THE WAR OF THE GOLDEN STOOL, GHANA, 1900
Captain George Marshall, Queen's Own Royal West Kent Regiment
All Saints, Maidstone, Kent
St. John the Baptist, Hartford, Cheshire
Lieutenant John Arthur Greer, 3rd West India Regiment
Holy Trinity, Much Wenlock, Shropshire
Captain James Methien Middlemist, 3rd Seaforth Highlanders
St. Andrew, Moretonhampstead, Devon
When Frederick Hodgson, Governor of the Gold Coast, demanded that the Golden Stool of the Ashanti people be delivered to him, so that, as Queen Victoria’s representative, he could sit on it as his right, it may well have been that he did not really understand what he was asking for. He may well have thought he was just asking to be given a throne; made of gold, true, but essentially just like any other throne. Equally he could have known that for the Ashanti, the Golden Stool was far more than a throne. He may have realised that it had cultural, religious and symbolic importance that far transcended its material existence. That would explain why the Ashanti had kept it hidden from the British. Hodgson was not just asking for a symbol of independence, he was demanding the soul of the nation. In asking for a stool, he was going to get a war.
The British had taken control of the Ashanti kingdom in 1896, when King Prempeh had refused to accept being subsumed into a British protectorate. The occupation had been achieved without resistance, surprising given that the two nations had been fighting for a hundred years, but Prempeh believed he still had some bargaining power, and he was wise enough to fear the power of British arms. The Ashanti had the advantage in terms of numbers, but they were armed with muskets; the British had artillery and machine-guns. The occupiers cited the continuation of slavery and human sacrifice as reasons for their taking control, exiled Prempeh to the Seychelles, and installed a Resident, later a Governor, to rule. The British capital was Cape Coast, on the Atlantic shore, but the Ashanti still regarded Kumasi as their capital, and to assert their dominance the British built a stone fort there, with twelve feet high stone walls and turrets at each corner, defended with cannon and machine guns. With their muskets the Ashanti could not take it; they could besiege it, though.
A siege was, therefore, what the Ashanti imposed. All the tracks out of the town were blocked with wooden stockades, with the British and their troops inside the fort. Initially the telegraph wires were not cut, and so Governor Hodgson could send for reinforcements. On April 18th 1900 a force of just over one hundred Hausa (Nigerian) troops arrived under the command of Captain James Middlemist, Captain George Marshall, an officer named Bishop and a Dr. Hay. Despite the stockades they encountered no resistance, which may have lulled Hodgson into a false sense of security.
On April 23rd a force of one hundred and fifty men under Marshall was sent out to destroy the Ashanti camps. There was none of the expected capitulation. The force was ambushed, with four men killed and fifty-eight wounded, including Marshall, Bishop and Hay. They were obliged to retreat back to the fort, and the Ashanti cut the telegraph wires. Two days later attacks were launched on the Christian communities in Kumasi, and the refugees fled to the fort for protection. Swiss Missionaries Frederick and Rose Ramseyer were allowed in, but their converts were not, being instead forced to cower outside, protected only by the fire of the machine guns on the walls. One consequence of the decision was that it led to the loss of Captain Middlemist.
I find the story of James Mentieth Middlemist rather sad. Raised by his widowed mother, James was the one to join the army – the others went to university to become an engineer, a doctor, a solicitor and a headmaster (All Hallows, Honiton). James joined the 3rd Seaforth Highlanders (despite being born in Ramsgate, as far away from Sutherland as it is possible to get), and married Milly Clark in Newton Abbott in Devon in 1897. Son Robert was born in late 1899, but James cannot have had long to enjoy his fatherhood, if any time at all, if by April he was in Kumasi.
The plaque to James Middlemist in St. Andrew’s, Moretonhampstead, attests that he died of fever whilst attempting to rescue the garrison at Kumasi. He may well have died of fever, but if he did it was after suffering severe internal injuries suffered when he was crushed against the gates of the fort by the pressure of the Christian convert refugees trying to gain entrance. Putting a heroic gloss on that is difficult; probably best to put it down to fever.
