Acknowledgements

Special thanks and appreciation must first be conveyed to Georgiana Bowen-Colthurst Sutherlin of Spokane, Washington State, USA, for details furnished about her parents, for access to their papers, for trusting me with them and for answering the many questions I put to her. Her co-operation was vital and on no occasion did she attempt to influence my conclusions. Her husband, Douglas Sutherlin, told some wonderful anecdotes about his father-in-law. Dr Francis Sheehy Skeffington, of Cambridge, England, made many constructive comments and suggestions in teasing out the truth. Dr Paul W. Miller, md, bch, bao, dmh, mrcpsych, a consultant psychiatrist in Belfast, gave very generously of his time in reading the manuscript, meeting me to discuss the case and providing a professional opinion of the character and mental condition of Captain Bowen-Colthurst. My thanks to the Irish Military Archives for the use of their resources. Extracts from the Sheehy Skeffington papers, the property of the National Library of Ireland, have been reproduced with the kind permission of the Library and the Sheehy Skeffington family. Thanks also to Mary Feehan, Wendy Logue, Elaine Towns and all at Mercier Press.

Séamus Moriarty extracted much of the information held at the National Library of Ireland, reviewed earlier drafts of the manuscript and made several constructive suggestions. Dr Donal Hall and Kevin Myers were invaluable advisers. Dan Malloy carried out the tedious task of proofreading several versions of the story and offered many useful ideas. My good friend Gerry Murphy very kindly put the maps into a
presentable format and improved the quality of the photographs. The late John Fitzwalter Butler, 29th Lord Dunboyne, was most obliging in furnishing information about his family.

Mention must also be made of the assistance given by: (in Ireland) Charles Callan, John Culleton, Liam Dodd, Jim Doyle, Commandant Ultan P. Edge (Press Officer, 2nd Eastern Brigade), Carol and Cormac Egan, Larry Gittens, Jim Herlihy, Moira Hodge, Jim Hoey, Commandant Victor Laing (Irish Military Archives), Patrick Hugh Lynch, Noel McDonnell (Cathal Brugha Barracks), Dominic McGinley, Bryan MacMahon, Major General P. F. Nowlan, Major General The O’Morchoe, cbe, cb, mbe, Colonel John J. O’Reilly (Executive Officer, 2nd Eastern Brigade), Michael Pegum, Lieutenant Colonel Brian Reade (Officer Commanding 2nd Infantry Battalion and Cathal Brugha Barracks), Neil Richardson, Liam Riordan, Angela Ryan, Richie Ryan, Alan Sheehy-Skeffington, Micheline Sheehy Skeffington, Tricia Sheehy Skeffington, Adam Taylor, Emma Taylor, Aoife Torpey (OPW), the staff of the Gilbert Library, the National Library of Ireland and the Wexford County Library; (in Northern Ireland) Colonel W. M. Campbell, obe (Royal Irish Regiment), Colonel W. R. H. Charley, obe, dl, Richard Doherty, Keith Haines, Captain Jaki Knox, mbe (Royal Ulster Rifles [RUR] Regimental Museum), Tommy McClimonds, Amanda Moreno (Head of Collections, Museums of the Royal Irish Regiment), Terence Nelson (RUR Museum), Deaglán Ó Mocháin, Bobby Rainey, Derek Smyth, obe, David Truesdale and Major Roy Walker, mbe (RUR Association); (in Great Britain) David Ball (Leinster Regiment Association), Colonel David Benest, obe (Defence Academy), Skeena Bowen-Colthurst, James P. Kelleher (Royal Fusiliers Regimental Museum), Major Denis P. Lucy, Professor Thomas McAlinden (Hull University), Captain James McNeish, Alastair Massie (National Army Museum), Hugh Pitfield, Major General Corran Purdon, cbe, mc, cpm, Eileen Sheehy Skeffington, Alex Shooter, Colin Smythe, Mr L. A. Spring (Surrey History Centre) and Tom Tulloch-Marshall; (in Canada) Annette and Matthew Bowen-Colthurst, Michael Bowen-Colthurst, Jean Eiers-Page (Prince Rupert City and Regional Archives), John Gilinsky, Jim Hume (Times Colonist), Rod Link (Editor, Terrace Standard), Joyce Linell and Elida Peers (Sooke Region Museum and Visitor Centre), Ruth Manning and Fern Berg Webber; (in the USA) Edward John ‘E. J.’ Sutherlin; (in France) Eddie Brittain and John Calder; (in Sweden) Martin Hugh Morris.

