British Concentration Camps of the South African War 1900-1902

THE DATABASE

Sources of information

This database consists mainly of information from the following sources:

The camp registers of the white camps, which are preserved in the DBC series, National Archives, Pretoria and the SRC series, Free State Archives. Although the majority of the registers have survived, some (like Kroonstad) disappeared at the end of the war, while others (like one of the Irene registers) have vanished relatively recently. The registers vary greatly in quality. In particular, the Orange River Colony registers appear to have been rewritten in 1902, probably at the request of the second Chief Superintendent of Refugee Camps, Colonel Wilkins, and the originals have not survived. Clerks were of varying competence and the information they recorded varies in accuracy and legibility.
The government gazettes of the Transvaal and Orange River colonies, which listed deaths in the camps. Although these were full and accurate, some deaths were not recorded. There is a gap, for instance, in the Balmoral camp records, unfortunately at the height of the epidemics there. In addition, the typesetters appear to have been English-speaking and often had difficulty with Afrikaans names, so mistakes did occur in the printing.
The lists from the RS series in the National Archives, Pretoria. These lists were compiled by P.L.A. Goldman, at the request of General Louis Botha, to provide information on all the deaths in the Boer republics during the South African War. His lists of deaths in the camps provides the basis for the numbers of deaths listed on the Vrouemonument in Bloemfontein. Goldman's techniques were old-fashioned and there appear to have been many duplicates included in his lists.

Acknowledgments: The project was funded by the Wellcome Trust, which is not responsible for the contents of the database. The help of the following research assistants is gratefully acknowledged: Ryna Boshoff, Murray Gorman, Janie Grobler, Marelize Grobler, Luke Humby, Clare O’Reilly Jacomina Roose, Elsa Strydom, Mary van Blerk. Thanks also go to Peter Dennis for the design of the original database and to Dr Iain Smith, co-grantholder.