A Family Archive · Cape Town · The Western Front · Rhodesia
Past and Present for the Future
My tale of hard living, of love and war, of storm and sunshine, of ships and cattle and sheep and horses and of men who row and sail and fight. — Bernard Meredith Leffler, 1890–1951
Cape Town · Delville Wood 1916 · Rhodesia · South Africa
The Author
Bernard Meredith Leffler was born in 1890 in Cape Town, South Africa, into a world of salt water and mountain air. As a boy of fifteen he was already sailing with Danish and Malay fishermen from the boatsheds at Three Anchor Bay, climbing Table Mountain to collect orchids and selling them to the flower sellers on the Cape Town waterfront.
When war came, Bernard enlisted to fight — navigating the complex politics of South African men going to war for the British Empire. He would find himself at Delville Wood in July 1916, one of the most catastrophic engagements of the entire Western Front for South African forces. He was captured. He spent the remainder of the war as a Prisoner of War.
His brother died of Spanish Flu in Brighton in 1918, while Bernard was still a prisoner. He returned to South Africa in 1919 and rebuilt his life — farming in Rhodesia and South Africa, writing for Farmer's Weekly, marrying Margaret Gardner, and raising a family.
He died of pneumonia in 1951, on his son's 21st birthday. He left behind four handwritten notebooks — over 500 pages — and a body of journalism that together constitute one of the most vivid firsthand accounts of South African life from 1890 to 1950.
This site is kept by his granddaughter, Patricia Mary Armstrong, née Leffler.
The bound manuscript · Adelaide, South Australia
15 July — 3 September 1916
"Poor Delville — it was a nice wood." The South African Brigade held Delville Wood for 47 days. Of approximately 3,153 men who entered the wood, only 750 survived. Bernard Meredith Leffler was among them — and was taken prisoner. The pages of his manuscript covering Delville Wood are missing. What remains is an article he wrote for the Johannesburg Star, probably for the opening of the South African Memorial in 1926.
From Boatsheds to Battlefields
81 chapters, published here from Bernard's original handwritten notebooks and his wife Margaret's typed transcript. The book follows Bernard from Cape Town's fishing boatsheds through the orchid trade on Table Mountain, the Boer War years, the Great War and Delville Wood, prisoner of war camps in Germany and Poland, and finally to life as a farmer in Rhodesia and South Africa.
Editorial Note
The writings published on this site — including From Boatsheds to Battlefields and the Farmer's Weekly articles — were written by Bernard Meredith Leffler and Margaret Gardner Leffler between approximately 1929 and the late 1930s. All language, spelling, grammar, phrasing, and terminology appears as originally written by the authors and must be read and understood in its historical context.
No disrespect nor offence is intended by the publication of this material. The writings reflect the attitudes, language, and conventions of their time and place, and are presented here as a primary historical record.
In From Boatsheds to Battlefields, Bernard Meredith Leffler wrote under the alias Mick Osmond and used fictional names for a number of characters. Unless clearly indicated otherwise, characters in the narrative are fictional and are not intended to represent or create any impression of real persons. Family names and his children's names also appear in the text in a fictional context. Where real historical figures and events are referenced, these are noted accordingly.
The Archive
After the war, Bernard and Margaret Leffler built a life farming in Rhodesia and South Africa. Both wrote for Farmer's Weekly in the 1930s. Margaret's articles — on poultry, household management, and farm life — are a remarkable document in their own right. She was not a footnote. She was a co-author of the post-war years.
The Leffler Family
This site is a gathering point. If you carry the Leffler name, or are descended from Bernard and Margaret, or hold any piece of this story — a photograph, a letter, a memory — we would very much like to hear from you.
Are you a Leffler? Do you have a piece of this story? We would love to hear from you.