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Boer War Page 91tt |
Rare Boer War Discoveries
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Below are some of the key items the Canadian Boer War Museum has added to its collections
in its ongoing efforts to preserve important Canadian heritage memorabilia from this period. |
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Great Canadian Heritage Discoveries
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Canadian Boer War Memorial Postcards 1903-1910
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| Brantford, ON: A hundred years of sunsets have fallen on the Boer War memorial at Brantford, Ontario.
After the war this small town had three local sons to memorialize. The statue, which the populace erected in their memory, in 1903, featured three large bronze plaques with relief images on three sides, showing the battles in which each man died.
He was only 22 when he died at Leliefontein, where Canada won three of its four Boer War Victoria Cross medals. It is trivial to say Norman died heroically; everyone in Brantford knew it without saying. But the British knew it too, and they were saying it, like General Smith-Dorrien, the commanding officer at Leliefontein. Had Norman lived, he also would have won the Victoria Cross. But, during the Boer War, the rules said you had to live in order to be nominated and win the VC. The rule was changed afterwards, because of the injustice to brave men like Norman, but it was too late for him. It would be up to his townsfolk to honour his sacrifice. He lies buried in Belfast, South Africa among the other Canadian dead from Leliefontein. JW Osborne (inset right), like many Canadians, fought in a British unit. He had the ill fortune to be present at one of the British Army's worst defeats in history, Jan. 24, 1900, on top of a mountain called Spion Kop. Today he lies buried in the mass grave - over the original trench lines - among hundreds of his British comrades of the Scottish Rifles, at whose side he fought and died. His name is on the far memorial pillar. The third man, William Sherrit, died at Boschbult Farm - Canada's second most costly battle of the Boer War - on Mar. 31, 1902, and was originally buried, that night, with seven other Canadians, on the spot where historian John Goldi, right, is standing. |
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Great Canadian Heritage Treasure
Norman Builder (left) used to walk along the banks of the Grand River here, on late summer evenings, just in front of the armouries where he trained with the local Militia unit.
These two cards show why cheap colour printing transformed the postcard trade in popular views, in Canada, in the first decade after 1900.
One of them could easily have written the card right, (also third down on the left, below) just before going to South Africa. It was sent by a keen hunter from Jerseyville, Ontario, in April, 1912, to Master Morley Baker, at Windham Centre, Ontario. He posted it the morning the Titanic sank with the loss of 1500 lives.
Roll overs to read letters more clearly.|
Quebec Boer War Memorials
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Nova Scotia Boer War Memorials
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| The Boer War saw the first widespread setting up of "memorials to the fallen" across Canada. The odd memorial had been set up, before, to commemorate the fallen in the Fenian Raids of the 1860s. A few more followed the Riel Rebellions, after 1885. But the Boer War saw memorials going up, at an unprecedented rate, in towns all across Canada. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| A Sad Postscript: The Anglo-Boer War was the last war, in which community statues and busts were erected to individual soldiers. Then, it was still economical to do, with only one or two fatalities coming from a region of several towns. And in their communal grief, the shock of losing even a single life roused the people to donate all the funds that were needed.
After the horrendous carnage of World War I, only group memorials - featuring at best, an anonymous statue - made any sense anymore. Whereas in the Anglo-Boer War only communities sorrowed, during the Great War to come, virtually every home grieved for a family member, relative, or friend. You could not memorialize each life lost with its own statue. On future memorials, the dead were now simply reduced to lists of dozens and scores of names on plaques. |
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For more memorabilia, and information about the monument to Canada's most famous Boer War casualty:
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Go to
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c Goldi Productions Ltd. 1996 & 2000
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