Its summer – December 1901. General Jan Smuts is on the run in the Cape Colony being chased by tens of thousands of British troops who are fixating on the fact that they don’t seem to be able to pin down this mercurial general. With him is one of our war narrators, Deneys Reitz. Or rather was with him until he became separated in late November and since then has been following Smuts – and trying to stay alive. This week we will hear how he stumbles into another series of largely...

This episode takes us to Christmas 1901 and the battle of Groenkop near Bethlehem in the Free State where General Christiaan de Wet catches the British offguard on the top of a two hundred foot high kopje. We will also hear how the opposition party leader Lloyd George narrowly escapes being lynched as a pro-Boer Brit in a night of extreme violence as you’ll hear. The wobble that Chamberlain the Liberal Unionist leader and Sir Alfred Milner were most worried about had begun back in England....

So its December 1901 Christmas is a fortnight away for the combatants and Christiaan de Wet was tracking his arch enemy, brother Piet. It was revenge he was after and as we all know – it’s a meal best eaten cold and unfortunately Christiaan was overheating. While he stewed on the information that his hated brother was instrumental in setting up the National Scouts, made up of Boer turncoats who now fought for the British, across the world the end of 1901 brought with it a number of...

This week its all about the scandal of the Concentration Camps which breaks across Great Britain as the Fawcett Commission releases its initial report. We also continue to monitor General Christiaan de Wet who has a large commando of 700 men and is beginning the move towards the Cape once more. His plan is to increase the pressure on the English although his previous attempt a few months before ended in failure. But first, a reality check for Lord Kitchener who has led what has become known...

This week General Christiaan De Wet who has been largely dormant for November awakens and begins to leer in the direction of the Cape once more while Sarah Raal continues to ride with Commandant Nieuwoudt and her three brothers but for how long? The presence of a woman fighting alongside the burghers in Nieuwoudt’s commando has become something of a problem for him. He’s worried that she’ll be killed while she simultaneously is creating propaganda for the Boers in her skirts and matching...

This week’s episode is dominated by a young woman who we heard about last week called Sarah Raal. While some of her exploits have been exaggerated for Nationalist reasons years after the Boer War, there’s no doubt that she was extraordinary by any measure. Remember she is in her early twenties and escaped from Springfontein Concentration Camp outside Bloemfontein heading to join her four brothers who were fighting with Commandant Nieuwoudt who was part of General Herzog’s commando in the...

Episode 113 covers events happening in November 1901 with six months of the war and this podcast left to run. This week Deneys Reitz and his fellow Boers suddenly realise they should not be wearing British uniforms which they donned after running out of clothing. Lord Kitchener has issued a proclamation that any Boer found clad in British uniforms should be shot out of hand as a spy. We also hear about Sarah Raal - one of the Boer women who actively fought in the war and was eventually made...

The first week of November 1901 shipping records published in the Times of London featured regular updates such as this one: “The Armenian left Port Natal for Bombay on Nov 3 with Boer prisoners, 36 officers and 981 men. They were escorted by the following: 67 th Battery RFA – Major Manifold, Captain Tapp, Lieutenant Sheppard, 2/Lieutenants Newland, Russell and 157 men 69th Battery RFA – Captain Belcher, Lieutenants Clark, Herbert, 2/Lieutenant Shaw and 156 men The Times continues to list a...

The scenes have shifted recently between the war in South Africa and the effect of the war in England. The press has begun to turn against the government with vitriolic attacks on war hero Sir Redvers Buller as we heard last week. There’s more bad new for the government in the form of the Fawcett Commission made up of women sent to assess the Concentration Camps in South Africa. What liberal activist Emily Hobhouse had been decrying for months was about to be confirmed by a group of...

It’s time for reflection - and to talk about General Louis Botha who’s invasion into Natal fizzled out leading to his commando being forced to flee Lord Kitchener’s columns back to the Eastern Transvaal. But all is not lost for the man who would one day become South Africa’s first Prime Minister. It’s the final days of October 1901 when he returns to his base roving the veld somewhere between Ermelo and the Swaziland border. It’s a region dominated by rolling grassy undulating hills, then...

This week we pick up where we left General Jan Smuts and his commando as they writhed about in pain having eaten from a plant that they failed to prepare properly and had poisoned about half the 250 men riding with the general. Worse, they were forced to fight off a British attack on the Mountains above Port Elizabeth at the same time. They had managed to escape the British cavalry and mounted infantry unit, but were now deep in badlands country in the mountains of the Eastern Cape region of...

This is an important week - it is the 120 anniversary of the start of the Boer War - which formally began on 12th October 1899. This week saw the Anglo-Boer War Museum in Bloemfontein host a conference as part of the commemorations. Amongst the topics discussed were how all communities were affected by this war, and those attending included both professional and amateur historians. On Saturday 12th, a monument to Australian forces was unveiled at the battle site of Driefontein. If you want...

