett, with orders to relieve Olivey’s force and return to base. In his subsequent report Cobbe made it quite clear that those were his explicit orders, and that if they had been obeyed Plunkett and one hundred and fifty-two other men would probably have lived to see the sunset.
Plunkett, with that foolhardy sense of superiority that at times has bedevilled British military history, decided to disobey orders. Relieving Olivey’s men only two kilometres from Cobbe’s camp Plunkett decided to advance to tackle the Dervish forces, advancing through a further six kilometres of dense head-high bush. Underestimating the enemy coupled with poor intelligence is a bad combination. Within minutes of reaching an open space in the bush, and without time to form a careful defensive formation, Plunkett’s force was attacked by an estimated eight thousand spearmen and horsemen, commanded by Hussain himself.
Plunkett managed to form a square and ordered volley fire, but the Dervish attackers still broke through, with the British officers targeted, and so slain or incapacitated first. The relief force had only been sent to retrieve Olivey’s men, and were not equipped to resist a sustained attack. With ammunition consequently short, Plunkett ordered his men to attempt to bayonet charge their way back to Cobbe. He was then shot through the head. No British officer escaped, and the surviving Sikhs were all killed on their charge back. Only forty-seven men, all Africans, most of whom had been separated during the initial attack, made it back to Gumburru.
Who were the men who died? Not surprisingly I can find no trace of the other ranks who were killed, including the two British Riflemen, Laurence Ensor and John Barrow. The two Sikh NCOs, Havildar-Major Dewan Singh and Lance-Havildar Khajan Singh are also just names on a list, as are, more surprisingly, some of the officers: Lieutenants Joseph Garner of the 2nd Dragoon Guards and Ernest Bell of the Suffolk Regiment, and Captains Lachlan McKinnon and James Johnstone-Stewart of the Derbyshire Regiment and the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders respectively.
Captain Herbert Humphrey de Bohun Morris of the East Kents was born in 1874 near Bridgnorth in Shropshire. Like many of his fellow-officers he was from an Army family, his father being a retired Colonel in the Bengal Army, and he was brought up in Bedford, where his memorial can still be seen in what is now Bedford Girls’ School, near another memorial to a subject of one of these stories.
Herbert Edward Olivey was a Captain in the Suffolk Regiment, born in 1871 in Penwerris, near Falmouth in Cornwall. He was another son of the Army, his father being a Lieutenant-Colonel in the Army Pay Department. His memorial is in St. Mylor’s Church at Mylor in Cornwall, the home village of his wife Charlotte. He is one of the few in these tales to have a child, daughter Ellen Elizabeth May being born in 1901. She died in 1986, and I wonder whether she ever knew that her father’s monogrammed playing cards are in the Regimental Museum in Bury St. Edmunds.
Captain Herbert Charles Vesey had originally been commissioned in the Lincolnshire Regiment, then transferred to the 2nd Sikhs. He was born in 1864, in Dublin, son of Edward Vesey, who was Ireland’s Paymaster General. Educated at Dover College as one of its earliest cohort of pupils, his memorial is, or was, at St. Augustine’s Church in Kohat, in Pakistan.
Lieutenant Francis Wheler Sime was born in the Punjab in 1876, the son of John and Ann Sime, his father being a Scot from Inchture, Perthshire. John Sime was a member of the Indian Educational Service. All of their six children were born in India, but by 1901 the family were settled in London. Francis qualified at Guy’s Medical School and joined the Indian Medical Service in July 1902, when he was posted to the Punjab. His military career lasted less than a year. His father died in 1911 and his mother 1925, both living long enough to see all three sons killed in action overseas. How hard must that have been?
Major Arthur William Valentine Plunkett has a memorial in the West Porch of Manchester Cathedral. He too was Indian-born, in 1868, in what is now Jabalpur in Madhya Pradesh, the son of an Irish Royal Engineer. Educated at Surrey County School in Cranleigh, which was founded to educate those whose parents were in “commercial pursuits”, he was commissioned into the Duke of Wellington’s West Yorkshire Regiment in 1888, and later married Winifred Hadwen, the daughter of a mill-owner from Ashton-under-Lyme. In a happier development Winifred remarried in 1907 to a Major in the Royal Fusiliers, and in 1911 was in Camberley in Surrey. I was worried that I might find Major Henry Alexander Walker in the casualty lists of the First World War; thankfully, I did not.
While Plunkett’s column was being destroyed another British column was out in the field, hoping to intercept the Mullah’s forces from the north. Major John Gough of the Rifle Brigade had a force of fifteen officers, five hundred and twenty-five riflemen and two Maxim guns. On the day Plunkett’s men died Gough reached a waterhole called Danot, from where patrols were sent out, capturing prisoners who reported that a battle had taken place at Gumburru.
