Graves

Even in the age of imperial chicanery, the audacity of the Jameson Raid was astounding. Imagine, two sizeable groups of well-armed mounted men, departing from Pitsane in present-day Botswana and Mafeking (now Mahikeng), respectively, at sunset on 29 December 1895, for a three-day canter to Johannesburg to overthrow Kruger’s government and proclaim it a colony of the British Empire.

Perhaps the closest modern counterpart is the so-called ‘Wonga Coup’ of 2004, to replace the President of Equatorial Guinea with an exiled opposition leader in return for preferential oil rights to corporations affiliated with those involved in the coup.

Ever since that death-or-glory ride, the fate of several of those men of the Mashonaland Mounted and the Bechuanaland Border Police units, who comprised the Jameson Raiders, have been lost in the fog of history and war. This article investigates where those bold policemen who were killed in clashes with the Boer burghers were buried.

By the mid 1890’s it was obvious that in the area immediately south of Johannesburg the world’s richest and greatest gold reefs ever, have been discovered. To the chagrin of Cecil John Rhodes, it also became clear that the extensive gold reefs he and other investors had hoped to find north of the Limpopo River, did not exist.

To Rhodes and other like-minded Randlords, it was intolerable that an ignorant and corrupt Boer government should rule the country where all this immense underground wealth existed. Gradually plans were laid  to seize, if not the whole of the...

To anyone familiar with the history of Richmond in the Northern Cape, the surnames Wagner and Hoffa are of great interest. In 1876, a 33-year-old storekeeper/accountant, John Martin Wagner married Bertha Hoffa, aged 20 years, in Richmond, the ceremony being performed by the Resident Magistrate. One of the witnesses to the marriage was Julius G Mosenthal. I wonder whether this is the same Julius who became a member of the Johannesburg and London Stock Exchanges and was buried in Highgate Cemetery in London?

The Wagners had 3 children who did well for themselves; clearly well educated. The eldest son, John, became a Solicitor; the middle child married a Civil Servant and the third child, born in Richmond in 1885, the subject of this biography, was Percy Albert, who became an eminent Consulting Geologist in South Africa.

But before we get to Percy, it is of interest to look at the family of Bertha. She was the firstborn child of the local doctor in Richmond, Moritz Hoffa, and was born in that little town/village in about 1856. She had 5 siblings and 1 of those achieved great heights in the world of science. This was Dr Albert Hoffa, born in Richmond in March 1859.  He trained as a surgeon, an orthopaedist and a physiotherapist. He is described as the founder of modern orthopaedics. It was he who introduced an operation for congenital hip dislocation in 1890.

When Percy was 17 years old, his father, John Martin Wagner, died on a mail...

The ‘Northern Rhodesia Great War Memorial’ just inside the entrance to the Victoria Falls World Heritage Site, at Livingstone, Zambia, was erected in 1922 to ‘The Memory of Northern Rhodesians who gave their lives for the Empire in the Great War 1914 – 1918’.

The red sandstone slabs of this Memorial were quarried at the Pasipas Quarry, near the railway line to the north of Bulawayo.

According to Rob Burrett, a Zimbabwean archaeologist and historian, the Pasipas Quarry was one of two great quarries that provided building stone for the fine buildings of Bulawayo, during the period 1893 to 1920. This Quarry also served as an important supplier of sandstone gravestones during this period.

It furthermore supplied the sandstone slabs for the Honoured Dead Memorial at Kimberley and the old Siege Memorial in Mafikeng (now Mahikeng), and possibly other memorials and tombstones in South Africa, as well.

Siege Memorial at Mahikeng

Honoured Dead Memorial at Kimberley

The Bulawayo architectural partnership of Frank J Scott & James Roberston was responsible for designing the impressive Memorial...

Remembrance tourism is all about visiting battlefields, fortifications, war cemeteries, memorials, etc., and is fast becoming a popular pastime.

During the last few years, Lorraine and I engaged in this type of tourism by viewing some Anglo Boer War sites and memorials at Colesberg, Noupoort, Middelburg, Aberdeen, Nieu Bethesda, Willowmore and Uniondale.

We omitted Graaff-Reinet because to view its historical sites would have added considerably to an already hectic travelling schedule.

Colesberg, Aliwal North, Burgersdorp and Stormberg were about as far south-east as the Boer forces advanced during their 1st invasion of the Cape Colony, upon the outbreak of war. During this buoyant early period, possibly misled by Republican hubris that the war would soon be over, 10 000 Cape Rebels enthusiastically joined up. But despite victories at Colesberg and Stormberg, by early 1900 the Republican forces were retreating across the Orange River to try and stem the advance of the powerful Imperial army along the railway line to Kimberley and from there to Bloemfontein. Abandoned by the retreating Boer commandos, many Cape Rebels quietly returned to their farms.

From October 1900, captured Cape Colonial Rebels were charged under the Special Tribunal’s Act. Rebels sentenced by these Special Courts were treated so leniently that it bordered on amnesty. Unfortunately, these lenient sentences encouraged rather than prevented Cape Rebels from joining the fray once the war proved far from over.

To the British, the war appeared to be won once they had captured Bloemfontein and Pretoria. So much so, that following the...

In my research in our old cemeteries, I sometimes find the headstones of prominent citizens of Johannesburg, which have been vandalized. This has been the case in the three stones featured here.

Charles Chudleigh – many South Africans reading this will remember shopping at the OK Bazaars, an affordable, family department store found in most big cities and towns around the country. But are you aware of its history? In 1854 in the Scilly Islands off Land’s End, Cornwall, Richard and Elizabeth Chudleigh welcomed their fifth of seven sons into the world. Remarkably, all these sons made it into adulthood. This particular son was Charles who came to South Africa in 1874. In about 1884, he set up business as a Draper in Queenstown, Cape Colony where in 1885 at the age of 31, he married his life’s partner, Margaret Jane Stirton. Samuel, his brother, was a witness at the ceremony, so we assume, he was in partnership with Charles in the drapery business already.

