Captain Edward Robertson Gordon, 9th Lancers, in South Africa during the Boer War (1899-1902) (family collection).
Major Edward Robertson Gordon was my great-great-great uncle, the eldest son of Captain Thomas Edward Gordon of the 14th Light Dragoons, an Indian Mutiny veteran. He was born in New Zealand on 24 February 1864, educated at United Services College in Devon and saw extensive action with the 9th Lancers over almost two and a half years during the Boer War, when he commanded a squadron, briefly commanded the regiment, was wounded and was Mentioned in Despatches. After the war he and Lieutenant Colonel F.F. Colvin co-authored Diary of the Ninth Lancers in South Africa 1899-1902 (London, Cecil Roy, 1904), based on their own private diaries. Gordon is also mentioned in a diary by another 9th Lancers officer, Lieutenant Eustace Abadie, who was present with the regiment in South Africa from the outbreak of the war until February 1900, and which has only recently been published (Spies, S.B., 1989, A soldier in South Africa: the experiences of Eustace Abadie, 1899-1902. Houghton, South Africa, the Brenthurst Press). The two regimental histories encompassing the Boer War also mention Gordon and contain detailed accounts of the actions in which he fought. The first, by a former 9th Lancers officer, was published in the same year as Colvin and Gordon’s Diary (Reynard, Captain Frank H., 1904, The Ninth (Queen’s Royal) Lancers 1715-1903. Edinburgh and London, Blackwell & Sons). The second, published in 1939, was based on that book and on the Diary but also contains additional material, including a first-hand account by Lieutenant Colonel F.H. Allhuson of the battles of Enslin and Magersfontein in December 1899 (Major E.W. Sheppard, 1939, The Ninth Queen’s Royal Lancers 1715-1936, Aldershot, Gale & Polden). That book can be read in full at the website of the 9th/12th Lancers Regimental Museum.
The volume Gordons under Arms: a Biographical Muster Roll of Officers named Gordon (C.O. Skelton and J.M. Bullock, Aberdeen University, 1912) contains a summary of Edward Gordon’s military career, alongside that of his father and his uncle William Cracroft Gordon, who had been an officer in the 9th Lancers in the 1850s. The details are drawn from the Army Lists, which include an officer’s dates of promotion, regiment and any active service, as well as from The London Gazette. They show that Edward was commissioned first into the 3rd (Militia) Battalion of the Royal Warwickshire Regiment, on 23 February 1884, and then transferred on 25 November 1885 to the 2nd Dragoon Guards (The Queen’s Bays), being gazetted as a Lieutenant in the regiment on that date. The 2nd Dragoon Guards went to India in the following year, being based successively in Umballa, Sialkot and Rawalpindi until 1895, and then from 1895-6 formed part of the British garrison in Egypt. Gordon was promoted to Captain on 18 September 1895, and on the return of the regiment to England he transferred to the 9th Lancers, joining on 16 December 1896. Four months before that the main body of the regiment had embarked for South Africa, where they were stationed until moving to Muttra in India in October 1898. They were ordered back to South Africa in 1899 in anticipation of conflict with the Boers, arriving on 10-11 October - the day that the war began - and leaving again for India on 13 March 1902, having been in South Africa for all but the final two months of the war.
Edward Robertson Gordon as a Lieutenant in the 2nd Dragoon Guards in 1888, when the regiment was in Umballa, India (1st the Queen’s Dragoon Guards Regimental Museum).
Edward Robertson Gordon as a Captain in the 9th Lancers, to which he transferred in that rank in 1896. The photo dates before 1902 as he does not yet wear his Boer War campaign medals and has the two stars of a Captain on his epaulettes (increased to three by Army reforms of 1902); as as he was in the field from 1899 to 1902 it seems most likely that the photo was taken before then (copyright 9th/12th Lancers Regimental Museum, Accession No 2090-16-42).
The Boer War was named after the itinerant farmers of Dutch origin whose ancestors had occupied coastal south Africa before the British took over from the Dutch in 1806. Seeking new pasturage and dissatisfied with British rule, especially the anti-slavery laws, the Boers trekked north from the 1830s to found Orange Free State and the South African Republic, also known as Transvaal. The immediate cause of the war was the discovery of diamonds at Kimberley near the border of Orange Free State in 1866 and especially of gold in the South African Republic in 1886, both of which drew ‘uitlanders’, foreigners, to the region, most of them British, in numbers that threatened to swamp the local Boer population. The war was fought from the Boer side to protect the sovereignty of the republics, and from the British side to protect the interests of the ‘uitlanders’ and advance those of British speculators and imperialists who could see gain in annexing the Boer states.
The 9th Lancers were present in all three phases of the conflict that ensued - the first in October-December 1899 when the Boers inflicting a series of defeats on the British and besieged Kimberley and other towns, the second in January-September 1901 when the British went on the offensive, resulting in nominal British control of both republics, and the third from then until May 1902 when the Boers conducted a guerrilla war and the British responded with a ‘scorched earth’ policy in which farms were destroyed and their occupants interned. The Boers, organised into ‘commandos’, proved to be formidable opponents, and by the end of the war over half a million British and colonial troops had served in the war. Some 20,000 British and colonial troops and over 6,000 Boers died in the conflict , as well as over 46,000 civilians from disease and starvation in the internment camps - at least 20,000 Africans and 26,000 Boers, many of them women and children.
