Victoria's Generals

by Steven J Corvi

  Chapter 4

  George Colley

  Ian F W Beckett

  Writing about the two minutes’ silence on Armistice Day in 1928, General Sir Ian Hamilton’s thoughts were not of Gallipoli or of the Western Front but of an incident forty-seven years previously when he had been a young subaltern in the 92nd Highlanders, soon to become 2nd Battalion, The Gordon Highlanders:

  I ought, no doubt, to think only of those who died in the Great War. Yet, when I consciously set myself thinking, one of the first I always think about is Sir George Colley, stretched out, exactly as the effigy of a Knight lies in a cathedral, upon the flattened summit of Majuba … There he lay upon a site which might have been selected by Valkyries for a hero’s grave, midway between the Transvaal and Natal with an eagle’s outlook over both.1

  Widely recognised as one of the most brilliant soldiers of his generation, George Colley had the distinction of passing out first from the Staff College at Camberley in only ten months instead of the usual two years with the largest aggregate of marks (4,274) ever obtained to that point. Moreover, finding the teaching undemanding, he had worked entirely on his own. Acquiring the habit of studying all manner of subjects in the early hours, he was also an accomplished water-colourist, played the flautina and became an authority on South African birds. Subsequently, as Professor of Administration and Law at the Staff College, Camberley, he wrote an influential article, ‘Army’, for the 1875 edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica. An excellent administrator and a writer of persuasive policy memoranda, Colley was considered by Evelyn Wood, ‘the best instructed soldier I met’. Colley’s mentor, Garnet Wolseley, also frequently referred to him as the ablest man he ever knew.2 Yet, Colley’s intellectual pre-eminence was to serve him ill in the field, his controversial defeat at Majuba on 27 February 1881 during the Anglo-Transvaal War (1880–81), which cost him his life, betraying lack of military judgement in his first independent command.

  The third son of the Hon. George Colley, a retired naval commander from an old established Anglo-Irish family, Colley was born in November 1835. After travelling with his parents in Europe, he was educated at Cheam and the Royal Military College at Sandhurst, passing out first and thereby receiving his first commission without purchase in The Queen’s Own Royal Regiment, the 2nd Foot, in May 1852. Regimental service in Ireland was followed by active service on the Cape Frontier, where Colley helped build a settlement for military pensioners being settled on the Kaffraria Frontier, surveyed the Transkei, and, still only 26, acted as a magistrate (administrator) for over 5,000 square miles of newly annexed territory. Colley rejoined his regiment when it was ordered to China for the Third China War in February 1860, being promoted to Captain in June 1860 and witnessing the capture of the Taku (Dagu) forts and the occupation of Peking (Beijing). En route home, he was detained at the Cape by the Governor, Sir George Grey, to resume his former frontier duties. Colley, however, wished to present himself for the Staff College entrance examination and declined a more permanent appointment at the Cape.

  Chronology

  1 November 1835

  George Pomeroy Colley born in Dublin Educated at Cheam School and Royal Military College, Sandhurst

  28 May 1852

  Gazetted Ensign, 2nd Foot

  1854–59

  Service on the Cape Frontier

  11 August 1854

  Promoted Lieutenant

  1860

  Service in China

  12 June 1860

  Purchased Captaincy

  1861

  Service on Cape Frontier

  1862

  Attended Staff College, Camberley

  6 March 1863

  Promoted Brevet Major

  July 1864

  Appointed Brigade Major, Devonport

  July 1871

  Appointed Professor of Military Administration and Law at Staff College

  15 May 1873

  Promoted Brevet Lieutenant Colonel

  17 December 1873

  Joined Wolseley’s Asante Expedition

  19 December 1873

  Appointed Director of Transport in Ashanti

  31 March 1874

  Promoted Brevet Colonel

  14 April 1875

  Appointed Colonial Treasurer, Natal

  12 May 1875

  Promoted Substantive Major

  4 February 1876

  Appointed Military Secretary to the Viceroy

  October 1877

  Appointed Private Secretary to Viceroy

  14 March 1878

  Married Edith Althea Hamilton

  26 May 1879

  Appointed Chief of Staff to Wolseley in Zululand

  24 April 1880

  Promoted Major General and appointed Governor of Natal, High Commissioner for South-eastern Africa, and C in C of Natal and the Transvaal

