Boer War Memorabilia - Pvt. JRD McKerihen, C Co. RCR, 1900

Great Canadian Heritage Treasure

Souvenir Boer Clip & Cartridge Battlefield Relics- James McKerihen 1900

Orig. clip & casings - Size - assorted
Found - Toronto, ON
Prov - McKerihen Coll
Left to right: .577 Enfield, 2 x .455/577 Martini-Henry, .38 unknown; .38/55 Winchester; 14 mm unknown; 11 mm Mauser clip; 2 x .303 Lee-Metford

Above the personal treasure trove of bullet and battlefield casing relics that James McKerihen brought back from his Boer War adventure in South Africa. Behind each bullet is a story...

1 - .577 Snider- This huge bullet was used in British military issue Snider Enfield rifles in the 1860s, first with a paper wrapper, later with one of brass, until replaced by the Martini-Henry in the 1870s. Perhaps James picked it up from a Boer who was still using this outmoded calibre, or got it as a historic curio from a British soldier pal.

2-3 .450/577 Martini-Henry - These two casing came from .450/577 Martini-Henry rifle, a very large calibre for the single shot rifle above that was the standard issue for the British Army from 1871 till 1888, and was used in its wars against the Zulus. It made one hell of a boom, a huge cloud of smoke, and walloped the shoulder.

The earlier bullet of the same calibre was the famous brass foil wrapped example left remnants of which are found on many Zulu battlefields in South Africa.

The .450 inch calibre was the diameter of the thin end of the shell to match the barrel diameter - the thickness of the famous US Wild West .45 pistol cartridge; the .577 inch calibre was the thick end of the shell which fit the breech.

The powder charge and the bottom of the bullet were sheathed in soft, rolled brass foil. Problems arose when the barrel overheated, after multiple firings, and the cartridges often jammed, or exploded prematurely, because the foil wrapping was too thin to prevent the overheated breech from igniting the powder, and blowing the shell up in your face, just after you loaded it.

So sometimes, while you were fiddling, trying to eject a spent shell with a knife, a Zulu stepped in with a short spear and ended your problems. At Isandlwana, in January 22, 1879, some 23,000 Zulus dispatched some 1300 British troops (including 850 Europeans) many, no doubt, caught with overheated Martini-Henry barrels.

Above part of the 1950s Raymond Stocker Collection: from Isandlwana a spent, grooved Martini-Henry bullet that probably hit soft earth, and hacked up cartridge, as well as a tent grommet, from the site where the British were slaughtered.

Left and right from Rorke's Drift - a famous Victoria Cross battle (Jan 22, 1879) immediately after Isandlwana - another spent Martini-Henry bullet that probably missed its target and hit a rock, and a cartridge that no doubt hit its target in an action where 11 Victoria Crosses were awarded when some 150 British soldiers held off an attacking force of thousands of Zulus, killing some 400.

The two shells in the McKerihen Collection are the next generation of .450/577 Martini-Henry cartridges - introduced in 1885 - that addressed the foil wrapped cartridge problems by replacing the soft brass with a solid drawn, but heavier, casing.

Of these two McKerihen cartridges, one is not back stamped ; the other is marked Eley (for Eley Brothers of England) and .577/450.

Even after the Martini-Henry was replaced, with the Lee-Metford rifle in 1888, as standard issue for the British Army, it stayed in service off the beaten track, for years afterwards with the British forces and others.

Below is Canadian James Diffey left and comrades, during the Boer War, sporting Martini-Henry rifles. Since they were in the Army Service Corps, probably driving wagons, they were not issued the newer Lee-Metford rifles that the infantry was using.

They are also wearing bandoliers that carry single shells only. In action, each cartridge had to be laboriously removed from the single loops in the belt, channeled into the breech, fired, then another got out. In the time it took to do all that, the Boers could load and fire a clip of five Mauser bullets (see below).

Go to James Diffey

During their colonizing period, the Boers had long preferred the large Martini-Henry for its lion, buffalo, and rhino stopping power. During the war, many Boers, who could not get hold of a Mauser, used their old Martini-Henrys. So James McKerihen would have been able to pick up these spent shells after any battle when the Boers were forced to withdraw.

