Wellington’s South African War Veterans’ bell

Wellington’s South African War Veterans’ bell

• Height  565 mm
• Width  686 mm
• Weight  219 kg
• Note  E

This bell is unique in the original set of bells placed in the Wellington Carillon in 1932, as it is not a memorial to the First World War, but for the veterans of an entirely different war. In 1928, two years after all the bells in the Carillon had been allocated to particular subscribers, one of the bells that had been previously designated to a family member became available. The Wellington branch of the South African Veterans’ Association jumped at the chance of funding a bell. The money for the bell was fully subscribed by veterans of the South African War, which had ended more than 25 years before.

The South African Veterans’ Association had been formed in 1920 to lobby for better recognition of the soldiers who had fought in that war, in line with what was given to those who had fought in the First World War. Unlike a number of towns, Wellington did not have a civic memorial to the soldiers who died in the South African War, so this bell was seen by Wellington veterans as a way to memoralise their own.

Unlike most of the other bells in the Carillon, this bell does not have a quotation and is not named after a particular battle or place. 

In later decades, to mark the anniversary of the Treaty of Vereeniging, which brought about the end of the South African War in 1902, and the First World War’s Battle of Jutland, which both occurred on the same day, 31 May, the 'South African War Veterans’ bell' and the 'Jutland' bell, were sounded eight times each. In 1934, after a special parade of South African War veterans from the Wellington Town Hall to the National War Memorial, the veterans climbed the tower to see ‘their’ bell. It was struck by one of the veterans ten times, to commemorate the ten New Zealand contingents that had fought in the war.