History

On 22nd January 1879 in the far flung reaches of the British Empire, a redcoated sentry stood watch. He wasn’t to know it, but at that very moment just a few miles away, the last of more than 1300 of his comrades, surrounded and outnumbered, were being cut down by an unstoppable enemy. In the hours to come, 4000 warriors of that great Zulu army would appear over the horizon and launch a series of brutal assaults against this small outpost in a fight that has gone down in history as the Battle of Rorke’s Drift.

On a cold April evening in 1812, on the approaches to this formidable fortress, thousands of Britain’s notorious ‘Redcoats’ crept in silence. Their objective? To scale three breaches, hacked into the city’s defences by enormous siege cannon, and to wrestle one of the key strongholds from Napoleon’s forces occupying Spain.