As the year 1880 drew to a close some 200 British soldiers began the defence of a makeshift mud fort the size of a tennis court; with them were a number of civilian women and children. Most of the soldiers had fought in the Zulu War: some had escaped from Isandlwana, others had defended at Rorke’s Drift and been at Ulundi. Although now heavily outnumbered by encircling Boers they were to hold out under constant fire by day and night for ninety-five days, until starvation and numerous casualties, including women and children, forced them to surrender. Too late they discovered that they had been duped by a devious enemy. In recognition of their gallantry the emaciated garrison was permitted by the Boers to march out of the fort with ‘the honours of war’, carrying their weapons, their home-made Union Jack flying and bugles playing. The place was Potchefstroom in the Transvaal and the conflict the First Anglo-Boer War of 1880-81. This is the story told in A RAIN OF LEAD: THE SIEGE AND SURRENDER OF THE BRITISH AT POTCHEFSTROOM by Ian Bennett. On the twentieth day of the siege, the British commander Colonel Winsloe decided to take possession of the Potchefstroom magazine. Close to the fort, it not only contained a quantity of ammunition but would also give an occupier a definite tactical advantage. To quote: “All day through the rain the British were subjected to accurate sniping. First one man was wounded in the arm, and then another in the chest; by the afternoon five Fusiliers had been hit. It was clear to Winsloe that any attempt to send men across open ground in daylight to occupy the magazine would be suicidal. ... When darkness eventually fell, Lieutenant Lindsell led twenty men from the Mounted Infantry over to the magazine and, making loopholes in the walls, turned it into a blockhouse. At daylight he discovered that from the loopholes in the gable end of the magazine he had a clear field of fire down Potgieter’s Street on to Boers moving in the market square. When a tempting target appeared, the Mounted Infantry opened fire, disclosing their position to the Boers. To the surprise of the British there was no immediate response from the Boers whose fire remained unusually sluggish through the morning. At 4 o’clock in the afternoon everything changed as the Boers implemented the plans they had been evolving since discovering the British were in the magazine. Heavy rifle fire once again hit the fort, much of it directed at the gun pits in the hope of preventing the British 9-pounders from again silencing the Boer cannon Ou Griet, which began to bombard the magazine from a new position beside Reverend Jooste’s house. The Boer gun was partly hidden by the house and was also protected by a substantial wall of sacks and bales. From 500 yards the old gun fired twenty-one rounds before being silenced by the 9-pounders; three pierced the roof of the magazine and a fourth went through a wall. Lindsell’s men stood firm while the 9-pounders opened up on Jooste’s house, their eighth round bursting inside the building, setting fire to the thatched roof. The burning material soon fell in, throwing up a fountain of sparks, followed by a series of flashes and explosions indicating that a dump of ammunition had been hit. Scattered burning debris set fire to nearby outhouses and wool sacks used for the gun emplacement, which was reduced to ashes. The Royal Artillery men in the fort had the satisfaction of having silenced Ou Griet for the second time. The Boer snipers, however, kept firing until late evening and nearly killed Lieutenant Dalrymple-Hay, a bullet going through the rim of his helmet as he incautiously looked over a parapet at the enemy positions.” Some further twenty days of fighting were to pass before the Boers managed to drive the Mounted Infantry out of the magazine, compounding the grave situation in the fort. Ian Bennett was born in Tanganyika in 1924 and grew up with an enduring interest in Africa. He was commissioned in the Royal Berkshire Regiment in 1943 and served with the Royal West African Frontier Force in Africa and South East Asia during and after World War II. He transferred to the Royal Army Service Corps in 1948 and went on to serve with the Gurkha Army Service Corps and the Royal Corps of Transport, retiring as a lieutenant colonel. His forty-seven years with the British Army took him to many parts of Europe, Africa, India and the Far East, where historic sites and battlefields stimulated a love of military history. He is the author of Eyewitness in Zululand. Back to Greenhill Military Book News No. 106 Table of Contents Back to Greenhill Military Book News List of Issues Back to Master Magazine List © Copyright 2001 by Greenhill Books This article appears in MagWeb (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other military history articles and gaming articles are available at http://www.magweb.com