And finally, to my wife, Maura Ryan, who was wonderfully patient while I spent so much time on this project.

To all of these I am very grateful.

Introduction

Some years ago, when I was writing a history of the 2nd Royal Irish Rifles, I attempted to supply biographical details of the officers who served with that battalion during the Great War. It very soon became clear that one man in particular, Captain John C. Bowen-Colthurst, had had such a varied and controversial life that I would have to omit much of his story to avoid his dominating the narrative. Most of the information I found in the public domain, and especially on the Internet, reduced Captain Bowen-Colthurst to an evil or deranged British officer who murdered, or caused to be killed, at least six people during the 1916 Easter Rising, including Francis Sheehy Skeffington, Thomas Dickson, Patrick McIntyre and J. J. Coade. Conspiracy theories abound, and it is commonly believed that the British government perverted the course of justice, initially by attempting to cover up the murders he committed and then by arranging a verdict of insanity in order to avoid a death sentence.

My own earliest recollection of the name of Captain Bowen-Colthurst dates to a few months after his death, when the Irish broadcaster Telefís Éireann transmitted Insurrection in 1966 as part of their celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the Rising. As a youth of twelve I was highly influenced by this television series, which glorified the heroes of the Irish Volunteers and the Irish Citizen Army. I clearly remember the representation of Bowen-Colthurst as a crazed man summarily shooting an innocent civilian in the street. Being a proud nationalist I had no reason to doubt this negative interpretation, and over the years the portrayal of Bowen-Colthurst scarcely changed. In 1981 the BBC transmitted a television docudrama entitled The Crime of Captain Colthurst, which was by no means a fair or accurate representation of the facts, and implied, without any of the military, political or medical files being available, that there had been a deliberate cover-up by the army and that many of the witnesses at Bowen-Colthurst’s trial had committed perjury. The main sources used, apart from the transcript of the court martial and the report of the Royal Commission of Inquiry, were the accounts left by Francis Sheehy Skeffington’s wife, Hanna, Sir Francis Vane and Monk Gibbon, all of which are far from impartial. In particular, Hanna Sheehy Skeffington was writing propaganda, which was quite understandable at the time, but it means that her account must be approached with some caution in terms of it being an accurate historical source. Despite this, these three sources have become the accepted foundation on which most accounts of Bowen-Colthurst’s actions in Dublin have been based to date. But they are flawed in many ways, as I shall show in the following pages.

As recently as 2011, RTÉ One transmitted a television programme entitled Réabhlóid, about the murders, but failed to provide a balanced report, preferring instead to recycle the earlier, inaccurate accounts. Over time, by comparison, relatively little attention has been focused on the indefensible murder of at least fifteen innocent civilians in North King Street by the 2/6th South Staffordshire Regiment.

Based on the conflicting evidence uncovered during my research, I came to realise that the vilification of Bowen-Colthurst was one of the many myths surrounding the 1916 Rising, one that historians over the years had made little or no effort to critically examine. For example, descriptions in books by Max Caulfield (The Easter Rebellion) and Peter de Rosa (Rebels: The Irish Rising of 1916) of Bowen-Colthurst’s activities are taken almost verbatim from the accounts of Hanna Sheehy Skeffington, Vane and Gibbon. The Wikipedia entry for Francis Sheehy Skeffington (accessed in January 2016) includes remarks such as ‘this event resulted in a Westminster-ordered cover-up’ and ‘a telegram was sent to Sir John Maxwell … ordering the arrest of Bowen-Colthurst, but Maxwell refused to arrest him’.¹

I decided that the case of Captain Bowen-Colthurst deserved deeper and more critical examination than it had received to date. Much new material emerged during my research that was fascinating and previously unknown. Accordingly, I set out to bring the true facts of the matter to the public attention. This book is not an apologia for Bowen-Colthurst’s actions in Dublin; rather it is a presentation of the available evidence and allows the reader to come to his or her own informed conclusions. I freely admit that, at times, the more information I uncovered, the more perplexed I became. He was clearly a man of high intelligence and courage, impulsive and charming, yet flawed, easily influenced, vindictive and eccentric, with a mental weakness when extreme exhaustion or excitement set in. He was also a loving father and proud to be Irish, aspects of his personality that are often overlooked.

