Virtual
War Memorial
Australia

Awards/Decorations: Queen's South Africa Medal with Diamond Hill, Johannesburg, Orange Fee State, Cape Colony clasps.

Personal Characteristics: Prior Service with H Company 4th NSW Infantry Regiment.

Reasons to go and fight: Detail not provided

Details of service in war: December 1899 - December 1900 in northern Cape Colony, Free State and Transvaal including battle of Diamond Hill, Johannesburg.

Service and life after the Boer War: Returned to Australia: 8 January 1901 on the Orient. John Daniel Revel Grimmond born on the 4 July 1874 at, Dundee, Scotland was the seventh child born to David Grimmond and his wife Magdaline Grimmond (formerly Beveridge). David & Magdaline and their 10 children left Glasgow December 1st 1883 and arrived in Sydney 16 February 1884, aboard the three masted Sailing Ship Stirlingshire. Their youngest daughter Julia died on the voyage to Australia. The family welcomed another daughter Wilhelmina Snidor Grimmond, their twelfth child, born at Islington, a suburb of Newcastle, Australia in 1884. Wilhelmina died in 1885.
John D R Grimmond married Catherine Elizabeth Jackson 21 October 1893 at Waratah, a suburb of Newcastle. There were nine children born to John and Catherine Grimmond, first at Waratah and later at Telford Street Minmi where John worked as a miner in John Brown's Minmi mines
Some time during 1899 John enlisted as a soldier and fought in the forces sent to South Africa during the Boer War. He must have returned during late 1900 for their sixth child, a boy, also named John Daniel Revel Grimmond was born October 19th 1901 at Minmi. Three other children were born 1903, 1904 and 1906. We think that his traumatic wartime experiences resulted in years spent in the Mental Hospital at Morisset, Lake Macquarie Shire, where he died April 6 1942 from Mitral Stenosis and Arterio Sclerous. He was buried in the family grave in the Methodist Cemetery Sandgate.