For those that want to find out more about this story, there is a special 'Relief of Ladysmith' anniversary tour happening on 25-27 February 2022. Click here for full details.
A notice appeared in the London Gazette of 5 February 1856 announcing the creation by Queen Victoria of Britain’s premier award for gallantry, for all ranks since the outbreak of the Crimean War in 1854. Its description and criteria for the award were:
“The distinction shall be styled and designated the “Victoria Cross” and shall consist of a Maltese cross of bronze with our Royal Crest in the centre, and underneath which a scroll bearing the inscription “For Valour”; On the reverse of the cross is engraved the date of the act of bravery and the name of the recipient is engraved on the back of the suspender.
The Cross shall only be awarded to those officers or men who have served Us in the presence of the enemy, and shall have then performed some signal act of valour, or devotion to their country”.
Victoria Cross (Wikipedia)
The award was open to all ranks and services. Where the act of bravery was performed by a group of men, officers and other ranks had the privilege of selecting, one of more of their number to receive the honour. This was the case for some of the VCs awarded for...
Remember the days when you actually went to the Post Office? When you actually posted a letter? When the Postmaster knew everyone by name? When the Dundee Post Office was a beautiful old sandstone building located just down from the Royal Hotel, where Stockowners now stands. Before it was demolished and the successor built next the Cop Shop.
Herbert Henry Paris was appointed as a Special Clerk, Telegraph Department, with effect from 19 December 1888. He became Postmaster and Telegraph Officer at Dundee with effect from 01 January 1898 and joined the Dundee Town Guard at the outbreak of the Boer War.
The following is an extract from “The Simple Man” by Gordon Everson:
At the outbreak of the Boer War the Postmaster of Dundee, Natal, was Mr. H.H. Paris, a Liverpudlian of some 33 years of age. Favouring winged collars and ties with knots four inches across, he was tall and a bit of a swell. Monocled, with carefully barbered curly hair, his generous moustache was neatly clipped. Educated at Liverpool College, he trained as a telegraphist in the Liverpool Post Office.
An opportunity arose for a Telegraphist in South Africa and Paris applied for (and obtained) a position at the Durban Post Office. He spent a couple of years in Durban before being invited to take the position of Private Secretary to the Postmaster General of Natal, (based in Pietermaritzburg). His next step took Mr. Paris to Dundee and the position of Postmaster.
Recently, Sarah Welham, convenor of the Friends of the Johannesburg Cemeteries, and I completed an exploratory road trip of the battlefields route between Koppies and Kroonstad, in the northern Free State.
I had previously visited the interesting but somewhat out of the way war cemeteries near the Rhenosterspruit railway bridge and at the Rooiwal railway station, both near the town of Koppies. Here General Christiaan de Wet achieved important victories over three British contingents in June 1900. His victories came at just the right moment to rejuvenate the despondent republican forces whose capital cities of Bloemfontein and Pretoria had recently fallen to the seemingly irresistible British forces.
We also intended to visit the old Kroonstad cemetery, to my knowledge one of only three cemeteries that contains graves of three important South African military events: The South African War; the 1914 Afrikaner Rebellion; and the 1922 Rand Revolt.
Departing Johannesburg our first halt was at the Koppies town cemetery, where we hoped to locate graves of rebels killed during the 1914 Rebellion.
Koppies situated approximately 63 km north-east of Kroonstad was laid out in 1910 on the farm Honingkopjes, Dutch for ‘honey hills’. It was stablished as a private agricultural settlement by General Christiaan De Wet, Minister of Agriculture in the ‘Orangia Unie’ Party Cabinet to provide employment for poor Whites. After the establishment of the Union of South Africa in 1910, this settlement was taken over by the government and further developed. De Wet nevertheless continued to visit the settlement...
Occasionally South African swop shops (pawn shops) have some historic photographic gems on offer, as was the experience just prior to Covid-19 lockdown at one such Cape Town based swop shop. The owner of the shop went scratching when asked for old photographs by the author.