On April 22nd Gough resumed his march, leaving Danot with nine officers and one hundred and ninety riflemen, and one of the Maxim guns. He left at dawn, and by seven-thirty patrols had encountered Dervish scouts. At half-past ten a large enemy force appeared; Gough formed a square, in a flat sandy terrain with thorn bushes over ten feet high around them.
It could easily have been a repeat of Gumburru, but it was not. Firstly, Gough was not attacked by surprise and so had time to arrange his troops into a defensive square. Secondly, because of that organisation Gough’s men could maintain a disciplined, reserved fire, not wasting shots and not wasting ammunition. Thirdly, because Gough’s force was an offensive column, intending to fight, they had much more ammunition than the men at Gumburru, and so could fight much longer. Fourthly they had a Maxim gunner who really knew what he was doing. Armourer-Sergeant Allan Gibb was with the Royal Ordnance, and accounts of the battle of Daratoleh stress the organised effectiveness of his use of the Maxim gun. Despite all that, however, Gough was still surrounded and outnumbered, and so he decided to retreat to his base at Danot; a fighting retreat, as structured and organised as it could be in the thick thorn bush, began – it lasted three hours.
The retreat involved an ‘elastic’ formation, with the rearguard changing as the retreat progressed, the rearguard moving back being replaced by one of its flanking lines to ensure continuous fire. One of the officers in charge of that changing rearguard was an old Harrovian, Captain Charles Bruce of the Royal Field Artillery. He was born in 1869 in Mauritius, where his father Sir Charles Bruce of Arnott was Governor. Sir Charles had previously been Professor of Sanskrit at King’s College, Cambridge, and went on to become Governor of British Guiana (now Guyana) and the Windward Isles, before dying in Edinburgh in 1920. That means he survived his son by seventeen years.
Captain Bruce was shot as he commanded the rearguard and lay wounded on the ground, unable to move. Three of his fellow officers rushed to save him from being finished off by the enemy, with one of them, Captain George Rolland, who was a contemporary of Bruce’s at Harrow, later describing how they were retreating through the bush when Bruce was shot through the body by a Dervish who had crept up close through the long grass, the bullet passing through from the right side to the left. Bruce weighed fourteen stone, too much for Rolland to carry, but help came in the form of Captain William Walker and Major Gough. With accompanying troops providing covering fire the three of them loaded Bruce onto a camel, but he was shot again, this time fatally. The three officers were awarded the Victoria Cross, Lance-Naik Maleya Singh was awarded the Indian Order of Merit, and the Distinguished Conduct medal was awarded to the three Askaris of the King’s African Rifles, Sergeant Ndermani, Corporal Surmoni and Sowar Umar Ismail. It’s pleasing to find that the accompanying troops were also recognised. The cynic in me wonders whether so many medals would have been awarded had the fiasco at Gumburru not occurred. Three Victoria Crosses does allow some saving of face.
It still all came to nothing. Despite subsequent British manoeuvring, and an Ethiopian victory over the Dervish in May, the Mullah’s forces, using their knowledge of the desert, avoided further conflict and evaded capture. By the end of June the British had captured a few prisoners, and hundreds of sheep, goats and camels. The Gvernment at home were not impressed, and the expedition called back. The Mullah lived to fight on, again.
Using Obbia the British planned to occupy a line between that port and Berbera to the north, controlling all the water holes and thus forcing Hussain’s forces, who were all desert nomads accompanied by families and livestock, to give themselves up. The obvious problem was that the British did not know the desert as well as Hussain and his men did, depending instead on unreliable guides, and they did not know all the waterholes, especially when the seasonal rains came.
However that was in the future. By the end of March 1903 British forces under General William Manning , mostly King’s African Rifles made up of East African troops, with a number of Sikh troops, had occupied the line of wells and moved on the offensive, heading for where Manning believed the Dervish herds were. Having established a camp at a well called Galadi, where there was ample water, Manning sent out a detachment of five hundred and sixty men, with camels and Maxim guns, to search for the herds believed to be at Gumburru, forty miles west. This detachment was under Lieutenant-Colonel Alexander Cobbe, with twenty other British officers commanding the native troops.
On April 16th two patrols that Cobbe had sent out from Gumburru returned reporting that they had encountered an enemy force and had come under fire, having one officer killed and three infantrymen wounded. As Cobbe prepared for battle a water convoy arrived, escorted by forty-eight men of the 2nd Sikhs under the command of Captain Robert Vesey. Cobbe’s force now totalled over five hundred men.
The following day, the 17th, Cobbe sent out two more patrols. One encountered no resistance, but the other, under Captain Robert Olivey, reported at eight o’clock that enemy forces were advancing on him, and that he needed reinforcements. Cobbe sent out a force of over two hundred men under Major Arthur Plunkett, with orders to relieve Olivey’s force and return to base. In his subsequent report Cobbe made it quite clear that those were his explicit orders, and that if they had been obeyed Plunkett and one hundred and fifty-two other men would probably have lived to see the sunset.
