TOPIC:

A while back I acquired the hand-crafted knife shown below. It, along with a Boer waistcoat bandolier, was consigned to auction by the Penrose family. Unfortunately, they do not know what relation Major W. Penrose is to them. The auctioneer’s description was as follows: "Major Penrose was a relative, possibly Great Uncle, of Alexander Peckover Doyle Penrose whose medals are also in this auction but his details, including regiment, are unknown to the current family. ...The items come direct from the family".

Despite many hours of searching, I have as yet been unable to find an officer of this name who served during the ABW. Medal rolls, Hart's Army List, the Official Army List and the Newspaper Archive have all drawn a blank.

A Trooper William Penrose, of Fowey, Cornwall, served with the 27th (Devonshire) Company, 7th Bn. Imperial Yeomanry, but I can find no connection between him and the Coke/Penrose family that sold the items (unless one goes back to the sixteenth century..!!).

I am stumped. Any ideas, anybody?




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Neville,

Like you I could not find anyone of that name.

I looked at the casualties suffered that day and there are no casualties that resulted from engagements. There were soldiers listed that day but all bar one are deaths from disease.

44 Boer prisoner were recorded on that date. Whether that is the date captured or date recorded is unclear. Some were taken on their farms and the greatest grouping was at Kroonstad.

As Major Penrose recorded the date, I would imagine that this was a significant event and out in the field somewhere rather than in any camp?

There is Captain E S Penrose of the Essex Regiment but he finished the war as a Captain and there is the problem of his initials.

Sorry not to be more help.

Best wishes
David

Neville, a long shot. The first Penrose that comes up when typing the name into the Name Search on this site has no initial but has "M" for rank. It is probably a typo where the M is the first initial of his Christian name but perhaps it stands for Major. The chap worked in a hospital and that is a great environment for appropriating things like a pocket knife as well as for leisurely hammering initials into copper.

Thank you, David and Everhard,

I'm pretty sure I'm never going to get to the bottom of this one. If it wasn't for the fact that the knife came directly from the family and that it looks and feels completely right, I would be wondering whether I'd been sold a pup.

Despite the rank issue, Trooper William Penrose, 27th Co. I.Y., seems to be the only man that comes close. At home, he was a Sergeant-Major in the 1st Cornwall Artillery Volunteers, so is it possible that the word "Sergeant" was omitted by mistake?

However, that would still leave the problem of how the Irish branch of the family ended up with items that once belonged to their very very distant Cornish cousin.

Oddly all records (medal rolls & casualty list) completed in South Africa give the trooper's initials as "R.W.", despite the fact that he was christened William James.


Everhard, M. Penrose was a nursing sister, so definitely not her.

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Neville is there a typo in the first line of you post in Major J Penrose?

The Penrose FT on Ancestry created by a Lisa Penrose shows that Alexander Peckover Doyle Penrose (1896-1940) did not have a great-uncle who would would have answered to the initial W (or J) and if they had they would have been 60+ at the start of the ABW. His father was James Doyle Penrose (1862-1932) a famous sculptor & artist of religious subjects (not to my taste at all!), the 1901 census found him living in London. Alexander did have two other brothers who might have answered to the initial W - Robert William & Henry Walter but both were market gardening in Sussex at the time of the 1901 Census.

Thank you David,

Typo corrected.
I had seen the Ancestry tree you mention and have cobbled one together myself with the same results.

Neville