In my attempts to gain a balanced view, I was able to trace a grandson of Bowen-Colthurst living in British Columbia, Canada – Michael Bowen-Colthurst. He very kindly put me in touch with Georgiana Sutherlin, a daughter of Captain Bowen-Colthurst by his second marriage. I sent her the material I had accumulated and was not surprised that she considered it all to be very negative. However, after several exchanges of correspondence, I was able to convince her of my genuine interest in presenting a balanced view of her father. Before long I learned that she was planning her first visit to Ireland and we arranged to meet in Belfast during autumn 2004. I was relieved to find that Gee, as she is known, is a very warm person without any airs or graces. She brought some wonderful photographs and documents from the records her father had kept. It was clear from our discussions that Gee is also a victim in this story. She vividly remembers, as a teenager, being taken out of school and placed under police protection while a search went on for an assassin who was targeting her father. Yet she adored her father, though she considered him more like a grandfather because of their age difference. Many of the anecdotes in this book originated in my conversations with her.

As our contact continued, Gee provided me with more photographs and papers, including the autobiographical notes of her mother and recollections of her cousin, Peggy Scott. Later she sent some scrapbooks and miscellaneous documents for eventual donation to the Royal Ulster Rifles Museum. The scrapbooks, about Tibet and South Africa, are predominantly newspaper cuttings and pictures from illustrated magazines, but interspersed with these are occasional gems of personal information. I must point out that Gee emphasised that I should write the story as I see it: ‘Don’t worry about trying to please me – there are many facts that are unpleasant but I came to grips with them many years ago. You are the first author to do any research into the facts. My father was his own worst enemy many times.’²

During the preparation of this book, I was asked to give a lecture on the subject in Dublin in the autumn of 2011. Needless to say, reactions were mixed. After the lecture one person introduced himself as Dr Francis Sheehy Skeffington, a grandson of Frank and Hanna. He, with his wife, Eileen, asked to see my research and, on reading it, later observed: ‘I have to say that your talk and the manuscript have stimulated Eileen and me … to look again and more critically at the history of my Sheehy Skeffington grandparents. Some of the family received wisdom has to be called into question, but I find it takes time to do that and modify long-held views without going over the top and rejecting them entirely.’³ In subsequent correspondence he and I amicably teased out several disputed points, and where agreement could not be reached on a couple of occasions, I have included both versions of events within the narrative.

John Bowen-Colthurst is an important yet relatively unknown figure in the story of the Rising. His actions, their consequences, and the perceived attitude of the British authorities towards the murders, caused widespread disaffection in the country and were partly instrumental in shifting Irish public opinion towards independence. This is his story.

Note regarding Chapter 4

To understand the Great War chapter clearly it is necessary to know how the British Army was organised in 1914. In simple terms, the basic unit was a section; four of these made up a platoon of about fifty men; and there were four platoons in a company (which also included a company headquarters), giving a total strength of roughly 230. Four companies, designated A, B, C and D, jointly formed a battalion – the four companies were divided into platoons, numbered 1 to 16. Bowen-Colthurst was in command of C Company, 2nd Battalion, Royal Irish Rifles. The strength of a battalion was approximately 1,000 men when headquarters, transport, supplies, signallers and cooks are included. There were four battalions in a brigade and three brigades in a division. The usual ranks, from the lowest, were: rifleman (a private); lance corporal; corporal; lance sergeant; sergeant; company sergeant major (CSM, warrant officer, 2nd Class); regimental sergeant major (warrant officer, 1st Class); second lieutenant; lieutenant; captain; major; lieutenant colonel (the commanding officer of a battalion); brigadier general (commanding a brigade); and major general (commanding a division).