Plunkett, with that foolhardy sense of superiority that at times has bedevilled British military history, decided to disobey orders. Relieving Olivey’s men only two kilometres from Cobbe’s camp Plunkett decided to advance to tackle the Dervish forces, advancing through a further six kilometres of dense head-high bush. Underestimating the enemy coupled with poor intelligence is a bad combination. Within minutes of reaching an open space in the bush, and without time to form a careful defensive formation, Plunkett’s force was attacked by an estimated eight thousand spearmen and horsemen, commanded by Hussain himself.
Plunkett managed to form a square and ordered volley fire, but the Dervish attackers still broke through, with the British officers targeted, and so slain or incapacitated first. The relief force had only been sent to retrieve Olivey’s men, and were not equipped to resist a sustained attack. With ammunition consequently short, Plunkett ordered his men to attempt to bayonet charge their way back to Cobbe. He was then shot through the head. No British officer escaped, and the surviving Sikhs were all killed on their charge back. Only forty-seven men, all Africans, most of whom had been separated during the initial attack, made it back to Gumburru.
Who were the men who died? Not surprisingly I can find no trace of the other ranks who were killed, including the two British Riflemen, Laurence Ensor and John Barrow. The two Sikh NCOs, Havildar-Major Dewan Singh and Lance-Havildar Khajan Singh are also just names on a list, as are, more surprisingly, some of the officers: Lieutenants Joseph Garner of the 2nd Dragoon Guards and Ernest Bell of the Suffolk Regiment, and Captains Lachlan McKinnon and James Johnstone-Stewart of the Derbyshire Regiment and the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders respectively.
Captain Herbert Humphrey de Bohun Morris of the East Kents was born in 1874 near Bridgnorth in Shropshire. Like many of his fellow-officers he was from an Army family, his father being a retired Colonel in the Bengal Army, and he was brought up in Bedford, where his memorial can still be seen in what is now Bedford Girls’ School, near another memorial to a subject of one of these stories.
Herbert Edward Olivey was a Captain in the Suffolk Regiment, born in 1871 in Penwerris, near Falmouth in Cornwall. He was another son of the Army, his father being a Lieutenant-Colonel in the Army Pay Department. His memorial is in St. Mylor’s Church at Mylor in Cornwall, the home village of his wife Charlotte. He is one of the few in these tales to have a child, daughter Ellen Elizabeth May being born in 1901. She died in 1986, and I wonder whether she ever knew that her father’s monogrammed playing cards are in the Regimental Museum in Bury St. Edmunds.
Captain Herbert Charles Vesey had originally been commissioned in the Lincolnshire Regiment, then transferred to the 2nd Sikhs. He was born in 1864, in Dublin, son of Edward Vesey, who was Ireland’s Paymaster General. Educated at Dover College as one of its earliest cohort of pupils, his memorial is, or was, at St. Augustine’s Church in Kohat, in Pakistan.
Lieutenant Francis Wheler Sime was born in the Punjab in 1876, the son of John and Ann Sime, his father being a Scot from Inchture, Perthshire. John Sime was a member of the Indian Educational Service. All of their six children were born in India, but by 1901 the family were settled in London. Francis qualified at Guy’s Medical School and joined the Indian Medical Service in July 1902, when he was posted to the Punjab. His military career lasted less than a year. His father died in 1911 and his mother 1925, both living long enough to see all three sons killed in action overseas. How hard must that have been?
Major Arthur William Valentine Plunkett has a memorial in the West Porch of Manchester Cathedral. He too was Indian-born, in 1868, in what is now Jabalpur in Madhya Pradesh, the son of an Irish Royal Engineer. Educated at Surrey County School in Cranleigh, which was founded to educate those whose parents were in “commercial pursuits”, he was commissioned into the Duke of Wellington’s West Yorkshire Regiment in 1888, and later married Winifred Hadwen, the daughter of a mill-owner from Ashton-under-Lyme. In a happier development Winifred remarried in 1907 to a Major in the Royal Fusiliers, and in 1911 was in Camberley in Surrey. I was worried that I might find Major Henry Alexander Walker in the casualty lists of the First World War; thankfully, I did not.
While Plunkett’s column was being destroyed another British column was out in the field, hoping to intercept the Mullah’s forces from the north. Major John Gough of the Rifle Brigade had a force of fifteen officers, five hundred and twenty-five riflemen and two Maxim guns. On the day Plunkett’s men died Gough reached a waterhole called Danot, from where patrols were sent out, capturing prisoners who reported that a battle had taken place at Gumburru.