While Middlemist was slowly dying a relief force of two hundred and fifty Nigerian troops under Captain J. G. O. Aplin was battling its way through from the coast to Kumasi. They fought through ambushes, and with the use of their machine guns reached the fort. The defenders may have felt some doubt about the usefulness of the relief though; all six officers and one hundred and forty men were wounded, and all their food, ammunition and cannon had to be abandoned. Clearly feeling they were in a position of strength the Ashanti offered negotiations.
The terms demanded were outrageously optimistic; it is difficult to see how they could ever have been considered seriously, so humiliating would acceptance have been for the British. There were four major terms: King Prempe was to be returned from exile; all Europeans were to leave Ashanti land; British demands for forced labour were to be dropped; slavery was to be restored. For a nation which had fought slavers constantly for the past century there was no way the last request could have been contemplated. No mention of the Golden Stool.
As talks went on a truce held, good for the defenders as food supplies were allowed in. With no fighting another relief force arrived, one hundred and seventy men and four officers, bringing with them food and ammunition. They arrived just in time, as within days the truce had ended. The reasons are not clear, but may be related to the dismal performance of further attempts at relief in the hinterland. Four hundred and fifty men of the West African Frontier Force under the wonderfully named Captain Wynford Montagu Hall of the West Yorkshire Regiment attempted to force a way through, but were compelled to retreat behind an improvised stockade, unable to move further. Lieutenant-Colonel Carter of the Black Watch, with three hundred and eighty men, including some of his own regiment, attempted to support Hall, but were ambushed and forced to retreat with heavy losses. A further force of one hundred men under a Captain Wilson was sent to reinforce Carter, but was also ambushed and Wilson killed. By the time Colonel James Wilcocks of the Frontier Force arrived at Cape Coast to contribute to the relief attempts he found no officers, troops or supplies left.
Back at the fort the siege continued, although no serious attacks were made, the Ashanti content to sit behind their stockades and wait. In retrospect this does not look sensible, but they were understandably wary of the fort’s machine guns, and there was also no unified leadership, so a defined tactical approach would be difficult to formulate.
I have to say I find the next phase difficult to visualise. By mid-June food in the fort was low, so Governor Hodgson decided to attempt to break out. Although all routes out were blocked by log stockades, that to the west had only one, and it led to the lands of a friendly chief, who also happened to be trapped in the fort. Leaving behind just over a hundred troops in the fort (mostly sick and wounded) the besieged left the fort in a misty light at seven in the morning on June 23rd – including bearers and followers about three thousand walked out, protected by six hundred troops armed with Maxim guns and cannons.
I can only assume that the sheer numbers involved, coupled with Ashanti nervousness of the machine guns, led to the escape being relatively successful. Captain Armitage took the stockade with a flank attack (with four killed and eleven wounded, including Captain Leggatt)., and the advance guard led by Armitage and Captain Marshall pressed on. It was during this advance that George Marshall received a head wound. Behind them stretched a two mile line of terrified civilians, converts and bearers (some of whom carrying, unbelievably, all Governor Hodgson’s belongings), with a rearguard under Captain Aplin keeping the column moving. Many in the middle of the column, unprotected by the guns, were killed, but thankfully that number decreased as rain fell, rendering the Ashanti matchlock muskets ineffective.
The fugitives eventually reached safety, at the fort of Inkwanta in the afternoon of the 25th. The previous nights had been spent in small villages, with the troops, European civilians and friendly chiefs inside, and the masses of bearers and followers outside. When the column moved out the next morning the waiting Ashanti took time out to loot what had been left behind, and although the rearguard then had to fight a running battle all the way to Inkwanta, and although many more followers and bearers were killed, the column eventually reached safety. No mention is made of the fate of Hodgson’s possessions, but sometime during that final day the handsome Captain Leggatt and the balding thirty-one year old George Marshall died of their wounds.
