Harry "Breaker" Harbord Morant.
Harry "Breaker" Harbord Morant (9 December 1864 – 27 February 1902) was an Anglo-Australian drover, horseman, bush poet, military officer and convicted war criminal. His first court-martial was doen at this property in Pietersburg. The first court martial opened on 16 January 1901, with Lieut.-Col. H.C. Denny presiding over a panel of six judges. Maj. James Francis Thomas, a Solicitor from Tenterfield, New South Wales, had been retained to defend Maj. Lenahan. The night before, however, he agreed to represent all six defendants.[23] A Captain Burns-Begg appeared for the prosecution.
The 1902 court-martial of Breaker Morant brought to trial six officers – Lieutenants Harry "Breaker" Morant, Peter Handcock, George Witton, Henry Picton, Captain Alfred Taylor and Major Robert Lenehan – of the Bushveldt Carbineers (BVC), an irregular regiment of mounted rifles during the Boer War.
The charges, which were in part prompted by a "letter of complaint" signed by James Christie and 14 other members of the BVC,[1] were that Lieutenant Morant had incited the co-accused to murder some 20 people, including the Boer commando Visser, a group of eight Boer prisoners of war (POWs), Boer civilian adults and children, and a German missionary named Heese. Morant and Handcock were acquitted of killing Heese, but were sentenced to death on the other two charges and executed within 18 hours of sentencing. Their death warrants were personally signed by Lord Kitchener.
It was not until 1907 that news of the trial and executions were made public in Australia when Witton published Scapegoats of the Empire. The Australian government ensured that none of its troops would be tried by the British military during World War I. The official court records have never been found, prompting accusations of a British cover up.
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