Siege of Mafeking: Baden-Powell's Fake Minefields and Bicycle Cadets

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Before the Second Boer War broke out in 1899, Lord Wolseley sent Colonel Robert Baden-Powell to raise two regiments of mounted rifles as a mobile deterrent on the frontier. Politicians afraid of provoking the Boers denied him artillery and horses, and his secretly recruited men were mostly untrained civilians. Facing Boer commandos of mounted marksmen armed with Mauser rifles, he dug in at Mafeking, a border railway town on the line between Bulawayo and Kimberley with large stockpiles of supplies. When war came in October 1899 the Boers cut the rail and telegraph lines, and about 2,000 defenders faced a besieging force that peaked at roughly 8,000.

The siege lasted 217 days. On May 12, 1900, Field Cornet Sarel Eloff led 240 men through a gap between two forts, set huts on fire, took the police barracks and telephoned Baden-Powell to gloat. African police closed in behind the raiders and Major Alec Godley's squadrons cut them into isolated groups, while the main Boer army failed to advance, and Eloff surrendered by nightfall. A 2,000-man relief column arrived on May 17. London's celebrations coined the verb to maffick, but army commanders judged the siege a waste of resources, and in 1908 Baden-Powell published Scouting for Boys.

• Soldiers pantomimed stepping over barbed wire that did not exist, and buried empty boxes in view of spies as fake landmines.
• A homemade searchlight of an acetylene lamp in a biscuit tin was carried around the six-mile perimeter each night.
• Baden-Powell negotiated Sunday truces for cricket and plays, and told General Snyman his side was 200 days not out.
• Siege banknotes were signed by the local bank manager, and a stamp bearing Baden-Powell's face replaced Queen Victoria's.
• Lord Edward Cecil organized boys aged 12 to 15 into a cadet corps that carried messages on bicycles under fire.