With the Mounted Infantry
....Trooper A. J. Gregory, of the 32nd Mounted Infantry, writes home from the Orange Free State, the first part of his letter having been written in the train en route for Bloemfontein. He says, on March 23rd: -
...."A fortnight to-day we got orders to go after the rebels, Lord Kitchener in command. They were supposed to be somewhere between De Aar and Prieska. So we set out, every man with 100 rounds of ammunition, about 1500 of us....We take no tents, only have necessaries, sleep on the ground with a waterproof sheet under us, and a blanket, rifle and bayonet and ammunition at our side....Our men made a hurried march on to Prieska, and charged through the town with the 7th Dragoon Guards at the front with fixed lances. I, with others who had more than one horse, were left at a place 22 miles away for the night and went on next morning. All night there was a fearful thunderstorm. Well, they found the majority of the Boer rebels had fled, but they captured about 50, with a few caught the next day, also a great quantity of dynamite, etc. I arrived next day. My captain had commandeered a rebel's houses, so that night we slept in a Boer's house for a change."
....Continuing his letter "sitting on a box at Bloemfontein station," Trooper Gregory says: - "I have just had a peep at a few of the most prominent men of the day - Roberts, Kitchener (I saw him often), Rudyard Kipling, and Sir Alfred Milner. We are staying in the station for the night, and don't yet know where we move to to-morrow. We stayed at that house at Prieska for two nights, and then the captain told me he was going on the staff, so we had to be attached to Lord Kitchener, and left Prieska and the Lancashire Hussars as well. They have gone to a place 100 miles further on, and the rebels have entrenched somewhere beyond. So we set off on our six days' return march....For three nights running we had to sleep in terrible rainstorms and then get up and march. At one bivouac the water was six inches deep in a quarter of an hour. We had just served up the meat to the officers, and they were going to sit down to it when down it came - pitch dark, out went the lamp, and wish-wash went everything....We reached De Aar at about eleven at night on March 27th, and got entrained rightaway almost."
Southport Visiter, Thursday 3rd May 1900
Death of a Southport Yeoman
....The mother of Alfred John Gregory, who resides at 30, Bridge-street, yesterday received a telegram from the War Office regretfully announcing that her son had died of enteric at Boshof on Saturday last. Trooper Gregory was 28 years of age. As a youth he took to the sea, but wearied of the life and became a sadler. He opened a shop in Princes-street on his own account and was doing fairly well; but when the War Office asked for volunteers for the Imperial Yeomanry Corps he offered himself to the officers in command of the Lancashire Hussars section in Southport and was accepted. He had no previous experience of soldiering. He left Southport on the 30th January for South Africa, and wrote an excellent diary of the voyage, which was published in the "Visiter." Several letters from him have been published in these columns. In one of them he made the now significant remark that he would remain in South Africa after the war. Writing from Bloemfontein on Good Friday, he stated that he had been in hospital eleven days with a slight fever, but that he was about to follow Captain Miller (who went with the Lancashire Hussars from Southport), to whose service he had been specially attached. Captain Miller was then at Kimberley with Lord Methuen. The next letter was dated Kimberley, April 22nd, and Gregory subsequently proceeded with Lord Methuen's column to Boshof. Here he broke down and died. Before leaving Southport he was presented (on the 17th January), by the Rev. F. Sinker, with a knapsack Bible and a silver matchbox, on behalf of the Christ Church Men's Bible Class, of which Mr. Gregory was a prominent member.
(Southport Visiter, Saturday 2nd June 1900)