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Many thanks, Neville, for your generous sharing of high quality information and images, on very many subjects.
I am constantly being educated by your posts, and I await your new posts with eagerness. Your collection must be the most extensive anywhere in private hands, and I look forward to seeing even more!
Rob

Thank you very much indeed Neville. I also always enjoy your posts, which contain so much detail and are so often accompanied by images that I haven't seen before. Your willingness to share your knowledge is much appreciated.

Thank you everybody for your kind remarks.

To think, if it hadn't been for the chance discovery of a locked stationery box in my grandparents' attic in 1976, I wouldn't be here, contributing on this forum today. Intriguingly marked "Maj. Gen. Sir G.M. Heath, K.C.M.G., C.B., D.S.O.", I wanted to know what lay inside this black tin trunk. A huge bunch of keys hung on a nail driven into a nearby beam, and after many attempts I eventually found the key that opened the "treasure chest". Inside were my great grandfather's diaries and photograph albums (both Boer War and WWI), together with bundles of letters to his wife, who lived out her final years in my grandparents' house. And so began a passion that has grown steadily over the years.

A trip to South Africa in my gap year, following in my great grandfather's footsteps and retaking photographs from the spots where he had once stood, cemented this new-found connection with my forebear's military past and the Anglo-Boer War.
And my other passion, for archaeology, was fuelled by the opportunity to help with the exhumations of Boer dead in the Ladysmith area, in advance of their re-interment in the Platrand Monument. As you can imagine, for an eighteen-year-old this was all intoxicating stuff. It would also lead to a career in archaeology.

Anyway, here's to Major Gerard Moore Heath, 2nd Balloon Section, without whom none of this would have happened.....



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Neville,

It is great to hear your journey to today.

We are all very pleased you opened that trunk!

Neville, congratulations. Attached a contemporary ABW drawing showing that the boers were onto Major Heath!

Thank you, Everhard

Here is your wonderful drawing, together with a German postcard, depicting the same scenario as viewed from the Boer side:

"Buren-Gruss!" ("Boer Greetings!")

The postcard originally had an applied three-dimensional bullet (residual stain just visible to the right of the balloon basket), together with a strip marking the projectile's trajectory from the muzzle of the Boer rifle (also lost).

Note the German depiction of Ladysmith, as a romanticised rustic village with ruined castle.






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