Many military heroes, from the Charge of the Light Brigade to the Zulu and Boer wars, ‘came together’ in Pinetown, writes Chris Waddington.
Immortalised by Tennyson, the epic Charge of the Light Brigade is just one of numerous military engagements of the late 1800s and early 1900s to have held the public imagination down the years. And some of the major roleplayers in several of these encounters all come together in a rather time-worn and tatty old book tucked away in a locked room at the Pinetown library.
Established in the 1860s, the Pinetown Library was one of the first in what was then Natal. At the time of the Anglo-Zulu war, when Pinetown was very much a garrison village peopled by several British regiments, the library was run from a private home – and the book in question was the register in which day-to-day records were kept.
It records the names of about 150 officers and men from regiments garrisoned in the village, some readily recognisable, even if the ranks are not familiar … Captains Malone and Baden-Powell, Major Bromhead and Lieutenant Allenby among them.
Captain Malone was one of the Six Hundred at Balaclava, and while his name might not be as well known as those of Raglan and Cardigan who sent the cavalrymen into the Valley of Death, it should be. He earned the Victoria Cross for his bravery as the survivors rode back, but not the six hundred.
21-year-old Lance-Sergeant Joseph Malone of E Troop of the 13th Light Dragoons had his horse shot from under him. He was returning to his lines on foot when he stopped and, under heavy fire, moved a wounded officer out of range of the Russian guns that volley’d and thunder’d.
After Crimea and as the Empire’s attention switched to South Africa, Malone, promoted to captain and transferred to the 6th Inniskilling Dragoons, found himself billeted in Pinetown.
The Annals of Pinetown, compiled by the Pinetown Women’s Institute in 1968, quotes a passage from Longmans’ School Geography for South Africa: “Fifteen miles from Durban is Pinetown, the most healthy spot in the British Empire…”
True or not, that did little for Captain Malone. The last entry in the old library register records his having checked out two books on May 5th, 1883, but, alas, there is no return date. Malone became ill, possibly with enteric fever, and died on June 28th. He is buried in the small cemetery in what was the old St Andrews churchyard off Kings Road.
One account of his funeral reads: “His body was brought from the Rugby Hotel on a gun carriage drawn by soldiers, his horse led in front of it, his boots hanging reversed from the saddle, with his sword and knapsack rolled on it, the helmet resting on the coffin. The band played the Dead March and the men moved along the road slowly and majestically to the solemn sounds; and we children were moved to tears with the pathos and marvel of it all.”
Malone’s old regiment, renamed the 13th Hussars, also spent time in Pinetown. They brought with them the young Captain Robert Stephenson Smyth Baden-Powell. Later better known as Lord Baden-Powell, or “BP”, the founder of the Scouting movement, his name also features in the library register. Sadly, the page listing his borrowings is missing and is marked as such – someone no doubt having purloined a valuable but non-displayable treasure.
His contribution to the list of epic engagements? Undoubtedly his eventual 217-day defence at the Siege of Mafeking during the Anglo-Boer war, which saw him emerge as a national hero in Britain. Many suggest it was at Mafeking that the idea of the Scout movement was born, although the Pinetown Annals quote him as having once said it was in Pinetown that the seeds were first sown. And it was then, during the campaign against the Zulus, that he is said to have come across a string of wooden Zulu beads, the design of which was later incorporated into the Wood Badge programme.
Major Gonville Bromhead’s contribution to the tales of derring-do is, of course, the battle of Rorke’s Drift in 1879 where, as a 33-year-old lieutenant, he commanded a company of the 24th Foot, later the South Wales Borderers, and with fellow lieutenant John Chard was among the 11 recipients of the Victoria Cross, the action coming as it did after the Zulus annihilated a British force at Isandlwana.
Bromhead arrived in Pinetown later that year while his regiment waited to embark at Durban on their way to be stationed at Gibraltar. A photograph, “probably taken in Pinetown” still exists, showing him among other B Company survivors of Rorke’s Drift.
And Lieutenant Allenby? An 1883 excerpt from the Natal Mercury reads: “Starters in a menagerie race were a pony, two fowls, several dogs, two baboons, a pig, guinea pigs, a phython (sic), a fowl decorated with chrome yellow, a drake and two frogs, and in a monkey race Lieutenant Allenby’s animal was about a chain behind the winner”.
This was the “Bloody Bull”, Field Marshall Edmund Allenby, who led the Egyptian Expeditionary Force in the conquest of Palestine and Syria during World War I and defeated the Turks at the battle of Megiddo, where his brilliant use of airplanes, infantry and mobile cavalry is said to have been a precursor to the Blitzkrieg tactics used by Germany in another war.
Like Malone, Allenby found his way to Pinetown with the 6th Inniskilling Dragoons who were based there from 1882 to 1884, during which time a squadron formed an escort for Cetshwayo at Fort Durnford on his return to Zululand. On a later return to South Africa, Allenby’s cavalry command would take part in French’s charge from Modder River to relieve Kimberley and also help round up Piet Cronje’s Boers at Paardeberg.
While Malone’s grave is in Pinetown, Allenby’s ashes are buried at Westminster Abbey; Bromhead lies in a military cemetery in Allahabad in India where he died of typhoid only a few years after leaving Pinetown; and Baden-Powell is buried in Kenya where he eventually retired.
Looking again at the old Pinetown library register, it begs the question: What happened to Captain O’Mahoney, Sgt Maj Scanlon, Captain Doyne, Lt Col Haydock, Captain Rose and all the others, including the Colonel Purnell whose reading matter from the library included Personalities I have Known?