On April 22nd Gough resumed his march, leaving Danot with nine officers and one hundred and ninety riflemen, and one of the Maxim guns. He left at dawn, and by seven-thirty patrols had encountered Dervish scouts. At half-past ten a large enemy force appeared; Gough formed a square, in a flat sandy terrain with thorn bushes over ten feet high around them.
It could easily have been a repeat of Gumburru, but it was not. Firstly, Gough was not attacked by surprise and so had time to arrange his troops into a defensive square. Secondly, because of that organisation Gough’s men could maintain a disciplined, reserved fire, not wasting shots and not wasting ammunition. Thirdly, because Gough’s force was an offensive column, intending to fight, they had much more ammunition than the men at Gumburru, and so could fight much longer. Fourthly they had a Maxim gunner who really knew what he was doing. Armourer-Sergeant Allan Gibb was with the Royal Ordnance, and accounts of the battle of Daratoleh stress the organised effectiveness of his use of the Maxim gun. Despite all that, however, Gough was still surrounded and outnumbered, and so he decided to retreat to his base at Danot; a fighting retreat, as structured and organised as it could be in the thick thorn bush, began – it lasted three hours.
The retreat involved an ‘elastic’ formation, with the rearguard changing as the retreat progressed, the rearguard moving back being replaced by one of its flanking lines to ensure continuous fire. One of the officers in charge of that changing rearguard was an old Harrovian, Captain Charles Bruce of the Royal Field Artillery. He was born in 1869 in Mauritius, where his father Sir Charles Bruce of Arnott was Governor. Sir Charles had previously been Professor of Sanskrit at King’s College, Cambridge, and went on to become Governor of British Guiana (now Guyana) and the Windward Isles, before dying in Edinburgh in 1920. That means he survived his son by seventeen years.
Captain Bruce was shot as he commanded the rearguard and lay wounded on the ground, unable to move. Three of his fellow officers rushed to save him from being finished off by the enemy, with one of them, Captain George Rolland, who was a contemporary of Bruce’s at Harrow, later describing how they were retreating through the bush when Bruce was shot through the body by a Dervish who had crept up close through the long grass, the bullet passing through from the right side to the left. Bruce weighed fourteen stone, too much for Rolland to carry, but help came in the form of Captain William Walker and Major Gough. With accompanying troops providing covering fire the three of them loaded Bruce onto a camel, but he was shot again, this time fatally. The three officers were awarded the Victoria Cross, Lance-Naik Maleya Singh was awarded the Indian Order of Merit, and the Distinguished Conduct medal was awarded to the three Askaris of the King’s African Rifles, Sergeant Ndermani, Corporal Surmoni and Sowar Umar Ismail. It’s pleasing to find that the accompanying troops were also recognised. The cynic in me wonders whether so many medals would have been awarded had the fiasco at Gumburru not occurred. Three Victoria Crosses does allow some saving of face.
It still all came to nothing. Despite subsequent British manoeuvring, and an Ethiopian victory over the Dervish in May, the Mullah’s forces, using their knowledge of the desert, avoided further conflict and evaded capture. By the end of June the British had captured a few prisoners, and hundreds of sheep, goats and camels. The Gvernment at home were not impressed, and the expedition called back. The Mullah lived to fight on, again.
Sources
Pictures
An Heroic Incident of the Battle of Daratoleh: The Rescue of Captain Bruce - from The Graphic, 1903 (found on eBay)
Major Arthur Plunkett - from 'The Soldier's Burden' as cited below.
Military
Somaliland 1902-03: The King's African Rifles in the Third Campaign against the Mad Mullah - from 'The Soldier's Burden' on www.kaiserscross.com. A wonderful military history website, stories superbly researched and well told.
www.glosters.tripod.com - a site listing military memorials
www.suffolkregimentmuseum.co.uk
www.hattam.co.uk
Hansard 23/4/1903
Genealogy
www.ancestry.co.uk
Vancouver Island in the Empire Who Was Who, 1850-1950 (J. F. Bosher. Berry Books, 2012) - the sister of Lieutenant Francis Sime has an entry
© Jonathan Dewhirst 2019
Pictures
An Heroic Incident of the Battle of Daratoleh: The Rescue of Captain Bruce - from The Graphic, 1903 (found on eBay)
Major Arthur Plunkett - from 'The Soldier's Burden' as cited below.
Military
Somaliland 1902-03: The King's African Rifles in the Third Campaign against the Mad Mullah - from 'The Soldier's Burden' on www.kaiserscross.com. A wonderful military history website, stories superbly researched and well told.
www.glosters.tripod.com - a site listing military memorials
www.suffolkregimentmuseum.co.uk
www.hattam.co.uk
Hansard 23/4/1903
Genealogy
www.ancestry.co.uk
Vancouver Island in the Empire Who Was Who, 1850-1950 (J. F. Bosher. Berry Books, 2012) - the sister of Lieutenant Francis Sime has an entry
© Jonathan Dewhirst 2019
