Baden-Powell's presentation of "The Wolf" to King Edward VII in 1903 ignited renewed interest in the gun, multiple newspapers carrying articles about her origins and construction.
In May of that year, the King deposited the gun in the collection of the museum of the Royal United Services Institution.
Globe, 23rd May 1903
MILITARY MATTERS.
The public were a little puzzled yesterday by a queer looking little gun which, on a still queerer looking gun-carriage, was being escorted by a detachment of the Royal Horse Artillery in review order, from Woolwich to Buckingham Palace. The gun, it appears, has a very interesting history. It was made in Mafeking during the siege, and has been presented to the King by Major-General Baden-Powell. The gun was known as the “Wolf”, after Baden-Powell, whose nickname this was among the people of the North. The carriage was made from a threshing machine.
Hampshire Telegraph, 30th May 1903
MAFEKING’S OWN.
When the Boers invested Mafeking one of the first actions of “B.P.” was to arrange for the manufacture of cannon to aid in the defence. One of these guns, aptly named the “Wolf”, mounted on an extemporised carriage made from agricultural implements, was this week presented to the King by Major-General Baden-Powell. It has since been deposited at the United Services Institution, where it is now on view to the general public.
Luton Times, 5th June 1903
The King and the Mafeking Gun.
“Deposited by His Majesty the King” is the legend inscribed upon the famous Mafeking siege gun now exhibited at the Royal United Services Institution. Rough though its workmanship may be, there is most certainly no present which the King could have received more proudly at the hands of an officer, or have set more deservedly before the eyes of his subjects. “The Wolf” (as the gun is called, after a nickname of General Baden-Powell) constitutes, indeed, in itself a memorial of British grit and resource and competence which should claim honour, and even reverence, as long as its metal endures. Every part of it bears witness to invention born of desperate necessity. Cast as it was during the siege in an old tank to which the necessary draught was supplied by the vacuum brake off a railway carriage, it was mounted on the wheels of a threshing machine. In truth, there is no end to the rough and ready expedients which had to be called into play in its manufacture. Nevertheless, here it is, a practicable gun – a miracle of terrible usefulness, more inspiring to the visitor than the mightiest ordnance ever turned out with all the appurtenances and means of a great arsenal.
Buchan Observer, 9th June 1903
THE MAFEKING SIEGE GUN.
The gun made and used in Mafeking during the siege of that town in the recent South African War, and deposited by the King in the Royal United Services Institution Museum, has had the following description added to it: – “This gun was made in the Railway Workshops in Mafeking during the siege. The core is a steel steam pipe around which were lapped bars of iron, which were hammered and turned into their present condition. The trunnions and breech are castings of brass. For the castings a blast furnace was improvised out of an iron water-tank lined with fire bricks, the draught being forced through the pipe of a vacuum brake off a railway carriage. The shells for the gun were similarly cast, and were loaded with powder, and exploded by a slow match which was ignited by the flare of the discharge. The powder was also manufactured in Mafeking. One occasion the breech blew out, and was repaired and fixed with the stout iron holding-bands which may be seen connecting the breech to the trunnion-block. The gun was made by Mr Coghlan, of the Railway Works, under the supervision of Major Panzera, British South Africa Police, who commanded the Artillery of the defence. It was mounted by Mr Gerrans, the well-known waggon builder in Mafeking, on the wheels of a threshing machine. It was named “The Wolf”, after Baden-Powell, whose nickname this was among the people of the North. Deposited by His Majesty the King”.
Lyttelton Times (Canterbury, NZ), 9th December 1903
BADEN-POWELL’S MAFEKING “WOLF”.
His Majesty has been presented with more than one lion, tiger and elephant; but it is questionable if any natural history specimen ever given to Royalty could claim the same interest at the “Wolf” recently handed over to the King by General Baden-Powell. She is three and a few months old, and was born in the railway foundry of Mafeking.
The occasion of the birth of the “Wolf” seems, says a “Pall Mall” writer, to those who were at it, to be away far back in history now, and the circumstances surrounding the hauling out of the dear old gun are like the dim details of a faded photograph. Yet once in a while through the smoke of the pipe of peace the same details flash out clear and distinct, and one feels that he is back in the cruel sun-glare and the dust. He sees the starving Baralong steal past like a galvanised skeleton, and the Colonel on his house-top, and in fancy he hears once more the crash of the deadly 6-inch shell and the not unmusical ping of the flying Mauser bullet.
