THE FIGHT AT MGUNI'S STRONGHOLD
2nd MATABELE WAR, SOUTH AFRICA, 1896
Captain Frederick Kershaw, 2nd Battalion, The York and Lancaster Regiment
York Minster
The Man
Kershaw is a Northern name, so although Frederick Kershaw was descended from a London "gentleman", it's not too surprising that when he decided to follow a military career he joined a Northern regiment. In 1881 he was stationed at Ashton-under-Lyme, a 2nd Lieutenant in the 6th Royal Lancs Militia, and by 1896 he had become a captain in the 2nd Battalion of the York and Lancaster Regiment, a path from Islington to Lancashire that led eventually to his death amongst the boulders of the Maputo Hills.
Frederick was distinctly middle-class. His father, the wonderfully-named Burroughs Dickie Kershaw, was a civil engineer (with the New River Company; the New River is an artificial waterway supplying London with drinking water, and can still be walked for most of its length between Ware and Stoke Newington), who lived at various times in Stoke Newington, Islington and St. Pancras before retiring to, and dying in, Woking. Brother Charles was a tea dealer and company director who retired to die in Bexhill. Uncle Edmund was a clergyman in Sherfield English in Hampshire and Withyham in Sussex. The colonial adventurer side of Frederick's character must have come from his grandfather, Samuel Kershaw, who retired from the East India Company in his forties to live in comfort in Stoke Newington.
The Background
The York and Lancaster Regiment were posted to South Africa in 1891, by which time Cecil Rhodes had already established British rights, through his British South Africa Company, to mine minerals in the lands ruled by the Ndebele king, Lobengula, lands called Matabeleland by the British. The treaty signed by Lobengula also contained, allegedly, a clause which allowed the company to establish its own police force and to have the right to control areas which were actually ruled by Lobengula. The area concerned was vast; Matabeleland covered the west and south of current Zimbabwe, with a subject people, the Shona, in Mashonaland in the north.
Matabeleland remained nominally independent until October, 1893, when Rhodes' men, under Leander Starr Jameson, led a raid in retaliation, it was claimed, for a Ndebele attack on Shonas living in one of the company's new settlements (the Ndebele, of course, regarded the Shona as their subjects). Equipped with Maxim guns Jameson's force captured Lobengula's capital, Bulawayo, forcing the king to flee. In January, 1894, Lobengula died, and the other Chiefs submitted, and the First Matabele War ended. British rule had been established, but that did not mean the end of trouble in Matabeleland.
Continued unrest should not have been surprising. The Ndebele had been warrior rulers but now found themselves being used as servants and labourers by their British overlords. The imposition of a taxation system forced them into paid work, often, humiliatingly for them, alongside their former vassal tribes. Moreover, by 1895 South Africa's cattle herds - and cattle were the traditional source of wealth and prestige for the Ndebele - were being hit by a major outbreak of rinderpest; over eighty per cent of the herds died. The Ndebele's spiritual leaders were blaming the disease on the presence of the white settlers in the land, and unrest was growing, so in retrospect Rhodes and Jameson's next idea was not very clever. Jameson launched a land-grab raid on the Boer Transvaal Republic, taking six hundred fighting men with him. The raid failed, the troops were jailed, Jameson and the other Britons were deported to England, and in Matabeland the sudden absence of so many occupiers prompted the Ndebele to plan revolt.
The Conflict
The rebellion was supposed to begin on March 28th, to coincide with an auspicious full moon, but it actually started a week early, when some young warriors ambushed and killed a native policeman. Three days later seven whites and three natives were killed at Edkin's Store and a further three white men, including Native Commissioner Bentley, were killed at the Nellie Reef Mine. Word soon spread, and within a week farms, mines and stores were being attacked throughout the country.
Although rescue patrols, some successful, were sent out from Bulawayo and other larger settlements, by the end of March over two hundred and fifty settlers had been killed, and hundreds of farms, mines and stores destroyed. The only settlers left were laagared in four besieged settlements: Bulawayo, Bellingw, Gwelo and Mangwe.
Ironically it was at this cusp of triumph that the rebellion was to be lost. Although the Ndebele had spiritual leaders they did not have a distinct military leader, being more a number of disparate bands each commanded by its own chief. A coordinated strategy did not therefore exist, and without clear leadership major errors were made. Understandingly fearful of the killing power of the Maxim guns the besieging Ndebele failed to mount any coordinated attacks against the settlements. Perhaps more significantly they also failed to sever links with Mafeking several hundred miles to the south. The road was not closed, and the telegraph lines were not cut, so the main British forces in Mafeking were soon alerted, and could plan a response. By the start of April those plans were underway, and this is where Frederick Kershaw enters the story.
