The lonely figure of Thorneycroft, the only man of action on the summit energizing and quickening the defence, stands out prominently in the confusion, gloom, and half lights of Spion Kop.  Buller’s impulsive intervention made him responsible for the position, and he tried to do his best.  If the final act was an error of judgment, there is little doubt that but for Thorneycroft, the Boers would have rushed the plateau on the afternoon of January 24.  He received no effective support from Clery and little from Warren, and was out of touch with Coke and the Colonels.  His uncertainty as to his authority caused him to refrain from exercising it fully until the last moment.  For the pain which the decision to withdraw must have given him, he deserves much sympathy.  But although it was approved of by Buller, who probably felt bound to support his nominee, it was at least premature.  He might reasonably have expected that an effort would be made during the night to relieve him, and might have postponed it for a few hours.  It is unjust to judge a man in the light of eventualities which he could not reasonably be expected to foresee, but subsequent accounts from the Boer side show that the attack would not have been renewed the next morning if the enemy had found the Twin Peaks, for the evacuation of which Buller and not Thorneycroft was responsible, and Spion Kop still occupied.

Not only the inconvenience, but also the danger of suddenly conferred local rank were illustrated on January 24.  Buller, hastily concluding from a garbled message that Crofton was incompetent, asked Warren to put Thorneycroft in charge.  Thorneycroft heard of his appointment orally through an officer who had chanced to be at the signalling station, and the written message which never reached him was, it is said, picked up next day by a Boer!  If the exigencies of war should ever require the sudden promotion of a junior officer to a position of great responsibility, it should not take effect until all concerned are notified.  The defence of Spion Kop was, during the greater part of the day, conducted by a syndicate of officers acting severally.

The curtain had fallen, the drama was over, and the critics took up their pens.  With Thorneycroft’s report on the retirement from Spion Kop began a controversy which lasted for more than two years.  Warren enclosed it in his own report to Buller, with the suggestion that a Court of Enquiry should be held to investigate the circumstances of the unauthorized withdrawal, and in succession each grade of the military hierarchy passed censure on the grades below.  In Buller’s covering despatch of January 31 with which he forwarded to the War Office, through Lord Roberts, Warren’s Spion Kop report, he commented very unfavourably on Warren’s arrangements and disposition of troops; and said that Thorneycroft had “exercised a wise discretion, and that no investigation was necessary”:  while to Warren’s general report on the whole