4 .38 Mystery Casing #1 - A short rimmed and belted, .38 calibre, brass foil wrapped - you can see the fold - casing of unknown type, with no decipherable head stamps.

5 .38-55 WRA & Co - A shell marked "WRA & Co.38-55." This .38-55 shell, which has straight sides, was introduced in 1884, as a black powder round, and developed a great reputation as a big game hunting and target shooting calibre.

WRA stands for Winchester Repeating Arms Co. of Bridgeport, CT, and . 38-55 was an original calibre of the famous US Model 1894 Winchester repeating rifle. Possibly this shell came from the rifle of a Boer sniper who had one.

Or it may have come from an 1894 Winchester used by an American supporter. Some 300 Irish-Americans were organized, by Irish-American Col. John Blake, into an Irish Brigade to support the Boers fighting for their freedom. (Though some 28,000 Irishmen were fighting on the opposing British side.)

Most of Blake's men were on the Natal front. Perhaps some Americans were on the Pretoria front resulting in this US cartridge showing up there.

(In those days principled Americans, like Blake, could be found fighting on the side of oppressed peoples of the world. Today Americans can principally be found oppressing the poor peoples of the world to get at their oil reserves, and the billions of dollars worth of oilfield management contracts that people like Vice-President Cheney can divert to companies like Haliburton, where he was CEO, thanks to his political association with George Bush who is pleased - along with his friends in the Coalition of the Willing - to provide the wars that make it all happen. Cheney and Bush must sneer with derision at Benazir Bhutto's husband who is known as Mr. Ten Percent for exploiting Pakistan for his personal benefit when he had political power there - obviously, only an inept piker in their view.

Is it any wonder that polls show that Europeans, the most literate, educated, and informed electorate in history, believe, by a wide margin, that the biggest threat to world peace is not Terrorism, Al Qaeda, Muslims, or Iran and the Bomb, but America and its rapacious and uncontrolled military-industrial war machine. And Canadians are dying - literally in Afghanistan - because Canadian lobbyists are eager to be aboard the same armaments gravy train, as was recently made clear in a Parliamentary Committee Meeting when former Prime Minister Brian Mulroney admitted to taking sacs of hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash from an international armaments dealer for pushing military materiel overseas in the 1990s.

As the arms dealer who gave the Prime Minister the sacks of cash told the Committee, "I have called for a Parliamentary Inquiry because what I did in the 1980s and 90s was not at all unusual in Canada. Why pick on me? It was normal business then and still is... Huge cash payments for arms deals are being made, as we speak, to the same people tied for decades to Prime Minister Mulroney, and his Conservative Government!" (Paraphrase of testimony)

6 Mystery Casing #2 (head stamp right) - A large rimmed, bevel headed, necked (is gently tapered along its entire length), c 14 mm calibre casing marked X and 1895, showing it was manufactured in October 1895. It is probably German (Krupp) or Austrian (Mannlicher) but the manufacturing letters at the bottom are hard to confirm and are possibly J or F or H 8 C.

7 The 11 mm Mauser clip. These casings are all 11 mm at the base and 55 & 57 mm long. All, as well as the clip, are marked DM for Deutsche Waffen & Munitionsfabriken (German Weapons & Ammunition Factories) of Karlsruhe, Germany. By 1899 the 8 mm Mauser was the most up-to-date version. These 11 mm casings were slightly older stock from earlier Mauser weapons that the Boers were still shooting off.

8 Two .303 blunt nosed British bullets, of the kind the British Army was shooting during the Boer War...

Oddly James kept no other British .303 shell casings, beyond these two bullet heads. He only chose exotic rounds liberated from the enemy.

Great Canadian Heritage Treasure

A tiny, but still fabulous memento of the Boer War service of Charlie Adams of the 10th Canadian Field Hospital, Army Medical Corps.

Charlie brought back a single .303 cartridge which, for over 100 years, has been tightly wrapped in a brittle paper wrapper which says "Used by Charlie Adams in the Boer War."