Note regarding the forms of names

There is potential for confusion among the various forms of names used for individuals mentioned in the book. I have attempted to reduce this by using the surname Bowen-Colthurst in the Introduction and elsewhere if the name is used in a direct quotation, but shortening it to Colthurst throughout the rest of the narrative. Colthurst is the form generally used in original quoted matter. For Major Sir Francis Fletcher Vane, either Major Francis Vane, or simply Major Vane is the form generally adopted throughout the book. Francis and Hanna Sheehy Skeffington generally, but not always, used the non-hyphenated version of their surname. I have employed this version, which is how Francis signed the 1911 Census.

1 
The Background
and Early Life of
John Bowen-Colthurst

‘Life’, Captain John Bowen-Colthurst will remind you, ‘has a big IF in the middle of it.’ If things had been different, if he had never laid eyes on an Irishman named Francis Sheehy Skeffington, his life would have followed a different course … and with mug of tea in hand he will ignore airliners overhead and cars whizzing by outside, to recall his youth in the days of good Queen Victoria.¹

This story is set in a different era, when Ireland was an integral part of the British Empire with a society divided by religion, culture, class, property, political aspirations and wealth. The old ascendancy class was endangered by an increasingly powerful Irish middle class, which was campaigning to establish Home Rule and a Dublin parliament. This change was feared by the ruling minority, the Protestant landed elite, who could not hope to retain their power under such a regime. The Great Famine of the 1840s was within living memory and agitation for land reform was well under way through the Land League. Into this society, John Colthurst Bowen (known within the family as ‘Jack’) was born at 13 Morrison’s Quay, Cork city, on 12 August 1880 and was baptised in the old Anglican parish church at Aghinagh. He was the eldest son of Robert Walter Travers Bowen, jp, and Georgina de Bellasis Greer, of Oakgrove, Coolalta, Killinardrish, County Cork. The Bowens were descended from Colonel Henry Bowen, a Welsh officer in Oliver Cromwell’s army, who settled in Ireland in the seventeenth century. Robert was the second son of Captain John and Mary Bowen née Honner, of Oakgrove. Georgina was the only daughter of Alfred Greer, jp, of nearby Dripsey House. Her mother, Peggy, was the only daughter of Major John Bowen Colthurst, 97th (The Earl of Ulster’s) Regiment of Foot, Dripsey Castle, Coachford, County Cork. The Bowen family name was changed to Bowen-Colthurst in 1882 under the terms of the will of Georgina’s uncle, Joseph Colthurst, whereby Georgina inherited the estate of Dripsey Castle. The old MacCarthy Castle of Carrigadrohid, destroyed in 1650 by the Cromwellian army, was part of the estate and stands on a rocky island in the river beside the road bridge to Killinardrish.

------ Route taken by Bowen-Colthurst

In this close-knit, religious family, John’s siblings were Mary Beatrice Clothilde ‘Pixie’, born in 1879; Peggy de Billinghurst Frieda, born in 1882; and Robert ‘Robbie’ MacGregor, born in 1883. Because of his height (as an adult he stood at 6 feet 3½ inches), John escaped the usual childhood bullying and from his youth took up the typical sporting pursuits of the privileged landed elite. He had a warm relationship with his father, who died in 1896 at the relatively young age of fifty-six. They would hunt, fish and shoot together as the opportunity arose.

Educated privately, including for a short period in Germany, John went on to attend public school from 1894 in the Army Class at Le Bas House, Haileybury College, Hertfordshire, learning the basics of military life and command. He always planned to pursue a military career, something that was quite common and traditional among the ascendancy class, though more commonly they took up less onerous commissions in the part-time militia battalions rather than actually joining the regular army. In 1898 he entered the Royal Military College, Sandhurst, with the aim of becoming an officer, and passed straight into the middle school, which reduced his time there from eighteen months to one year. His intermediate examination results for December 1898, in which he came second, were:

Subject	Maximum	Achieved
Military administration	300	236
Military law	300	230
Tactics	300	259
Fortification	300	218
Military topography	300	278
Languages – German	300	253
Total	1,800	1,474

Having passed out second, with honours, in June 1899, he was commissioned into the 1st Royal Irish Rifles on his nineteenth birthday, 12 August 1899. This was no mean feat: out of the 113 successful cadets only eight qualified with honours, so he would have had great expectations of an eminent career.

