TOPIC:

With due respect and apologies if I am showing my ignorance.

I would say the “elevated” photo labelled “Rest Camp” posted by Neville was taken from a balloon and those tents are British army tents. The low level photo and the night-time depiction posted previously by David show tents but of an entirely different nature.

After Pretoria was taken by the British they repurposed the site as a hospital and based on letters home in British newspapers I think it was a convalescent hospital and that is when the name “Rest Camp” began to be applied to it.

So I would suggest Neville’s “Rest Camp” photo was taken during the repurposing process but before the Wiltshires had arrived to remove the barbed wire (see previous post by Ian). However, the low level photo was taken while it was still in the possession of the Boers and being used as a prison for British Officers.

There is one thing that argues against the elevated one being taken from a balloon – looking at the shadows of the poles etc one might expect to be able to detect the shadow of the balloon.

David,

You might well be right. The caption "Rest Camp" certainly suggests as much.

A couple of observations: the photograph was definitely not taken from a balloon, as the out of focus branch at bottom left shows. Anyway, van Hoepen, a Boer photographer, is unlikely to have been allowed up in a British military balloon (from which, according to my great grandfather's diaries, it was nigh impossible to capture good photographs due to constant movement and slow shutter speeds).

The fact that Jan van Hoepen took the photograph indicates that it was taken before or during June 1900, when he was deported to Holland. His photograph of Lord Roberts and his Orderly shows that he was definitely active in Pretoria shortly before he was kicked out. Would a June date make sense in terms of the repurposing of the officers’ quarters as a rest camp?

Albeit in limited numbers, the Boers did use bell tents, as the photograph below shows. There are also images of the Pretoria Commando using these.




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Not recognising the topography of present-day Waterval as that shown in the "Rest Camp" photograph, I turned to Twice Captured, by the Earl of Rosslyn, where I found the following description of the author's journey to the officers' quarters:

My road led me through two or three streets which apparently intersect one another at right angles, and along each were rows of low, but neat villas or bungalows, with an occasional church spire or imposing building to relieve the monotony. High evergreens, blue gums, and tall willows shade the inhabitants from the heat of the noonday sun; and a little river, now only a stream, seemed to form a northern boundary of the town. I passed close to where President Kruger was sitting on the stoep of his humble home, which faces his own private place of worship, and, crossing the river, soon got a glimpse of the 'birdcage', as I have since christened it, which held our British officers as prisoners of war.

The river Rosslyn refers to is the Aapjes River. Jeppe's 1899 map shows a single bridge/drift over this waterway, carrying the road north towards Waterval (12 miles away) and Hammanskraal. The area just beyond the river, described as the location of the camp, sits between two areas of high ground, that to the southeast being the hill shown on the left in the photograph. The Union Buildings now occupy the southern slopes of this ridge.

Problem solved. The compound in the photograph is indeed the former officers' camp (latterly a British rest camp), but it was not at Waterval.























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Neville - this is how I picked up that the Pretoria Rest Camp had previously been used to imprison British officers:



Not sure who exactly wrote these extracts which appeared at the end of very long article about a variety of things.

A Private Kelf who was a Clerk in the Pretoria Rest Camp wrote a lot of letters to his parents which were published in the Berkshire Chronicle - this is the start of one:



The next one says how comfortable his living quarters were except for the rats at night which were the size of kittens. He kept them at bay by keeping his bedroom light on until one night the Adjutant turned the lighting power off and the rats started running over his face and he went to war.

Another article carries a letter from a a member of the Welsh Regiment and says it was sent from "Arcadia, Rest Camp, Pretoria" - I can see Arcadia on your map.

The Waterval Prison was used to imprison the rank & file:





The Waterval Prison was also known by the rank & file as "Kruger's Boarding-House".

We can conclude that besides being a very good photographer, Van Hoepen was a dab hand at climbing trees.

Regards, David.

The POW camp at Waterval, photographed by van Hoepen.

This image comes from a series of photographs that were "looted from a Boer farm" during the advance on Bloemfontein in March 1900. It shows that van Hoepen's work was well distributed amongst the Boer population early in the war. The majority of van Hoepen photographs encountered today are period reprints, sold by British studios, such as J.E. Middlebrook's. The picture of the officers' quarters above is an example of one of one of these, as is shown by the addition of "Copyright / Middlebrook / Durban". Other studios attempted to erase van Hoepen's name entirely.










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I found this map on the Facebook page of the Warwickshire Yeomanry Museum, put there to explain the movements of the 5th (Warwickshire) Company, 2nd Battalion, IY. I have not yet established where they found it.

It clearly shows the location of the Waterval PoW Camp and presumably was drawn up before "Bobs" arrived in Pretoria. It does not show the location of the Birdcage which I think would have been just to the west of where it says Arcadia (alternatively just to the north of the "Sun" of Sunnyside).