The cartridge is unique for another reason. It was manufactured in Charlie's home town of Montreal, and is head stamped DC by the Dominion Cartridge Co. and marked as a military round.

Being in the hospital corps meant that Charlie, in all probability, did not get to do much, if any, shooting at Boers.

So we're not sure what "used" means... In all likelihood he patched up more Boers than he shot at....

Go to Charlie Adams

.303 Cartridge - Sgt. Charlie Adams, 10th Canadian Field Hospital

Orig. cartridge - Size - 57 mm
Found - Montreal, QC

Dum Dum

Left is one of the Mauser clips that revolutionized the war and which is similar to the one that James McKerihen "liberated" top. He could only find one that had been dropped and inserted some empty shells he found lying around.

The stash of another Boer veteran left shows live shells that he brought back in the same kind of clip. The veteran had his live bullets mounted on a felt covered board.

Left below in a favourite photographic pose of the day, a press of the thumb and five Mauser bullets are loaded at one go...

A controversial shell is at the 3 o'clock position, a soft-nosed bullet (JSP- jacketed soft point) which expanded on impact, creating more damage than a simple hole.

As the explosive charge of powder increased in the late 19th century, lead from fired bullets was increasingly being stripped off by the rifling in the barrel. To combat this fouling, the lead bullets were jacketed with brass. Unfortunately the hardened metal bullet now made a smaller cleaner hole and did less damage to a target than the old soft lead one used to.

So at Dum Dum in Bengal in India, in the early 1890s, a British Army Captain invented the JSP bullet by peeling off the top of the metal jacket, exposing the soft lead. Now when it hit the target the soft bullet immediately flattened, spreading out and doing massive tissue damage instead of just passing through. Military men everywhere were pleased with the British invention. DD now stood not only for Dum Dum but Death and Destruction, which, to their great delight, the JSP bullet had immeasurably increased...

Hunters loved it too; the JSP could mushroom and stop an animal much more quickly. (But the damage was really no greater than the old .450/577 had made.)

But civilians disagreed with the military, and outlawed the JSP for military use almost immediately, with the Hague Convention in 1899, just on the eve of the Boer War.

Boers being hunters first, military men not at all, when the Boer War broke out, had piles of JSP rounds for their hunting needs.

Many of these rounds found their way to the battlefields because Boers were responsible for their own upkeep, in fighting to defend their homeland, and families, unlike the British and colonials who were all paid and supplied with clothes, food, guns, and ammo, by the Imperial government.

Inevitably there were lots of hostile articles about the Boers using "outlawed" Dum Dum bullets which were found on battlefields.

Long after the war, charges and counter-charges flew back and forth about who was using illegal bullets to kill people with...

Great Canadian Heritage Treasure	At the end of the war the Boers had no more 8 mm Mauser rounds or Martini-Henry shells left, so they had to resort to using British rifles and ammo that they managed to capture, or find discarded, at abandoned British camp sites. It was truly amazing how many rifle shells that were left behind because of careless or lazy Tommies, or when they had to abandon a site in a hurry because Boers suddenly appeared in the neighbourhood... The Boers would then hide bullets they found, especially the large ammo caches, in secret locations, until they could procure weapons to fire them off with. Sometimes they never came back... The captured, or found, Lee-Metford .303 rounds that we feature here were kindly provided for photography by Dave Gyles who said he recovered them near Balmoral, RSA. He said they came from a stash that remained unused, and undiscovered near Elephantsfontein, until long after the war was over. The shells are still live and carry the Royal Laboratories, Woolwich, back stamp. These are the shell type from which James McKerihen pulled out the bullet heads for his collection of relics top. Below a classic pose of young Boer commandos that demonstrates - for all men of all nations throughout History - the dogged resolve of men to resist invaders of their homeland. No hint of a smile or surrender; each had probably lost a sister, mother, wife, daughter, or granny in the concentration camps; or more than one. They show their success in being able to liberate British guns and ammo to turn against their attackers. The three men in back carry 1898 Mausers, the two on the right loading them from bandoliers carrying multiple clips of five shells. Given pride of place, up front, are two men with captured British rifles: the man front left carries a first generation British Lee-Metford Mark I rifle, with an 8 shell magazine; his pal on the right is carrying a newer Lee-Metford Mark II with a 10 round magazine. Once the Lee-Metford magazine was shot off, though, each shell had to be loaded singly, which is why one carries a bandolier with single round loops. The other carries his bullets in a bag. In the time they can load one bullet, the two men back right can fire five, loading their rifles, in the same motion, with Mauser clips of five shells from their clip bandoliers.

