Edward Woodgate - Military Career

Military Career

Woodgate was born in November 1845 in Belbroughton Worcestershire, the son of Rev Henry Arthur Woodgate, the rector of Belbroughton Holy Trinity Church. He was educated at Radley College and entered the 4th Foot in April 1865. He served in the Abyssinian War, the Ashanti War, and the Anglo-Zulu War.

Woodgate served during the Second Boer War and fought at the Battle of Spion Kop. He commanded a large force sent to capture the strategic hill during a night assault on 23 January. On the following morning he sustained a serious wound that was, in the end, to take his life; a shell splinter struck his head above the right eye. He suffered injury to the brain associated with a shattered orbit. It is documented that while being carried down the hill to hospital on a stretcher, he struggled to rejoin his men and had to be forcibly restrained. As a result of the trauma he lost all recent memory and had no recollection of the war.

Woodgate later fell into a coma and died at Mooi River Natal on 23 March 1900, aged 54. His grave is in the churchyard of St John's Anglican Church just outside Mooi River.

He left a fiancée, Gladys Newbolt.

In addition to a memorial on the Spioenkop battlefield there is also a memorial to him in the Belbroughton Holy Trinity Church yard.