Out came a box with some significant historical images, amongst them four photographs relating to a single South African maritime catastrophe.
1) Catastrophes photographed
Early catastrophes were popular photographic events. World-wide a variety of examples exists of disasters photographically captured - be that the consequences of blizzards, hailstorms, floods, fires, earthquakes, air or shipping disasters. Two immediate examples that come to mind are the San Francisco earthquake (1906) and the Hindenburg air disaster (1937).
A quick search on South African natural catastrophes from before 1920 indicates that no curated collections of such images are in existence. One man-made disaster which was well documented photographically was the Johannesburg dynamite explosion of February 1896. The underlying theme of this article is however that of a natural disaster that was photographed.
Braamfontein Dynamite Explosion (A Johannesburg Album)
Some South African photographic evidence of natural disasters do exist, also in the form of picture postcards, such as the Pretoria hailstorm (November 1913) or the Standerton floods (January 1911).
The remains of the largest fortification built by the British during the Anglo-Boer War (1899-1902) can still to be seen today on Strubenkop in Lynnwood, Pretoria. The site today is a nature reserve managed by the City of Tshwane but apart from the remains of the fort nothing much is left on the hill. It is therefore believed that the reserve was proclaimed to preserve what was left of the building.
The history of the Anglo-Boer War in Pretoria has been quite well documented. It was a war between the two Boer Republics (the Transvaal or Zuid-Afrikaansche Republiek and the Orange Free State) and Great Britain. After the British captured Pretoria on 5 June 1900, they erected fortified posts at strategic position all over South-Africa. The main aim was to protect railway lines and other routes as well as to limit the movement of the Boer commandos. The railway lines were of particular importance as illustrated by the fact that the Boers also guarded them when they were still in control thereof.
Repairing a bridge during the South African War
By January 1901, many blockhouses (small fortifications) had been erected. These were mainly corrugated iron structures (called Rice pattern blockhouses) as these were pre-fabricated and could be built...
Nita Meyer and her husband, Izak, farmed at “Twyfelfontein” near Laffnie’s Drift on the Buffalo River. Her original diary, written in high Dutch and covering hundreds of pages, is held at the Talana Museum archives.
Izak was a burgher of the Utrecht Republiek and a brother of President Lukas Meyer of the Nieuwe Republiek at Vryheid. Nita was the daughter of Doctor Aveling, of Harrismith. They had two children, Marthie and Izzie.
Prior to the outbreak of the war, commando members were mustered and their families banded together for self protection. Sina Uys and her four children, as well as Minnie Van Rooijen and her four children, all came to stay together at “Wydgelegen” with Nita.
The personalities from the Uys family, mentioned below, came from a tragic line of forebears. The patriarch Piet Uys and his son, Dirkie, were killed by the Zulus at Italeni in April 1838. The second generation Piet Uys was killed by Zulus on Hlobane on 28 March 1879 while fighting for the British forces. The third generation Dirkie was one of the first burghers to be killed at Talana on 20 October 1899.
The primary purpose of this article is to introduce the first known catalogue of Anglo-Boer war stereo photographs produced by the American based B.W. Kilburn & Company (Version 1 – as at June 2021 - click here to view).
This article is the second in a series on South African Anglo-Boer war stereo photographs, also referred to as stereoviews, produced by American based entities. The first in the series was on the Anglo-Boer war stereo photographs produced by another American entity, namely Underwood & Underwood (in this article the stereoview is also described in more detail).
“Long Cecil” the big gun built by the de Beers company during the siege of Kimberly (sic). Long Cecil is a single cannon, designed by an American citizen, George Labram. Today the gun is located on the stylobate (facing the Free State) of the Honoured Dead Memorial in Kimberley.
