Church Parade on Sunday (Part 2)

British member of Parliament and The Times correspondent William Burdett-Coutts inspected the hospital accommodation at Bloemfontein in the Orange Free State and published his findings in June 1900. This was during the South African War and a few months after the fall of Bloemfontein.  He described typhoid sufferers lying in bell tents, which were overpoweringly hot at midday, with thick clusters of flies on their faces. ‘In many of these tents,’ he wrote, ‘there were ten typhoid cases lying closely packed together, the dying against the convalescent, the man in his 'crisis'pressed against the man hastening to it.'


Almost twenty years later, Burdett-Coutts commissioned local Wynberg stone mason, Robert Cane, to erect a memorial to British privates who had died at Wynberg Military Hospital during the Anglo-Boer war.   The large granite boulder selected for the memorial weighs some 35 tons and it took 2 months to relocate from Wynberg hill to its present resting place at the St John's Cemetry.  A squad of workmen toiled for three days to manoeuvre the great rock past the brick wall of Highlands House.  Jean St Leger was there at the time and wrote of the boulder's noisy transit in her memoir - "Coming Home to Roost".

Who was Frans David Oerder?

In 1899, Frans Oerder was commissioned by Paul Kruger to be the official war artist of the Transvaal Republic.  Oerder was educated in Rotterdam and emigrated to the Transvaal in 1890.  Like many other Hollanders of that time, Oerder worked on the Delagoa Bay Railway line - his line of work - painting signal poles.

During the Anglo Boer war Oerder painted, and sketched, scenes of life and nature at the battle front.  The image above shows the Apies River, which runs through Pretoria.  Oerder painted this picture whilst a prisoner of war in 1902.  Today most of his paintings and sketches are housed at the Anglo-Boer War museum in Bloemfontein.