Who connects a pretty little Norfolk village with a bloody battle thousands of miles away in South Africa?

In 1879 during the Anglo-Zulu colonial wars, the British military suffered a catastrophic defeat at The Battle of Isandlwana in what’s now the province of KwaZulu-Natal. Yet that same day, a small garrison of 140 men miraculously held out against 4,000 mighty Zulu warriors during a 12 hour siege known as The Defence of Rorke’s Drift. And a civilian from Norfolk was instrumental in their success.

‘Padre’ George Smith was an army chaplain, son of a shoemaker from Docking. Seeing a group of Zulu fighters approaching on captured British horses, he rushed to Rorke’s Drift to raise the alarm. This imposing giant of a man was a missionary, so not expected to take up arms. Instead he strode tirelessly about the compound hefting haversacks of ammunition, keeping up a constant supply to soldiers at the barricades, tending to the wounded and dying whilst bellowing verses from the Bible at the top of his voice.

Smith is depicted in two Rorke’s Drift paintings and appears, described as a ‘huge cove’ with a fiery red beard in George MacDonald Fraser’s novel Flashman and the Tiger. As a non-combatant, he wasn’t eligible for a Victoria Cross, though 11 were awarded, the largest number won in a single action. But he was given a job for life and all who fought at his side remembered the man they nicknamed ‘Ammunition Smith’.