TOPIC:

Henry George Denham

Private, 48th Coy. (North Somerset) Imperial Yeomanry
Private, Provisional Transvaal Constabulary
Ranger, Corp of Cattle Rangers – Anglo Boer War

- Queens South Africa Medal (Cape Colony, Orange Free State, Johannesburg, Diamond Hill) to 2516 PTE H.G. DENHAM. 48TH COY IMP. YEO.

Henry Denham served with one of the few Yeomanry Companies that earned battle clasps – other than the Wittebergen clasp which was common to many.

He was born on 20 June 1880 in Blackford (near Wedford) in Somerset, England -not very many miles from where I now live. His father, George, was an Agricultural Labourer whilst his mother , Martha (born Francis), was a Char Woman. Our first glimpse of Henry comes courtesy of the 1881 England census where, at the tender age of 9 months, he was the youngest born in the household. Times were tough for working class families in Victorian England, his older sibling, Agnes, was at 13 years of age, already out to work as a Domestic Servant. Others in the house were Emily (11), William (8) and Alice (6).

Ten years on, at the time of the 1891 England census, the family were living in Village Street, Wedmore. George, as Henry was then called, was all of 10 years of age, followed by Herbert (9) – of the other children there was no sign. With few prospects before them, the impoverished classes very often found a home in the military – the pay was regular and, as long as you behaved yourself and didn’t get on the wrong side of the Sergeant Major, your future was reasonably assured. A random or stay bullet whilst in action was always a possibility but most young men viewed that as a risk worth taking!

Henry was no different, he was very decidedly working class and looking for an opportunity to gain employment. As the 19th century drew to an end there was something else happening which may have excited his interest and sent him into the waiting arms of the recruiting officer. This was the advent of the Anglo Boer War which burst onto the international stage on 11 October 1899. The British military presence in South Africa at the time was woefully inadequate in terms of numbers and resources to pose a serious threat to the Boer Commandos of the Transvaal and the Orange Free State which swept across the colonial borders with the Cape and Natal the day after hostilities were declared.


The North Somerset Yeomanry

In what became known as Black Week, the British Army suffered a number of embarrassing reverses at Boer hands and the call went out for the raising of an Imperial Yeomanry from among the populace back home to aid and assist in the fight against the Boers.

Seizing his opportunity, Denham completed the Short Service (One Year with the Colours) attestation forms at nearby Bath on 15 January 1900 – thereby making him one of the First Contingent men to enlist (there were three contingents in all before the war ended.) 21 years old, he was a Labourer by occupation. Physically he was 5 feet 6 inches in height, weighed 145 lbs and had a fresh complexion, blue eyes and dark brown hair. Having been passed as fit by the Doctor, he was assigned no. 2516 and the rank of Private with the 48th (North Somerset) Company of the new Imperial Yeomanry.

The Bath Herald of 3 March 1900 carried a lengthy article wherein all 120 members of the North Somerset were mentioned by name, including which of the four Sections they had been assigned to. Denham, from Blackford near Weston-super-Mare, was posted to No. 1 Section under Captain G.A. Gibbs, along with 29 compatriots, all from the surrounding area with the exception of a P Hamilton who hailed from Port Elizabeth in the Eastern Cape.

The 48th were commanded by Maxwell Sherston the nephew of the Commander in Chief in South Africa, Lord Roberts. Major Sherston volunteered his Company as bodyguard to Lord Roberts and as such they spent most of their time in this role. This is partially why they were the only IY company to take part in some of the “structured” actions of the war – the battles of Diamond Hill and Johannesburg – as Roberts worked his way upcountry to occupy the Transvaal capital of Pretoria and beyond.

In order to get a broad idea of where they found themselves, two letters home from one of Denham’s comrades, Trooper F. Goodridge of Weston-super-Mare, published in The Guardian of 28 July 1900 is quoted from. The first is written from just outside Johannesburg and is undated:-

“My last letter was written from Kroonstad. We have now crossed the Vaal River and are at present outside Johannesburg, which place we hope soon to be inside. Yesterday our troops captured five engines and about 100 carriages, but the Boers will not come out of the town so we are going to bombard it. We are now only 38 miles from Pretoria and that will only take three days easy marching to cover so we shall be home, or at least coming home, in a month’s time.

The Boers are a crafty set and have blown up all the bridges in the Free State, but have not touched their own railway. We are very short of stores, and have only got three biscuits a day and some bully beef….but we don’t starve although the rations are short.

