The Battle of Spionkop (Spioenkop) - who won?

[Music] [Applause] so by the standards of later battles in World War one the fight here for spean cop was was pretty small really but actually it was the biggest most important battle of the British Empire had fought in a long time and the number of dead in such a small space was terrifying so I grew up watching football at Leicester City of Filbert Street and I used to stand in the Kop as it was called and that wasn't the first cop in the world the first was that in Liverpool and field and it was named after this hill we're visiting now spean cop which was the scene of carnage okay so first lesson learned when visiting the battlefield of Spion Kop don't arrive at the gate before 9:00 because it's locked so I'm here on top of spean Cop and behind me you can see the two gala River which has been holding up the British advance towards Ladysmith for a long time Warren and his troops crossed just down there but they spent too long messing around too long doing dress rehearsals and by the time they came up this hill the Boers were already entrenched and ready for them so eventually after a lot of messing around by General Warren he finally gave the order for the Lancashire Brigade to storm this place just behind where the camera is spean Kop the highest hill in the region over a thousand men of the Lancashire Brigade were chosen tough men mainly reservists and they had to move along this spur at night in silence not easy to do with so many men and their equipment at one point a dog started barking at them and instead of killing it one of the troopers made a lead from a rifle strap and led it away back down the hill and the events continued so it's hard going even on the plateau isn't it just with two books it's hard going and you think you've come over the top just there and there's a ways to go part of the problem for the advancing British that morning was they didn't really know where they were going they had no Maps they had no decent intelligence the Boers knew this ground like the back of their hand they were always going to be struggling to dig in in the best positions so the men who led the British assault that night were from the Lancashire Brigade these weren't the tried and tested troops that were meant to be leading the attack instead they were mainly reservists tough guys no doubt many of them had done a lot of years as regulars before being called back to the colors but they hadn't been in South Africa long and this was their first taste of real battle so as the British troops came over onto the plateau just short of the crest there was a couple of borås centuries they fired off a couple of shots the Brits chased and with bayonets skewered this guy and this is his grave it says in memory of unknown burger sentry killed on this spot one report I read said that he might have been a black guy fighting with the Boers but I haven't read that anywhere else so I don't know if that's true or not so now the British moved here onto the top of the hill and they started digging but they didn't have enough entrenching tools and this ground does not lend itself to digging trenches but they did what they could they had a shallow trench and they thought they could dig in now and that was kind of the battle over they thought they'd won but soon the Boer sharpshooter started picking them off and they realised that this position was actually incredibly dangerous by the end of the day this trench was filled with dead the British lost two hundred and forty-three men killed and over 1,200 wounded or taken prisoner during the action here and the dead are commemorated on this beautiful memorial right next to the main British trench on the top of the hill side-by-side two unknown British soldiers and in the middle leftenant the Honorable Neville Windsor Hill Trevor I think that says it's kind of hard to read it's quite worn all I can read on this post here is the words brave soldiers have no idea what the rest says so around 8:30 as the shell fire was getting really heavy the man in command up here Major General Sir Edward Woodgate was mortally wounded by a shell splinter right here on the northeast corner so three future world leaders were present at the battlefield here one was Winston Churchill Louie Bota and Mahatma Gandhi he was a member of the Indian volunteer if I think he was the founder of the Indian volunteer ambulance corps and there's a new memorial here for those guys and for the black Scouts who largely remain unnamed and unknown says that this monument is dedicated to the memory of the extraordinary bravery courage and devotion to duty of the Indian stretcher bearers and ambulance corps and African Scouts who displayed most conspicuous bravery an acts of self-sacrifice in the presence of extreme danger on the battlefields of Spion Kop and surrounding areas during the South African War so the men in these shallow trenches didn't have a lot of cover and they were being hammered both by artillery fire that was coming in at a rate of 10 rounds a minute and inflating rifle fire a lot of guys got shot in the head from the sides so one thing that's hard to appreciate is how confused the fighting was here it wasn't as simple as here with a British here with a Boers actually there were intermingled there were groups here groups there some Boers were behind the British there was overs in front some to the side was really confusing there was bullets pinging off these rocks with colleagues falling all around them at about 1:00 p.m. a number of British troops started to surrender they started waving their hankies and before they knew it the Boers had moved forward and started rounding up prisoners at this point thornycroft who was now in charge of the troops on this hill came storming forward take your men to hell sir he said to the Boer commander there's no surrender here and he was a big bloke 22 stone and massive so people did what he said it was about now that the reinforcements started to arrive first into the fray were the Middlesex regiment who immediately swept into a bayonet charge trying to clear as many of the Boers off the ridge as they could meanwhile the burghers of the Carolina commander were trying to come around the back of the British if they'd have managed that they would have been carnage but right on cue the Scottish rifle was arrived fixed bayonets and cleared them away okay so I'm here on the east end of Spion Kop now the main British trench is over there to my right but what I want to show you is to important features there was a luenell a low Knoll which is just over there and the Boers had riflemen on their who could control these slopes which made it very difficult for the British to maneuver further over is a feature known as Twin Peaks and on there the Boers had artillery pieces and more riflemen and amazingly the British hadn't attacked this until in the afternoon in one of the rare pieces of initiative the King's Royal Rifle Corps that day decided to storm it they pushed and pulled their way up and they took that feature there it was really important the Boers considered Twin Peaks to be the key to this whole battle and when they lost it they thought it was over they thought they'd lost the battle but amazingly read was Buller in command of the British troops in the Tal saw the colonel of the King's Royal Rifle Corps on there and demanded he come back down he didn't want to see them get killed and despite ignoring multiple requests for him to come back now down eventually the CEO of the King's Royal Rifle Corps was killed and the man who took over his second-in-command couldn't keep ignoring Bullas orders to come down and despite holding the key to the battle they withdrew okay so after walking around this battlefield extensively I think I'm starting to realize in greater detail what the problem was the British should entrench themselves over there which technically is the high point of the feature but as you can see there is a bit of a ridge between me here and where you can see the British memorial that marks their position that allowed cover for the Boers who still controlled this dominant position on the corner looking north which meant they could keep bringing up troops without being harassed I think that was part of the problem if the Brits had moved forward and taken this corner of Spion Kop they might have done better that day so the battle despite being one was thrown away the British as night came still held to be on cop they were actually in a great position they were ready to sweep the Boers before them and move on to Ladysmith but they didn't know that they thought they were going to get a hammering again and instead of staying here and using this to move for and relieve Ladysmith they pulled back and went back to square one another example of terrible generalship I can only imagine what it must have been like to have been a British soldier up here who's for all day long whose mates have been killed and badly wounded and then told now we're going to withdraw and go back to where we started I'd have been terribly angry

Channel: Redcoat History

Views: 27,490

Keywords: military history, British army, war, anglo boer war, liverpool, Liverpool FC, Spion kop, battle of spion kop, battle of spioenkop, south africa, Queen Victoria, battlefield tour

Id: m4LMT-q1Bpg

Length: 9min 18sec (558 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 23 2018