9th-12th-Lancers - Year 2002 - Page 0083
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| Regiment | 9th/12th Lancers |
|---|---|
| Year | 2002 |
| Transcription |
REGIMENTAL JOURNAL OF THE 9TH/12TH ROYAL LANCERS (PRINCE OF WALES’S) 81 under the command of General Sir Frederick (later Lord) Roberts including the march on Kandahar, until the recent American action, the only successful invasion of that country in modern times. The Regiment, with three Indian regiments, formed a cavalry brigade commanded by Brigadier-General Hugh Gough, grand-nephew of the Field Marshal, and one of two brothers who had won the VC in the Indian Mutiny. The Ninth were repeatedly commended for their services in Roberts’s dispatches and Goughie, then commanding a Squadron, was temporarily in command of the regiment while it was on operational duty around Kabul in December 1879. He was mentioned in dispatches on several occasions, awarded the Afghan medal with three clasps and a bronze decoration for the march on Kandahar and was promoted Brevet-Major. Soon after the war Goughie visited his former subaltern, James Hunter and his wife Jessie, at their Berwickshire home. James’s widowed mother, the formidable Isabella, regarded Goughie with a beady eye and told her four unmarried daughters that on no account were they to marry their brother Jim’s friend as he was so ugly! In reality, she was being ingenuous if not down- right devious. A photograph of Goughie, on his charger, taken in the year he joined the Regiment, depicts a handsome man with fine open features. Isabella’s real objection was that Goughie had no money. Goughie and Maria Jean, the second of the daughters, always known as May, defied her and fell in love. Goughie’s parents were equally opposed to their engagement. After his fine record in the Afghan War, Goughie was in line to command the Regiment in due course and the meagre pay was insufficient to meet the expenses of commanding a smart Cavalry Regiment in late Victorian times. Goughie’s parents would press the attractions of various heiresses on him, pointing out that such a marriage would resolve this financial gap and thus advance his already distinguished career. Goughie, who had faced down Afghans, and the spirited May were not deterred and eventually succeeded in wearing down the forceful opposition of both families. Years later, May told her grand- daughters that Goughie proudly declared that ‘he would rather be in Hell with his May than in Heaven with whatever heiress that his family wanted him to marry’ and the girls saw tears come into her eyes as she recalled his determination. Until tragedy struck they had a very happy marriage. As a refuge for their growing family, three boys and four girls, and as he well knew the strains on their family budget, James Hunter leased Goughie and May his dower house, Belchester, about a half-mile south of the Berwickshire village of Leitholm. James Hunter’s daughter Hy Wilson vividly described the Gough family lifestyle off-duty, which was straight out of the pages of Somerville and Ross’s Irish RM stories: 241s children we loved visiting our cousins the Goughs at Belchester. We were always sure of a warm welcome and lots of fitn... My father used to say that under the Gough occupation a bit of Ireland had been planted in Berwickshire. Horses and ponies roamed the place and frequently entered the house! On one occasion the family descended for breakfast and found a very large pony in the dining-room. An argument then arose as to whether to attempt to jump the animal out of the window or lead it through the house to the front door. (I do not remember which method was adopted). Another time the youngest daughter upset the hen food on the stairs, and rather than waste it all, called the hens in doors to eat it! One of these hens was in the habit of laying eggs in the dining-room fireplace. Can you imagine the reaction of visitors to the scurry, flurry and cackling of a hen flying out of the fireplace in the middle of lunch.” I In 1895, Goughie took over command of the Regiment. Two years later his hunter-chaser Parapluie won the Grand Military Gold Cup, ridden by his fellow-officer, Captain (later General Sir) David Campbell, a successful amateur jockey. Campbell had won the 1896 Grand National on The Soarer, the first of three Ninth Lancers officers to win the race over the neXt forty years. In September 1899, Goughie was on leave in Scotland when he was summoned back to the Regiment, then stationed at Muttra in India, but ordered to sail for South Africa. The Regiment embarked from Bombay in three transports on September 24. On arrival at Durban on October 8, three days before war broke out; the transports were ordered to sail on to Cape Town. The transport WARDHA carrying C Squadron encountered a severe gale between Durban and Cape Town. According to WARDHA’s master the storm was more severe than any he had experienced in more than 30 years at sea. 92 out of l 50 horses and mules, (12 officers’ chargers and 71 troop hors- es) were killed or washed overboard in this horrible disaster, which was to have serious consequences.2 Goughie had arrived in Cape Town by the time A and D Squadrons disembarked between October 14 and 16. The Regiment mustered at Orange River Station in Northern Cape Colony on October 18 and formed part of the 1st Infantry Division commanded by Lieutenant-General Lord Methuen, late Scots Guards. When war became inevitable, the controversial financier and former Prime Minister of the Cape, Cecil Rhodes had ostenta- tiously taken refuge in the diamond town of Kimberley, which, with its garrison, had promptly been besieged by the Boers. The regimental historian Sheppard wrote caustically that Rhodes and his colleagues ‘like a passionate child interned in a dark room were screamingfor release’3 In his book on the Boer War, Thomas Pakenham points out the overwhelming feature of a war in South Africa: ‘The Boers were virtually all mounted infantry. The War Office had made almost no concessions to this ...Against 50,000 Mausers, in the hands of Boer irregulars, they had planned to match... 50,000 Lee-Metfords in the hands of British regulars. That and the weight of British artillery was the thinking...the arithmetic looked very different if one counted feet, not rifles. The Boers had six feet- two for a man, four for a horse -behind every Mauser. Only an eighth of the British force was mounted...it would be mobile war but of a strange, unequal sort. Buller... recognised this... his plan when he reached Cape Town...had been to...give theArmy an entirely new mobility. He had intended to raise large numbers of irregular colonial troops— men who could ride and shoot exactly like the Boers and retrain his Army in the novel principles of war in the veld... Then came disaster: Rhodes stranded at Kimberley, White at Ladysmith. Buller had to drop everything and speed... to the rescue” Sir Redvers Buller had been appointed as C-in-C at the last moment and had only reached Cape Town on October 31. He ordered Methuen to relieve Kimberley in an operation under- taken for political rather than strategic reasons and which was fraught with difficulties from the outset. Of Methuen’s 8,000 men less than 1,000 were mounted. In addition to the Regiment, he had the services of Rimington’s Guides or Tigers (so-called because they wound leopard-skin puggarees round their hats), a small if colourful force of irregular cavalry, about 100 strong, commanded by Major Michael Rimington, (6th Iniskilling Dragoons) and largely made up of English speaking South Africans and loyal Boers, about 30 New South Wales Lancers and two companies of mounted infantry. These units all came under Goughie’s command. The opposing Boer force of about 3,000 men, predominantly mounted infantry, was far more mobile, outnumbering Methuen’s mounted forces by more than 3 to 1. To make matters worse, the remounts to replace the horses lost at sea, described as small colonial horses, only arrived on November 18 and the regimental saddlery which had been brought from India, which was in any case overdue for replace- ment and unsuitable for service, was too large for them. The inevitable result was a serious outbreak of the dreaded cavalry scourge, sore backs. Methuen was disturbed to find that, con- trary to what Buller had told him in Cape Town, there was little |
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