Battle of Spion Kop

Killed British soldiers lying in trenches

The Battle of Spion Kop (Afrikaans: Slag van Spioenkop) was fought about 38 km (21 miles) west-south-west of Ladysmith on the hilltop of Spioenkop⁽¹⁾ along the Tugela River, Natal in South Africa. The battle was fought between Boer and British forces from 23-24 January 1900 as part of the Second Boer War, and resulted in a famous British defeat during the Boer War.

The battle

General Sir Redvers Buller, VC, commander of the British forces in Natal, was at the time still overshadowed by Lieutenant-General Louis Botha and the fate of Ladysmith undecided. Buller gave control of his main force to General Sir Charles Warren, who decided to attack the Boers along two fronts. General Warren had command of 11,000 infantry, 2,200 cavalry, and 36 field guns. After ten days' travel and preparation to reach Trichardt's Drift on the Tugela river the battle for Spion Kop began. Spion Kop, as the largest hill in the region at over 1,400 feet, had become occupied by the Boers, who were armed with modern German Mauser rifles. The Boers had a practice of not taking the highest point of hilltops, but building bunkers and positions just below the hilltop on the opposite side of the enemy, so the British soldiers never saw them until it was too late. The Boers practiced guerilla warfare and were very mobile and adept at their scouting of British forces, who were not so mobile as the Boers; thus hiding behind hilltops was a favoured tactic instead of occupying hilltops. On the night of 23 January, Warren sent a force under Major General Edward Woodgate to secure Spion Kop. Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Thorneycroft was selected to spearhead the initial assault, and his force climbed to the hilltop in fog and seized an acre-wide plateau. In the night Major General Woodgate had his men digging trenches with only the moon to light their foggy way. Major General Woodgate communicated with General Warren of the success of taking the hilltop, but the good cheer only lasted until the fog lifted.

With the dawn of the new day the British discovered that they had the smaller and lower part of the hilltop of Spion Kop, while the Boers occupied higher ground on three sides of the British position, so the bloody fight for the hill began. The Boers had watched the British all night and waited for the fog to lift, and at the sight of the British the Boers proceeded to devastate the British with deadly rifle fire from their Mausers into the British positions. The Boers brought their artillery to bear on the British position, dropping shells at a rate of ten rounds per minute. From Aloe Knoll of Spion Kop Commmandant Henrik Prinsloo with 88 men attacked the Lancashire Fusiliers and left seventy of them dead with bullet holes on the right side of their heads. Major General Woodgate was killed in action at this point. Colonel Malby Crofton took charge and asked for reinforcements, but got none. The British position was to hold Spion Kop at all costs. The Boers proved to be sharpshooters in a enfilade position against the British, and anyone who did not find cover in time was shot dead or wounded.

In the chaos General Buller recommended a new commander for the fight on Spion Kop, and General Warren promoted Thorneycroft to Brigadier General and gave him operational control of the battle. Thorneycroft's first operational command was to stop a surrender on Spion Kop declaring there shall be no surrender. There were still some surrenders, but it was against orders and the British line held. Winston Churchill was a journalist stationed in South Africa and he was commissioned an officer at the rank of Lieutenant of the South African Light Horse by General Buller during the Boer War after his prisoner-of-war prison escape. Churchill acted as a courier to and from Spion Kop and General Buller's HQ and made a statement about the scene: "Corpses lay here and there. Many of the wounds were of a horrible nature. The splinters and fragments of the shells had torn and mutilated them. The shallow trenches were choked with dead and wounded." The battle was chaos littered with bodies and dead messengers, so the fog of war left little understanding of the overall situation except for the bloody conflict to control the hill.

After sixteen days into the campaign Brigadier General Thorneycroft ordered a retreat after reporting that the soldiers have no water, and ammunition is running short, and the hill cannot be held at the current casualty rate for another night. The casualties result of the battle were 400 British dead left buried on Spion Kop and 1,400 British wounded or captured. The Boers had 58 dead and 140 wounded with Commandant Prinsloo taking a loss of 55 of his 88 men.

Ladysmith would be taken by the British on another day.

Note about the name

Although the common English name for the battle is Spion Kop throughout the Commonwealth and its historic literature, the official South African English and Afrikaans name for the battle is Spioenkop, which is in common use in South Africa and is the correct English spelling of the borrowed Afrikaans name; spioen means "spy" or "look-out", and kop means "hill" or "outcropping". Another variant that is sometimes found is the combination into Spionkop.

The name Spionkop originates from Dutch instead of Afrikaans. Spion (and not Spioen) is the Dutch word for "spy". Since Afrikaans originates from Dutch (until the 1920's Dutch was still the official language of the Boers) this is the most probable explanation.

Miscellaneous

The Kop Stand at Anfield Stadium — home of the English football team Liverpool — is named in honour of the battle. The east side of Sheffield Wednesday's Hillsborough, built on a hill, is also called "Spion Kop".

Similarly, in places like Australia there are numerous hills bearing the name "Spion Kop", presumably because of their perceived resemblance to the location of the battle in the eyes of returned servicemen.

"The Battle of Spion Kop" was an episode of the Goon Show, broadcast on 29th December 1958

References

The 7 volume "The Times History of the War in South Africa", ed L.S. Amery,(pub 1900-1909)
An Illustrated History of South Africa, Cameron & Spies, Human & Rousseau publishers, 1986 (ISBN 1868121909).
Military Heritage did a feature about the bloody Spion Kop battle for a hill of the Boer War (Herman T. Voelkner, Military Heritage, October 2005, Volume 7, No. 2, pp 28 to 35, and p. 71), ISSN 1524-8666.
Winston, Churchill, My Early Life. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1930.
Byron Farwell, The Great Anglo-Boer War. New York; Harper & Row, 1976.
Denis Judd, The Boer War. New York: MacMillan, 2003.
William Manchester, The Last Lion. Boston: Little Brown, 1983.
Thomas Pakenham, The Boer War. New York: Random House 1979.
Celida Sandys, Churchill: Wanted Dead or Alive. New York: Carroll and Graf, 1999.

The battle

Note about the name

Miscellaneous

Further reading

References