Quiz answers ... and a few inaccuracies!

As promised, here are the answers to the four quiz questions I set yesterday:

1. 24th Regiment of Foot (2nd Warwickshires); they did not become the South Wales Borderers until two years after the battle.
2. 32 of the 122 defenders were Welsh (26%). Of the rest 49 were English (40%), 16 were Irish (13%), 1 was Scottish (under 1%), and 3 were born outside the British Isles (2.5%). The origins of the remainder (17%) are unknown.
3. One, a VC to Private Robert Jones. Of the other nine VCs, seven went to Englishmen, one to an Irishman, and one to a Swiss. Of the four DCMs awarded, two went to Englishmen, one to a Scot, and one to an Irishman .
4. Colour Sergeant (later Lieutenant Colonel) Frank Bourne, who died on VE Day.

ZULU was and is a great film, but in terms of accuracy it leaves a lot to be desired. For example Sir Evelyn Wood described Lieutenant John Chard as a 'useless officer ... a dull, heavy man, scarcely able to do his regular work'. Sir Garnet Wolseley was also unimpressed, stating that a 'more uninteresting or more stupid-looking fellow I never saw'. Not quite how Stanley Baker portrayed him in the film!

Michael Caine's portrayal of Lieutenant Gonville Bromhead is also not very accurate. He was becoming deaf by the time of the battle (this is sometimes cited as the reason why he was left behind at Rorke's Drift and was not with the rest of his regiment), and his commanding officer – Lieutenant Colonel Henry James Degacher – described him as 'hopeless' even though he seems to have been liked by the men he commanded.

Other inaccuracies include:

• Colour Sergeant Frank Bourne – who is played in the film be veteran actor Nigel Green – was in his early twenties at the time of the battle, and was known by the other soldiers as 'The Boy'
• Private Henry Hook – who is portrayed as a semi-criminal, hard-drinking malingerer – was in truth a teetotaller who was in receipt of Good Conduct pay and who later became a Sergeant-Instructor in 1st Volunteer Battalion, Royal Fusiliers. After his discharge from the army he worked at the British Museum as an Inside Duster and was later promoted to become a Cloakroom Attendant.
• Otto Witt – the Swedish missionary who ran the mission at Rorke's Drift – left just before the battle started because his family lived in an isolated farmhouse about 20 miles away and he wanted to be with them, and not because he was drunk and was a threat to the morale of the defenders.
• Acting Assistant Commissary James Dalton was a very experienced soldier (he had reached the rank of staff sergeant in 1867 and had served with Sir Garnet Wolseley's Red River Expedition in Canada in 1870 before retiring and emigrating to South Africa) was the driving force behind staying and defending Rorke's Drift and not retreating towards Helpmekaar. He pointed out to Chard and Bromhead that the Zulus would easily overtake and wipe out an escorted column of wagons full of hospital patients travelling in open country and moving at walking pace.

None of this detracts from the fact that ZULU is a great film, but as the reporter says at the end of the film THE MAN WHO SHOT LIBERTY VALANCE, 'when the legend becomes fact, print the legend.'