Published May 11, 2024 • 5 minute read
There’s not a lot in Canada to remember the Boer War — a battle that marked this country’s first-ever overseas military entanglement.
But Windsor has one such monument dedicated to the 1899 to 1902 conflict in South Africa, memorializing a time when former colonies would automatically heed Queen Victoria’s call to arms to help expand a distant corner of the British Empire.
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The century-old monument in Jackson Park, fenced off for years, is in bad shape but now getting a bit of expensive TLC by heritage restorers.
“Yes, it was a nasty little war, it was an imperial war,” said Gene Lotz, an amateur Windsor historian who has just written a book on the Boer War.
In the preface of Lotz’s self-published Canadians in a Forgotten War, editor Herb Colling, a former CBC Windsor journalist, explains the book’s title:
“Because it’s the kind of war one would like to forget. It wasn’t fought for a noble cause. It wasn’t right, or just. It was a greedy little battle.”
Gold, silver, diamonds, land — Rule Britannia.
Almost two decades before historians would begin writing about Canada’s heroic forging as a nation at Vimy Ridge (1917) and other bloody overseas First World War battlegrounds, young Canadians responded to the call of the British Empire to pick up weapons and fight against Dutch descendants on the African continent 13,000 kilometres away.
The Boers fought a savage, grinding guerrilla war, and the Brits and their colonial helpers targeted civilians, laid waste to crops and farms and erected concentration camps.
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Asked why Windsor should honour that, Lotz said it’s about such things as valuing service beyond self, respecting sacrifices and remembering those who are willing to risk everything — and who did.
“It’s part of our history, and I think it’s important to remember. Yes, it was an imperial war … a nasty little war. But it doesn’t take away from what these soldiers did, what they thought they were fighting for.”
Most of the estimated 270 Canadian dead were the result, not of battle, but of disease, dysentery, typhoid fever and pneumonia. The Boer War was also the first time that Canadian nurses were dispatched overseas to tend to wounded and dying soldiers.
Canada hadn’t declared war but Parliament passed a resolution of support. Among the first wave of Canadian volunteers in October 1899 — dubbed “the gallant thousand” by the press — were 18 Windsor militia members (Windsor at the time had a population of only 12,000).
About 30 more Windsor area volunteers would join in two subsequent contingents.
Facing fiercely independent white settler farmers of Dutch, German and Huguenot descent, the invaders won, with a victorious British field marshal noting: “Canada now stands for bravery, dash and courage.”
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If you forget history, you’re doomed to repeat it
A memorial with a fountain “dedicated to the memory of Windsor heroes, who fell in the Boer War” was erected in 1906 along the front of the stone post office building at the corner of Ouellette Avenue and Pitt Street. A year before the opening of the Paul Martin Building at that location in 1933, the Boer War memorial was moved to Jackson Park.
An Oct. 13, 1931, story in The Border Cities Star (the Windsor Star’s predecessor) spoke of how pleased veterans were that their South African War Memorial would soon be moved from its downtown location. The reasons speak to some of the same complaints about Windsor’s downtown expressed nearly a century later.
“It is now a hangout for out-of-works and a cuspidor for whoever passes by. There is no respect or reverence,” C.V. Strevett, vice-president of the South African War Veterans’ Association, was quoted saying at the time.
There were plenty of “out-of-works” — or unemployed — at that time due to the Great Depression. A cuspidor is a spittoon, commonly used at the time to receive the projected droolings of loitering lovers of chewing tobacco.
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The choices were either a spot on Giles Boulevard opposite the Essex County cenotaph (itself eventually moved to north of the current city hall) or to Jackson Park. With the extension of Ouellette Avenue south through Jackson Park, Windsor’s Boer War memorial was forced to move again in 1961, to its current home in the sunken garden.
Last month, after a couple of years of being fenced off due to its crumbling exterior, workers with Clifford Restoration Ltd. began repairs expected to take five months.
With the COVID pandemic and inflation partly to blame, a “rejuvenation” effort estimated in 2020 to cost $255,000 ballooned to nearly triple that amount. The winning Clifford tender is for $675,000. City parks development manager Wadah Al-Yassiri said the project requires specialty work that only registered heritage consultant/contractors are qualified to perform.
The memorial was in need of “significant repair,” according to the city, with a number of the stones cracked or crumbled. Not included in the work is restoring the original fountain feature of the memorial that includes the names in bronze of 48 Windsor and Essex County soldiers.
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“You can’t rewrite history based on today’s sensitivities,” said Lotz. In those days, he said, “if you were called, it was your duty … if you wanted to be part of the empire.”
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Lotz cites one of the profiles in Canadians in a Forgotten War, which is filled with illustrations and individual soldier profiles. Walter White was with the Essex Fusiliers and only 19 when killed on a mercy mission — crawling into the battlefield to bring water to a wounded comrade.
“I’m proud of Walter White, serving his Queen and putting his life on the line for another soldier — I honour that.”
And while it was a war fought long ago, Lotz said there are strong parallels to current affairs. He points to Putin’s Russia and its invasion of Ukraine as a modern-day version of an empire fighting to reassert its authority and reclaim former glory.
“If you forget history, you’re doomed to repeat it.”
For more information, visit Lotz’s Facebook page on Canadians in a Forgotten War, copies of which are also available at the Chimczuk Museum gift store and several area bookstores, including Juniper Books (1990 Ottawa St.).
dschmidt@postmedia.com
twitter.com/schmidtcity
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