Queen's South Africa Medal

• 1. Introduction

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  The Queen's South Africa Medal came into being on the authority of Queen Victoria herself, instituted in 1900 for service in the Second Boer War. It was meant to mark what British commanders expected to be a brief, decisive campaign. They were wrong. The war had started on the 11th of October 1899, and it would not end until the 31st of May 1902. By the time the last medals were awarded, roughly 178,000 had been struck. What drove that number so high, who actually received one, and what did the physical object itself look like? Those are the threads this documentary follows.

• 2. A War Longer Than Expected

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  Queen Victoria's planners expected the conflict to conclude in 1900. The first medals were struck accordingly, bearing the years "1899" and "1900" on the reverse. Approximately fifty of those dated medals were awarded before it became clear the war would grind on far longer. Workers then machined the years off both the dies and the unminted blanks. A third version was produced from new dies, with no date markings at all.

  The war itself was punishing beyond anyone's early prediction. Enteric fever killed several thousand soldiers and created a constant drain on manpower, even before battlefield casualties were counted. Men routinely went without basic rations. The published casualty rolls ran to over 50,000 names; studies of contemporary publications and reports placed total casualties, including those caused by disease, at 97,000. The Boer forces the British faced were skilled guerrilla fighters, expert horsemen and marksmen who used the terrain with discipline and precision. Winning this campaign was not a matter of weeks.

• 3. Who Qualified

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  Eligibility for the medal stretched far beyond the regular British Army. Members of the Royal Navy, hospital nurses, and colonial forces from Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and India all qualified. So did locally raised units from the Cape of Good Hope and Natal, and even "hensoppers" (a term meaning "hands-uppers," applied to collaborators from the South African Republic and the Orange Free State who sided with the British). War correspondents were eligible. Non-enlisted men of any nationality who drew military pay could also qualify.

  The New Zealand 10th Contingent illustrates how inclusive the criteria were. That unit arrived in Durban in May 1902 but saw no fighting before the war ended; its members still received the medal. At the other end of the scale, approximately 1,500 medals were presented unnamed during the 1901 tour of Australia and New Zealand by the future King George V. Many of those were named locally afterward, either at public expense or privately.

  Not every medal was silver. Non-combatant Indian troops and other non-combatant men who drew military pay received a bronze version. Nurses, Royal Navy personnel who served offshore but never landed, and the troops who guarded Boer prisoners on the island of Saint Helena all received the medal without any clasp attached.

• 4. Twenty-Six Clasps

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  A medal without a clasp told one story; a medal with nine clasps told another. Nine was the maximum number of clasps awarded to any single recipient, and there were twenty-six clasps in total, authorized in Army Order 94 of April 1902. They fell into three categories: Battle clasps for specific engagements, State clasps for general service within a territory, and Date clasps covering 1901 and 1902.

  The geographic precision in the clasp criteria was striking. The Relief of Mafeking clasp, for example, required troops to have been south of an east-west line drawn through Palachwe in Bechuanaland Protectorate, or to have marched from Barkly West in the Cape of Good Hope on the 4th of May 1900 under Colonel Bryan Mahon. The Paardeberg clasp went to troops within 7,000 yards of General Piet Cronje's final laager in the Orange Free State. The Wittebergen clasp was awarded to those inside a defined perimeter running from Harrismith to Bethlehem, thence to Senekal and Clocolan along the Basutoland border.

  Conflicts between clasps were carefully managed. A recipient could not hold both a Defence and a Relief clasp for the same town, whether Mafeking, Kimberley, or Ladysmith. The Cape Colony and Natal clasps were not awarded together; Cape Colony took precedence when a soldier qualified for both. Clasps were worn reading upward from the ribbon suspension, ordered by the starting dates of the relevant action and, for four clasps sharing the same start date, by the duration of the campaign.

• 5. The Physical Object

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  The medal itself is a silver or bronze disk 38 millimetres in diameter. The obverse carries a crowned and veiled effigy of Queen Victoria facing left, with the Latin inscription "VICTORIA REGINA ET IMPERATRIX" running around the upper perimeter. The reverse was designed by G. W. de Saulles and shows Britannia holding the Union Flag in her left hand and a laurel wreath in her right. Behind her, troops march inland from a coast. Two men-of-war appear in the left background, with Neptune's Trident and Britannia's shield resting in the foreground.

  The three types of reverse differ in small but traceable ways. The rarest version, awarded to Lord Strathcona's Horse among others, shows the years "1899" and "1900" below Britannia's wreath, with the wreath almost touching the "R" of "AFRICA". On machined examples, those years were removed, though ghost impressions sometimes remain visible. The final version, produced from new dies, positions the wreath so it nearly touches the "F" of "AFRICA" instead. This same reverse design was also used for the King's South Africa Medal.

  The ribbon is 32 millimetres wide and built from alternating bands: a 7-millimetre red band, then a 4-millimetre dark blue band, repeated in reverse order and separated by a 10-millimetre orange band at the center. Recipients' names and details were impressed onto the rim; some officers had theirs engraved rather than stamped.

• 6. A Companion Medal

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  King Edward VII instituted a separate King's South Africa Medal in 1902, aimed at soldiers who had served in South Africa after the 1st of January 1902 and who had completed 18 months of service in the conflict before the war ended on the 1st of June 1902. That service did not need to be continuous. The King's Medal was always awarded alongside the Queen's Medal, never instead of it, and the Queen's Medal continued to be issued through the war's close.

  The two date clasps, South Africa 1901 and South Africa 1902, were formally issued with the King's Medal but physically worn on the Queen's Medal ribbon by those ineligible for the King's award. The King's South Africa Medal also shared its reverse design with the later Queen's medal mintings, tying the two awards together in appearance as well as in campaign history. The correct order of precedence places the Queen's South Africa Medal at the head of the Second Boer War campaign medals, followed by the Queen's Mediterranean Medal, the Transport Medal, and then the King's South Africa Medal.

• 7. South African Recognition

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  The Republican side in the Boer War eventually received its own campaign recognition. The Dekoratie voor Trouwe Dienst, the Medalje voor de Anglo-Boere Oorlog, and the Lint voor Verwonding were instituted on behalf of King George V by the Governor General of the Union of South Africa. In the South African order of wear, the Queen's South Africa Medal comes first among Second Boer War medals, preceding the Medalje voor de Anglo-Boere Oorlog, then the Lint voor Verwonding, and finally the King's South Africa Medal.

  On the 6th of April 1952, the Union of South Africa established its own range of military decorations and medals. These new South African awards took precedence over earlier British awards, with one exception: the Victoria Cross still outranked everything. Among British campaign medals applicable to South Africans, the Queen's South Africa Medal retained its place in the sequence, preceded by the Cape of Good Hope General Service Medal and succeeded by the Medalje voor de Anglo-Boere Oorlog. The unofficial clasps that circulated alongside the official twenty-six, including ones for Colenso, Glencoe, and Pieter's Hill, never made it into that formal hierarchy.