The Response
The York and Lancaster Regiment was stationed in Mafeking, and it was to them that the High Commissioner for South Africa, Sir Hercules Robinson, turned. Major Herbert Plumer was given the local rank of Lieutenant-Colonel and instructed to raise a relief force (Rhodes was doing the same in Mashonaland to the north). Plumer assembled the men, while Captain Kershaw, promoted to Major, organised all the arms, ammunition and equipment. By the end of the month eight hundred and fifty men were ready, armed with Martini-Henry rifles, seven Maxim guns, forty-five wagons and over eleven hundred horses. The men included four hundred and fifty regular troops, along with police and civilian volunteers. The civilian volunteers appear to have been a mixed bunch; in his account Baden-Powell refers to an architect riding next to a gold prospector, and an ex-Able Bodied Seaman accompanying a pince-nez-wearing Cambridge graduate.
Meanwhile the Ndebele continued to surround the besieged towns but, despite their superior numbers, failed to prevent reconnaissance patrols going out, or on occasions larger forces from venturing out to attack. On April 25th a force under a Captain Macfarlane engaged the largest Ndebele group besieging Bulawayo and drove them off. The Ndebele were skilled skirmishers, but were less proficient in more formal engagements. Moreover, they knew relief forces had set out, and confidence was waning. When the relief arrived in early May the Ndebele forces began to withdraw.
By mid-June the British forces, now under the command of General Carrington (with Baden-Powell as his Second-in-Command) were ready to go on the offensive.
On the 16th June the Mhimo, the spiritual leader whose preaching had galvanised the uprising, was captured and killed. On the 29th Carrington sent Plumer to Inyati, north-east of Bulawayo, where the presence of a large gathering of Ndebele had been reported. Plumer had seven hundred and fifty troops supported by Maxim and mountain guns, and his attack at dawn on July 5th scattered the Ndebele, killing one hundred warriors, capturing five hundred women and children, and seizing over three thousand livestock. The Ndebele retreated, withdrawing into defensive mode in the Matopo Hills, an area of granite kopjes and forested valleys south of Bulawayo, covering over three thousand square kilometres, and rising to over three thousand metres.
The Action
Carrington’s tactics were now to wear the Ndebele bands down by picking them off one by one, attacking each kopje stronghold, each of which was commanded by a separate chief, in turn. On July 31st Kershaw was in command of an attack which scattered the Ndebele with artillery, allowing the force to move on to the stronghold of a leading chief, Sikombo Miguni, whose base overlooked a mountain pass near the Tuli road. It was rough country of steep ridges and boulder-filled ravines. On the 5th August Plumer attacked.
The assault began with Captain the Honourable J. Beresford taking one hundred and thirty-eight men, supported by Maxim guns, in an attempt to gain command of a prominent ridge. Progress over the broken ground was slow, and the Ndebele warriors outflanked the attack and tried to take the machine guns. Beresford’s troops had to turn back to respond, but Lieutenant Hubert Harvey and Battery Sergeant-Major Alexander Ainslie were killed, and the Maxim gun crews were reduced to one man (an 18 year-old trooper named Evelyn Holmes). Although the Ndebele were driven off Beresford’s advance was halted, and he called for help.
Plumer sent a troop under Captain Nicholson to aid Beresford, and ordered Major Kershaw to attack a kopje from which the Ndebele marksmen were directing damaging fire.
The attack was challenging as “the ascent was extremely difficult, climbing over immense boulders and rocks”, and the Ndebele were targeting the officers and N.C.O.s. Frederick Kershaw’s end was described by Baden-Powell - “poor Kershaw was shot with two bullets through him at the entrance to the main cave, and his sergeant was shot through the head”. The sergeant was Archibald Innes-Kerr, of the Mafeking Relief Force, and two other N.C.O.s, William Gibb and Oswald Douglas McCloskie, were to die before the Ndebele were driven from the summit, leaving over two hundred of their force dead. The bodies of all the British killed were buried under a large tree near Plumer’s camp, now the site of Fort Umbugulu. The graves are still there, although most of the commemorative plaques have gone.