It's early Spring 1901 and in England there are now serious doubts about how the British Army is going about its campaign in South Africa. Winston Churchill had been elected as an MP for Oldham partly because of his fame as a survivor of a Boer prisoner of war camp. He took issue with the manner in which the war office under Brodrick was going conducting itself in South Africa - it alarmed Churchill. He believed the military policy was wrong. It had started back on the 12 March 1901 - three...

This is September 1901 and it's been a wet Spring so far. The weather has caused trouble for both Jan Smuts and Louis Botha - but things are about to improve for Smuts after his daring raid into the Cape Colony almost ended before it started as you’ve heard. The number 17 shall feature strongly in this episode. We will hear how the 17th Lancers who were the first line of cavalry in the Charge of the Light Brigade during the Crimean war, meet their match on the African veld. Twenty four...

An incredible turn of events was taking place after a few icy months of winter - the Boers were waking up like hibernating bears and there would be a sudden escalation in incidents across south Africa. General Jan Smuts led a commando of around 400 men. He had survived three near misses after entering the Cape in the first week of September 1901. Remember I’d explained how he was first attacked by a group of Basutho’s, then he was ambushed by a British patrol while conducting surveillance -...

It’s mid September 1901 and Jan Smuts is about to face one of the most challenging moments in his illustrious career. He was only 28 at this point, yet was to achieve so much in the next few weeks and would forever be remembered as the remarkable soldier who led a tiny group of men into the mouth of the British Empire lion. His immediately challenge, however, involved the weather, rather than the British. In an event which became known in Boer storytelling as The Big Rain, his commando...

We continue to rid4 with General Jan Smuts and he has just entered the Cape Colony, an invasion that has been planned to coincide with Spring in early September 1901. The master guerrilla fighter and his commando of around 400 men are in a spot of bother, however. As they entered the Cape, their route took them through Basutho territory where they were set upon by around 300 warriors armed with rifles, spears and knobkerries. As we heard last week, they managed to fight off the attack, but...

Spring is upon is in this podcast - so too the long-awaited invasion of the Cape Colony by General Jan Smuts and his commando. It has taken him almost a month of zig-zagging across the Free State from his base in the Eastern Transvaal to arrive at the border. Other Boer leaders had already been busy in the Cape, but they were operating in smaller units and were regarded as less significant at least from the point of view of the British occupying the territory. Smuts’ arrival was a completely...

This week we hear about the Dandy Fifth and Deneys Reitz. It’s also time to ride with General Christiaan de Wet as he sums up the Blockhouses. Reitz has fallen in with “this little band” as he calls them - and most would die tragically. There were Dandy fifth were actually nine in number and led by Jack Borrius who was a short thick-set man of 28 from Potchefstroom. We must stand back and take a look at what was happening across the battlefields at this time. For most of South Africa the...

It’s an amazing to think that back in 2017 I was thinking about this podcast and whether I should go ahead and cover a topic that was missing on both iTunes and general podcasting. Jumping in and starting in October 2017, the plan was to follow the war as it wound its way through the next three or so years. Now we're on episode 100! We’re now well into year two and this podcast series will wrap up at the same time as the Boer war - in May next year. I’ve tracked the incidents, events and...

It’s early August 1901 and a series of events in a far off corner of the war would end up resonating internationally for the next one hundred and 18 years. These involved the Bushveld Carbineers, the unit of irregular troops from Australia that was eventually disbanded. I covered part of this story in an earlier podcast, Episode 72. Because most of these events happened in August 1901, and that's where we are in our podcast series, we must reconsider the story of Breaker Morant. The...

It’s time for an exchange of letters and a proclamation or two. General Jan Smuts and his commando have broken into smaller units and are traveling from the Transvaal to the Free State / Cape border. They’re going to launch an invasion in a last-ditch attempt to entice their Afrikaner brothers living in the Cape Colony into an uprising. So far it's failed. The Cape Afrikaners are threatened with execution should they take part in the Boer war, as the British consider the Cape their Colony...

This week we will hear about bandits at the Southern Border who are making the most of the guerrilla war raging around the Transvaal, parts of the Cape and the Free State. These motley laggards lurked close to towns and sometimes waylaid unfortunate men and women who passed by as they in turn were fleeing from the British - or the Boers. Of both. The small town of Fauresmith is a classic desert town on the edge of the karoo close to where the Free State and Cape colony border lay. This...

It’s the third week of July 1901 and this winter has been cold even by the standards of South Africa’s high plains. As I’m writing this, snow has blanketed parts of the semi-desert known as the Karoo and it was no different then. And Deneys Reitz is close to this region. He had found a bolt hole near the Lesotho border where he’d been hiding out with a handful of fellow travellers and his German colleagues. They’d been able to bathe for the first time in months having found a copper...

It’s mid July 1901 and it's a Southern Winter. We will also hear how the commanding officer in Pretoria, General Maxwell, meets a Petticoat commando member Johanna van Warmelo who unknown to him, is carrying explosives during their meeting. There’re awful resonances here with contemporary events. For example, Lord Kitchener writes in the London newspapers in 1901 that the Boer women and children are relatively healthy and well, and that the hygiene of the camps is at acceptable levels....