2
War in South Africa

From as far back as the seventeenth century, frequent battles had raged over possession of land in South Africa. By the late nineteenth century, the British were attempting to gain the economic power of the gold mines in the Dutch Boer republics of the Orange Free State and Transvaal for their Empire. They also wanted to take over these areas so they would control a zone ranging the entire length of Africa, from Cairo to the Cape. The first Anglo-Boer clash happened between December 1880 and March 1881, and the Boers, under provocation, subsequently invaded the British areas of Natal and the Cape Province on 10 October 1899, thus initiating the Second Boer War.

At that time, the 1st Royal Irish Rifles were based at Fort William, Calcutta, the largest fortress in British India. Recently arrived Second Lieutenant Bowen-Colthurst was assigned to take 150 men from there to South Africa to reinforce the 2nd Battalion, which had suffered heavy losses at Stormberg in December, when British forces were defeated by the Boers. The draft left on 22 January 1900 for embarkation at Bombay and, on arrival in South Africa, began a short period of training with the restructured 2nd Royal Irish Rifles. The battalion then travelled northward by train to the Orange River, arriving there on 13 February. It was there that Colthurst got his first taste of action in the skirmishing at Bethulie Bridge, before the British forces continued on to Springfontein. By this time the southern part of the Orange Free State was settling down and, on 20 February, the Rifles marched eastwards to Smithfield, where they were assigned to accept surrenders and collect arms from the Boers who had returned to their farms.

Orders were received from headquarters on 28 March to position one company – about 120 men including Colthurst – together with twenty-five men of the mounted infantry at Helvetia for proclamation duty, outlining the terms of surrender to the local population, and to send a further three companies to Dewetsdorp. Before leaving Helvetia, Captain William J. McWhinnie, the officer in charge, heard that there was a small party of Boers in the area of Dewetsdorp and so took the precaution of bringing the small mounted infantry group under Lieutenant Charles R. W. Spedding with him. Having reached Dewetsdorp on 1 April, orders were received by telegram to move immediately to Reddersburg and await further instructions, so the main column headed off early on the morning of 2 April, in heavy rain, which slowed progress.

The move had been ordered because a Boer commander, Commandant Christiaan De Wet, had fought a successful engagement at Sannah’s Post on 31 March, destroying the waterworks that supplied Bloemfontein. Lord Roberts, the British commander-in-chief, was anxious about the two Rifles detachments, especially the one at Dewetsdorp, which was only forty miles south-east of Sannah’s Post, so General Sir William Gatacre, who was in Springfontein, was ordered to move the detachments back towards the line. Unfortunately, Gatacre did not mention anything about De Wet in his telegram, nor did he place much emphasis on the need for haste. Captain McWhinnie therefore knew nothing of his troops’ precarious situation, but had sent the mounted infantry back to Helvetia on 1 April to ensure that those there had received their orders.

The column regrouped in the afternoon and moved off again. After stopping for the night, the Rifles set out on 3 April and marched until 10 a.m., when a cloud of dust was reported to the west. A defensive position was taken up on a horseshoe-shaped ridge called Mostert’s Hoek, about four miles north-east of Reddersburg. The area was too large for the British force to defend indefinitely: the mounted infantry held the western side, and the infantry companies the remainder. Without being detected, De Wet had been shadowing them with a small force of 110 men since the previous day, but had been joined that morning by reinforcements, bringing his numbers up to some 500 men. He saw that the British force was not strong enough to occupy the whole ridge, so immediately gave orders to General De Villiers to advance and seize the western end of the ridge. De Wet then divided his remaining troops into small companies, with orders to occupy small hills that were between 600 and 700 paces to the east, leaving to himself and Commandant Nel the task of seizing a small ridge that lay south-east of the British lines. Before making his attack he sent a note to McWhinnie: ‘Sir, I am here with five hundred men, and am every moment expecting reinforcements with three Krupps, against which you will not be able to hold out. I therefore advise you, in order to prevent bloodshed, to surrender.’¹