The Aftermath
The loss of Sikombo’s stronghold was a major blow to the Ndebele. Two other leading chiefs, Olimo and Makoni, had been killed, and on August 18th envoys from Sikombo and another surviving chief, Inyanda, arrived seeking a peace meeting. Peace was agreed, and so at the end of a conflict which had led to the deaths of hundreds of settlers, and thousands of Ndebele, the spring planting began, although the rinderpest continued.
The struggle was not completely finished. In the north Rhodes’ Mashonaland Relief Force had left Mashonaland relatively undefended, and so in June the Shona had rebelled, a fight which they maintained until the following year.
Afterwards
Kershaw (and Harvey, Ainslie, Innes-Kerr, Gibb and McCloskie) may have been dead, but the other British protagonists went on to successful careers. General Sir Frederick Carrington went on to command in the Boer war, and died in his home town of Cheltenham in 1913. Robert Baden-Powell achieved fame with his defence of Mafeking in the Boer War, and for his founding of the Boy Scout movement. Herbert Plumer, who with Kershaw had amassed the Mafeking Relief Force, was eventually promoted to Field-Marshal, commanded the British 2nd Army between 1915 and 1917, became C-in-C of the British Army of the Rhine, and was appointed High Commissioner for Palestine. He was created a Viscount, and died in Knightsbridge in 1932.
One final thought. In the 1830s the Ndebele took the land from the Shona. In the 1890s the British took it from the Ndebele. A century later Mugabe and his cronies began seizing land from the white farmers. As The Who sing, “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss”.
TO THE MEMORY OF CAPTAIN FREDERICK KERSHAW, 2ND BATTALION, THE YORK AND LANCASTER REGIMENT, WHO FELL IN ACTION IN THE MATOPO HILLS IN MATABELELAND ON THE 5TH AUGUST 1896
Y
2nd MATABELE WAR, SOUTH AFRICA, 1896
Captain Frederick Kershaw, 2nd Battalion, The York and Lancaster Regiment
York Minster
The Man
Kershaw is a Northern name, so although Frederick Kershaw was descended from a London "gentleman", it's not too surprising that when he decided to follow a military career he joined a Northern regiment. In 1881 he was stationed at Ashton-under-Lyme, a 2nd Lieutenant in the 6th Royal Lancs Militia, and by 1896 he had become a captain in the 2nd Battalion of the York and Lancaster Regiment, a path from Islington to Lancashire that led eventually to his death amongst the boulders of the Maputo Hills.
Frederick was distinctly middle-class. His father, the wonderfully-named Burroughs Dickie Kershaw, was a civil engineer (with the New River Company; the New River is an artificial waterway supplying London with drinking water, and can still be walked for most of its length between Ware and Stoke Newington), who lived at various times in Stoke Newington, Islington and St. Pancras before retiring to, and dying in, Woking. Brother Charles was a tea dealer and company director who retired to die in Bexhill. Uncle Edmund was a clergyman in Sherfield English in Hampshire and Withyham in Sussex. The colonial adventurer side of Frederick's character must have come from his grandfather, Samuel Kershaw, who retired from the East India Company in his forties to live in comfort in Stoke Newington.
The Background
The York and Lancaster Regiment were posted to South Africa in 1891, by which time Cecil Rhodes had already established British rights, through his British South Africa Company, to mine minerals in the lands ruled by the Ndebele king, Lobengula, lands called Matabeleland by the British. The treaty signed by Lobengula also contained, allegedly, a clause which allowed the company to establish its own police force and to have the right to control areas which were actually ruled by Lobengula. The area concerned was vast; Matabeleland covered the west and south of current Zimbabwe, with a subject people, the Shona, in Mashonaland in the north.
Matabeleland remained nominally independent until October, 1893, when Rhodes' men, under Leander Starr Jameson, led a raid in retaliation, it was claimed, for a Ndebele attack on Shonas living in one of the company's new settlements (the Ndebele, of course, regarded the Shona as their subjects). Equipped with Maxim guns Jameson's force captured Lobengula's capital, Bulawayo, forcing the king to flee. In January, 1894, Lobengula died, and the other Chiefs submitted, and the First Matabele War ended. British rule had been established, but that did not mean the end of trouble in Matabeleland.
