Sir Harry Smith - bungling hero - A.L. Harington (First edition)

Sir Harry Smith, with his military bearing and romantic marriage to the Spanish Juana, so captured the imagination of his contemporaries in South Africa, that the country has named three towns after him as well as a fourth, after Aliwal in India, where he led the British army to victory over the Sikhs. Today Harry Smith is not regarded as great, but in his own time he was extremely important.

Harry Smith spent some fifteen years in South Africa (1829 – 1840; 1847 – 1852) first at the centre of complex and controversial affairs on the eastern frontier (1835 – 1836) and later as an active, confident but eventually harassed and embattled governor and high commissioner (1847 – 1852).

Dr Harington, in this penetrating study of early Victorian society and the British military system, has been entirely concerned with an attempt to see Smith as he was, in the context of his time, and not to laud his dash and vigour, to destroy his credibility or to make fun of his eccentric behaviour.

While he has been mainly taken up with investigating and describing Smith’s behaviour and decisions in order to understand their origins and consequences, “what actually happened” was an end in itself on two occasions. The first of these is the death in May 1835 of Hintsa, chief of the Gcaleka and paramount chief of the entire Xhosa people, an incident that was to haunt him for the rest of his life. The second deals with Smith’s negotiations with the Voortrekker leader Andries Pretorius, when the two met at the Tugela in February 1848.

This biography reveals how Earl Grey, responsible for the colonies in Russell’s cabinet, dominated Sir Harry to such an extent that he failed as high commissioner and had consequently to be recalled.