During the South African War of 1899-1902 blockhouses formed an essential part of British military strategy against Dutch forces. Initially these were fairly substantial and were used to guard key military points, but once the war moved into its final stages, they were used, together with barbed wire, as a means of limiting the movement of Republican commandos. All in all, some 8000 blockhouses were built over a period of two years, and although most were eventually dismantled, a number still remain in silent testimony of a bitter and foolish war.
When war broke out in October 1899 the British army was faced with the problem of engaging an enemy in the southern African interior with lines of communication stretching some 800-1200 km. The nearest available ports were Cape Town, Port Elizabeth and East London, and the only rapid means of reaching the theatre of war available to them was the Cape’s newly-developed railway system whose lines had only reached Colesberg in 1883, Kimberley in 1885, and Mafeking in 1894. The shorter route from Durban had been cut off early on in the war by the Republican invasion of Natal, and in order to limit the threat of Republican attacks upon the railway infrastructure further south, the British began to build a series of blockhouses to guard key railway points and bridges.
At first the men on sentry duty lived in either army tents or in corrugated iron sheds provided by the railways. However these structures offered little protection from...
