Episode 26 - Ladysmith relieved and Buller makes film history

This week I thought we’d concentrate on the town of Ladysmith in Natal which had been besieged by the Boers for over a hundred days by February 1900. It was also the town from which nearly 13 000 British troops had been unable to escape, hemmed in by a force of 8 000 Boers. You’d imagine that this British force could have broken out, being significantly larger than their besiegers. But the Boers had dominated the battles of the veld in both Natal and to the west, around Kimberley, for sixteen weeks. At first they appeared ghostly, moving across the waves of brown grass on the undulating veld on their horses, disappearing, re-appearing. In most battles up to now, the British hadn’t even seen their enemy. And that was particularly true of the men and women holed up in Ladysmith. They’d endured constant shelling like their colleagues in Kimberley as well as in the far north west at the town of Mafeking. We’ll deal at length with the battles around this town later, but of the three towns, Ladysmith was the worst by far in which to have been caught without a chance of escape.