Gong used in Boer War

The 2nd Battalion landed at Cape Town, South Africa, on January 22nd 1900 to fight in the Second Anglo-Boer War. This had started the previous year with a series of humiliating defeats and sieges for the British forces. Under a new Commander-in-Chief, Lord Roberts, and his Chief of Staff, Lord Kitchener, their fortunes changed and victory in a series of conventional battles brought the British to Pretoria. Pretoria had been founded in 1835 by Marthinius Pretorius who named it in honour of his father, Andries Pretorius, the Vootrekker leader. The Great Trek was undertaken by Dutch settlers leaving Cape Colony in the 1830s and 1840s to establish their own states outside the British empire. By 1860 Pretoria was the capital of the South African Republic. Soon after the beginning of the Second Boer War, Winston S. Churchill, then a war-correspondent, was held prisoner at a school in Pretoria from which he escaped. General Roberts' force, including the 2nd Norfolks, took the town on the 5th June 1900, though two more years of war followed before the Peace of Vereeniging was signed in Pretoria on 31st May 1902.