The Army List for 1906 contains the following summary of Edward Gordon’s Boer War service:
Captain Edward Robertson Gordon of the 9th Lancers during the Boer War, probably taken after 22 September 1900 when he was put in command of D Squadron (Colvin, Lieutenant Colonel F.F. and Gordon, Captain E.R., 1904, Diary of the Ninth Lancers in South Africa 1899-1902. London, Cecil Roy, p. 199).
Colvin and Gordon’s Diary and Abadie’s diary give further details. The ship carrying the squadron to which Gordon was attached, D Squadron, arrived at Durban on 10 October 1899, and the regiment first came under fire on 10 November at Luipers Kop. He was appointed Brigade-Major to Major-General J.M. Babington, the highly regarded commander of the 1st Cavalry Brigade, on 13 December, and continued in that role until 7 February 1900. Abadie recorded that ‘Gordon is now Brigade-Major and is doing excellently well; I hope he gets a brevet for the war - it will make all the difference to him.’ On 16 February he was wounded when the Boers opened a ‘heavy fire’ near Dronfield, and he did not return to the regiment until 11 April. Abadie noted that Gordon was hit in the neck, though not ‘seriously’. On 7 May he was put in charge of the regimental Maxim machine gun, taking it into action on 19 July and then on 31 August near Quaggafontein. He was Mentioned in Despatches in Lord Robert’s Despatch of 4 September 1901 (The London Gazette, 10 September 1901, p. 5929), along with Colvin and several other officers and enlisted men of the regiment (before the introduction of the Military Cross in 1914, a ‘Mention in Despatches’ was the only award available to officers below the rank of Major other than rare awards of the Distinguished Service Order - normally for Majors and above - and the even rarer Victoria Cross; the ‘brevet’ mentioned by Abadie was an unpaid advance in rank given for meritorious service).
From 22 September 1900 until the 9th Lancers left South Africa – the last action for the regiment was on 3 March 1902 – Gordon was in command of D Squadron, one of three squadrons of the regiment. In late December 1901 he temporarily took over command of the regiment, and on 2 January 1902 he led it and the Cape Mounted Rifles on a reconnaissance. For much of this period the regiment formed part of a mobile ‘column’ that swept the countryside and carried out raids. Colvin and Gordon’s diary first mentions the regiment carrying out farm burning on 17 October 1900, and then mentions it frequently until May 1901, as ‘burning’, ‘destruction’ or ‘clearance’, including the burning of grain. On 28 May 1901 the column of which the regiment was part included ‘from 25,000 to 30,000 sheep and nearly 1,000 cattle, besides families.’ A photograph in the diary entitled ‘Farm clearing by “A” Squadron’ shows soldiers overseeing women outside a building tying up their belongings in sheets.
Captain Edward Robertson Gordon and Captain J.V. Forrest (later Colonel, C.B., C.M.G.), the regiment’s medical officer, during the Boer War, probably in 1901 (Colvin, Lieutenant Colonel F.F. and Gordon, Captain E.R., 1904, Diary of the Ninth Lancers in South Africa 1899-1902. London, Cecil Roy, p. 239).
Of many actions in which D Squadron was involved during this period, one singled out in the regimental histories, mentioning his name, was the capture of ‘Lotter’s Commando’ on 5 September 1901, when A and D Squadrons encircled a farm which the commando had occupied. At a cost of 9 men killed and 9 wounded, the Lancers and a squadron of the Cape Mounted Rifles ‘fought it out muzzle to muzzle’ with the Boers, killing 13, wounding 46 and capturing the remaining 74 men, in one of the more successful British actions of this nature in the later part of the war. By this time the cavalry had become highly skilled on the terrain, having learned from the Boers and becoming proficient at travelling long distances for reconnaissance, raids and ambushes.
The regiment covered more than 8,500 miles during the war, not including reconnaissance and patrolling. Altogether it sustained 225 casualties, including six officers and 65 other ranks killed or died of wounds or disease and 15 officers and 115 other ranks wounded, as well losing many horses – including almost a hundred killed or washed overboard during a storm in the passage from India. These casualties represent a considerable part of the regiment, which at one point in September 1901 was down to 15 officers, 150 men and 36 fit horses (they had left Muttra with 16 officers, 475 men and 518 horses).
Officers of the 9th Lancers at Muttra in India in 1899 shortly before deploying to South Africa for the Boer War, including Captain Thomas Edward Gordon (front row, third left) (copyright 9th/12th Lancers Regimental Museum, Accession No 2090-16-37).
