Fritz Joubert Duquesne - Second Anglo-Boer War

Second Anglo-Boer War

When war broke out in 1899, Duquesne returned to South Africa to join the Boer commandos. He was wounded at the Siege of Ladysmith and received the rank of captain in the artillery. Duquesne was captured by the British at the Battle of Colenso, but managed to escape in Durban. He joined the Boers again for the Battle of Bergendal but they had to fall back to Mozambique, where they were captured by the Portuguese and sent to an internment camp in Caldas da Rainha, near Lisbon.

At this camp, he charmed the daughter of one of the guards, who helped him escape to Paris. From here, he made his way to Aldershot in England where he joined the British army and got posted to South Africa in 1901 as an officer.

As a British officer, he returned to Cape Town with plans to sabotage strategic British installations. He recruited 20 men, but was betrayed by the wife of one of them. He escaped the death penalty by volunteering to give (phoney) Boer codes to the British, but was still court-martialled and sentenced to life in prison. The other 20 members of his team were executed by firing squad.

His prison in Cape Town was in the Castle of Good Hope. The walls of the castle were extremely thick, yet night after night, Duquesne dug away the cement around the stones with an iron spoon. He nearly escaped one night, but a large stone slipped and pinned him in his tunnel. The next morning, a guard found him unconscious but uninjured.

Duquesne was one of many Boer prisoners sent to Bermuda, where he was one of an estimated 360 prisoners interned on Burt's Island, the second smallest of the then-five self-governed internment islands. The 5' 10" "23-year-old" managed to pass himself off as an American, and was noted for his "fresh" complexion and "well set up", "gentlemanly" appearance by the Burt's Island Commandant (spokesman and representative for the other Boers), Captain C.E.M. Pyne. On 25 June 1902, Duquesne and Nicolaas du Toit travelled by ferry (legally, as the war had ended) to Bailey's Bay, Hamilton Parish, Bermuda to meet Anna Maria Outerbridge, a leader of a "Boer Relief Committee", who was so well known for trying to assist Boers in escaping that the military searched her house whenever there was an escape, the Colonial Assembly outlawed assisting and harbouring escaped prisoners of war, and on Guy Fawkes Night an effigy of her, not Guy Fawkes, was burnt. Outerbridge arranged for one of the men to escape while turning the other over to the military, and Duquesne was sent to the port of St. George's where another Boer Relief Committee member, Captain W. E. Meyer, arranged transportation out of the colony. About this time, he met and married Alice Wortley. Fritz was considered a very attractive man, but mysterious. When her family discovered he required her to have numerous abortions, they advised her to divorce him, which she did.