*.303 Lee-Metford Liberated Live Rounds, 1900*
Orig. rounds - Size - 77 mm Found - by Dave Gyles, RSA (Dave Gyles of Pretoria probably has the best collection of dug relics in South Africa, which he has been fortunate to excavate in his years of enthusiastic and dedicated digging on Boer War sites while serving as a tour guide and doing contract work for the Government of Canada.)

Great Canadian Heritage Treasure

.303 Lee-Metford Battlefield Relics - Spion Kop, Jan. 1900

Orig. dug battlefield relics - Size - 57 mm
Found - Hastings, UK
Dug - Spion Kop, Dec. 1959, by Raymond Stocker, UK

These shells were found in 1959 near the far right monument in the photo below, at the head of the trench in which hundreds of soldiers are buried, including Lt. JW Osborne from Brantford, Ontario, who served with the Scottish Rifles and died there Jan. 24, 1900.

Spion Kop was probably the bloodiest battle the British fought in the Boer War. The casualty figures, for this disastrous British defeat, were highly covered up, but Americans who were there on the Boer side, when they buried the British dead, claimed to have counted many hundreds of dead.

The photos of the carnage were the most publicized of any taken during the war.

Go to Spion Kop & the Osborne Memorial

Great Canadian Heritage Treasure

.303 Lee-Metford Battlefield Relics - Enslin, Belmont, RSA

Orig. cartridges - Size - up to 57 mm
Found - Enslin, & Belmont, RSA

Ms. Susan Botha kindly gave us the crimped shell far left, which she found and shows on the battlefield on her farm at Enslin (Graspan), explaining that the British troops kept powder dry this way for starting fires in wet weather. (The comparison shell is a gift courtesy of Boschbult Farm.)

The two other crimped shells were from a Canadian campsite at the Battle of Belmont location where our tripod legs right dislodged them when we set up for a shot for our Boer War documentary. Right Canadian historian and cinematographer John Goldi CSC, setting up another shot at the Canadian cemetery at Paardeberg.

The three crimped shells date from the opening months of the war when the army of Lord Methuen was moving up the railway on the western front to relieve Kimberley after fighting the Battles of Belmont and Graspan. The shells are very likely crimped by Canadians. The British moved through Belmont quickly, whereas the Canadians spent many weeks camping and training in this area.

Go to Discovering Belmont Historic Sites

Both Belmont shells have the primer removed below right probably so that if you fell down on rocks with it in your pocked, it would not go off in your pants... All are back stamped the same; the example below right is from the shell far right above.

The shell left is a live Lee-Metford round from 1900 showing the primer intact, and not punched in by the firing pin, as seen below. Both shells carry the R Arrow L stamp of the Royal Laboratories, Woolwich, England manufacturing plant.

Great Canadian Heritage Treasure

Battlefield Relics - Magersfontein, RSA

Orig. relics - Size - 60 mm
Found - Magersfontein

A rusting Boer Martini-Henry shell that probably killed a gallant British Highlander at Magersfontein right and turned back a British attack supported by shrapnel shell balls top exploding overhead on Dec. 11, 1899.

Right historian John Goldi on the site of the surprise ambush at dawn, on ground once littered with scores of dead and dying British Highlanders.

A British war memorial sits atop Magersfontein mountain against which the British were advancing in the dark for a surprise ambush at dawn.

In fact the British got the surprise, with the Boers lying in wait in trenches far out from the base of the mountain, in the foreground and right as they appear today. Historian Johann Hattinghe, with his back to the mountain, points in the direction from which the British advanced.

