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Hello Cazino.....

Welcome to the forum, think that you have bitten off more than you can chew though.....

Good luck.

Mike

Dear Cazino
You have picked a very interesting research project. I have been similarly interested in the army's response to the onset of guerilla tactics in the ABW and I am much further from KEW than you! I would strongly recommend getting or accessing a copy of "Field Intelligence Department 1899-1902" by D.Buxton (no ISBN on my copy) and they sometimes turn up on ebay. Whilst essentially a medal roll, the book does have good background info. Another really good book is "Roberts and Kitchener in South Africa 1900-1902" by Rodney Atwood (ISBN 978-1-84884-483-4); this work covers a fair bit of ground and is in my opinion, the best recent offering on the subject. There is much background info on countering the guerilla war therein. You might also find Vol.5 of the Times History of value.
There was also another source mentioned on our forum some time ago; Summary of Intelligence, British Army. This appears to be a succession of data sheets re what was happening in various areas during the ABW. If anyone ever gets around to publishing them, it would be worth having.
My interest was kindled by service in the Royal Aust. Infantry 1965-1970 in a relatively minor role. We were constantly updated by what was happening "up north" and the evolution of COIN. I never got there but the interest remained.
Good Luck, Ian Linney.

I really hate digitising with avengeance! Once done, you often find the original material spirited away for ever, never to be seen again!
This is the case not just at Kew, but across England in general, with many council owned archives and libaries too, I remember as a small boy looking at copies of the local newspaper, these were bound in A2 size leather covers, back in the late 1990's I bought a Military Medal to a local man and thought that I would take another look at those bound volumes to see if I could find him mentioned.
I was advised that they were in a salt mine and I would have to be content with micro film copies, the quality of which left much to be desired and the year I wanted was missing!
Never mind its the way forward!

djb wrote: Digitising the Archives is, to be fair, quite a big job! In the interim, nothing is quite the same as leafing through the original paperwork, seeing the handwritten sketches of battle, the hastily penned recommendations for awards, the signatures of Roberts, Buller et al.