Orders, Decorations, Medals and Militaria

The Queen’s South Africa Medal awarded to Madame Alice Bron, a Belgian lady whose ‘Diary of a Nurse in South Africa’ provides a narrative of her experiences as a nurse attached to an ambulance with the Boer Forces and later as a nursing sister in the British service in South Africa

Queen’s South Africa 1899-1902, no clasp (Nursing Sister A. Bron) with re-affixed replacement suspension, edge bruising and contact marks, otherwise nearly very fine £300-£500

The following extract is taken from a review of her diary published in The Times, August 27, 1901:

‘Mme. Alice Bron, whose DIARY OF A NURSE IN SOUTH AFRICA (Chapman and Hall) has been translated from the French by G. A. Raper, is a Belgian lady who has for many years taken an active part in hospital work. When war broke out in the Transvaal, she joined the staff of the ambulance sent out by the Dutch and Belgian Red Cross Associations, and remained in South Africa until the summer of 1900, when she was recalled to Belgium by the sudden death of her husband. Mme. Bron went out, she tells us, full of enthusiasm for the Boer cause, but she had got no further than Lorenzo Marques when her enthusiasm began to ebb away. She preserved enough, however, to enable her to write from Pretoria an article for the Petit Bleu, extolling the civilisation of the Boers; but she now confesses in her preface that that with a newcomer’s ignorance she mistook the Hollander colony for the Boers themselves, and devotes the bulk of her book to telling us in no uncertain terms what she thought of the Boers... It is pleasant to read that when Mme. Bron had settled her affairs in Belgium, she returned as a nursing sister in the British service to South Africa.’

Sold with a recent O.C.R. reprint of Alice Bron’s diary.