Identifier: besiegedbyboersd01ashe (find matches)
Title: Besieged by the Boers; a diary of life and events in Kimberley during the siege
Year: 1900 (1900s)
Authors: Ashe, E. Oliver, (Evelyn Oliver)
Subjects:
Publisher: New York, Doubleday, Page & Co.
Contributing Library: The Library of Congress
Digitizing Sponsor: The Library of Congress

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own therethey handled it very gingerly, for only a fewweeks before we had had news from Mafekingof a blacksmiths trying to open a similar shell,when it exploded, blew off his legs and one ofanother mans, and killed a third man. Sothey had good reason to be careful, and let itsoak in a tub of water for a few hours. My driver had seen one of the men who pickedthis shell up, and told me he said it was as bigas the hand-bag that I carry instruments aboutin. Seeing that this came from a colouredman, of course I did not believe it, but it provedto be rather under than over the truth, for thisinfernal affair was eighteen inches and a halflong, six inches in diameter at the base, andweighed eighty-seven pounds. We found laterthat these shells were not very accurately made^many of them being twenty inches long andweighing considerably more than the regulationone hundred pounds. As you can imagine, thesight of this did not encourage us, for we knewthat a gun big enough to carry this shell could
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BOER lOO-POUND SHELL AND DE BEERS Q-POUNDER, OUR BIG GUN 123 reach any part of Kimberley or Beaconsfield,so there was no possibihty of getting out of itsrange; and we also saw that there was no build-ing in Kimberley, except perhaps the strongrooms at the banks, that would not be pene-trated easily by it. Fortunately, the gun was fired from a placealmost directly opposite the front-door end ofour house, so if we kept either in the little pas-sage at the back of the dining-room or, betterstill, in the covered way between the house andthe kitchen-block we should be fairly safe; forwe had come to know from experience that ashell is usually exploded by the first wall ittouches, but that it has sufficient impetus tocarry it through that wall, and actually burstsin the first room it comes into. Coming fromthe direction they did, these shells would haveto come through at least two pretty solid wallsbefore they reached the other end of the house,and this made us feel fairly safe. The shell-in

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