Continued unrest should not have been surprising. The Ndebele had been warrior rulers but now found themselves being used as servants and labourers by their British overlords. The imposition of a taxation system forced them into paid work, often, humiliatingly for them, alongside their former vassal tribes. Moreover, by 1895 South Africa's cattle herds - and cattle were the traditional source of wealth and prestige for the Ndebele - were being hit by a major outbreak of rinderpest; over eighty per cent of the herds died. The Ndebele's spiritual leaders were blaming the disease on the presence of the white settlers in the land, and unrest was growing, so in retrospect Rhodes and Jameson's next idea was not very clever. Jameson launched a land-grab raid on the Boer Transvaal Republic, taking six hundred fighting men with him. The raid failed, the troops were jailed, Jameson and the other Britons were deported to England, and in Matabeland the sudden absence of so many occupiers prompted the Ndebele to plan revolt.
The Conflict
The rebellion was supposed to begin on March 28th, to coincide with an auspicious full moon, but it actually started a week early, when some young warriors ambushed and killed a native policeman. Three days later seven whites and three natives were killed at Edkin's Store and a further three white men, including Native Commissioner Bentley, were killed at the Nellie Reef Mine. Word soon spread, and within a week farms, mines and stores were being attacked throughout the country.
Although rescue patrols, some successful, were sent out from Bulawayo and other larger settlements, by the end of March over two hundred and fifty settlers had been killed, and hundreds of farms, mines and stores destroyed. The only settlers left were laagared in four besieged settlements: Bulawayo, Bellingw, Gwelo and Mangwe.
Ironically it was at this cusp of triumph that the rebellion was to be lost. Although the Ndebele had spiritual leaders they did not have a distinct military leader, being more a number of disparate bands each commanded by its own chief. A coordinated strategy did not therefore exist, and without clear leadership major errors were made. Understandingly fearful of the killing power of the Maxim guns the besieging Ndebele failed to mount any coordinated attacks against the settlements. Perhaps more significantly they also failed to sever links with Mafeking several hundred miles to the south. The road was not closed, and the telegraph lines were not cut, so the main British forces in Mafeking were soon alerted, and could plan a response. By the start of April those plans were underway, and this is where Frederick Kershaw enters the story.
The Response
The York and Lancaster Regiment was stationed in Mafeking, and it was to them that the High Commissioner for South Africa, Sir Hercules Robinson, turned. Major Herbert Plumer was given the local rank of Lieutenant-Colonel and instructed to raise a relief force (Rhodes was doing the same in Mashonaland to the north). Plumer assembled the men, while Captain Kershaw, promoted to Major, organised all the arms, ammunition and equipment. By the end of the month eight hundred and fifty men were ready, armed with Martini-Henry rifles, seven Maxim guns, forty-five wagons and over eleven hundred horses. The men included four hundred and fifty regular troops, along with police and civilian volunteers. The civilian volunteers appear to have been a mixed bunch; in his account Baden-Powell refers to an architect riding next to a gold prospector, and an ex-Able Bodied Seaman accompanying a pince-nez-wearing Cambridge graduate.
Meanwhile the Ndebele continued to surround the besieged towns but, despite their superior numbers, failed to prevent reconnaissance patrols going out, or on occasions larger forces from venturing out to attack. On April 25th a force under a Captain Macfarlane engaged the largest Ndebele group besieging Bulawayo and drove them off. The Ndebele were skilled skirmishers, but were less proficient in more formal engagements. Moreover, they knew relief forces had set out, and confidence was waning. When the relief arrived in early May the Ndebele forces began to withdraw.
By mid-June the British forces, now under the command of General Carrington (with Baden-Powell as his Second-in-Command) were ready to go on the offensive.
On the 16th June the Mhimo, the spiritual leader whose preaching had galvanised the uprising, was captured and killed. On the 29th Carrington sent Plumer to Inyati, north-east of Bulawayo, where the presence of a large gathering of Ndebele had been reported. Plumer had seven hundred and fifty troops supported by Maxim and mountain guns, and his attack at dawn on July 5th scattered the Ndebele, killing one hundred warriors, capturing five hundred women and children, and seizing over three thousand livestock. The Ndebele retreated, withdrawing into defensive mode in the Matopo Hills, an area of granite kopjes and forested valleys south of Bulawayo, covering over three thousand square kilometres, and rising to over three thousand metres.
The Action
Carrington’s tactics were now to wear the Ndebele bands down by picking them off one by one, attacking each kopje stronghold, each of which was commanded by a separate chief, in turn. On July 31st Kershaw was in command of an attack which scattered the Ndebele with artillery, allowing the force to move on to the stronghold of a leading chief, Sikombo Miguni, whose base overlooked a mountain pass near the Tuli road. It was rough country of steep ridges and boulder-filled ravines. On the 5th August Plumer attacked.
