The Imperial Yeomanry was a mounted infantry formation of the British Army which served in the Second Boer War. Raised on 2 January 1900, the formation was initially recruited from the British middle class, but subsequent contingents were significantly more working class in their composition. The British Army's existing yeomanry regiments contributed only a small proportion of the total Imperial Yeomanry establishment. The formation was officially disbanded in 1908, with individual Yeomanry regiments incorporated into the new Territorial Force.
Background The Dutch Cape Colony was established in modern-day South Africa in the second half of the 17th century by the Dutch East India Company. During the Napoleonic Wars when the Batavian Republic was allied with Napoleon it was invaded in 1806 by the United Kingdom and formally transferred in the Anglo-Dutch Treaty of 1814. Unhappy with the subsequent British governance, the Dutch settlers, known now as the Boers, established their own territories, the Orange Free State and the Transvaal. The two states were recognised by the British in 1881, following Boer victory in the First Boer War. The discovery of gold in the Transvaal in 1886 led to a gold rush, and the treatment of the prospectors by the Boers resulted in greater British government involvement, a revival of friction between the British and Boers and, in October 1899, the outbreak of the Second Boer War. Although the Boers were predominantly farmers and were heavily outnumbered by the regular forces of the British Army, they organised themselves into highly mobile mounted columns called commandoes and fought at long range with accurate rifle fire. Their tactics proved to be highly effective against the lumbering British forces, and in one week in December 1899, known as Black Week, they inflicted three significant defeats on the British. It soon became apparent that the British mounted capability – comprising small contingents of regular infantry on horseback and insufficiently supplied, ill-suited cavalry – needed to be reinforced. The basis for just such reinforcement had been in existence since 1794 in the form of the volunteer Yeomanry Cavalry. Already, in October and November 1899, Lieutenant-Colonel A. G. Lucas, the yeomanry representative in the War Office and an officer of the Loyal Suffolk Hussars, had proposed this force as a source of reinforcement. His proposals were initially declined, but the request by General Redvers Buller, Commander-in-Chief of the British forces in South Africa, for mounted infantry after his defeat in the Battle of Colenso on 15 December 1899 prompted a rethink. The domestic yeomanry was, however, a small home defence force, only some 10,000 strong, steeped in a cavalry tradition and restricted by statute to service only in the United Kingdom, making it in itself unsuitable for service in South Africa.
Creation On 18 December, Hugh Lowther, 5th Earl of Lonsdale and Charles Cavendish, 3rd Baron Chesham, who both commanded yeomanry regiments, offered to recruit 2,300 volunteers from the domestic yeomanry for service in South Africa. Although Lord Wolseley, Commander-in-Chief of the Forces opposed it, George Wyndham, Under-Secretary of State for War and himself a yeoman, established an imperial yeoman committee with Chesham and two other yeomanry commanders. The result, announced on 24 December, was the Imperial Yeomanry, which was duly established on 2 January 1900. By the end of the war, just under 35,000 men were recruited in three separate contingents. Its structure, companies and battalions rather than the squadrons and regiments of the domestic yeomanry, reflected its role as mounted infantry. The existing yeomanry was invited to provide volunteers for the new force, thus forming a relatively trained nucleus on which it was built. It was, however, a distinct body in its own right, separate from the home force, and the domestic yeomanry provided only around 18 per cent of the first contingent of over 10,000 men. Volunteers also came from the yeomanry's infantry counterpart, the Volunteer Force, but the majority were newly recruited from the yeomanry's traditional demographics of the middle class and the farming community, although some 30 per cent were working class. The first contingent recruits were able to build on the experience many of them already had with horsemanship and firearms courtesy of two or three months drilling in domestic yeomanry regiments before they were shipped to South Africa.
Operations in the Second Boer War
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