  8 May 1880

  Assumed additional prefix surname, becoming Pomeroy-Colley

  28 January 1881

  Defeated at Laing’s Nek

  8 February 1881

  Defeated at Ingogo

  27 February 1881

  Killed at Majuba

  Appointed CB, 1874; CMG, 1878; KCSI, 1879

  Passing out of Camberley and having been promoted to a brevet majority in March 1863, Colley spent five years as Brigade Major at Devonport, though this was enlivened by his appointment in 1867 as an examiner in military history and art for Camberley, Sandhurst and the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich. In 1869 Colley was offered the post of head of garrison instruction in England but it was vetoed on the grounds that he was too junior, and he then turned down the offer of military secretary to the C in C, Bombay.3 In July 1871 he was then appointed to the professorship at the Staff College, where he remained until summoned to join Wolseley’s Ashanti (Asante) expedition on the Gold Coast in November 1873. It is not clear when Colley and Wolseley had met previously, but they had clearly done so. Wolseley’s choice of staff and special-service officers was a mixture of men he knew – not least from his earlier Red River expedition in Canada in 1870 – recent graduates of the Staff College, and those who had established some kind of intellectual reputation, such as Frederick Maurice and Henry Brackenbury, respectively instructor in tactics at Sandhurst and professor of military history at Woolwich. Thus, Colley’s position at the Staff College would have been an obvious recommendation. Initially, Wolseley requested Colley’s services to command what might be termed a ‘special-service’ battalion but was compelled to take regular battalions off the normal service roster. Colley then came out as a special-service officer.4

  Placed in charge of the expedition’s faltering transport arrangements immediately after his arrival in December 1873, Colley’s administrative skills helped salvage Wolseley’s need to get his force to the Asante capital of Kumase and back to the coast before the onset of the rains and before disease began to take its toll on his white troops. The problems had largely arisen from difficulties in first recruiting native carriers and then preventing them from deserting. Colley estimated that he needed 8,000 carriers to get the expedition to Kumase when there were only about 6,000 currently available. Part of the shortfall was found by converting the two West India regiments already deployed and an irregular native regiment commanded by Evelyn Wood into carriers. Colley reorganised the carriers into tribal companies and into regimental transport to accompany the troops and local transport to work on the lines of communication. Wolseley implemented a measure passed through local Judicial Assessors’ Court to permit the arrest of those refusing to be conscripted for labour, forcing them to work without pay and making them liable to flogging if they refused to work. Colley also began to raid and burn recalcitrant villages. The measures got the expedition to Kumase and back, though Colley believed it had been a near-run thing with only five days’ supplies to spare.5

  The many newspaper correspondents accompanying the expedition differed in their opinions as to who was responsible for the initially chaotic transport arran
gements, but all testified to the transformation wrought by Colley. Frederick Boyle, of the Daily Telegraph, wrote of Colley’s ‘astonishing activity which conduced so much to the success of the expedition’, while G A Henty, of the Standard, himself a former commissariat officer, wrote that Colley, ‘by his activity, energy, and untiring zeal, excited the admiration of all’. For Winwood Reade, of The Times, Colley was ‘an extraordinary man’. Reade noted that Colley constantly travelled back and forth along the tracks ‘infested by parties of the enemy’ but seemingly bore a charmed life. According to Reade, ‘To Colley it is due that Coomassie was taken when it was.’6 Wolseley’s own final dispatch recorded that Colley’s ‘great talent for organisation soon placed the transport upon a satisfactory footing’.7