George Marshall was a native of Hertford in Cheshire, scion of a Cheshire gentry family who at one time had been the largest salt mine owners in the county. The family home, Hartford Beach, is still there, now converted into two houses on Beach Road, but by the time of George’s death his father, a friend of Edward VII’s, which might say something about him, had moved to a house called Bryn-y-Coed in Bangor, North Wales. They were now gentry, living off rents, not merchants any more. Not that that helped George, who was destined not to see the decline of the family fortune.
With the escape of the Governor’s column the nature of the conflict turned, inevitably in Britain’s favour. The force in the fort remained, safe under the protection of their Maxim guns. Captains Hall and Carter, stuck in their improvised camps, were relieved by forces under Colonel Burroughs and his regiment from Sierra Leone, and by troops commanded by Major Charles Melliss.
In late July a force under Major Beddoes tackled a large Ashanti army east of Dompoase. After a couple of hours of skirmishing the Ashanti, armed with their muskets and spears charged the British force and, as whenever such a set-piece occurred, the Ashanti were mown down in their hundreds. In the end, the spear can never defeat the machine-gun.
With the main Ashanti army destroyed one thousand men under Colonel Burroughs went to take Kumasi.
It was not easy. Each of the stockades had to be taken separately, and they were defended defiantly. He attacked the first two in daylight hours, and although successful he was taking unsustainable losses, and expending too much ammunition. He changed tactics, and the next stockade, between Kokofu and Kumasi, was attacked at night, without guns, just bayonets and swords until the element of surprise had been lost.
This is where our third protagonist, Lieutenant John Arthur Greer, enters the story, in a classic Victorian hero way. As they got within feet of the stockade a sound must have been heard. A volley of musket fire blasted out of the stockade and Greer fell to the ground mortally wounded. The troops wavered, but Greer raised himself off the ground and waved his sword as if leading a charge. In response all his fellow officers yelled the order, and the five hundred troops charged. It did not take long to take the stockade, and at last the Ashanti resistance was broken.
John Greer is commemorated on a plaque in Holy Trinity Church, Much Wenlock, which is where he was baptised in 1877. The family were actually Irish, distillers from Lurgan, but like the Cheshire Marshalls, and other mercantile families in these stories, as they got richer they aspired to gentility, not trade, and their children moved into the professions. Hence John’s great-grandfather, George, was the distiller, grandfather John was an Esquire, and father George was a barrister. No Greers appear to remain in Much Wenlock, but the family still occupies the house in Lurgan, Woodville House, and its landscaped park, although it is not open to the public.
So John Greer’s defiant last action signalled the end of the war, and militarily the British won, and the Ashanti lost. However the Ashanti people are now the largest group in modern-day Ghana, and the Golden Stool was never captured by the British, and is still in the possession of the Ashanti royal family. Who won?
And the other characters in our story?
King Prempe returned from exile in the Seychelles in 1924 and died in Kumasi in 1930, aged sixty. He was succeeded by his nephew, Prempeh II. The current king, Osel Tutu II, acceded to the throne in 1999.
Astonishingly Frederick Hodgson was granted other Governorships. He went on to be Governor of Barbados, then of British Guiana, and died in London in 1925, aged seventy-three. The man who Hodgson sent to find the Golden Stool - and who later led the escape column - was Captain Cecil Armitage, son of a Scarborough GP. He went on to become Governor of Gambia, retired in 1927, and died at Rendcomb in Gloucestershire in 1933.
James Middlemist’s son, Robert, grew up to join the Royal Navy, and to be appointed an Acting Lieutenant aboard the submarine K5. In January, 1921, whilst on an exercise in the Bay of Biscay, K5 dived, but did not resurface, lost with all hands. His mother, who had remarried, died in 1942. She had no family left to leave her worldly goods to.
