There, in the twilight, lay a British convoy, stoutly defended by a company of the kiddies and a few Yeomanry, and shelled--as the Kaffir had said--with great precision by two Boer guns. The General thereupon gave the Kaffir a 'fiver' to carry a letter through the Boer lines to the commander of the convoy, telling that officer to hold out manfully, and promising that with the dawn Brabazon and the Imperial Yeomanry would come to his aid.
The Kaffir succeeded in his mission. The convoy was encouraged, and, good as his word, with the daylight came the General, at whose approach the Boers fled incontinently, so that Brabazon, the Yeomanry, and the convoy came in safety and triumph into Thabanchu together.
Ian Standish Monteith Hamilton was born at Corfu in 1853. His father, the late Colonel Christian Monteith Hamilton--then a captain, but who eventually commanded the 92nd Highlanders--was the eldest son of John George Hamilton and of Christina Cameron Monteith, daughter of Henry Monteith of Carstairs, sometime Member of Parliament for Lanarkshire. His mother, the late Maria Corunia Vereker, was daughter of John, third Viscount Gort, by Maria O'Grady, daughter of Viscount Guillamore.[#] The Hamilton family is one of the elder branches of the Scottish Hamiltons, and represents the male line of the Hamiltons of Westport. One of his ancestors on his father's side, a Colonel Hamilton, was for several years an aide-de-camp of the first Duke of Marlborough, and it was therefore something in the nature of a coincidence when Ian Hamilton found the present Duke of Marlborough serving in a similar capacity on his staff. It would not be quite correct to call him a pure Celt, but some notice should be taken by those interested in these questions that his blood is mostly Celtic: both of his grandmothers, Monteith and O'Grady, being of Celtic stock, Scottish and Irish respectively.
When Ian Hamilton was born his father was serving with a detachment of the 92nd Highlanders at Corfu. His mother died in 1856, and for the next ten years, the father being constantly on duty with the regiment, he and his younger brother, Vereker Hamilton, who was born in 1856, lived with their grandparents at Hapton, in the Holy Loch in Argyllshire. Such a childhood on moor and loch in a fine wild country was likely to develop and brace nerve and muscle, and stir the keen blood inherited from many generations of warlike ancestors. He was educated first at Cheam, and as he grew sufficiently old at Wellington College. Here he was very happy, and although he was not especially noted for industry, his success in the examinations at the end of each term excused any neglect in its course. In 1872 he passed the tests for the army, and, according to the system at that time in force, was offered the choice of going to Sandhurst or living for a year abroad to learn a foreign language thoroughly. The cadet chose the latter, and was sent to Germany. Here he had the good luck to make the close friendship of a most distinguished old man. General Dammers was a Hanoverian who had fought against the Prussians at Langesalze, and who, refusing a very high command under the Prussians, lived at Dresden. Although he himself remained aide-de-camp to the ex-King of Hanover, he became the centre of a group of Hanoverian officers who had entered the Saxon service. He was thus in touch with the latest school of military thought, stimulated to its utmost activity by the lessons of the great war which had lately been concluded. From General Dammers, Ian Hamilton learned the German language, military surveying, something of military history, and something doubtless of strategy and the art of war. The year thus passed very profitably. On his return to England, however, the War Office announced that they had changed their minds and that for the future everybody must go through Sandhurst. Such protests as his father, himself an officer, was entitled to make were overruled by the authorities, and Ian Hamilton embarked upon his military career having lost, through no fault of his own, one year of seniority--a year which Fortune had perhaps even then determined to restore to him manifold.