As the Londoner may have opportunities of seeing the “Wolf”, it may not be amiss to give her story.
Baden-Powell wanted shells for the obsolete seven-pounders sent him by a generous colonial Government. The food for the guns was as scarce as that for the garrison. The railway engineers declared that the turning out of such shells would be beyond engineering ingenuity with the material at hand. Whereat the Colonel was sad, for without shells the guns were useless. But refugee Conolly was in Mafeking. He had come from Johannesburg, and had the craft of the mechanic at his fingers’ ends. With him was Coghlan, who had mated with him in the Gold Reef City. They were both Irishmen; they did not boast of the Engineering College training of the railway men; the mathematics, formulae, calculations and such were as so much Greek or astronomy to them. Conolly volunteered to turn out the shells. The Colonel smiled at him, and feared that the trials of the siege had played havoc with yet one more mind. But Conolly was serious, and it struck Baden-Powell that stranger things had happened. He commandeered the railway works, and handed them over to the refugees.
With marvellous ingenuity they fashioned a blast furnace. They audaciously essayed to do with steam coal what the engineers believed could only be accomplished with the aid of coke; they did not look for the special moulding sand that their superiors declared to be necessary, but used the sand of the veldt. The shells were turned out in abundance, and not only shells for the seven-pounders, but solid shot for the old ship’s gun that the natives had dug up from the earth of their stad. Then it was that Conolly amused the Colonel by offering to make artillery.
Towards the setting of the sun he one day passed the spot where I sat wondering what the next day’s menu would be like. Over his shoulder was a ten-foot length of four-inch drain pipe. He laid it down while he borrowed one of my few remaining matches wherewith to light his pipe, and as he shouldered his load again he informed me that the drain pipe was the new gun, and hoped he would not be bagged by a sniper while carrying it over the open.
Day after day there was brisk business in that railway workshop. Conolly and Coghlan worked harder than the hardest-working black in the country. They gathered scrap, melted it down, and cast it into rings. Each ring they arranged red-hot over a suitable length cut from the drainpipe, and when they had so shrunk on several thicknesses of rings they placed their growing howitzer in the lathe and rounded her off. Then they stuck on a chase and drilled a vent, arranged trunnions, induced the local blacksmith [Gerrans] to make the strangest gun-carriage ever seen, and handed the weapon over to the commanding officer.
So that future generations might know her, her founders stamped her base-plate with the words, “The Wolf. Siege of Mafeking”.
Panzera brought her out on the veldt to try her. Some of us went with him. He loaded her up and attached a piece of time fuse. Then he yelled to us to bolt, as he couldn’t tell what she might do. We bolted, all but the photographer, who, in his nervousness, took cover behind his tripod and camera. All went well with the “Wolf” until she was given too big a feed of powder, which made her buck and loosen her breech. But with a new one she got to work again, and did better work than any of the battery of “sevens” in Mafeking.
Now she is among the King’s curiosities. Who would have expected it who saw her growing? Escorted to the Palace, too, by a battery of the real Royal Horse Artillery, in all their gorgeous kit – their red-bagged busbies and gold-laced jackets and gun-boots! The procession must have savoured of the strange, and probably the Brodrick-baiter thought the old cannon was the kind of thing he intended to arm the “right of the line” with. But ratty though she must have seemed, and foreign-looking and insignificant, she will always be kindly remembered by those who held the outpost in that hammered hamlet far out on the veldt.
Aberdeen Press, 11th August 1904
The release of the convict Witton [Breaker Morant’s co-defendant] calls to mind various incidents of the Boer war and what has become of some of the most interesting relics of it.
The “Wolf” gun cast by the people of Mafeking and used by them with such success in defending their town now rests in London in the United Service Museum, to which it was presented by the King. It is wonderful that such a weapon should have proved of such great use as it did. A muzzle-loader, and a smooth bore at that, it has nothing beyond the most elementary description of sights. The projectiles made for it were round, with a long bolt sticking out of them, on which was screwed pieces of wood that filled tightly the bore of the gun and served as wads or gas checks. The gas checks acted too efficiently on one occasion, and as the breech of the gun offered less resistance to the explosion than the shell and wad, the end of the gun blew off. Nothing daunted, the Mafeking artificers bound it on again with bands.
A near neighbour of the “Wolf” in the Museum is one of the wheels of Colonel Long’s battery that got cut up at the Tugela. In the rim and spokes of the wheel there are 16 bullet holes.
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