Major-General Sir George Pomeroy Colley, (1 November 1835 – 27 February 1881) was a British Army officer who became Governor and Commander-in-Chief of Natal and High Commissioner for South Eastern Africa. Colley was killed in action, at the Battle of Majuba Hill.
Early years
He was the third and youngest son of the Hon. George Francis Pomeroy (George Francis Colley from 1830) of Ferney, County Dublin, by his wife, Frances, third daughter of Thomas Trench, dean of Kildare, and was a grandson of John Pomeroy, 4th Viscount Harberton. Raised in Rathangan, County Kildare, he was educated at Cheam, Surrey, where his headmaster, Dr Mayo, described him as "swift to take offence, prompt and vigorous in resenting it".
He was educated at the Royal Military College, Sandhurst, where he was first in general merit and good conduct at the examinations in May 1852, and was appointed at the age of sixteen to an ensigncy without purchase in the 2nd or Queen's foot. His biographer Sir William F. Butler writes: 'George Colley at this time has been described to me by one who remembers him well in his seventeenth year. He was slight and well-proportioned, but with a look of great physical strength. The features possessed the strongly moulded type noticeable in several branches of the Colley race; the brown hair fell upon a forehead already suggesting intellectual power. His chief interests at this time were the artistic and literary pursuits which always held their own, notwithstanding an arduous professional life, until in the stress of the last few years they were necessarily laid aside. On such topics he was, I am told, often full of talk — at other times silent and dreamy. Though finished in manner even as a lad, he himself seems in his boyish years to have suffered from a quite disproportionate sense of shyness.'
Early in 1875 Colley, who had been made a colonel for his services in Ashanti, accompanied Sir Garnet Wolseley on a special mission to Natal, where he temporarily undertook the duties of colonial treasurer, in which capacity he was instrumental in introducing many reforms into the administration of the colony. But the chief feature of this visit to South Africa was a journey that he made into the Transvaal, and thence through Swaziland to the Portuguese settlement at Delagoa Bay, which bore fruit in a valuable report, and a map, which is entered in the 'British Museum Map Catalogue,' 67075.
When Lord Lytton was appointed viceroy of India, early in 1876, he took Colley as his military secretary. This appointment was subsequently exchanged for the higher one of private secretary to the viceroy. It is no secret that in this capacity Colley exercised great influence in the events which led to the occupation of Kabul and the Treaty of Gandamak.
He was still holding the office of private secretary to the viceroy when Sir Garnet Wolseley, on being ordered from Cyprus to Natal, after the disasters in Zululand, asked that Colley might join him, to which Lord Lytton consented. Colley accordingly served as chief of the staff to Wolseley in Zululand and the Transvaal, until the murder of Sir Louis Cavagnari at Kabul, and the outbreak of the second Afghan war caused his recall to India, when he resumed his post of private secretary to the viceroy.
Colley, who had received the distinctions of Companion of the Order of the Bath and Companion of the Order of St Michael and St George, was created Knight Commander of the Order of the Star of India in recognition of his official services in India.
Second Anglo-Afghan War
thumb|Sir George Colley during the [[Second Anglo-Afghan War]]
Colley served nearly all of his military and administrative career in British South Africa, but he played a significant part in the Second Anglo-Afghan War as military secretary and then private secretary to the governor-general of India, Lord Lytton. The war began in November 1878 and ended in May 1879 with the Treaty of Gandamak. After the war, Colley returned to South Africa, became high commissioner for South Eastern Africa in 1880, and died a year later at the Battle of Majuba Hill during the First Boer War.
First Boer War
left|thumb|Sir George Pomeroy Colley at the [[Battle of Majuba Hill]]
Gladstone, the incoming Liberal Prime Minister was convinced that Beaconfieldism had alienated the Boers. To soften the blow of annexation by the British Empire, he resolved to decentralise a form of local government to the Transvaal Boers. This would be administered to them by the Governor-General of the Cape, Sir Bartle Frere, and the new Governor of the Natal, Major-General Sir George Colley. On 24 April 1880, he was appointed to the Natal command, with the rank of major-general, succeeding Sir Garnet Wolseley as governor and commander-in-chief in Natal, and high commissioner for South-eastern Africa. The close of that year found affairs in the Transvaal, which had been annexed since 1877, in a very critical state.
On 'Dingan's Day', 16 December 1880, a Boer republic was proclaimed at Heidelberg, Transvaal. Colley telegraphed London to express doubt that a Boer revolt was unlikely. The Liberal Government was in disarray: while left-leaning MPs called on the cabinet and colonial office to withdraw from the Transvaal and 'end the war', the Queen's Speech indicated that Her Majesty required imperial authority be restored. Yet within the new year, Colley found himself compelled to take immediate measures for the relief of the small garrisons of British troops scattered throughout that territory, and those already besieged. With the small force available, about fifteen hundred men, he at once proceeded to the extreme northern border of Natal, and in the course of January had several conflicts with the Boer forces, the principal being at Battle of Laing's Nek and Ingogo Heights, the former of which was unsuccessful.
On 17 February 1881, Sir Evelyn Wood, who had been appointed second in command, arrived at Newcastle with some additional troops, afterwards returning to Pietermaritzburg, and on 26 February, by a night march, Colley, with part of the troops, occupied, after an arduous climb of eight hours, a height known as Majuba, with a commanding view overlooking the Boer camp. The next morning, Colley was informed Boers were advancing on the British position. He took no action until subordinates impressed upon him the seriousness of the situation. Engaging at range, they picked off the British, Colley being shot dead by a rifle bullet through the forehead. As Edward Mahon, Surgeon, later explained to Sir George's brother Henry:
'I saw him [the General] near the centre of the plateau on the top of the hill. They [the Boers] asked me to identify him, and this I did. He was only wounded once, and that through the top of the skull. Death must have been instantaneous. From the direction of the wound, he must have been facing the Boers when hit.'
He is buried at Mount Prospect Cemetery, Natal. Colley's death persuaded the Imperial government to act, to reassert its authority. The Queen urged the negotiating convention to avoid "troubles" in South Africa. In August the Pretoria session opened, and a British Resident was proposed as a permanent Crown representative in which was described as "an illusionist's trick". The Volksraad would have to ratify the convention's proceedings if the Boer republic was to accept its own freedom reinforcing their own volkisch, nationhood and identity. "The government", said Gladstone, sought to "signalise itself by walking in the plain and simple ways of right and justice, and which desires never to build up an empire except in the happiness of the governed." Lord Salisbury was disgusted by the convention, demanding that the empire's suzerainty was immediately enforced. Colley's defeat and death highlighted the strains and tensions between empire and the governed, local governance and an Imperial Parliament.
Family
Colley married, in 1878, Edith, daughter of Major General H. Meade Hamilton, CB. They had no children but, by his marriage to Elizabeth Wingfield, Sir George's brother Henry FitzGeorge Colley was the father of ten children.