The Postcard
A postcard that was published by Gale & Polden Ltd. of London, Aldershot and Portsmouth. The image is a glossy real photograph, and the card was printed in England.
The card was posted in Richmond, Surrey using a ½d. stamp on Saturday the 4th. May 1918. It was sent to:
Miss M. V. Servis,
12, Oaklands Grove,
Uxbridge Road,
Shepherds Bush.
The message on the divided back of the card was as follows:
"Kew, Sat.
We found we had a Sat.
off so are here for the
day, and it is simply
gorgeous, although a
bit too crowded.
Love to all,
Wyn."
Kew Gardens
The adult fee for admission to Kew Gardens used to be one pre-decimalisation penny. It now costs £15.50. As there were 240 old pennies to the £, it is now 3,720 times more expensive to get in than it used to be. How's that for inflation?
Kew Gardens is a botanic garden in southwest London that houses the largest and most diverse botanical and mycological collections in the world.
Founded in 1840 from the exotic garden at Kew Park in Middlesex, its living collections include some of the 27,000 taxa curated by the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, while the Herbarium, which is one of the largest in the world, has over 8.5 million preserved plant and fungal specimens.
The library contains more than 750,000 volumes, and the illustrations collection contains more than 175,000 prints and drawings of plants. It is one of London's top tourist attractions, and is a World Heritage Site.
The Kew site, which has been dated as formally starting in 1759, though it can be traced back to the exotic garden at Kew Park, formed by Henry, Lord Capell of Tewkesbury, consists of 132 hectares (330 acres) of gardens and botanical glasshouses, four Grade I listed buildings, and 36 Grade II listed structures, all set in an internationally significant landscape. It is listed Grade I on the Register of Historic Parks and Gardens.
Kew Gardens has its own police force, Kew Constabulary, which has been in operation since 1847.
The Egyptian Expeditionary Force
So what else happened on the day that Wyn posted the card?
Well, on the 4th. May 1918, the Egyptian Expeditionary Force retreated back to the Jordan Valley after failing to hold the towns of Sunet Nimrun and Es Salt.
They suffered 1,784 casualties while inflicting over 2,000 on the Ottomans.
Howard Burnham
The day also marked the death of Howard Burnham.
Mather Howard Burnham, who was born on the 27th. May 1870, was an American who went by the name of Howard; his brother was the celebrated scout Frederick Russell Burnham.
Burnham was a descendant of Thomas Burnham (1617–1688) of Hartford, Connecticut, the first American ancestor of a large number of Burnhams. The descendants of Thomas Burnham have taken part in every American war, including the French and Indian War.
Howard traveled the world, frequently working as a mining engineer and, during the Great War, he became an intelligence officer and spy for the government of France.
He had a wooden leg which he used to conceal tools for spying when he was behind enemy lines.
-- Howard Burnham - The Early Years
Howard Burnham was born to a missionary family on a Sioux Indian reservation in Tivoli, Minnesota, just before his family moved to Los Angeles, California.
He was named after his cousin Lieutenant Howard Mather Burnham, a United States Army Civil War officer who was killed in action in the Battle of Chickamauga.
Howard's father, the Rev. Edwin Otway Burnham of Kentucky, a long-time frontiersman and a missionary, died when Burnham was only 3, leaving the family destitute.
Howard and his mother, Rebecca Russell Burnham, originally from Westminster, Middlesex, England, left to live with an Uncle in Iowa, but his brother Fred, then 12, stayed in California in order to repay the family debts and to make his own way.
At 14, Burnham was in school in Massachusetts. Ill with an injured leg, his brother sent him the money to return to Los Angeles. His leg was removed four inches below the knee.
Howard also suffered from tuberculosis, and following the amputation, he had a long convalescence. For those two years, he lived with his brother, who taught him how to shoot, saddle a horse, the art of scoutcraft and how to ride the range, and all of this in spite of his wooden leg.
A voracious reader with an amazing memory, Howard enjoyed books on military strategies and tactics, and was fascinated by history, geology, metallurgy, and mining.
