Virtual
War Memorial
Australia

-  Researched and written by Anthony Stimson -

Tpr. Sidney Lansdell, 23, was born in Benenden, Kent, in 1876. His father was a prosperous tenant farmer. Sidney emigrated to South Australia at the age of 20 when he secured a traineeship with DA Lyall of St. Andrew’s vineyard near Auburn, near Clare. Conceivably there was a family connection between the families. When he enlisted in March 1900, he was a trainee winemaker with Thomas Hardy and Sons, a quiet and unassuming young man liked by all. What prompted him to abandon temporarily a career as a winemaker is unclear.

Lansdell’s service in South Africa was unheralded except for a dramatic action at dawn on 25 April 1901. He was one of 20 men in a small party under Lt. Herbert Reid, 24, when Reid ambushed and captured a much larger force of 60 under Commandant Schroeder, complete with a maxim gun. It was in a remote part of Transvaal and Reid’s derring-do saw him briefly a hero of the Empire; his DSO was gazetted a fortnight later. A month later Lansdell was KIA with Tpr. Herb Goodes at Bethel in Transvaal. It was 24 May 1901 and Lansdell, recently promoted to lance-corporal, was leading a patrol of four men, including Goodes, when Boers, advancing behind smoke, took the patrol by surprise. News of his death did not reach Adelaide for two months as he seems to have had no family in South Australia. Official notification would have gone to his father in Kent rather than Government House in Adelaide, and it is probable that the Staff Office only raised questions when troopers’ letters home mentioned his death in passing.

Lansdell and Goodes were reinterred in the 1960s in Primrose Cemetery at Germiston, near Johannesburg. There is a fine plaque in the hall at Mintaro, near Clare, honouring Lansdell and two Mintaro boys who died in South Africa. Interestingly the AWM records his name as ‘Lansdale,’ following Lt. Col. Murray’s Official Records of the Australian Military Contingents to the War in South Africa (Government Printer, Melbourne 1911). Murray was wrongly advised by the Staff Office in Adelaide.