"The boy who fired the last shot of the war", Neels Blom, Weekender

newspaper · an original record · consulted 2026-08-16

Type

newspaper

Repository

Newspaper clipping, family papers, held by Frans Oosthuizen

Reference

Column "On the water" by Neels Blom, dated in manuscript on the cutting "Weekender 18-19/4/09". The byline gives blomn@bdfm.co.za, which is Business Day's domain - Weekender was the BDFM weekend title.

Consulted

2026-08-16

The citation as it was given

RECORDED, AND NOT USED AS FAMILY HISTORY. | WHAT IT IS: a personal column about a story told among the writer's cousins - Bloms, Malans and Van Bruggens - at the Van Bruggen homestead in MAGALIESBURG. An Oosthuizen family's house on the Magalies River was burnt by Kitchener's troops; a boy too young for commando was told to take a Mauser and three cartridges and hide in the kloofs; he shot a British despatch rider carrying the peace orders after 31 May 1902, and the game the cousins played ended with the cry "That was the last shot of the war". | THE COLUMN DISOWNS ITSELF IN ITS OWN FIRST PARAGRAPH: "I can't say I remember which aunt did the telling, or whether it is just a story that any Boer family may claim." It also says the aunt never said where the soldier fell or where the boy was. | SEARCHED ONLINE 16 Aug 2026 AND FOUND NO INDEPENDENT VERSION of this incident - no Oosthuizen last-shot story at Hekpoort or Magaliesburg in the Anglo-Boer War literature reachable that way. | SO IT IS NOT PUBLISHED AS ANYTHING. These are MAGALIESBURG Oosthuizens, not this district's, and 9a gives a different branch a line in a note at most. The cutting is kept because the family kept it, and because what a family chooses to cut out of a newspaper is itself a small fact about them.

Kept verbatim. This project contradicts published genealogies and corrects a family's own oral tradition, so every claim has to be checkable by someone who was not in the room.

Nothing in the model cites this source yet.