The British had taken control of the Ashanti kingdom in 1896, when King Prempeh had refused to accept being subsumed into a British protectorate. The occupation had been achieved without resistance, surprising given that the two nations had been fighting for a hundred years, but Prempeh believed he still had some bargaining power, and he was wise enough to fear the power of British arms. The Ashanti had the advantage in terms of numbers, but they were armed with muskets; the British had artillery and machine-guns. The occupiers cited the continuation of slavery and human sacrifice as reasons for their taking control, exiled Prempeh to the Seychelles, and installed a Resident, later a Governor, to rule. The British capital was Cape Coast, on the Atlantic shore, but the Ashanti still regarded Kumasi as their capital, and to assert their dominance the British built a stone fort there, with twelve feet high stone walls and turrets at each corner, defended with cannon and machine guns. With their muskets the Ashanti could not take it; they could besiege it, though.
A siege was, therefore, what the Ashanti imposed. All the tracks out of the town were blocked with wooden stockades, with the British and their troops inside the fort. Initially the telegraph wires were not cut, and so Governor Hodgson could send for reinforcements. On April 18th 1900 a force of just over one hundred Hausa (Nigerian) troops arrived under the command of Captain James Middlemist, Captain George Marshall, an officer named Bishop and a Dr. Hay. Despite the stockades they encountered no resistance, which may have lulled Hodgson into a false sense of security.
On April 23rd a force of one hundred and fifty men under Marshall was sent out to destroy the Ashanti camps. There was none of the expected capitulation. The force was ambushed, with four men killed and fifty-eight wounded, including Marshall, Bishop and Hay. They were obliged to retreat back to the fort, and the Ashanti cut the telegraph wires. Two days later attacks were launched on the Christian communities in Kumasi, and the refugees fled to the fort for protection. Swiss Missionaries Frederick and Rose Ramseyer were allowed in, but their converts were not, being instead forced to cower outside, protected only by the fire of the machine guns on the walls. One consequence of the decision was that it led to the loss of Captain Middlemist.
I find the story of James Mentieth Middlemist rather sad. Raised by his widowed mother, James was the one to join the army – the others went to university to become an engineer, a doctor, a solicitor and a headmaster (All Hallows, Honiton). James joined the 3rd Seaforth Highlanders (despite being born in Ramsgate, as far away from Sutherland as it is possible to get), and married Milly Clark in Newton Abbott in Devon in 1897. Son Robert was born in late 1899, but James cannot have had long to enjoy his fatherhood, if any time at all, if by April he was in Kumasi.
The plaque to James Middlemist in St. Andrew’s, Moretonhampstead, attests that he died of fever whilst attempting to rescue the garrison at Kumasi. He may well have died of fever, but if he did it was after suffering severe internal injuries suffered when he was crushed against the gates of the fort by the pressure of the Christian convert refugees trying to gain entrance. Putting a heroic gloss on that is difficult; probably best to put it down to fever.
While Middlemist was slowly dying a relief force of two hundred and fifty Nigerian troops under Captain J. G. O. Aplin was battling its way through from the coast to Kumasi. They fought through ambushes, and with the use of their machine guns reached the fort. The defenders may have felt some doubt about the usefulness of the relief though; all six officers and one hundred and forty men were wounded, and all their food, ammunition and cannon had to be abandoned. Clearly feeling they were in a position of strength the Ashanti offered negotiations.
The terms demanded were outrageously optimistic; it is difficult to see how they could ever have been considered seriously, so humiliating would acceptance have been for the British. There were four major terms: King Prempe was to be returned from exile; all Europeans were to leave Ashanti land; British demands for forced labour were to be dropped; slavery was to be restored. For a nation which had fought slavers constantly for the past century there was no way the last request could have been contemplated. No mention of the Golden Stool.