The offer was declined, so De Wet immediately began his attack, inflicting several casualties, but his Krupp guns did not arrive until late in the afternoon and only a few shells were fired before darkness set in. McWhinnie sent a dispatch rider eighteen miles west to Bethany, seeking assistance, and divided the whole position into four sections. De Wet now had over 800 men at his disposal and restarted his attack at dawn, his artillery playing havoc with the Rifles’ positions. He was sure that reinforcements would come to the aid of the British, and attempted to force a surrender before that happened. The regimental history of the Royal Irish Rifles recounted:

At 8 a.m. the enemy were firing on the mounted infantry at a range of thirty yards from one of their sentries, and the British could see nothing to fire at in return. Shortly afterwards the western half of the horse-shoe was rushed from the northern side, where the enemy had assembled in large numbers unperceived, and the mounted infantry then capitulated, some time before 9 a.m. The enemy then proceeded to creep up closer and closer to the localities held by H and A Companies, and at the same time the position was also being assaulted from the west and south. D Company’s position was now taken. The enemy’s tactics were to bring a very heavy and accurate fire to bear on the British from a distance, whilst they kept pushing in their spare troops to fifty yards from the hostile infantry … A Company was then captured, and the assault was continued as before, and also from the east.²

The Boers were now descending on the British in large numbers and the defenders were broken up into small groups, so, to avoid the risk of a disaster, McWhinnie decided to surrender. Total casualties were three officers and about twenty men killed, twenty-four men wounded, six officers and 452 men taken prisoner.³

In the overall story of the war, this was a minor incident. General Gatacre arrived too late to help and did not pursue the withdrawing Boers; as a result of this affair and other failures, he was relieved of his command and sent back to Britain. The propaganda machine in Britain made the best of things, as shown by this piece of jingoism from the illustrated weekly magazine Black & White Budget of 21 April: ‘Surrounded by overwhelming odds and exposed to severe tropical storms, our gallant fellows fought like tigers for four-and-twenty hours on end, until their ammunition gave out. When the last cartridge had been fired they were forced to surrender to avoid utter annihilation.’⁴ However, De Wet saw things differently:

I ordered the gunners to keep up a continuous fire with our three Krupps. This they did from half-past five until eleven o’clock, and then the enemy hoisted the white flag. My men and I galloped towards the English … But before we reached them, they again began to shoot, killing Veldtcornet Du Plessis, of Kroonstad. This treacherous act enraged our burghers, who at once commenced to fire with deadly effect. Soon the white flag appeared above almost every stone behind which an Englishman lay, but our men did not at once cease firing. Indeed! I had the greatest difficulty in calming them, and in inducing them to stop, for they were, as may well be imagined, furious at the misuse of the white flag.⁵

Apart from Du Plessis, the Boer losses were only six wounded.

The Earl of Rosslyn, a special correspondent with the Daily Mail who had been captured elsewhere, was part of a group of prisoners that included Colthurst and which was sent to Pretoria:

Officers and men had to trudge for some hours over the veldt, carrying their coats and other articles … Next morning we marched till ten o’clock and stopped at a farmhouse about four miles from Dewetsdorp, where sixteen sheep and plenty of bread were served out. It was interesting to note the difference in Tommy Atkins. From the draggled, morose, bitter, and saddened soldier, he changed at once into the forgetful, cheerful, well-filled man. Such is the effect of a good meal and a dirty pond in which we all bathed.

The officers underwent no such transformation. Poor chaps, I was sorry for them. They had but one topic. They argued and debated for a long time whether they could be blamed for the disaster … We were lucky in having fine weather, as we camped on the veldt every night … We were not allowed to enter Winburg the night of our arrival, but Commandant Grobler drove out and paid me a visit, bringing a bottle of whiskey with him. There was a sudden rush for pannikins, and the forbidden liquor soon disappeared much to the amusement of our kind donor.

