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Hi Peat..Thanks for the info.You were right about the badge it is the 30th Cambridgeshire Regiment of Foot 1874-1881.
I notice on my Grandfathers photo he has corporal stripes. I know in the Roll's for medals he is a private. He might have been promoted on return to Dublin ( don't know. )
On BFI Player there is a film showing the East Lancashire Regiment returning to barracks from South Africa in Preston (1902)
Rgs P

If you look at his attestation paper regarding previous service. It mentions 2 entries, one is East Lancashire, the other I cannot decipher. Perhaps that may have been where he received his Corporal stripes before he served in the Irish Rifles...... Just a thought.

From what I can see from a search on Find my Past, The Weekly Irish Times [Dublin], of 22 February 1902, reported in the casualty list "1st East Lancashire Mounted Infantry—3984 Corporal B. Toombs, Standerton, February 12" as being dangerously ill with enteric fever.

I'm in the process of going through The Blackburn Times for anything relating to the war; lots of East Lancashire Regiment men mentioned, but haven't come across a Toombs yet, although the coverage does concentrate on men from Blackburn and district.

There is also another variation of his surname recorded.

3984 R Toomps, Private - which records him as a casualty, along with missing in action.

Hi Dave and Berenice,

I see that another avenue of research in period newspapers could be of 5073 Private F. Moore of the same regiment who was also reported missing on line of march on the 6th May 1900 with Private R. Tombs.

Trev.

If he was Mounted Infantry, you can search under 8th M.I. A company of the 1st East Lancs was detached to serve with this unit as soon as the battalion arrived in South Africa, and were under separate command throughout as far as I can tell. A good background source is a book “Red Roses on the Veldt” by John Downham, not sure publisher, might be the Lancashire Infantry Museum. It’s a potted history of the Lancashire regiments in the Boer war, and has got a couple of chapters on the East Lancs M.I. Company. They had a different sort of war to the infantry battalions. My grandfather served in this company as a very young Private, which is interesting in itself as I reckon the milkman’s horse would be his previous experience of meeting horses.