As talks went on a truce held, good for the defenders as food supplies were allowed in. With no fighting another relief force arrived, one hundred and seventy men and four officers, bringing with them food and ammunition. They arrived just in time, as within days the truce had ended. The reasons are not clear, but may be related to the dismal performance of further attempts at relief in the hinterland. Four hundred and fifty men of the West African Frontier Force under the wonderfully named Captain Wynford Montagu Hall of the West Yorkshire Regiment attempted to force a way through, but were compelled to retreat behind an improvised stockade, unable to move further. Lieutenant-Colonel Carter of the Black Watch, with three hundred and eighty men, including some of his own regiment, attempted to support Hall, but were ambushed and forced to retreat with heavy losses. A further force of one hundred men under a Captain Wilson was sent to reinforce Carter, but was also ambushed and Wilson killed. By the time Colonel James Wilcocks of the Frontier Force arrived at Cape Coast to contribute to the relief attempts he found no officers, troops or supplies left.
Back at the fort the siege continued, although no serious attacks were made, the Ashanti content to sit behind their stockades and wait. In retrospect this does not look sensible, but they were understandably wary of the fort’s machine guns, and there was also no unified leadership, so a defined tactical approach would be difficult to formulate.
I have to say I find the next phase difficult to visualise. By mid-June food in the fort was low, so Governor Hodgson decided to attempt to break out. Although all routes out were blocked by log stockades, that to the west had only one, and it led to the lands of a friendly chief, who also happened to be trapped in the fort. Leaving behind just over a hundred troops in the fort (mostly sick and wounded) the besieged left the fort in a misty light at seven in the morning on June 23rd – including bearers and followers about three thousand walked out, protected by six hundred troops armed with Maxim guns and cannons.
I can only assume that the sheer numbers involved, coupled with Ashanti nervousness of the machine guns, led to the escape being relatively successful. Captain Armitage took the stockade with a flank attack (with four killed and eleven wounded, including Captain Leggatt)., and the advance guard led by Armitage and Captain Marshall pressed on. It was during this advance that George Marshall received a head wound. Behind them stretched a two mile line of terrified civilians, converts and bearers (some of whom carrying, unbelievably, all Governor Hodgson’s belongings), with a rearguard under Captain Aplin keeping the column moving. Many in the middle of the column, unprotected by the guns, were killed, but thankfully that number decreased as rain fell, rendering the Ashanti matchlock muskets ineffective.
The fugitives eventually reached safety, at the fort of Inkwanta in the afternoon of the 25th. The previous nights had been spent in small villages, with the troops, European civilians and friendly chiefs inside, and the masses of bearers and followers outside. When the column moved out the next morning the waiting Ashanti took time out to loot what had been left behind, and although the rearguard then had to fight a running battle all the way to Inkwanta, and although many more followers and bearers were killed, the column eventually reached safety. No mention is made of the fate of Hodgson’s possessions, but sometime during that final day the handsome Captain Leggatt and the balding thirty-one year old George Marshall died of their wounds.
George Marshall was a native of Hertford in Cheshire, scion of a Cheshire gentry family who at one time had been the largest salt mine owners in the county. The family home, Hartford Beach, is still there, now converted into two houses on Beach Road, but by the time of George’s death his father, a friend of Edward VII’s, which might say something about him, had moved to a house called Bryn-y-Coed in Bangor, North Wales. They were now gentry, living off rents, not merchants any more. Not that that helped George, who was destined not to see the decline of the family fortune.
With the escape of the Governor’s column the nature of the conflict turned, inevitably in Britain’s favour. The force in the fort remained, safe under the protection of their Maxim guns. Captains Hall and Carter, stuck in their improvised camps, were relieved by forces under Colonel Burroughs and his regiment from Sierra Leone, and by troops commanded by Major Charles Melliss.
In late July a force under Major Beddoes tackled a large Ashanti army east of Dompoase. After a couple of hours of skirmishing the Ashanti, armed with their muskets and spears charged the British force and, as whenever such a set-piece occurred, the Ashanti were mown down in their hundreds. In the end, the spear can never defeat the machine-gun.
With the main Ashanti army destroyed one thousand men under Colonel Burroughs went to take Kumasi.
It was not easy. Each of the stockades had to be taken separately, and they were defended defiantly. He attacked the first two in daylight hours, and although successful he was taking unsustainable losses, and expending too much ammunition. He changed tactics, and the next stockade, between Kokofu and Kumasi, was attacked at night, without guns, just bayonets and swords until the element of surprise had been lost.