Next morning we started early through the town. The officers were taken to the Winburg Hotel for breakfast, where, after a wash and an excellent meal, under the supervision of a German guard, they were told they might go to a store and buy what they wanted before the train left … The officers had a first-class corridor carriage reserved for them, and a compartment adjoining for their servants.⁶

Colthurst spent six weeks in the ‘Bird Cage’, the officers’ prison on the outskirts of Pretoria comprising a large shed of corrugated iron with a mud floor. It stood in the middle of a bare compound surrounded by a triple fence of barbed wire. Inside were lines of small iron beds for about 120 occupants. The treatment of the officers was reasonable during their captivity, the major problems being boredom and the cold at night. As the main British force approached, the prisoners went through a period of extreme anxiety as their captors fed them a diet of misinformation as to their future prospects. An early indication of the vindictive side of Colthurst’s nature manifested itself at that time, as he explained in a letter to his mother:

We were released on the glorious ‘fifth of June’ the day that the British flag floated over the capital of the Transvaal. Previous to our release we had been having a fairly exciting time and had a narrow escape of being carted off to Lydenburg. Having seen our former gaolers, about 50 villainous looking Hollanders, safely inside the barbed wire, with a few loaded rifles outside, I started for the town and saw Lord Roberts triumphal entry on the afternoon of the fifth, the march past was a splendid sight, and many of us would have given a lot to be in it. All officer prisoners of war had a personal interview with Lord Roberts on the 6th while the remainder of my time in Pretoria was spent wandering round the town knocking old Burghers down. I am afraid the Sunday school lessons of my youth were forgotten in the desire for retaliation, which, however, was only partially gratified.⁷

The British initially considered the campaign to be over, but a protracted guerrilla war was pursued by the ‘bitter-enders’. Colthurst was placed on duty protecting the lines of communication from being disrupted. The main Boer unit in the area was under the command of Commandant Danie Theron, whose Scouting Corps gained a reputation for destroying railway bridges and trains during this period. In a letter dated 1 July 1900, Colthurst summarised his impressions of the Boers:

The job we have now on hand is not very exciting but means a good deal of hard work. Captain Spencer and myself with three other officers and 300 men are at Klip River, half way between Johannesburg and Vereeniging. There is a fine bridge here and a pumping station. Ever since we came here we have been hard at work digging trenches, redoubts, etc. … We have a good many Boers in the hills round, about 700 I think, they are however a cowardly lot of devils and content themselves with sniping the pickets occasionally at long range … It is very cold here now, hard frost every night but everyone is in the best of health. I wish Robbie [his brother] would come out and we would start on some farm of 50,000 acres with a private gold mine, the soil is very fertile and would grow anything, but the Boers don’t try to cultivate it. They graze a few cows and a few horses and grow a few mealies or potatoes, a little tobacco, and a tree at each side of the doorway.

In spite of my hatred and contempt of the Boers … I have been trying to pick up the ‘Taal’. I can read Dutch quite easily, but can only speak sufficient for commandeering purposes … When I was captured the whole of my kit was taken by the Boers, or rather all I had with me except the clothes I stood in. I took the lens off the telescope and it, I suppose, is still hidden under a boulder on the field of battle. They got my rifle, field glasses, and revolver, but by judicious commandeering I am gradually replacing them.⁸

Having been promoted to lieutenant on 20 August, Colthurst began home leave and was back in Cork by the end of October. On 7 November 1900 the conservative Cork Constitution reported that he ‘was received with great rejoicings by his tenantry … and the heartiness of his welcome bore ample testimony to the popularity of his family in county Cork, and the good feeling which exists between landlord and tenant on the property which he owns’.

On 7 February 1901 Colthurst left London to rejoin the 1st Royal Irish Rifles in India and arrived in Bombay on 2 March. His twenty-first birthday did not go unnoticed at home – the Cork Constitution of 15 August reported that ‘the tenantry of the Oakgrove and Dripsey Castle estates had bonfires lighted at various points of vantage, and rejoicings at the coming of age of Mr John Bowen-Colthurst were very general … [he] succeeds to estates at Carrigadrohid, Killinardrish, and Dripsey’. The Rifles moved from Calcutta to Fyzabad in the Punjab on 3 February 1902, while Colthurst was sent back to South Africa to collect 149 men. He returned to Bombay with them on 24 March and rejoined his unit in early April. During this time, Colthurst engaged in womanising to some degree, a weakness that continued throughout most of his life, but he turned against alcohol and gambling at an early stage. He also developed an obsessive passion for religion that was to dominate his life.