He roamed the deserts from Death Valley to lower California, living among and learning from the Cahuilla Indians of Agua Caliente (now Palm Springs, California), and teaming up at times with solitary prospectors to learn desert prospecting, pocket hunting, and the mysteries of the "great horn spoon" (probably the California Gold Rush).
In 1888, during one of his desert prospecting excursions, Burnham had a shoot-out with an Indian (not Cahuilla). He was on an old trail leading over the mountains between Kawia and San Jacinto, and less than an hour before the attack he met an Indian with whom he had a conversation in Spanish.
Burnham continued on the trail until he heard a slight report and felt something hit his right leg, and then a second report resulting in a flesh wound to his left leg.
Howard immediately threw himself flat on the ground, and commenced cautiously eyeing the surrounding area for the enemy. When saw a hat rising from behind a rock about 150 yards away, he drew his pistol and fired on the hat.
His enemy fled down the Los Coyotes creek, down the canyon trail Burnham had been following, with the intent to assume a new ambush. Burnham recognized his enemy as the Indian he had met a short time earlier, and he knew that this Indian was carrying a Winchester rifle and had him out-gunned.
Burnham left his pack animal, tools, provisions and blankets and quickly fled on his horse down a steep cliff away from the trail and to safety in San Jacinto.
For the next few years, Burnham studied mining, and worked on and off in the California desert as mining engineer at the Alvord mine, a gold mine owned and operated by the Burnham-Clapp family.
Howard received his professional mining certification from the Pacific Chemical Works of San Francisco, a company owned and operated by Henry Garber Hanks, the first State Mineralogist for California.
-- Howard Burnham in South Africa and Rhodesia
After the Alvord mine in California was destroyed by fire, Burnham stayed in California until 1894 when he left for the South African Republic to join his brother Fred who was already in Bulawayo, Matabeleland.
Howard soon found work as a mining engineer, and was put in charge of the assay laboratory and smelting room at the Langlaagte Royal Mine in the Transvaal.
In 1895, he was preparing to accompany his brother in a massive expedition into Northern Rhodesia when he took ill and was forced to leave for Europe to recuperate. He left for Germany accompanied by his nephew Roderick, and the two of them then went to London, England.
In 1895, Howard married his first wife Margaret. He returned to the United States and from 1896 to 1898, and attended the Michigan Mining School, graduating with an S.B.
By September 1898, Burnham and his wife were back in Africa where he worked for an English syndicate supervising over 2,000 miners at the Rosa deep gold mine near Johannesburg, South Africa.
While in the Transvaal, Burnham was a chief chemist, an engineer, and an assistant inspector for mines, and he wrote a textbook: Modern Mine Valuation.
When the Second Boer War broke out in 1899, Burnham felt that he would be protected because of his American citizenship. Initially, he remained at his post in the mines in the Boer Republic, but as a precaution, he sent his wife to Cape Town, South Africa, then a British colony.
However the situation in Johannesburg quickly worsened. The Boers seized the mine and began working it for their own benefit. Burnham traveled to East London, South Africa in order to inform the syndicate directors of the situation.
Burnham was captured by the British, and held 24 hrs before he could prove that he was an American citizen. When he started back to Johannesburg, he was captured by the Boers, who took him for a British spy.
For a time, he was uncertain if he would be shot or hanged. He wired his family for funds in order to help get him out of his predicament. Only weeks earlier, his brother had been prospecting in Alaska during the Klondike Gold Rush when he received a telegram from Lord Roberts requesting his assistance in the war – Fred left for Africa within the hour.
Fred Burnham had just been appointed Chief of Scouts for the British Army, and was en route to South Africa via England, but he was still too distant to provide any immediate help.
Over the next few years, Howard lived in England and South Africa. He gave lectures and contributed a series of articles on mining techniques and the principles underlying the finance of mining enterprises, more especially the "risk rate."