Our troops have entered Johannesburg and the Boers have surrendered the town. Then was the time to get grub, we broke into the stores and took everything in the way of eatables we could lay our hands on. We are now on the way to Pretoria.”

The second letter, also undated, is written from the headquarters in Pretoria:-

“We have got to Pretoria at last. The Boers made a stand outside on the kopjes, and we had a lively time of it I can tell you. We were advancing along the veldt and had just reached the top of a kopje when boom! went a Boer gun, and a shell burst close at hand, wounding a Naval officer in the ankle. The Naval guns got into action, and then the bullets and shells came whistling around. It was alright I can tell you – you would hear a bullet whistle over your head and it would make you bob down when our artillery got into action.

There were two forts, one on the right of us and one on the left and there were Boers sniping us from the trenches outside. We had to lie on the ground for three hours with the shells bursting around us. Every time you looked up ping! went a bullet at your head. At last the firing got so heavy we had to retire. Then was the time. You would see two men struggling to get behind an anthill, and anywhere out of sight and out of the way of bullets which were going ping-ping all the time. At last we drove the enemy out of the kopjes, but had to retire because of the darkness. In the morning we found that they had cleared off, and so we entered Pretoria behind Roberts and had a grand march past.”

Another letter from the front by yet another of Denham’s comrades, A.W.H. Marshall, appeared in the Leighton Buzzard Observer of 4 September 1900. Headed “At the Front with “Bobs” it read, partially, thus:

“…. Of course you have heard of our Company being “Bob’s” bodyguard, and that our Company was the first to enter Bloemfontein, Brandfort, Kroonstad, Johannesburg and Pretoria. The hottest fire I was under was the day before we entered here, whilst scouting, when I had some very narrow shaves….and the next morning when we entered (Pretoria) there was a lot of sniping going on. We have had some very rough times on the march up. Half rations of bully beef and biscuits and water the colour of chocolate which would freeze in our water bottles at night; and at midday it would be warm, and we only had a thin blanket to make up for all that different temperature at night.

When we left the Cape we were over 100 strong and now we only number 35 and most of them have fever. I think we were very lucky to get on “Bob’s” headquarter staff as we have been in front all the way up. About twenty used to escort “Bob’s” during the day and the rest went scouting (we took it in turns) and if we stayed at any place on the march we went as despatch riders to the headquarters staff.

That was the time we used to do our horses up, as very often we had to go twenty to thirty miles to catch some column up. We have had plenty of escort work since we have been here as the “little man” goes out most days and very often goes on long rides.”

With the occupation of Pretoria and Bloemfontein the Boer leadership merely shifted their Governments eastwards and the war carried on. Gone, however, after August 1900 were the pitched battles where you could “see” your enemy, to be replaced with guerilla warfare – hit and run attacks by fast-moving, highly mobile Boer patrols.

In early 1900 most of the first contingent men, their short service of one year up, made ready to return to the United Kingdom, making way for a bunch of fresh recruits – the second contingent – that were heading to South Africa to replace those going home. The second contingent, generally speaking, was of an inferior stamp than their predecessors and soon attracted a bad press back in England and among the army hierarchy. Denham was invalided back to England where he appears in the 1901 census at home in Village Street, Blackford, as a “Trooper in Imperial Yeomanry. On Active Service. Invalided Home.”

After a short stay at home, he made his way back to the front and would have been in time to take part in one of the most written about disasters in which some of the Yeomanry were embroiled - the fight at Vlakfontein on 29 May 1901 where they were accused of running away.

Known as the New Yeomanry, they had a shaky start in their first major action at Vlakfontein in the south-west Transvaal. The 230 yeomen of the 7th Battalion who had set off from Naauwpoort under General Dixon three days earlier, were a mixture of first contingent men (like Denham) in their last days of service and newcomers from the second contingent.

As was usual for the Imperial Yeomanry, they were not a complete battalion, only the 27th (Devonshire), 48th (North Somerset) and 69th (Sussex) being present. Dixon’s task was to search for hidden guns and ammunition to the west of Naauwpoort, but unknown to him, a 3000-strong Boer force under the guerilla leader Christoffel Kemp had assembled in the area. On the 29th Dixon reached Vlakfontein sixteen miles west of Naauwpoort where he left some of his infantry in camp and marched out in three detachments with the yeomanry on his left and the Scottish Horse on his right.