This is where our third protagonist, Lieutenant John Arthur Greer, enters the story, in a classic Victorian hero way. As they got within feet of the stockade a sound must have been heard. A volley of musket fire blasted out of the stockade and Greer fell to the ground mortally wounded. The troops wavered, but Greer raised himself off the ground and waved his sword as if leading a charge. In response all his fellow officers yelled the order, and the five hundred troops charged. It did not take long to take the stockade, and at last the Ashanti resistance was broken.
John Greer is commemorated on a plaque in Holy Trinity Church, Much Wenlock, which is where he was baptised in 1877. The family were actually Irish, distillers from Lurgan, but like the Cheshire Marshalls, and other mercantile families in these stories, as they got richer they aspired to gentility, not trade, and their children moved into the professions. Hence John’s great-grandfather, George, was the distiller, grandfather John was an Esquire, and father George was a barrister. No Greers appear to remain in Much Wenlock, but the family still occupies the house in Lurgan, Woodville House, and its landscaped park, although it is not open to the public.
So John Greer’s defiant last action signalled the end of the war, and militarily the British won, and the Ashanti lost. However the Ashanti people are now the largest group in modern-day Ghana, and the Golden Stool was never captured by the British, and is still in the possession of the Ashanti royal family. Who won?
And the other characters in our story?
King Prempe returned from exile in the Seychelles in 1924 and died in Kumasi in 1930, aged sixty. He was succeeded by his nephew, Prempeh II. The current king, Osel Tutu II, acceded to the throne in 1999.
Astonishingly Frederick Hodgson was granted other Governorships. He went on to be Governor of Barbados, then of British Guiana, and died in London in 1925, aged seventy-three. The man who Hodgson sent to find the Golden Stool - and who later led the escape column - was Captain Cecil Armitage, son of a Scarborough GP. He went on to become Governor of Gambia, retired in 1927, and died at Rendcomb in Gloucestershire in 1933.
James Middlemist’s son, Robert, grew up to join the Royal Navy, and to be appointed an Acting Lieutenant aboard the submarine K5. In January, 1921, whilst on an exercise in the Bay of Biscay, K5 dived, but did not resurface, lost with all hands. His mother, who had remarried, died in 1942. She had no family left to leave her worldly goods to.
Sources
Images
Inmates of the Fort at Kumasi - from 'The Ashanti Campaign of 1900' (C.H. Armitage & A.F. Montanaro, London, 1901)
Military
Wikipedia
'The Fall of the Asante Empire: The Hundred Year War for Africa's Gold Coast - Robert B. Edgerton, The Free Press, New York, 1995
Genealogy
Ancestry
stjohnshartford.org - website of St. John's, Hartford
www.grave-mistakes.blogspot.co.uk
www.parksand gardens.org - giving information about the Greer house in Lurgan
'The Rise and Fall of the Marshalls of Northwich, salt proprietors: a saga of the industrial era in Cheshire, 1720 - 1917 - a fascinating article by D. A. Iredale on www.hslc.org.uk, the website of The Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire
© Jon Dewhirst 2018
Images
Inmates of the Fort at Kumasi - from 'The Ashanti Campaign of 1900' (C.H. Armitage & A.F. Montanaro, London, 1901)
Military
Wikipedia
'The Fall of the Asante Empire: The Hundred Year War for Africa's Gold Coast - Robert B. Edgerton, The Free Press, New York, 1995
Genealogy
Ancestry
stjohnshartford.org - website of St. John's, Hartford
www.grave-mistakes.blogspot.co.uk
www.parksand gardens.org - giving information about the Greer house in Lurgan
'The Rise and Fall of the Marshalls of Northwich, salt proprietors: a saga of the industrial era in Cheshire, 1720 - 1917 - a fascinating article by D. A. Iredale on www.hslc.org.uk, the website of The Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire
© Jon Dewhirst 2018