[[{"fid":"11548","view_mode":"media_adaptive","fields":{"format":"media_adaptive","field_file_image_alt_text[und][0][value]":false,"field_file_image_title_text[und][0][value]":"Kilburn number 13783 – The monsters that raised the siege at Kimberley via Carol Hardijzer"},"link_text":null,"type":"media","field_deltas":{"6":{"format":"media_adaptive","field_file_image_alt_text[und][0][value]":false,"field_file_image_title_text[und][0][value]":"Kilburn number 13783 – The monsters that raised the siege at Kimberley...
This article is about William English, (1875-1915), a miner originally from the North-East of England who through hard work became a mining engineer in the gold mines of South Africa. It is based on the website williamenglish.net which includes his journal, poems and additional commentary. Creating the website has been a project for William’s descendants, Hilary Norris and Larry Cunningham.
William was born in Wylam in 1875. If the movement around the pits of the north east which his grandparents, parents and then William himself made during the eighty years from 1815 to 1895 are plotted on relevant maps, it can be seen that the family moved from Wylam and Tow Law in the west, to Whitburn and Blyth in the east; from Coundon in the south to Amble in the north. In other words, they traversed almost the whole of the northern coalfield! William’s family can truly claim to be Northumberland and Durham miners.
He found his own first job as a trapper when he left school at thirteen but after a week: ‘I didn’t like the mine, and wanted to leave, but my father said I had looked for the job myself and would now stay there. Well, that fixed my destiny, but I know I should never have been a miner.’
William later followed in his father Henry’s footsteps and found work in the mines of South Africa. When he arrived in 1897, the original shanty town of some 3000 people that had sprung up around Ferreira’s...
Just prior to the outbreak of the Boer War, the small mining and railway village of Hattingspruit, only a few kilometres north of Dundee, grabbed some reflected limelight. This was due to the incredible physical exertion of 7 000 Zulu workers who walked from the Witwatersrand Goldfields back to their homes in Zululand.
The logistics of this march were organised by John Sydney Marwick. At 24 years old he was a fluent Zulu linguist, and the Johannesburg Agent for the Natal Native Agency, responsible for the recruitment and personal affairs of several thousand Zulu workers employed on the mines. His Zulu nickname was “Muhle”.
John Sydney Marwick
The discovery of diamonds and gold and the subsequent mining operations had revolutionised the country. There were far reaching changes in the social, political and economic life of the country and its inhabitants. A cheap and constant supply of labour was needed and by 1899 100 000 Africans were employed on the gold mines.
Once it was clear that war was going to break out and that the closure of the gold mines was imminent, the question arose as to what would happen to the mine workers Many of the mines shut down and 78 000 workers sought refuge outside the Transvaal.
This week’s news reports about the current spike in the Covid pandemic echo down the ages to 120 years ago. Stories about the measles outbreak in the winter of 1901 in the Potchefstroom concentration camp sound eerily familiar with overcrowded hospitals, exhausted medical staff and a lack of beds and medical equipment – and a very high mortality rate.
The only visible reminder of the tragedy of the Potchefstroom concentration camp is a Garden of Remembrance tucked away in a quiet street in the suburb of Baillie Park. Since 1918 a memorial, known as the women’s monument, is standing sentinel. The inscription on the monument reads:
Gedenksteen ter eere van de 967 kinderen, 117 vrouwen en 57 mannen die omgekomen zyn in de kampen alhier gedurende den Oorlog van 1899-1902.
“Hul nachedachtenis sal voortleven”
Onthuld deur
Mev de Wed Gen JH de la Rey
The monument was erected in memory of the 967 children, 117 women and 57 men who died in the camps in Potchefstroom during the war of 1899-1902. “Their memory will live forever.” The monument was unveiled by Mrs Nonnie de la Rey, the widow of General Koos de la Rey. Click here to read my article on the monument.
The death of each person was a monumental tragedy to their family. Multiplied by 1 141, this became tragedy not to be forgotten. This is how it came about.
Backstory
The Anglo-Boer War (1899-1902) is well documented. Scholars agree that the main reason for the outbreak of the...
