TOPIC:

Having recently discovered the identity of the cameraman who signed his photographs with a simple “S”, I did a quick search through my archive and found I have six of his images. All these compositions are exceptional and those of combatants are perhaps some of the finest photographs of Boer forces taken during the campaign. Accordingly, I felt Sheppard deserved a topic of his own.

It was a paragraph in Howard Hillegas’s “The Boers in War” that allowed me to attribute these images to a recorded Pretoria photographer. Reginald Francis Stringer SHEPPARD had a studio on St Andries Street, and joined the Pretoria Commando on the outbreak of war, taking his camera equipment on commando with him. As far as I am aware he is the only professional photographer to have captured full-plate images of combatants while on active service with the Boer forces.

“In the Pretoria commando there was a young professional photographer named Reginald Sheppard who carried his camera and apparatus with him during the greatest part of the campaign, and took photographs whenever he had an opportunity. On the morning of the Spion Kop fight, when the burghers were preparing to make the attack on the enemy, Mr. Sheppard gathered all the burghers of the Carolina laager and posed them for a photograph. He was on the point of exposing the plate when a shrapnel shell exploded above the group, and everyone fled. The camera was left behind and all the men went into battle. In the afternoon when the engagement had ended it was found that another shell had torn off one of the legs of the camera’s tripod and that forty-three of the men who were in the group in the morning had been killed or wounded. Before the same battle one of the Boer generals asked Mr Sheppard to photograph him, as he had had a premonition of death and he desired that his family should have a good likeness of him. The general was in the heat of the fight, but he was not killed” (Hillegas, 1900, p. 286).

There is only one Sheppard listed on the Bloemfontein ABW database, a Henry William Halse Sheppard, who served with the Staatsartillerie. William was Reginald’s brother (their mother’s maiden name was Halse). The Sheppard family couldn’t have been more English, so it would be interesting to know why the two brothers decided to put their lives on the line for the Boer cause.

Below are the photographs that I have in my collection. All have negative numbers with prefix “Z”, and of only single or double digits, perhaps suggesting that Sheppard’s ABW output was relatively small.





The laager of the Pretoria Commando, in the shadow of Nicholson’s Nek, taken during the Siege of Ladysmith. There is a remote possibility that the man in the foreground is Sheppard himself (though a colleague would have had to have exposed the plate). A photographer’s black cape, attached to slouch hat, hangs on a branch next to the man in question.



















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Continued ....


















And, finally, one from the Free State Archives, presumably taken shortly before the photograph of the same five men below the falls (see above). No “Z” number or caption visible. From the dimensions I would say this print has been cropped along the bottom edge.




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Wonderful detective work Neville! I think we can confidently add one more photograph to the list, which comes from your own collection: only Gen Schalk Burger would fit the description of anxiety (see below), and the font of the script at the bottom of the photograph looks the same as the others you've shown.

"Before the same battle one of the Boer generals asked Mr Sheppard to photograph him, as he had had a premonition of death and he desired that his family should have a good likeness of him. The general was in the heat of the fight, but he was not killed"

Well spotted Rob.

I wondered which Boer general Hillegas was referring to and whether the photograph still existed. I can now just see the telltale "Z.2" on the right hand side. Now we know that this photograph was taken just before Spion Kop.

Again, Sheppard's talent shines through.

Another image from the von Wichmann album.



Neville