Balmoral Refugee Camp 1901 – 1902

Middelburg camp presents a problem in trying to understand why so many people died in the camps. It was the largest camp in the Transvaal system, reaching over 7,000 inmates at one point, and the reports of Dr Kendal Franks and the Ladies Committee suggest that it was very badly run. Dr Franks was critical of the layout of the camp and complained that the administration was ‘lax’, while the Ladies Committee thought it ‘one of the most unsatisfactory we have seen’.1 An intake of over 3,000 in May 1901 brought in desperately impoverished and debilitated people, which precipitated disease. By all these criteria the mortality in Middelburg ought to have been amongst the worst in the system, yet this was not the case, as a comparison with Mafeking camp shows. Indeed, apart from the May peak (a pattern which appeared in almost all the camps) mortality was little worse than the camp average, which was a record few camps achieved.

http://www2.lib.uct.ac.za/mss/bccd/Histories/Middelburg/

Barberton camp was opened at the beginning of February 1901 but it grew slowly. By the end of August 1901 it only had about 2,000 inmates, small by the standards of most camps. It was situated to the south-west of the town on high ground. Both Dr Kendal Franks and the Ladies Committee were very taken with the lovely setting, surrounded by high hills, close to the Swaziland border. B. Graumann, who was superintendent throughout the war, sent in terse reports so it is often difficult to glean much about the life of the camp. He appears to have been an efficient man, however, and he was much praised by Kendal Franks, when he visited the camp in August 1901. The camp was beautifully pitched, the tents laid out with the utmost regularity (which always impressed the British authorities) and there was a general appearance of order and cleanliness. At the beginning of August there was an influx of over 1,000 Boers and a second camp was established in the local agricultural showgrounds.

http://www2.lib.uct.ac.za/mss/bccd/Histories/Barberton/

Balmoral camp was established relatively late, on 25 July 1901, coming into use a week later – a remarkably short time in which to set up a camp. It was created to take the overflow from the Middelburg and Belfast camps and was divided into the districts from which most of the inmates came – Balmoral, Lydenburg and, later, Ermelo. The move from Middelburg had been precipitated by the poor health in that very large camp and the people arrived unwell. Later arrivals included fugitives from the Bronkhorstspruit district, who were starving and exhausted. By November 1901 they were coming in from the Lydenburg and Barberton districts, in a very bedraggled state, it was noted, because they had been out on the veld for some time. Although by the end of 1901 Kitchener had ordered that no more families should be sent to the camps, his instructions were often ignored and some continued to trickle in. On 27 April 1902 125 people arrived, half of them men, in a pitiful state. ‘They were literally in rags and it was hard to discern the original material of the men’s clothing. When compared with the inmates of the camp they looked a very unkempt lot’, the superintendent noted.

http://www2.lib.uct.ac.za/mss/bccd/Histories/Balmoral/