Gents, again thank you for the additional information. I received from a friend in Pretoria a copy of the pages about the subject from Breytenbach’s magnus opus.
During the Jameson raid President Kruger and Kommandant General Joubert were confronted with the fact that over 40% of the Burgers conscripted under the commando system were unarmed and many of the others were armed with obsolete guns. With the country under threat, Kruger -without consulting the ZAR Executive Council- instructed Joubert to urgently acquire 5.000 rifles and carbines with ammunition, a few weeks later he increased that number to 15.000. Because of the urgency, quick delivery seemed to have been more important than quality. So, before it was (much later) decided that the Mauser with the smokeless ammunition was to be the standard issue, many knee-jerk purchases had been made which explains to a large degree the ordnance-nightmare mix of guns that were available to the Boers at the beginning of the war. (49.810 Mausers, 43.752 Martini-Henry’s, 6.150 Guedes, 2.730 Lee-Metfords and 100 Krag Jorgenson’s)
The reason behind my original query is that I find it rather surprising that the UK Government allowed the ZAR (and OVS) to purchase weapons from UK manufacturers after the Jameson Raid. At the time Joe Chamberlain was Secretary of State for the Colonies, a very powerful man in the Government and, with Rhodes, one of the silent forces behind Jameson’s “Strooptocht”. Chamberlain was also a big shot in Birmingham; He was a major industrialist and was the city’s Mayor. As such it is inconceivable that he wouldn’t have known about the ZAR purchase orders to the Birmingham arms manufacturers, even if these had come through agents. This raises the delicate question: Did Dirty Joe let these purchase orders be filled to the benefit of his fellow Brummies notwithstanding that such clearly was not in the interest of the country?
Given that after the start of the war the supply lines for ammunition for the non-British made arms used by the ZAR quickly dried up, the Boers came to rely to a large extend on raiding British stores to re-supply. Of course, they also started to use the guns they had ‘liberated” from British troops but the fact that over 50% of the weapons they already used were of British manufacture -and used the same ammunition as what their enemy used- must have helped the Boers immensely. As such the British Government (Chamberlain?) allowing the pre-war sales to the ZAR and OVS seems to constitute a strategic error of major proportions.
Perhaps the forum members who are better versed on this matter could shine more light on this.