Charles Chudleigh

The two brothers moved up to the very young Johannesburg in June 1889 when Johannesburg was barely three years old. They realized the potential in this dusty mining town and opened a drapery shop in Eloff Street (corner of Pritchard Street) which they called Mount’s Bay House. In 1893 they built a larger store, a quaint...

There is another headstone in Braamfontein cemetery which has intrigued me for years. I first saw it when Flo Bird and I were researching interesting stones in the Anglican section at the far western end of Braamfontein cemetery. I noticed a plot with just an arch made of what looked like stone, complete with a capstone. There was a base for the two short pillars to stand on but that was all. No name, no dates. This was even worse than my ‘Grannie’ headstone (click here to read about this mystery)! What struck me was the strangeness of the design of the stone which sat in the one corner of the plot with nothing else on the plot at all. I hadn’t seen anything like it before.

Determined to get to the bottom of this mystery, I looked at graves around it which had headstones on and went to the burial registers to find their grave numbers. In this way, I was able to work out that this arch headstone was on plot 17014. When I looked up who was buried in that plot, I knew that my efforts had not been in vain – this was the son of Sir Theophilus Shepstone, KCMG who had been instrumental in the annexing of the Transvaal for the British in 1877.

Theophilus Shepstone, known as Offy, was the third son of Sir Theophilus and Maria Shepstone.  He was one of 9 children – 6 boys and 3 girls. But let us set the scene...

Some time ago, I was wondering what happened to William Henry Auret Pritchard when he died. You may ask why I should be interested in this man. Well, for historians of Johannesburg, it is a well-known fact that as a Land Surveyor, he was asked to link the two sections of Central Johannesburg which had been laid out on either side of a mining enterprise in the vicinity of the Supreme Court (Pritchard and Bree Streets). De Villiers had surveyed the original stands in early Johannesburg but because of mining activity between President and Bree Streets, he was unable to survey the stands that were laid out after the mining in that section had finished. Because these two sections had been laid out independently of each other, the north/south streets on either side didn’t meet, so there is a kink in the streets where they cross Bree Street. Pritchard did his best and a street was named after him!

The kink in the road (Google Maps)

Pritchard Street (The Heritage Portal)

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Mehmet Remzi Bey/Effendi was the first and last Consul General of the Ottoman Empire posted to South Africa. Turks began immigrating to South Africa during the 19th Century and in 1889, the Ottoman Empire sent and maintained Honorary Consulates in Johannesburg and Durban.

Bey, as I shall call him, was born on December 30, 1869, in Istanbul to a family of Ottoman aristocrats. After completing his professional training, he joined the Ottoman Foreign Service at the age of 23. He served in several countries with distinction and on April 21, 1914, just before the outbreak of World War 1, he was appointed Consul General to South Africa. Bey’s wife was the Russian diplomat, Madam Helene Hanim. They arrived in Cape Town on May 21, 1914, much to the excitement of the Muslim community. The couple had 2 children. Unfortunately, despite his diplomatic status, he was regarded as part of ‘the enemy’ and interned in South Africa by the British colonial government.

Life in captivity was difficult for Bey – he became seriously ill and received no medical treatment. It was only when it appeared he would not survive that he was released. Sadly be died on February 14, 1916 aged 45/46, just a few weeks after his release. The cause of his death on his Death Certificate was given as Cerebral Hemorrhage and Coma. He died at 39 Ellis Street, Yeoville and mercifully his demise was quick.

Imam Kamaldien was the man who notified the authorities of his death. He...

Some time ago, I was wandering around the General Section of Braamfontein cemetery, doing some research. There was a family plot with one headstone on it and its cross broken off and laid down in front of the stone.  I think this cross may have been turned by Mr Pon and the waste pickers from outside the main gates of the cemetery on one of our cleaning parties. But that is another story.

I took a photo of the headstone as the inscription interested me. It simply said, ‘Grannie’ and gave her date of birth and date of death. I must confess that I was a little annoyed as inscriptions like that make tracing family members in the cemetery very difficult. I put the photo on the back burner, meaning to try and work out who Grannie was when I had time.

I often thought about the grave when I visited the burial registers but without a name, I knew it was like looking for a needle in a haystack. However, earlier this week, I had some time on my hands while I waited to meet someone in the cemetery, so went through the registers, checking each letter of the alphabet for someone of her age who died on that date. I wondered whether I was wasting my time but then I got to the letter ‘S’ and there she was – Eliza Julia Smith. Her date of death and age were correct.

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Probably 30 years ago I was asked by Belgian visitors to Talana Museum, if I was aware of the Talana Farm cemetery outside the village of Boezinge in Belgium. At the time I wasn’t, but that started a long journey of research and discovery about this cemetery and its links with the Battle of Talana (20 October 1899). It led to a couple of visits to Belgium to see the cemetery for myself, talk to various people about it, and on 11 November 2014, to being one of the representatives to lay a wreath under the Menin Gate, in memory of the 4 Dundee men commemorated on the walls of that memorial. That evening and the subsequent 10 days at the centenary memorial functions at various cemeteries and memorials in Belgium and then being a guest speaker at an international conference at the Lewarde Mining Museum, on coal mining and the First World War, will remain with me forever.

Menin Gate (Wikipedia)

Pam McFadden at Talana Farm cemetery (Talana Museum)

Talana Farm was one of a group of farm houses named...