On that morning the whole side of the trench would have been filled with Boer farmers peering through the sights of their Martini-Henry and Mauser rifles. Below, as the scene would have looked from the Boer side, which shows why there was such carnage as the unknowing Tommies approached, close together, on the open plain in front.

Great Canadian Heritage Treasure	A fabulous collection of battlefield shells from the Battle of Hart's River, on Boschbult Farm, in the Western Transvaal, March 31, 1902, all gathered by farmers over the passing decades, as they ploughed the fields. It features mostly Lee-Metford fired .303 British cartridges, with three exceptions: - the large 37 mm Pom-pom shell, probably from a Canadian gun, - a remnant from a large Martini-Henry shell, bottom fired by a daring Boer who charged in close, and - a single unrimmed 8 mm Mauser cartridge top centre, from another Boer who braved the withering fire from the volley of .303s On one end of these bullets are the dead Boer farmers of 1902; on the other end the arms manufacturers, like the Chamberlain Family, who were munitions industrialists whose sons were leading political facilitators in giving their family plants fat contracts in war production. In 2007 bullets like this still litter battlefields around the world. This time the dying are non-white, Muslim men, women, and children. Today the purveyors of death and destruction are the new generation of industrialists that prosper from exporting war - the Cheney and Bush oilfield cartel that seeks to find cheaper oil at a price it can control, in perpetuity; don't ever expect US occupational forces to leave Iraq or Afghanistan in your lifetime... Canadians, like mangy curs yapping at the heels of their Yankee overseers, have their own ravenous war industry lobbyists - like Prime Minister Brian Mulroney - many of whom are raking in tens of millions of dollars in "success" fees as the Conservative Government hands out billions of dollars in sole source military contracts for buying and servicing tanks, planes, and guns, all of which end up killing, you guessed it, the same non-white Muslim men, women, and children targeted by the American war machine... But, a hundred years later, thanks to advancing civilization, the ferocity of the killing has increased...

*Battlefield Relics, Battle of Hart's River, Mar. 31, 1902*
Orig. relics - Size - mostly 57 mm Found - Boschbult Farm, RSA by farmers
Collateral Damage - Then & Now - While some 30,000 Boers (mostly women, children) were killed in the Boer War, in our day, hundreds of thousands of Muslims (women and children again, probably more than men) have been killed by the American led "Coalition of the Willing to do the Killing" in Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon, and Palestine. There is another difference... Then, Boer women and children died in concentration camps through genocidal neglect; today, Muslim women and children are being killed overwhelmingly in their own homes and neighbourhoods, by deliberate and targeted high-precision missiles, bombs, and gunfire. Today you cannot use the excuses of Lord Kitchener's day of accidental negligent homicide. The "Coalition of the Willing to do the Killing'" is using the most sophisticated and most accurate computer controlled and satellite guided killing machinery ever devised by man. Pentagon publicity videos and Discovery Channel programs proudly publicize the pinpoint accuracy with which Judaeo-Christian technology can aim missile delivered bombs, from hundreds of miles away, to within a few feet of the desired target. Every week these high precision murder weapons seek out targets in cars and homes, in Gaza, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Somalia. Let there be no mistake - the high-tech precision gunners and guided missile launchers know exactly who they have in the cross-hairs, and why... Hopefully Muslim men will "learneth their lesson" of the high cost of opposing the will of white Judaeo-Christian Crusaders... If the Boer War taught military men anything it is that targeting the women and children of fighting men offers the best guarantee of final victory. Carpet bombing German women and children in Hamburg and Dresden sealed the victory in Europe in World War II; atom bombs obliterating Japanese women and children at Hiroshima and Nagasaki did the same in the Pacific theatre. It is also why, though the Coalition of the Killing claims to be fighting the Terrorists, Taliban, Al Qaeda, insurgents, whatever, Muslim women and children are being killed in stunningly huge numbers... For all the mock apologies, it is not an accident, because it has brought success before. It is a historical fact, that, in spite of the self-righteous Judaeo-Christian hype about modern military chivalry and increasing morality and civility in the conduct of war, at no time in warfare in the past several hundred years previous to World War II, have "European" military men (German and Allied) killed more civilians, especially women and children, during the conduct of their work... Their policy is continuing in the current war against the Muslims. (In their defence we acknowledge it is true the current victims are not white or Christian peoples.) Hillary Clinton, that heroine of modern American womanhood, said, as part of her run for the US Presidency in 2008, that she was prepared to "obliterate Iran," presumably with atom bombs, as part of her foreign policy initiatives, if need be... Even in the 21st century, a half century after Hitler, American university trained women are willing to consider mass genocide against non-white Muslim men, women, and children, if it would benefit Americans in one way or another at home... And millions more so-called American feminists applauded her... It is a truism that the more educated white elites have become, in the 20th century, the more they talk about morality, and how decently they conduct warfare - compared to their enemies - the greater have been the number of women and children they have killed. It escalated in World War II and it certainly did not end with the death of Hitler... In the Middle East it has never stopped since... Simply put, officers of the British Victorian Army would be appalled at how their successors - modern military officers - have skewed the conduct of war away from confronting professional fighting men, to targeting, instead, directly and indirectly, their women and children... The Boer War taught them that nothing succeeds like success... And lest you think this can't be so, you have the word of Canada's top General, Hillier who loudly barked at a press conference that *"our job (the Canadian Forces) is to be able to kill people"* namely *"the detestable murderers and scumbags"* in Afghanistan. And then killing is, also, much more face-saving than diplomacy - having to talk to people of a colour and religion which you clearly despise...

