On the night of January 22, 1879, a young colour sergeant moved among his men in the flickering light of a burning hospital, steadying them as wave after wave of Zulu warriors crashed against the makeshift barricades of a remote mission station. Frank Bourne was just twenty-four years old, stood barely five foot three, and carried the nickname “The Kid. ” Yet by dawn, when the Zulus withdrew across the Buffalo River, he had helped hold Rorke’s Drift against an attack that should have overwhelmed its garrison. The story of Rorke’s Drift began eleven days earlier, when Lord Chelmsford’s British force crossed into Zululand to begin a planned invasion.
Two battalions of the 24th Regiment of Foot formed the backbone of the expedition, and B Company, under Colour Sergeant Bourne, had been left behind to guard the supply depot at the Buffalo River crossing. For a soldier eager to prove himself in battle, guard duty felt like a bitter disappointment. Bourne later recalled his frustration at watching his comrades march toward the fighting while his company remained behind. That disappointment dissolved into something far more serious on the afternoon of January 22.
At Isandlwana, a Zulu force of roughly twenty thousand overwhelmed a British camp, annihilating a garrison of thirteen hundred men, including nearly seven hundred soldiers of the 24th. No white soldier on foot survived the disaster. A reserve portion of the Zulu army, flushed with victory, now turned toward the small supply depot at Rorke’s Drift. The station was little more than an old mission building, converted into a hospital and supply store.
Its garrison numbered fewer than 150 British soldiers, including walking wounded and hospital patients. Against them came an estimated four thousand Zulu warriors, attacking late that afternoon and continuing through the night for nearly twelve hours. Bourne had joined the army in 1872, at eighteen, enlisting in the 2nd Battalion of the 24th Regiment rather than face a life as an agricultural labourer in rural Sussex. His pay was six pennies a day, from which three and a half were deducted for mess and washing bills.
Promotion had come quickly. By 1875 he was a corporal, by 1878 a sergeant, and by the time the regiment shipped to South Africa he had risen to colour sergeant of B Company, responsible for roughly one hundred men. He was the youngest colour sergeant in the British Army. Despite his modest stature, Bourne had earned the respect of his men.
He acted as a sort of unpaid secretary to the many soldiers under his command who could not read or write, writing letters home and reading the replies as they arrived from Britain. When the regiment reached South Africa for the Kaffir War against the Xhosa in 1878, and then moved to Natal ahead of the Zulu invasion, Bourne’s steady professionalism followed him company by his side of steady competence. During the defence of Rorke’s Drift, his role was exactly that of a colour sergeant: steadying the line, organising the barricades, and keeping his company disciplined through the chaos of a night attack. Some of the most desperate fighting occurred inside the hospital, where men dug through interior walls, moving room to room while carrying patients to safety as the building burned around them.
When dawn broke on January 23, the Zulus withdrew, leaving over five hundred of their dead and wounded behind. The defenders had lost seventeen men killed. The defence was hailed as a remarkable stand, and eleven Victoria Crosses were awarded to the defenders. Bourne was not among them.
This omission has puzzled and irritated viewers of the 1964 film Zulu, in which the actor Nigel Green gave Bourne a towering, stern presence that made him seem the unmistakable backbone of the defence. Many assumed such a man must have received the highest recognition. But the Victoria Cross was reserved for conspicuous bravery, valour, self-sacrifice, or extreme devotion to duty. No survivor cited Bourne’s actions in those categories.
Doing his job well, even under fire, was not in itself grounds for the medal. According to Bourne, he was offered either the Victoria Cross or a commission as an officer. As the eighth child of a labourer, he recalled that the family exchequer was empty, so he chose the commission. He was one of four defenders at Rorke’s Drift to receive the Distinguished Conduct Medal, Britain’s second-highest military decoration at the time, along with an annuity of ten pounds per year, the same amount awarded to a holder of the Victoria Cross.
The battle itself faded from popular memory, until the film Zulu brought the story back into public consciousness decades later. Bourne himself, meanwhile, remained in the army. In 1880, the 24th became the South Wales Borderers and deployed to India. In 1882 he married Eliza Fincham at St.
Thomas Cathedral in Bombay, and their first son was born the following year. Two more sons and three daughters followed over the coming years, while Bourne served in the Third Anglo-Burmese War, part of a nine-thousand-strong British and Indian army that was ferried up the Irrawaddy River to attack the Burmese capital. That flotilla would later be remembered in Rudyard Kipling’s poem “Mandalay. ”
Now a quartermaster sergeant, Bourne returned with his regiment to Britain, and in 1890 he finally took the commission that had been offered eleven years earlier.
By 1893 he was adjutant at the School of Musketry at Hythe in Kent, not far from his native Sussex. In 1907, after thirty-five years of service, Captain Frank Bourne retired and moved to Beckenham, where he became assistant secretary of the National Miniature Rifle Club, an organisation established by Field Marshal Lord Roberts after the Boer War to train a reserve of skilled marksmen. The time of need arrived sooner than anyone expected. In 1914, with the outbreak of the First World War, the sixty-year-old Bourne tried to re-enlist, but was deemed too old for active service.
His skill and experience, however, were considered too valuable to waste. He was appointed adjutant at the school of musketry in Dublin and promoted lieutenant colonel and during the war trained approximately ten thousand British and Irish marksmen. When peace was restored, he retired for a second time, now holding the Order of the British Empire alongside his Distinguished Conduct Medal, which he had earned decades before. Eliza Bourne died in 1931, and Frank moved in with his eldest daughter Beatrice.
In 1936 he was interviewed by the BBC Radio, when he was eighty-one years old, the surviving defender who had held the line at Rorke’s Drift reflected on the Zulu attack he remembered that night. He expressed surprise that the Zulus had not used their assegais to slit the mealie bags that held up the British barricades, and he spoke of his admiration for the Zulus, noting that if the enemy had known how to use their rifles better, British casualties would have been much higher. He refused to boast of his own conduct that night. Instead, thought of himself as insignificant in that Anglo-Zulu War campaign, but rather he remembered his own B Company men.
He described his men in these terms: that they were moving among them all the time, and not for one moment did they flinch, and their courage and bravery could not be expressed in words. For him, he said, they were an example of his soldiering days. Colour Sergeant Frank Bourne, the last surviving defender of Rorke’s Drift, died on May 9, 1945, aged ninety-one, on the day after the end of the Second World War in Europe. The young colour sergeant of Rorke’s Drift, the five-foot-three soldier known as “The Kid,” had outlived the war that killed the empire’s enemies.
The sixty-year-old Bourne had long since become Lieutenant Colonel Bourne, awarded the OBE and the Distinguished Conduct Medal, and the memory of Rorke’s Drift had come down through time as one of the iconic moments of the Victorian army. Long afterwards, a BBC employee disposed of the 1936 recording, believing the interview had no historic value. The transcript survived, the transcript of the interview, and the transcript that recorded his words, has survived and remains worth reading.
It preserves the testimony of a man who never claimed courage for himself, and who pointed not at his own courage, but at the men of B Company, who held and did not flinch, the men he called his example, the men who stood with him at Rorke’s Drift, under that burning sky, on the night the Zulu reserve came to the Buffalo River and found its defence held.