Captain Jack Hindon and his train wreckers. Photograph
Die volgende interessante inligting oor John Oliver Hindon is hier gevind.
The following interesting information on John Oliver Hindon was found here
HINDON'S LOST MANUSCRIPT
John Oliver Hindon, also known as Captain Jack Hindon of the Hindon Scouts or Dynamite Jack for his attacks during the Anglo-Boer War (1899-1902) against British supply and troop trains, was Scottish by birth.
His mother was a child-bride married to a British Army veteran. Jack Hindon had one sister, Margaret, and the family moved frequently, either because his father was restless or because his mother followed the available work. He joined the British Army like his father, but he absconded after a beating by his officer. This happened while in Durban, Natal, which was at that time a British annex.
Hindon traveled inland to the Transvaal Republic where he became a stonemason and later a police officer. He assisted the Boers against Leander Starr Jameson who, under orders from Cecil John Rhodes, tried to take the Transvaal Republic and its gold deposits by force. Hindon was rewarded for his loyalty to the Boer government with citizenship.
When the Anglo-Boer War started he was sequestered to the Middelburg commando and fought with distinction during the war. Almost immediately after the war he began to suffer from a combat induced neurological disease.
He married Martha Coetzee and in 1904, like many other fighters in the war, he traveled to St Louis to perform in the Boer War Show at the Exposition. The show was taken to Coney Island where it went bankrupt, stranding its players in New York without finances. Many of the Boers in the show settled in the United States.
Hindon was taken in by the Irish Americans and lived between Europe and the States until 1910 when Union was declared. In 1911 Louis Botha, the Prime Minister of the new Union, lifted the ban on Hindon who was by then seriously ill. Hindon returned to Middelburg in the Transvaal where John Tower Blake, an American living in South Africa, gave him a rent free home to live in. This home was known as Blake House.
Friends in government made sure that Hindon's wife Martha had work, and that he received an income from donations. Gustav Preller wrote a pot boiler and fictionalized biography of Hindon which was sold to raise funds for his friend and comrade in arms during the Anglo-Boer War.
In 1914, around the time WWI was declared, a group of Boers who had always believed that they had been betrayed by Louis Botha and other leaders who had negotiated peace with the British, rebelled. The rebellion was quelled and the players exorcised from political and social life, many left destitute and without permanent work for the rest of their lives.
Louis Botha, once a close friend of Jack Hindon's wrote to him asking if he had been involved in the rebellion. At this point, it is necessary to say that Jack Hindon had grown from a recalcitrant teenager into an astute political adviser and a sought-after supporter by political pundits in South Africa.
Botha and Botha's advisers feared that Hindon was a facilitator for the rebels. This suspicion was more an expression of the paranoia of a besieged government than a reality as Jack Hindon by the time he received Botha's letter was blind, paralyzed and in extreme pain. The only functional organ in his body was his brain which remained alert, incisive, and master of its owner.
Hindon was outraged by Botha's accusation. He responded with one of the most lucid and power pieces of political writing for the time, and he did so in English, explaining that perhaps his use of Afrikaans as a second language was not aiding in clarity and intention of meaning, so he would explain the situation to Botha not only in words of one syllable, but in words written in his mother tongue.
Hindon and Botha died within reach of each other as WWI and its subsequent memories and consequences were still freshly etched on the pages of history. Both died sick, broken men, but both left legacies that are still remembered today, even though one is more silent and more hidden than the other.
One of the things Jack Hindon left behind was a manuscript about the Anglo-Boer War, early Afrikaner nationalism, and his perceptions of his time and his adopted home. It was written in English. He left all his personal papers and ephemera to Gustav Preller with the request that the manuscript be published after his death. It never was.
Preller gave a plausible reason for not publishing it. WWI had changed the face of the world and the Anglo-Boer War had been re-written as a footnote in history. What Hindon had to say no longer mattered.
It is more probable that Preller had watched in horror as the Botha government destroyed its opponents and their careers and futures. After Louis Botha came the Jan Smuts era. Although an ardent rebel during the Anglo-Boer War, Jan Smuts became a man of Empire and more rabid in his determination to stamp out opposition than Botha ever was. Preller wanted to survive, and publishing Hindon's manuscript was not one of the ways in which to do so.
I have looked for Jack Hindon's manuscript in every potential place of storage - logically speaking - and I have come up empty-handed. Either Preller destroyed Hindon's manuscript, or someone else did. Because the fate of this manuscript is still unknown it is possible, marginally so, that Hindon's words continue to exist somewhere. And one thing is certain about those words - they told a story very different from the one that has been manufactured by political agendas over the past one hundred years. This is a story that could potentially reveal the true role of foreigners in the Boer ranks, and it could clarify the reasons why men, good and loyal men, were destroyed so utterly and so irrationally by once former friends like Louis Botha, a man not remembered for brutality.