  Colley was one of a number of officers who Wolseley offered the governorship of the Gold Coast to at the end of the expedition. Few were keen to remain. Still only a substantive captain, Colley preferred ‘returning to my regiment as a captain till there is more soldiering to do’, though ‘it is pleasant to find that one’s work has been favourably judged by those over me’. He also declined to lecture on the expedition to the Royal United Service Institution on the grounds that he ‘only came when the uphill work was all over’, Evelyn Wood subsequently delivering the lecture instead. Colley wrote to his brother, Henry, that he would be ‘well satisfied’ with the complimentary notices he had received in the press ‘for I went out for fun and had my fun and a pleasant three months trip in a new country and a warm climate at government expense!’.8 In the event, Colley’s reward was the CB and promotion to substantive colonel. He spent the summer of 1874 visiting US Civil War battlefield sites and meeting a number of, mostly Confederate, generals.

  Colley was now a key figure in Wolseley’s ‘Ashanti Ring’, accompanying Wolseley’s mission to Natal in February 1875, which was intended to persuade the colonists to accept inclusion in the proposed South African federation. Wolseley made Colley his Colonial Treasurer. Unexpectedly, however, when required to make a major speech to the Legislative Assembly in support of the bill to alter the Natal constitution on 20 May 1875, Colley’s nerves got the better of him and he lapsed into silence. Wolseley was astonished: ‘It was a curious case of nervousness, attacking a man who has had great experience in lecturing and who is gifted with a thoroughly logical mind and a very clear perception.’ Colley himself wrote that he had not been prepared for the courteous nature of the debate for ‘if they would only have made me angry I think I could have spoken’.9 The bill passed by a narrow margin, Colley then undertaking an extensive tour through the Transvaal, Swaziland and Mozambique.

  Colley next took up an appointment as AQMG at Aldershot, but after barely a month there was offered the influential post of military secretary to the new Viceroy of India, Lord Lytton, in February 1876. He accompanied Lytton to India in March 1876, becoming a leading advocate of the so-called ‘forward policy’ within Lytton’s circle in the period leading to the outbreak of the Second Afghan War in November 1878. By the time the war began, he had become Lytton’s private secretary, having turned down the chance to return to Camberley as commandant. Sir Neville Chamberlain noted that Colley, always present at meetings with Lytton yet always silent, ‘has given the Viceroy the key to the discourse, and is his real military mentor’. Similarly, Wilfred Blunt wrote that Colley’s influence over Lytton was so strong that ‘he had persuaded the Viceroy that between them they could direct the whole detail of the plan of campaign from Simla’. Indeed, Colley’s ‘Memorandum on the Military Aspects of the Central Asian Question’, completed on 7 June 1876 while Colley was on the voyage out to Bombay, has been characterised as ‘the charter of Lytton’s defence policy’.10

  In terms of the possibility of a wider war against Russia, Colley selected the route through Peshawar and Balkh to Tashkent as the best line of offensive operations since Tashkent seemed the real seat of Russian military power in central Asia. With regard to the defence of India, Colley regarded Kabul as the key since it controlled most of the main routes between Afghanistan and India and would also enable eventual offensive operations to be mounted into the Central Asian khanates. By contrast, the C in C in India, General Sir Frederick Haines, was no less an advocate of a ‘forward policy’ than Lytton or Colley, but regarded the route through Kandahar to Herat and Merv as the most suitable. Haines’s judgement was shared by his Quartermaster General, the then Colonel (local Major General) Frederick Roberts, though Roberts also appreciated the military significance of Tashkent. Colley, however, always believed that Herat lay beyond the realistic sphere of operations on logistic grounds, writing to one friend, ‘I am a firm believer in the old military maxim that the difficulty of an operation increases in the ratio of the square of the distance.’ Subsequently, Colley saw little point in retaining Kandahar after the conclusion of the Second Afghan War when Pishin appeared far more useful as a military base.11

