BOER PRISONERS.

Gisborne Times, Volume VII, Issue 348, 24 February 1902, Page 3

BOER PRISONERS.

An interesting description of the life led by tbe Boer prisoners at Umballa Camp, in tiie Punjaub, Northern India, is given in a letter by one of them, which has recently been published. The camp covers an area of about 120yds, and is enclosed by an inner bamboo fence, separated by about fifteen yards from an outer fence of barbed wire. Outside this latter fence the sentries patrol day and night, and about 200 yards off a mounted native Lascar is continually on the beat on each side. There are one hundred and forty tents and the camp boasts a general store, managed by Parsees, two colfee shops, run by burghers, three work tents, where some admirable curios are turned out, and a public reading-room. The prisoners have taken enthusiastically to British sports, and forget their exile in the excitement of Rugby and Association football, cricket, and hockey. “In cricket,” states the writer of the letter referred to, “we have at last received a drubbing, and that a severe one, at the hands of a picked garrison team. Some said the team pitted against us was iiot a strong one, but I must say their play looked uncommonly like South African first-class cricket, in which none of our representatives ever indulged.” •The grief of the burghers over this defe at, however, , was forgotten in the coi.'templation of—to some of them — a stranger and more novel-thing than cricket. Miss Ada Mavern’s Comic Opera and Burlesque Company, which ■was t curing in the neighborhood of TJmballtV generously gave a gratuitous performance at the camp. “Many of the spectators,” the Boer writer remarks upon this event, “belonged to the unsopnisticated back-country farming class, unskilled in English, and totally unacquainted with anything in the shape oC a variety show. Moreover, being of a religious turn, not a few of them professed to he quite shocked at clever Miss Vichard’s clog dance, and various other items. Notwithstanding these little drawbacks however he does not fail to add that “ the performance was much appreciated.’-