Great Canadian Heritage Treasure	Genocidal Generals James McKerihen went home in the lull between when the traditional war ended and the guerilla war began, as well as the genocide that was responsible for the wholesale extinction of some 10% of the Boer population under Lord Kitchener's policy to crush the Boers. James knew not, and played no role in, the horrors to come against the civilian population by the British war machine. There was wild opposition, recently, when someone wanted to put up a public plaque to Lord Kitchener near his home town in Ireland. People were outraged that this general, whose deliberate policies were responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of Boer women and children, should be publicly recognized this way in our day. Some would call putting sick Boer women and children on reduced rations "indirect killing." Certainly thousands died of hunger, malnutrition, and starvation, a result of housing, hospital, and rationing policies of an "uncaring" controlling authority. Some might say a malevolent one. Women and children, by far, were the primary victims of the Kitchener phase of the Boer War. And their dying, in overwhelming numbers, finally brought the Boers to surrender to Lord Kitchener's demands. Some 4,000 Boer fighting men had died. The remaining men could not stand to see the statistics on dying women and children climb higher than the 28,000 they were to reach in 1902. (Countless British apologists, then and now, blamed the Boers - women and especially the men - for the deaths. Just as in our day Christian apologists blame Muslim freedom fighters for the deaths of countless thousands of women and children from Coalition bombs and guns.) Certainly, in our day, white military men hate the non-white Muslim men they are fighting with a passion that borders on the psychotic - you only need to read the visceral public pronouncements of Canadian and American generals and their leader George Bush... They make it absolutely clear they will stop at nothing in their power to defeat them... They've all read their Boer War history, and know what it will take... They're certainly up to the task. Unfortunately they have not read their Muslim, or Afghan history. They will ultimately go home in defeat, having writ a page of History as a wretched and sordid as any in the annals of genocidal outrages in modern times. All reflected in the medals on their chests... They are not medals James McKerihen would have wanted to wear, because it is also a war he would not have signed up to fight... As a civilian volunteer he would never have consented to take part in any war where the majority of victims are women and children... who the generals airily dismiss as "collateral damage" in the fight for Freedom and Democracy. Like the overwhelming majority of Canadian civilians today, his Christianity and self-respect would have made him turn away in disgust...

