Oliver John Hindon, also known as Jack, was born in Logie, Perth, Scotland, on 20th April 1874 to Thomas Hindon and Elizabeth Thompson.
In 1888, he came to South Africa as a bandboy aged 14 and moved to the Transvaal Republic via Zululand and became a bricklayer who also helped with the building of railway bridges. As a volunteer, he did military service in the commando against L. S. Jameson and then joined the Transvaal Police. He became generally known when, during the Second Anglo-Boer War, he, with H. F. Slegtkamp and De Roos, occupied Spioenkop. Then he joined Edwards’s spy corps, and later Dame Theron’s reconnaissance corps. Oliver John Hindon was finally appointed head of his own corps, whose special duty it was to destroy the British lines of communication. He gained a reputation as a “destroyer of trains”. On 23 February 1903, he married Pauline Coetsee of Middelburg, where he settled. After a residence of some years in the Netherlands and the U.S.A. after the Second Anglo-Boer War, he returned to South Africa with nervous paralysis, which made him a helpless invalid, and on the 19th March 1919, he died in poverty in Pretoria.
In recognition of his devotion and daring, the Jack Hindon Medal was instituted in 1970. This South African military decoration was awarded to warrant officers, NCOs and lower ranks in the Commandos for long and outstanding service. The medal featured an embossed depiction of Hindon hoisting the Vierkleur flag during Spioenkop. It was awarded until it was discontinued in 1975.
A lesser-known but intriguing facet of his legacy is the existence of a “lost manuscript”—his reflections on the Boer War, early Afrikaner nationalism, and his experiences—entrusted to the historian Gustav Preller with instructions to publish posthumously. That manuscript was never released, and its whereabouts remain a mystery.
