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Neville, many thanks for solving the Sgt Oliver, Royal Warwickshire Regiment puzzle.

Below another paper knife with a story produced in Diyatalawa.


This ebony example (38,5 x 2,8 cm) is engraved with the text “A souvenir from Diyatalawa, The Boer Camp, Ceylon 1900-1901” with the initials J.T.B. on the extremity of the handle.



The initials on the handle potentially make this otherwise run-of-the-mill example rather interesting. After trailing through the lists of all Boer prisoners on Ceylon in the database of the Bloemfontein Museum, only one name matched all the available information: James Thompson Bain, a member of the Heidelberg Commando who was captured on May 31, 1900 in Johannesburg and subsequently shipped off with the Mohawk to the Diyatalawa Camp on Ceylon.

A quick search on the internet unearthed that J.T. Bain was a well-known man: An engaged trade Union militant according to some, a socialist pest according to others.
James Thompson Bain was born into a poor family in Dundee (Scotland) in 1860. To escape poverty he enlisted in the British Army at the age of 16 and was deployed to the recently Annexed Transvaal in 1878. During his time in South Africa, Bain participated in the battles against the Zulus in Natal. In 1880 he was sent to India where he served until retirement from the Army in 1882. Bain then returned to Scotland and trained as a fitter (or engineer according to other sources). During this time he became active in socialist circles and joined the Scottish Land & Labour League.
In 1890 Bain moved back to South Africa. He first settled in Cape Town, then Kimberly to end up in booming Johannesburg where he became involved in the Labour Union, a trade union launched in 1892.

During the entire 1890’s Bain remained politically active on the left side of the spectrum as a leading figure in the Johannesburg Trades Council and Editor of the Johannesburg Witness. Bain had a strong dislike for the British and the Rand Capitalists and that explains why he agreed to act as a spy for the Kruger Government, both in- and outside the Transvaal. At the outbreak of the war, he joined the Boer forces and fought until his capture in Johannesburg on May 31, 1900. Bain, with his Scottish roots and British Army background, faced potential charges of treason. He was imprisoned but wasn’t charged for treason as he was able to prove he had become a naturalized Transvaal citizen well before the war had broken out. The British Authorities reluctantly recognized that fact and sent him to Ceylon as a common Boer POW. Bain returned to South Africa in 1903.

From about 1905 Bain gradually became a prominent political figure in South Africa, as President of the Transvaal Independent Labour Party and through his involvement in the South African trade union movement (Trade Union Federation). He was the initiator of the mine strikes of 1913 which sent him back to jail and led to his deportation. Bain returned to South Africa in 1914, got his hopes up for the future during the Soviet Revolution in 1917 but died from natural causes in October 1919 in Johannesburg, 75 years before his communist dreams for the country became all but reality.

Professor Jonathan Hyslop dedicated an entire book to J.T. Bain: “The Notorious Syndicalist: J.T. Bain, a Scottish Rebel in Colonial South Africa”