COMPASS VESTA CASE WITH A DIFFERENCE

[Gil Boyd]

The silver stamps tell a tale on their own, I found the Lion and the border means it was made in Birmingham and hope someone on here can read the full date story from the stamps for me.

Information

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[Surpmil]

Here and here.

You can see they don't have that Zimmerman mark listed, though it seems to be the most common.

As for the date, it looks like 1900 to me. So, Stenson may have done some act which was felt worthy of a private recognition?

There was a bit of a fuss made about a troop of B Squadron who escaped the trap that Lt. Col. Möller led the rest of them into at Glencoe/Talana Hill. Stenson might have been one of those, but not as a senior NCO presumably as he is not mentioned whereas another is. He might still have been a corporal (or cavalry equivalent) at that point.

In this book Stenson is shown as in B Squadron.

Apparently there was an inquiry and Lt. Col. Möller was "acquitted", but Lord Roberts decided he was not to be given another command after his release. By the time he died in 1918 he had become just "Bernard Moller".

[Gil Boyd]

Surpmill,
Thanks for that. I have tried to copy/print that page of the book where it shows he was wounded on the 8th December 1899. Do you hold the book and can copy me that page so I can try and find out which battle they all appeared to get injured in on that day please. All I could do was enlarge it and take a snapshot on my phone and send it to myself in the normal way

[Surpmil]

I don't have the book, it's a scan held at Internet Archive: Digital Library of Free Wayback Machine.

There's nothing in the nominal roll on p.267 that suggests he was wounded and he's not mentioned anywhere else according to the search engine on that site. The roll is a bit confusing but if one goes back to the first page it is stated to be a list of all those who served in S.A. and the blanks after names thus indicate no record rather than a "ditto" effect.

As far as I can see Stenson came through unscathed. He must have been lucky or smart enough to avoid dirty water or other contaminations that led to the "enteric fever" which killed about as many as combat.

Around this time the Japanese were getting very interested in those famous (Royal) Doulton ceramic water filters which the WO seems to have overlooked - and which are still in use today of course. Gen. Ishi of Unit 731 infamy got his start in this field IIRC. The Japanese eventually found ways to pump the water through the filter media rather than just using gravity feed which increased the output enough to make it useful in the field.

But getting back to Stenson, I found no clear trace of him after the war. If you can access records of the 18th through the museum of The Royal Hussars or whatever the successor regiment is, you might find out what became of him. The fact that such an object was still in the UK suggests he didn't emigrate, but it's also the kind of thing that was often "sent home" to relations when an emigrant died somewhere abroad.

(Many keyboards have a "print screen" key which temporarily saves a "screen shot", which can then be pasted directly into MS Paint or another image manipulation program for further editing and saving under whatever name one chooses.)