*Lord Kitchener, 1916*
Orig. oil on canvas - Size - 41 x 51 cm Found - Niagara-on-the-Lake, ON Canadian Educators Say Some Genocide is Good for You Educators in schools in the Toronto, Ontario region of Canada have developed a curriculum dealing with genocide that features three main units: Armenians in Turkey in World War I, Jews in World War II, Rwanda in 1994. All of which no one cannot do anything about anymore. But they claim, studying the dead past will prevent such outrages in future... Eh? So why do the educators pointedly ignore the most egregious example of genocide which has been going on here and now, for over a decade, which one could prevent, the targeted deaths of Muslim women and children in the Middle East whose death toll now is in the hundreds of thousands, and mounting daily... But concerned educators and schools have always been stalwarts of the home front, and cheerleaders for fighting the enemy overseas, picked by the special interests and political bosses of the day. Not to mention the private agendas they pack beneath their scholarly cloaks. We can't undermine the work of our Christian generals on the battlefields, now can we? After all, they are making the world safe for Democracy and Civilization in a war in which hundreds of thousands of Muslim women and children are merely collateral damage. And that's too big a word for school children to understand... And besides, that's a small price to pay for making the world safe for white Judaeo-Christian civilization...

Great Canadian Heritage Treasure	James was, like many men who fought in the Boer War, a souvenir junkie from the biggest event in their lives. He collected shells and bullets of all different kinds from the battlefields where he fought, principally at Zand River, and Doordrecht, battles which cleared the way for the triumphant British march into Pretoria. James brought back this Mauser clip and empty casings - from the most famous rifle of the Boer War. The accuracy of the Mauser bullet, against British officers and men, sporting white helmets and shiny swords and medals, caused huge casualties in the opening months of the Boer War. In desperation men painted their swords, bayonets, and white webbing with khaki stain. The Scots Greys even painted their horses. And khaki covers for pith helmets became the norm. The Mauser is distinguishable, from its British .303 counterpart, by the notched or recessed (rimless) base. In combat it was decidedly superior. The Mauser clip was revolutionary, and a great improvement on the British Lee-Metford magazine. During a battle, once a Canadian had emptied the Lee-Metford rifle's magazine, it effectively became a single shot weapon; he then had to load each bullet one at a time. No soldier could carry extra heavy and bulky Lee-Metford box magazines; but a Boer commando easily carried a bandoleer of a dozen or more lightweight Mauser clips. The Boers loaded their rifles with clips of five shells. In the same motion it took a Tommy to load one bullet, a Boer could slip in a clip of five. In firepower one Boer was as effective as five Brits. The advantage was actually far greater. British soldiers were still trained to shoot as a group, with individual accuracy not prized as much as producing a wall of fire against an approaching enemy. The Boers, being hunters by nature, prized sharp shooting as a personal skill from long practice at filling the family larder with wild game. When a Boer shot he meant to hit; when a Tommy shot he hoped to hit...

*Souvenir Mauser Clip & Shells - James McKerihen 1900*
Orig. Mauser clip & casings - Size - 57 mm Found - Toronto, ON Prov - McKerihen Coll

Great Canadian Heritage Treasure	A fine collection of dug relics loaned for photography courtesy of Dave Gyles who collected them from the Surrender Hill historic site. Here, in July, 1900, some 5,000 Boer men, women, and children, surrendered to the British, who collected and burned their Mauser and Martini-Henry rifles and ammunition. Dave explains that the top row features melted shell casings that once looked like the .303 cartridge far left; the next row, melted Mauser bullets; the third row, .455/577 bullets from the Martini-Henry like the example shown right. Below on the exact spot where the Boers are handing over their rifles, Canadian historian John Goldi points out the spot where the fire burned for days leaving a caustic residue that prevented growth of new plants for over 100 years since. In another then and now photo display, Boers stream down the track where John Goldi stands, on the way to the burn site, just behind the camera,while British generals watch the surrender under the Union Jack.

*Boer Relics, Surrender Hill, Fouriesburg, RSA - July, 1900*
Orig. melted bullets - Size - various Dug - Fouriesburg, RSA by Dave Gyles

Boer War Memorabilia - Pvt. JRD McKerihen, C Co. RCR, 1900 - 5