Mourning Card: Burial of the Union Jack in Pretoria following the British defeat in the First Anglo-Boer War (1881)

This is an extraordinary and deeply evocative piece of South African ephemera. It is an original "mourning card" printed by British loyalists to protest the burial of the Union Jack in Pretoria following the British defeat in the First Anglo-Boer War (1880–1881). Ephemeral items like this—printed rapidly for a highly specific political demonstration—rarely survive in this condition, making it a brilliant piece of historical documentation.

The "Burial" of the Flag
Following the catastrophic British defeat at the Battle of Majuba Hill in February 1881, the British government under William Gladstone negotiated a peace treaty known as the Pretoria Convention. The treaty restored self-government to the South African Republic (the Transvaal), effectively ending the short-lived British annexation that had begun in 1877.

To the British loyalists and soldiers stationed in Pretoria, this treaty felt like an absolute betrayal. On August 2, 1881—the day before the convention was formally signed—a crowd of incandescent loyalists, led by figures like the prominent local businessman R.C. Williams, staged a mock funeral in Pretoria.

They placed a Union Jack inside a coffin.
They marched it through the streets of Pretoria in a somber funeral procession.
They buried the coffin in a designated grave (purportedly near the site of the present-day Pretoria cemetery)
On the coffin, they inscribed a bitter epitaph.

This card reproduced that exact epitaph word-for-word.

"In His Fifth Year": This references the exact duration of the British annexation. The British flag had been raised in the Transvaal in April 1877; by August 1881, it was in its fifth year of "life."

"In other climes none knew thee but to love thee": A deeply sentimental, Victorian expression of imperial pride, lamenting that the local population failed to appreciate the "benevolence" of British rule.

"RESURGAM": Latin for "I shall rise again." This was a defiantly prophetic choice of words. Nineteen years later, in June 1900 during the Second Anglo-Boer War, British forces under Lord Roberts re-occupied Pretoria. British soldiers actually exhumed the buried flag (or what remained of it) and defiantly hoisted it over the Pretoria government buildings once more.

The reverse side of the envelope/card holder features a beautiful contemporary hand-written inscription addressed to:

"The Honble J. R. Stopford — Pretoria."

This refers to the Honorable James Richard Neville Stopford (later the 7th Earl of Courtown).

During the aftermath of the Anglo-Boer War and into the reconstruction era (early 1900s), Stopford served as a prominent British official in the Transvaal administration, notably working as the Clerk of the Executive Council under the British military and civil administration in Johannesburg and Pretoria.

The fact that this card was kept by or gifted to a high-ranking British administrator in Pretoria underscores its status as a prized historical souvenir among the British establishment who remembered, or were tasked with undoing, the ‘humiliation’ of 1881.

An exceptional artifact of colonial protest and political theater.

Letter; worn, scuffed, torn at the edges.
Envelope size: 140mm x 80mm

R7,500