On this day in Wembury — 6 April 1900
A letter arrived in England, written on the 6th April 1900, that brought immense relief to one Wembury family. Trooper Lloyd Reid of Wembury, serving with Roberts’s Horse in the South African War, had been reported killed in action at Sanna’s Post only weeks earlier. The news had come from his troop captain and was accepted as fact by both the army and the press. Then, in early May, a letter reached his relatives, written from Pretoria and dated April 6th, in which Reid revealed he was alive and a prisoner of the Boers.
“Do not worry about me,” he wrote. “I am treated well.” Those few lines, printed in the Totnes Weekly Times, turned grief to celebration. His capture had come during one of the most confused and bloody engagements of the war, when British mounted units were ambushed while escorting a convoy near Bloemfontein. Many soldiers of Roberts’s Horse were killed or taken prisoner that day, and letters like Reid’s offered rare reassurance to families back home.
For Wembury, it was a moment of personal triumph amid a distant imperial conflict — the narrow escape of a young man who had gone from the village to the veldt, survived battle, and sent word home from captivity that he was safe and unbroken in spirit.
(Totnes Weekly Times, 26 May 1900, letter dated 6 April 1900)