Recently, Sarah Welham, convenor of the Friends of the Johannesburg Cemeteries, and I completed an exploratory road trip of the battlefields route between Koppies and Kroonstad, in the northern Free State.
I had previously visited the interesting but somewhat out of the way war cemeteries near the Rhenosterspruit railway bridge and at the Rooiwal railway station, both near the town of Koppies. Here General Christiaan de Wet achieved important victories over three British contingents in June 1900. His victories came at just the right moment to rejuvenate the despondent republican forces whose capital cities of Bloemfontein and Pretoria had recently fallen to the seemingly irresistible British forces.
We also intended to visit the old Kroonstad cemetery, to my knowledge one of only three cemeteries that contains graves of three important South African military events: The South African War; the 1914 Afrikaner Rebellion; and the 1922 Rand Revolt.
Departing Johannesburg our first halt was at the Koppies town cemetery, where we hoped to locate graves of rebels killed during the 1914 Rebellion.
Koppies situated approximately 63 km north-east of Kroonstad was laid out in 1910 on the farm Honingkopjes, Dutch for ‘honey hills’. It was stablished as a private agricultural settlement by General Christiaan De Wet, Minister of Agriculture in the ‘Orangia Unie’ Party Cabinet to provide employment for poor Whites. After the establishment of the Union of South Africa in 1910, this settlement was taken over by the government and further developed. De Wet nevertheless continued to visit the settlement...