The assault began with Captain the Honourable J. Beresford taking one hundred and thirty-eight men, supported by Maxim guns, in an attempt to gain command of a prominent ridge. Progress over the broken ground was slow, and the Ndebele warriors outflanked the attack and tried to take the machine guns. Beresford’s troops had to turn back to respond, but Lieutenant Hubert Harvey and Battery Sergeant-Major Alexander Ainslie were killed, and the Maxim gun crews were reduced to one man (an 18 year-old trooper named Evelyn Holmes). Although the Ndebele were driven off Beresford’s advance was halted, and he called for help.
Plumer sent a troop under Captain Nicholson to aid Beresford, and ordered Major Kershaw to attack a kopje from which the Ndebele marksmen were directing damaging fire.
The attack was challenging as “the ascent was extremely difficult, climbing over immense boulders and rocks”, and the Ndebele were targeting the officers and N.C.O.s. Frederick Kershaw’s end was described by Baden-Powell - “poor Kershaw was shot with two bullets through him at the entrance to the main cave, and his sergeant was shot through the head”. The sergeant was Archibald Innes-Kerr, of the Mafeking Relief Force, and two other N.C.O.s, William Gibb and Oswald Douglas McCloskie, were to die before the Ndebele were driven from the summit, leaving over two hundred of their force dead. The bodies of all the British killed were buried under a large tree near Plumer’s camp, now the site of Fort Umbugulu. The graves are still there, although most of the commemorative plaques have gone.
The Aftermath
The loss of Sikombo’s stronghold was a major blow to the Ndebele. Two other leading chiefs, Olimo and Makoni, had been killed, and on August 18th envoys from Sikombo and another surviving chief, Inyanda, arrived seeking a peace meeting. Peace was agreed, and so at the end of a conflict which had led to the deaths of hundreds of settlers, and thousands of Ndebele, the spring planting began, although the rinderpest continued.
The struggle was not completely finished. In the north Rhodes’ Mashonaland Relief Force had left Mashonaland relatively undefended, and so in June the Shona had rebelled, a fight which they maintained until the following year.
Afterwards
Kershaw (and Harvey, Ainslie, Innes-Kerr, Gibb and McCloskie) may have been dead, but the other British protagonists went on to successful careers. General Sir Frederick Carrington went on to command in the Boer war, and died in his home town of Cheltenham in 1913. Robert Baden-Powell achieved fame with his defence of Mafeking in the Boer War, and for his founding of the Boy Scout movement. Herbert Plumer, who with Kershaw had amassed the Mafeking Relief Force, was eventually promoted to Field-Marshal, commanded the British 2nd Army between 1915 and 1917, became C-in-C of the British Army of the Rhine, and was appointed High Commissioner for Palestine. He was created a Viscount, and died in Knightsbridge in 1932.
One final thought. In the 1830s the Ndebele took the land from the Shona. In the 1890s the British took it from the Ndebele. A century later Mugabe and his cronies began seizing land from the white farmers. As The Who sing, “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss”.
TO THE MEMORY OF CAPTAIN FREDERICK KERSHAW, 2ND BATTALION, THE YORK AND LANCASTER REGIMENT, WHO FELL IN ACTION IN THE MATOPO HILLS IN MATABELELAND ON THE 5TH AUGUST 1896
Y
Sources
Photo
Mt. Effefe, Matopo Hills, circa 1900
Military
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Matabele_War
www.historynet.com/second-matabele-war.htm
www.peterbaxterafrica.com
'The Matabele Campaign Being a Narrative of the Campaign in Suppressing the Native Rising in Matabeleland and Mashonaland 1896' (R.S.S. Baden-Powell, Methuen & Co, London, 1901) - available online at http://www.gutenberg.org/files/47158/47158-h/47158-h.htm
Genealogy
www.ancestry.co.uk
ⓒ Jonathan Dewhirst, November 2014
Photo
Mt. Effefe, Matopo Hills, circa 1900
Military
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Matabele_War
www.historynet.com/second-matabele-war.htm
www.peterbaxterafrica.com
'The Matabele Campaign Being a Narrative of the Campaign in Suppressing the Native Rising in Matabeleland and Mashonaland 1896' (R.S.S. Baden-Powell, Methuen & Co, London, 1901) - available online at http://www.gutenberg.org/files/47158/47158-h/47158-h.htm
Genealogy
www.ancestry.co.uk
ⓒ Jonathan Dewhirst, November 2014