A present from the Queen

SOLDIERS OF THE QUEEN is a description generally applied to those men who fought in the second Boer War of 1899-1902 in which Bourne was well represented.

Queen Victoria was so concerned about their morale that she wanted to lift their spirits and after hearing about the pleasure they got in receiving gifts from home, decided to send each of them a box of chocolate, then a luxury for the majority of people, as a Christmas and New Year gift for 1899-1900.

Forty thousand tins were produced, each carrying a gold-embossed picture of the Queen’s head with the words “South Africa 1900” and the greeting “I wish you a happy New Year” inscribed on the front. Few have survived but one which was sent to a Bourne man, Charles Stuffins, has just surfaced in Spain where it has been preserved as a family memento by his great grandson.

Charles was the son of William Stuffins, a butler, of 24 Woodview, Bourne, and his wife Frances. He had enlisted for twelve years on 24th September 1894 at the age of 19, joining the Royal Horse Artillery as a gunner, and his unit sailed for South Africa at the outbreak of the war. We know of his progress during the campaign because copies of the letters he wrote to his mother back in Bourne have survived.

By 1900, he was serving with H Battery of the Royal Horse Artillery and for the next three years, he wrote home to his mother telling her of his progress and the conditions faced by the troops. A typical example of his observations can be found in letters from March 1900 telling that his unit had helped relieve the town of Kimberley which had been besieged for four months and describing their long marches on the road to Bloemfontein in heat and dust together with some hard fighting:

We keep jolly. We were all very happy when the Queen sent a telegram to us for doing such good work. Kimberley is a very nice place. The people were reduced to eating horseflesh. The Boers had done a lot of damage with their big guns. The women and children were down the mines out of harm's way. When we marched through they cheered us. I am getting black with the sun. I have not had my clothes off for a month and we sleep out in the open, without tents.

The royal gift arrived late for some of the troops and is first mentioned by Charles in a letter home from Bloemfontein on April 10th telling his mother that it was on its way to Bourne for safe keeping:

I have sent you the Queen's chocolate box. I hope you will take care of it for me until I come home. The Queen sent it to us for a New Year's gift. We did not get it before because we have been on the move. I am sending you a Kruger shilling which you will find in the chocolate box. Please save it for me until I come home. There was a pound of chocolate in the box. It was very good of the Queen to send it to us. They are offering £10 for the chocolate boxes here but none of the men will sell their boxes. I hope you will enjoy the eating of the chocolate and think of me and of the Queen. I expect by the time you get this we shall be on the way to Pretoria. We start from here with 80,000 troops so I think we shall make a good sweep of it. I am in the best of health. I hope you get the chocolate box safely.

Charles returned from South Africa and was discharged from the army on 23rd September 1906 but re-enlisted when the Great War broke out in 1914 and was sent to France where he was reported missing in action during the Battle of Cambrai in 1917 but survived and eventually won the Military Medal for bravery in action. When the war ended in 1918, he returned home and went to live in Lincoln where be became a bus driver, later a garage hand, married and had two daughters, but died in 1954, aged 77, and is buried in the Washingborough Road Cemetery.

The coveted box of chocolate was subsequently passed down the family together with his army medals, South Africa 1899 with clasps and the King’s Medal and clasps from 1901 and 1902, the Military Medal and campaign awards from World War I. It is now in the hands of his great grandson, Mark Lockwood who has lived in Spain for the past fifteen years and currently works as an English teacher in Barcelona but continues to make regular trips back to England to keep in touch with family and friends in Lincolnshire, including Bourne.

“Sadly, by the time the chocolate box was passed on to me, it was empty”, he said. “Until a few years before, it had still contained the chocolate but my great uncle, that is Charles’s son, decided that it had become very old and so he threw it away. Unfortunately, the medals have also gone. They were given by my great uncle to his son but they were later stolen from his house. Perhaps one day they will surface for sale on the Internet and I will be able to get them back but luckily I managed to get a copy of Charles’s discharge papers before everything was lost.”

These tins have now become highly collectable and while some have been kept in the family, many are in military museums and others often surface at car boot sales, in antique shops and fairs and frequently on eBay, the Internet auction site. Their value depends on their condition but they are worth looking out for because their real interest is in the stories they tell about the lives of those who received them and for this reason alone, are well worth preserving.

The letters home from Charles Stuffins form part of my booklet Letters from the Front (2003), an account of the Bourne soldiers who wrote home to their loved ones during the Boer War, and a copy can be found in the reference section of the public library and on the CD-ROM A Portrait of Bourne.