A search for guns in the valley proved fruitless and at midday Dixon took the centre detachment back to a nearby farm where a cache of ammunition was found. Dixon decided that it was too late in the day to remove this hoard and ordered the whole force to return to camp. The yeomanry, together with a hundred men from the Derbyshires and two guns, was to act as rearguard during the withdrawal.

Kemp was about to launch an ambitious strike against the rearguard. The Boers had already experimented with using mounted charges when attacking British columns but at Vlakfontein they added a new refinement to this tactic. At 1.30 pm, just as the rearguard under Major Harry Chance of the Royal Artillery was preparing to retire, Kemp’s men set fire to the nearby grass. Using the dense smoke as cover they began to drive in the yeomanry screen while simultaneously launching a feint attack on the Scottish Horse and the rest of the British detachment on the right.

Chance pulled back his infantry and sent the guns after them, but the grass fire rapidly gained on the yeomanry with the Boers advancing just behind it. Suddenly the situation developed into a crisis. Masked by the smoke and aided by a yeomanry picket which had retreated without orders, the Boers outflanked Chance on his left and out of the flames burst 500 men, some firing from horseback, others shooting as they led their mounts at the run. The yeomanry suffered heavily, six of its sixteen officers being killed or mortally wounded. Seventy of their men were killed or wounded and the rest panicked and galloped past the guns to the rear. The Imperial Yeomanry lost nearly a third of its number.

Was the veteran Denham there? Most likely, as the entire 48th were in action and he only took his leave of them – discharged at his own request after 1 year 154 days service – over two weeks later, on 17 June 1901.

Whereto now for Denham? The Provincial Transvaal Constabulary beckoned. This mysterious outfit (there is not much known about them) was made up of volunteers from all over the Regular and Volunteer army. According to the roll, Denham and over thirty of his North Somerset comrades joined on 14 June 1900, their period of service being until 7 October 1900 when, it is to be supposed, their services were no longer required and they were discharged.



Reluctant to return to England and the war still raging without an apparent end in sight, he looked around for another outfit to join. He found it in the form of the much-maligned Corps of Cattle Rangers. The Rangers, according to contemporary reports dating from April 1901 were formed at about that time after the fighting columns deployed to chase down the Boers were finding it difficult to bring in the captured cattle.

“Colonel Morgan has, therefore, organised a Cattle Rangers Corps. The Corps is divided into troops of twenty five men, each under an officer, who collect stock and bring it into Pretoria. In addition to their daily pay members of the corps are to receive a percentage on the value of the stock they bring in. The intention is to clear the country of cattle. The first troop has already started operations.”

Perhaps because of jealousy or other more nefarious reasons, the Rangers’ soon found themselves with a reputation for being cavalier with the truth and for enriching themselves in every possible way. Little control seems to have been exercised over them and a glance at their nominal roll reveals that many of them were discharged with ignominy or worse.

Denham’s attestation paper for enlisting with the Corps was completed at Pretoria on 12 June 1901 and provides the reader with a physical description of him as being 22 years old, 5 feet 8 inches in height with a fair complexion, fair hair and blue eyes. His father of “Blackford near Weston” was his next of kin. Aside from their main focus, there were also moments of danger as well – on July 13, just after he had joined, “seventy Boers made a determined attempt one night this week to carry off a large herd of cattle at Hammanskraal, near Pretoria. The cattle were guarded by 50 men of the Cattle Rangers Corps, who made a stout resistance. The fighting was so close that clubbed rifles were used. The Boers were driven off, leaving behind one dead and four wounded, two mortally. The Rangers had two men slightly wounded. No cattle were taken.”



Denham’s stay with the Rangers’ ended when the unit was disbanded on 31 December 1901. His war was, by all accounts, finally over. Electing to remain in South Africa he found employment with “The Jumpers” Gold Mining Company Limited in Johannesburg. A large organisation with 100 000 shares floated at £1 each. But his post-war foray into civilian life was to be of brief duration – he passed away on 26 February 1902 at the Jumpers Hospital with Acute Peritonitis and is buried in the Johannesburg Cemetery. He was a Battery Hand on the mine at the time of his death at the age of 22.

His probate claimed that he was a Trooper in the Imperial Yeomanry at the time of his death although we know this not to be the case. His effects amounted to £151 to his father, George Denham, Labourer.

Acknowledgments:

- Newspaper articles accredited above
- Anglo Boer War Forum for nominal rolls
- Familysearch.org for death notice etc.
- Ancestry for medal rolls etc.