His mother was a child-bride married to a British Army veteran. Jack Hindon had one sister, Margaret, and the family moved frequently, either because his father was restless or because his mother followed the available work. He joined the British Army like his father, but he absconded after a beating by his officer. This happened while in Durban, Natal, which was at that time a British annex.
Hindon traveled inland to the Transvaal Republic where he became a stonemason and later a police officer. He assisted the Boers against Leander Starr Jameson who, under orders from Cecil John Rhodes, tried to take the Transvaal Republic and its gold deposits by force. Hindon was rewarded for his loyalty to the Boer government with citizenship.
When the Anglo-Boer War started he was sequestered to the Middelburg commando and fought with distinction during the war. Almost immediately after the war he began to suffer from a combat induced neurological disease.
He married Martha Coetzee and in 1904, like many other fighters in the war, he traveled to St Louis to perform in the Boer War Show at the Exposition. The show was taken to Coney Island where it went bankrupt, stranding its players in New York without finances. Many of the Boers in the show settled in the United States.
Hindon was taken in by the Irish Americans and lived between Europe and the States until 1910 when Union was declared. In 1911 Louis Botha, the Prime Minister of the new Union, lifted the ban on Hindon who was by then seriously ill. Hindon returned to Middelburg in the Transvaal where John Tower Blake, an American living in South Africa, gave him a rent free home to live in. This home was known as Blake House.
Friends in government made sure that Hindon's wife Martha had work, and that he received an income from donations. Gustav Preller wrote a pot boiler and fictionalized biography of Hindon which was sold to raise funds for his friend and comrade in arms during the Anglo-Boer War.
In 1914, around the time WWI was declared, a group of Boers who had always believed that they had been betrayed by Louis Botha and other leaders who had negotiated peace with the British, rebelled. The rebellion was quelled and the players exorcised from political and social life, many left destitute and without permanent work for the rest of their lives.
Louis Botha, once a close friend of Jack Hindon's wrote to him asking if he had been involved in the rebellion. At this point, it is necessary to say that Jack Hindon had grown from a recalcitrant teenager into an astute political adviser and a sought-after supporter by political pundits in South Africa.
Botha and Botha's advisers feared that Hindon was a facilitator for the rebels. This suspicion was more an expression of the paranoia of a besieged government than a reality as Jack Hindon by the time he received Botha's letter was blind, paralyzed and in extreme pain. The only functional organ in his body was his brain which remained alert, incisive, and master of its owner.
Hindon was outraged by Botha's accusation. He responded with one of the most lucid and power pieces of political writing for the time, and he did so in English, explaining that perhaps his use of Afrikaans as a second language was not aiding in clarity and intention of meaning, so he would explain the situation to Botha not only in words of one syllable, but in words written in his mother tongue.
Hindon and Botha died within reach of each other as WWI and its subsequent memories and consequences were still freshly etched on the pages of history. Both died sick, broken men, but both left legacies that are still remembered today, even though one is more silent and more hidden than the other.
One of the things Jack Hindon left behind was a manuscript about the Anglo-Boer War, early Afrikaner nationalism, and his perceptions of his time and his adopted home. It was written in English. He left all his personal papers and ephemera to Gustav Preller with the request that the manuscript be published after his death. It never was.
Preller gave a plausible reason for not publishing it. WWI had changed the face of the world and the Anglo-Boer War had been re-written as a footnote in history. What Hindon had to say no longer mattered.
It is more probable that Preller had watched in horror as the Botha government destroyed its opponents and their careers and futures. After Louis Botha came the Jan Smuts era. Although an ardent rebel during the Anglo-Boer War, Jan Smuts became a man of Empire and more rabid in his determination to stamp out opposition than Botha ever was. Preller wanted to survive, and publishing Hindon's manuscript was not one of the ways in which to do so.
I have looked for Jack Hindon's manuscript in every potential place of storage - logically speaking - and I have come up empty-handed. Either Preller destroyed Hindon's manuscript, or someone else did. Because the fate of this manuscript is still unknown it is possible, marginally so, that Hindon's words continue to exist somewhere. And one thing is certain about those words - they told a story very different from the one that has been manufactured by political agendas over the past one hundred years. This is a story that could potentially reveal the true role of foreigners in the Boer ranks, and it could clarify the reasons why men, good and loyal men, were destroyed so utterly and so irrationally by once former friends like Louis Botha, a man not remembered for brutality.
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