In London on the 18th. November 1903, Burnham married Constance Newton, then a young school teacher and an heiress to Newton, Chambers & Company, whom he had met on the ship during their voyage to South Africa.
-- Howard Burnham in Mexico
While his wife and children stayed in England and France, Burnham returned to North America in 1907, and for the next few years became associated with the Yaqui River irrigation project in Mexico with his brother Fred.
In 1908, he and W. A. Wadham of London, England, took a month-long geology and mining trip through Sonora on behalf of American and English business partners. Negotiations were made for the purchase of four properties: the Batue, Mequite, La Fiera, and another property.
Howard considered the La Fiera to be the best of the four, and a small force of men under the supervision of John Anderson was put to work there.
In 1909, Howard traveled with Hector Walker of England on a 300-mile journey from Phoenix, Arizona into Mexico, and then east through Chihuahua and into the Sierra Madres to look for good grazing lands and minerals.
His brother purchased water rights and some 300 acres (1.2 km2) of land in this region and contacted an old friend of the Burnhams from Africa, John Hays Hammond, who conducted his own studies and then purchased an additional 900,000 acres (3,600 km2) of this land—an area the size of Rhode Island.
However just as the irrigation and mining projects were nearing completion in 1912, a long series of Mexican revolutions began. The final blow to Burnham-Hammond plans came in 1917 when Mexico passed laws prohibiting the sale of land to foreigners.
The Burnham and Hammond families kept their properties until 1930, and then sold them to the Mexican government.
-- Howard Burnham's Espionage in the Great War
During the Great War, Burnham worked in intelligence for France. In 1917, French intelligence sent him across enemy lines as a spy in order to discover if the Germans were preparing a new front through the Alps.
Traveling through neutral Switzerland, Burnham assumed his former identity as an American mining engineer, and crossed into Germany on the plea of extreme ill-health – his tuberculosis had violently resurfaced.
Burnham had spent much time before the war in German spas, and his work for the French intelligence had been classified, so the real reason for his near-death return was not suspected by the authorities.
Additionally, Howard was traveling with large quantities of American gold coins for his treatment and gold was desperately needed in wartime Germany. Nevertheless, Burnham was both searched and closely watched throughout his stay.
While in Germany, Burnham applied his engineering skills to converting simple household materials in useful surveying instruments, and he used his wooden leg to conceal these tools when he traveled to places such as Bad Nauheim.
Due to the high cost of his treatments, $500 a month paid in gold, Burnham was a welcome visitor at every resort in Germany. Still, all of his correspondence was reviewed, and at the insistence of the German authorities he was frequently escorted by one or more nurses and a private secretary.
Since Howard was unable to permanently record his surveys and other findings on paper, he relied on his remarkable memory.
Burnham became very ill and was allowed to return to Switzerland for his health. The French government quickly transported Burnham to Cannes, France. From his death bed, Burnham shared his secrets with other intelligence officers, and the French government transported his family from England to Cannes.
The data Burnham had gathered was convincing: the Germans were not opening a new front in Alps, and there was no need to move allied troops away from the Western Front.
Howard's dying words were whispered to his surgeon:
"Always have I wanted to help pay the debt
my country has owed to France. Go back to
the Front and save the living. I am already
dead."
Howard was laid to rest in Cannes beside the tomb of A. Kingsley Macomber, another American, to honor the French Admiral François Joseph Paul de Grasse, whose fleet had enabled George Washington to force the surrender of Lord Cornwallis at Yorktown, Virginia in 1781.
-- The Family of Howard Burnham
Howard had four children:
-- Frederick Newton Burnham (1904 – 1959). Born in Lydenburg, Republic of South Africa (now the Territory of South Africa), died in Hastings, England.
-- Thomas Chambers Burnham (1906 – 2004). Born in England, died in Key Largo, Florida.
-- Mary Burnham (1909 – 1987). Born in England, died in London, England.
-- Katherine "Kitty" Burnham (1911 – 1999). Born in San Francisco, California, died in Bath, England.
