Mafeking siege letters come up for sale
• Antiquarian Auctions is offering the papers dated 1899 to Winston Churchill’s aunt, Lady Sarah Wilson, who was arrested by the Boers for being a spy
Items of special interest offered on the Antiquarian Auctions online auction are two individual letters, each written on a single sheet of paper in slightly faded script, with the envelopes addressed to Lady Sarah Wilson c/o General Snyman.
The lady was the sister of Lord Randolph Churchill, father of Sir Winston Churchill.
According to the catalogue, the letters were sent through the Boer lines to Lady Sarah while a prisoner of the Boers during the siege of Mafeking and are both dated Mafeking December 5 1899, one from her husband, and the other from Col Robert Baden-Powell, military commander at Mafeking at the time of the siege.
The first letter from BadenPowell said: “Dear Lady Sarah, I am so distressed about you. You must have been having an awful time of it, and I can’t help feeling very much to blame; but I had hoped to save you the unpleasantness of the siege.”
Baden-Powell had offered to exchange Lady Sarah. “However, I trust now that your troubles are nearly over at last”. For as Baden-Powell said: “I wrote on Sunday asking you to be exchanged with Mrs Delpoort, a Boer woman, but had no answer, so have written again today and sincerely hope that it will be all right.
“Thank you so much for the kind letters you wrote me, and which I never answered. Hope you are well in spite of all your troubles. Yours sincerely R Baden-Powell.”
This letter was published in Lady Sarah Wilson’s South African Memories. with two grammatical corrections in London in 1909.
The letter from her husband Gordon Wilson said: “My dearest Sarah. I am sending you a letter from the Colonel & I hope his appeal to the chivalry of General Snyman will be answered in the affirmative.
“I am sure as he is an honourable gentleman that he will see his way to helping two ladies in distress. There is no honour to be gained in retaining ladies as prisoners of war & this would be of course never to be done by a civilised nation. Gordon”.
She moved with her husband at the beginning of the war to Mafeking, where he served as aide-de-camp to Baden-Powell.
Baden-Powell asked Lady Sarah to leave Mafeking for her own safety after the Boers threatened to storm the British garrison.
This she duly did, and set off on an adventure in the company of her maid, travelling through the South African countryside.
While she was at Mosita, Lady Sarah sent messages on Boer positions to Mafeking by pigeon, but was arrested as a spy when the Boers captured one of these pigeons.
She was initially supposed to be exchanged for a convicted horse thief, Petrus Viljoen, but Baden Powell found it impossible to do this.
Lady Sarah was exchanged for Delpoort and returned to Mafeking, where she served as a nurse at the Victoria Hospital and as the first woman war correspondent for the Daily Mail for the final five months of the siege.
The siege ended after 217 days, when the Royal Horse and Canadian Artillery galloped into Mafeking on May 17 1900.
Only a few people standing in a dusty road, singing Rule, Britannia, were there to greet their saviours. But in London, it was a different scene as more than 20,000 people turned out in the streets to celebrate the relief of Mafeking.