Heroes of the Victoria Cross NEVILLE HOWSE

During a fighting retreat at Vredefort, in the Orange Free State, this medical officer rescued a severely wounded man and carried him to safety, despite fierce enemy fire

- MURRAY DAHM

The son of a Crimean war veteran and doctor, Neville Reginald Howse was born in Stogursey, Somerset, in 1863. Qualifying as a doctor in 1886, he migrated to Australia in 1889 for health reasons ('weak lungs') and set up his own medical practice in the New South Wales (NSW) city of Newcastle, then in the town of Taree. Deciding to become a surgeon, he returned to Britain to attend the Royal College and returned to Australia in 1899, setting up a practice in the central NSW town of Orange. When Britain declared war on the Boer Republics in October 1899, launching the Second Boer War, Howse volunteered for military service with the second contingent, New South Wales Army Medical Corps. Commissioned as a lieutenant, he departed for South Africa on 17 January, arriving in Capetown on 18 February. He contracted typhoid and was hospitalised for eight weeks.

In May, fighting near Doornkop, about 11km west of Johannesburg, a recovered Howse was mentioned in dispatches for his work treating casualties in the field. Two months later he was attached to a column of the 4th Brigade of Mounted Infantry commanded by General lan Hamilton under Brigadier-General Charles Parker Ridley, chasing the formidable and mosteagerly sought Boer general, Christiaan de Wet.