Officers of the 9th Lancers at the Modder River, South Africa, in December 1899, including Captain Edward Robertson Gordon (lower left), Major Colvin and Lieutenant Abadie, authors of the diaries cited here. Of this group, Brassey was killed, Ellison died of disease, Cambell, Gordon, Durand, Cavendish, Sadleir-Jackson, Little and Brooke were wounded, and Theobald became a prisoner of war. J. Grenfell Esq’ is likely to be John Pascoe Grenfell, a Lieutenant in the Buckinghamshire Yeomanry and brother of Captain Francis Octavius Grenfell, who won the V.C. with the 9th Lancers during the First World War (copyright 9th/12th Lancers Regimental Museum, Accession No 2090-16-48).
Close-up of photo above showing Captain Thomas Edward Gordon at Muttra in India in 1899 (copyright 9th/12th Lancers Regimental Museum, Accession No 2090-16-37).
Close-up of photo above showing Captain Thomas Edward Gordon at the Modder River in South Africa in December 1899 (copyright 9th/12th Lancers Regimental Museum, Accession No 2090-16-48).
This image and the close-up below shows almost 500 officers present at the Relief of Kimberley. Captain E.R. Gordon is identified in the caption as No 167. Several copies of this photomontage are known to exist (family collection).
This copy of Colvin and Gordon’s Diary is signed by Colvin to his sister. Forrester Farnell Colvin (1860-1936) commanded the 9th Lancers in South Africa from July 1900 to February 1901. He retired as a Lieutenant Colonel and was awarded a C.B.E. following re-employment as a staff officer during the First World War, when one of his jobs was to decide the fate of British cavalry horses in Germany in 1919 (family collection).
Cluden Bank, in Northam, Devon, where Edward lived with his father and two of his sisters after his return from New Zealand in 1910. The house was built in 1909 by his father and named after the ancestral Gordon home near Dumfries in Scotland. It was less than a mile from United Services College at Westward Ho!, where Edward and his two brothers went to school. My grandfather Captain Lawrance Wilfred Gibbins remembered spending time at this house as a boy with his Gordon relatives before and during the First World War.
From The Broad Arrow: the Naval and Military Gazette, 11 December 1914, p. 676.
Edward Gordon was promoted to Major in India on 15 March 1904 and retired from the Army after the regiment returned once again to South Africa in 1906, when he left to run his part of the family’s 11,860 acre sheep station at Hawke’s Bay in New Zealand. He left there in December 1910 to live with his father at Northam in Devon, where he died in 1914. His nephew John Gordon also served as an officer in the 9th Lancers, joining them in Italy in 1945 near the end of the Second World War.
As a result of its extensive Boer War service, the 9th Lancers had considerable campaigning experience among its senior officers and N.C.O.s at the outbreak of the First World War compared to many other regiments in the British Army. On my mother’s side, my grandfather Tom Verrinder and his brother Edgar served in the 9th Lancers during the First World War, and my grandfather told me that he knew men in the regiment who were Boer War veterans. These included both of the commanding officers during his service, Lieutenant Colonels H.M. Durand and R.H.R. Brocklebank, and Brigadier D.J.E. Beale-Brown, commanding officer of the 2nd Cavalry Brigade, all of whom had been fellow-officers of Edward Gordon in South Africa. Durand was wounded alongside Gordon in the action at Dronfield in February 1900. The diarist Lieutenant (later Major) Abadie, who won the D.S.O. in South Africa, died of wounds following the action of the 9th Lancers at Messines on 31 October 1914, when the regiment suffered more officers killed in one day than they had in the entire Boer War.
Acknowledgements
I’m very grateful to Angela Tarnowski, curator of the 9th/12th Royal Lancers Museum in Derby, for allowing me to reproduce the photographs from the regimental collection shown here; to Ian Gill, former curator of the 1st Dragoon Guards Museum in Cardiff, for the photograph of Gordon in the Queen’s Bays; and to my cousin Angus Gordon of Clifton Station, Hawke’s Bay, New Zealand, for providing much information about the Gordon family history.
References
Colvin, Lieutenant Colonel F.F. and Gordon, Captain E.R., 1904, Diary of the Ninth Lancers in South Africa 1899-1902. London, Cecil Roy (available as a Naval and Military Press reprint).
Reynard, Captain Frank H., 1904, The Ninth (Queen’s Royal) Lancers 1715-1903. Edinburgh and London, Blackwell and Sons.
Shepperd, Major E.W., 1939, The Ninth Queen’s Royal Lancers 1715-1936. Aldershot, Gale & Polden (online here).
Skelton, C.O. and J.M. Bullock, 1912, Gordons under Arms: a Biographical Muster Roll of Officers named Gordon in the Navies and Armies of Britain, Europe, America and in the Jacobite Risings. Aberdeen University (online here).
Spies, S.B., 1989, A soldier in South Africa: the experiences of Eustace Abadie, 1899-1902. Houghton, South Africa, the Brenthurst Press.
Whyte, F. and Alteridge, A.H., 1930, A History of the Queen’s Bays (the 2nd Dragoon Guards) 1685-1929. London, Jonathan Cape.