  With the more immediate prospect of a war limited to Afghanistan in the autumn of 1878, Haines responded to a request to suggest appropriate measures to secure the Kurram Pass from Thal and to advance on Kandahar from Quetta by additionally recommending a demonstration of force in the Khyber from Peshawar. Winter, however, was approaching and Lytton only wished to exert pressure on the Afghan Amir, Sher Ali, to accept a British mission at Kabul. Consequently, Lytton declined to authorise creating any reserve for the forces being gathered at Quetta, Thal and Peshawar. Solid and steady, Haines never quite grasped that Lytton wished to avoid an occupation of Afghanistan and to make further political points in proving to London that India could sustain operations without recourse to reinforcements from home, and in proving to St Petersburg that no threat to India would draw British forces out of Europe. Colley was to describe one conference as 5 hours of ‘dull, stolid obstinacy such as I think I never witnessed before,’ as Haines continued to argue for what Colley subsequently suggested Haines envisaged as ‘a great campaign on the Oxus and a peerage’.12

  Colley undoubtedly fed Lytton’s unfavourable perception of Haines. Haines’s frequent description of Colley, as ‘the finest theoretical soldier he had ever met’, is capable of more than one interpretation, while Haines also recorded on another occasion that Colley was ‘a greatly overrated man’.13 Haines certainly strongly deprecated Colley being sent in a supposedly private capacity to consult commanders on the Punjab Frontier on ways of dealing with incursions by the Jowaki Afridis in September 1877, seeing this as intervening directly between him and his subordinates, but Lytton angrily responded that he had not appointed Colley simply to compile his ‘household accounts’ and would use his personal staff unreservedly as he saw fit.14 For his services in India, Colley was rewarded with the CMG in 1878 and the KCSI in July 1879, having been judged initially not to have performed sufficient ‘signal’ service for a knighthood when first proposed by Lytton in 1877.15

  Part of Colley’s wider agenda in India had been a complete reorganisation of the Indian army with the abolition of the three existing presidential armies and the substitution of four corps, and also bringing the whole of the North-West Frontier under a single trans-Indus authority wielding military and political power.16 Wolseley was the obvious candidate for the latter if not the supreme military command in India. Colley’s efforts to create an opening for Wolseley, however, were frustrated through the opposition of the army’s C in C, the Duke of Cambridge.17 At least Colley was able to achieve another part of the reform agenda by overseeing the establishment of a military intelligence department in India, meeting Colonel Robert Home of the War Office Intelligence Department while in London in March 1878 to settle a division of geographical responsibilities between the two.18

  As one of Wolseley’s protégés, and in seemingly intriguing to get Wolseley the chief command in India, Colley had fallen foul of Cambridge. The Duke had rejected the notion of Colley for the command at the Cape in 1878 and was equally opposed to Wolseley securing Colley’s services as chief of staff when Wolseley wa
s sent to take over the direction of the Zulu War in May 1879. In the event, through appealing to the Secretary of State for War, Frederick Stanley, Wolseley did secure Colley’s services but only in the rank of Brigadier General rather than Major General as Wolseley wanted. Colley proved invaluable, Wolseley recording that he was ‘so clear-headed & hard-working: he is never idle for a moment & works unremittingly’. Indeed, it has been suggested that Colley was the real architect of the political settlement that Wolseley imposed upon Zululand in that dividing the territory between thirteen compliant chiefs answerable to a British Resident resembled Indian security concepts. The renewal of the Second Afghan War in September 1879, however, saw Colley recalled to India.19 In April 1880, however, Wolseley succeeded in seeing Colley appointed his successor, Colley being promoted to Major General on 24 April and made Governor of Natal, High Commissioner for South-eastern Africa and C in C in Natal and the Transvaal. Though uncertain whether he should do so when matters remained uncertain in India, and being delayed in any case, Colley took up his appointment in June 1880. He hoped, as he wrote to Wolseley, that he could ‘do my master credit’.20 In theory, and for reasons that remain unknown, Colley had assumed an additional prefix surname on 8 May 1880, becoming Sir George Pomeroy Pomeroy-Colley. It would appear, however, that he preferred to remain known as Sir George Colley and no one seems to have referred to him in any other way.21