Natal Mounted Police

[2] The first commandant was Major John George Dartnell (1838-1913) formerly of the 86th (Royal County Down) Regiment of Foot while the first enrolled trooper was Edward Babington of Londonderry in 1874.

[3] Dartnell later described his recruits as the: ...flotsam and jetsam of the colony, and a very rough lot they proved to be, being principally old soldiers and sailors, transport riders, and social failures from home, etc.

[5] In 1877, twenty-five men of the Natal Mounted Police provided the protective escort for Sir Theophilus Shepstone, the Special Commissioner, when he went to Pretoria to issue a proclamation announcing the establishment of British authority over the Transvaal.

[6][7] The first detachment of the NMP under Dartnell returned to Isandlwana on the evening of the battle where they spent the night among the ruins of the camp and the bodies of their colleagues before accompanying Lord Chelmsford's relief column on its advance to Rorke's Drift early the next morning.

When Sir Garnet Wolseley arrived in Durban in July 1879 to supersede Lord Chelmsford as commander of the forces in the Zulu War and as Governor of Natal and the Transvaal and the High Commissioner of Southern Africa the Natal Mounted Police provided his escort during his visit to Zululand in the final days of the War.

When after these Rebellions normal policing duties were resumed, men of the NMP provided an escort for the Empress Eugénie in 1880 when she came to Natal to see where her son, Napoléon the Prince Imperial, had been killed the previous year during the Zulu War.

[8] Clarke was to succeed Dartnell as Chief Commissioner on his retirement in 1903 When in September 1899 war with the Boer Republic looked likely the men of the Natal Police were put on alert and used to watch the borders.

When war was eventually declared in October 1899 the first casualties were a Natal Police picket at De Jager's Drift who were captured by the Boers.

The Imperial Light Horse and Natal Carbineers with a team from the Royal Engineers caught the Boers off-guard and forced them to withdraw and abandon their guns.

Early next morning the Boers shot the horses of the NP forcing them to make their own way back by foot at the same time enduring withering rifle fire.