At the Fireside--Volume 1 (14 page)

The Battle of Bronkhorstspruit

The Battle of Bronkhorstspruit

When Sir Theophilus Shepstone had Rider Haggard raise the British flag in Pretoria on 12 April 1877, thereby annexing the hopelessly insolvent Transvaal, it was perhaps inevitable that the burghers, would, at some stage, rebel against direct British rule. The Boers met on 8 December 1880 on the farm Paardekraal just outside Krugersdorp, elected the Triumvirate of Joubert, Kruger and Pretorius and went into revolt. The Governor, Sir Owen Lanyon, having for months played down the possibility of revolt, finally called for reinforcements. Colonel Colley was marching up from Natal and Colonel Anstruther, with the 94th Regiment, was instructed to leave Lydenburg post-haste and march on Pretoria. Anstruther dithered for fourteen days in Lydenburg, buying more transport wagons and stores and having the endless farewell parties that gallant officers were accustomed to.

On 5 December, with a 40-piece band leading the way, Anstruther's ‘flying column', consisting of 9 officers and 254 other ranks, 3 women and 2 children and 16 large commissariat wagons, each drawn by a span of 18 oxen, left Lydenburg for Pretoria to the cheers of the people lining the street.

Because of the debacle of the Sekhukhune War, the British did not believe that the Boers would actually fight, and all warnings of the likelihood of an ambush, particularly in the hills to the east of Pretoria, were completely ignored. The ‘flying column' averaged less than 15 km per day and, on 15 December, Colonel Anstruther received yet another warning from a mounted half-caste policeman about a possible Boer ambush. Again the warning was ignored – and no scouts were sent forward.

On the night of 19 December the officers and the men of the 94th bivouacked near Honey's Farm. The peach orchard was in full fruit. The troops helped themselves to the ripe peaches and stuffed their haversacks to the brim. The sergeants and officers tried to make good the situation by going to the faimhouse to apologise and pay the Boer vrou compensation. In the morning, with the band in full swing, and most of the men having unbuttoned their red serge tunics because of the hot December highveld sun and, having thrown their rifles onto the wagons, they were surprised when the band leading the column stopped playing. Out of the bush came a young Boer, with a white handkerchief tied to the muzzle of his rifle, bearing an envelope addressed to Colonel Anstruther, which he handed to Ralph Edgerton, the band's conductor. Anstruther, rode up to the front of the column, opened the envelope and read, ‘We have declared the Transvaal a Republic and any movement of troops is disallowed. You are to turn around and go back to Lydenburg. For if you cross the Bronkhorstspruit, we consider it an act of war.'

Colonel Anstruther, still not believing that the Boers would fight, and not realising that Commandant Frans Joubert and his commando were lying only a short distance away with their rifles ready, said to the youngster, ‘My orders are to go to Pretoria, and to Pretoria I will go.' Anstruther rather foolishly called for the opening of the ammunition boxes, whereupon Frans Joubert, considering this a hostile act, ordered his men to charge. They galloped to within 200 metres, dismounted and opened fire. The battle was over in less time than it takes to tell the story, and within fifteen minutes fifty-seven of the troops were dead and slightly over a hundred lay wounded in the dirt of that old road. The wounded Anstruther ordered his men to surrender.

The local Boer women on the surrounding farms nursed the British soldiers, but Anstruther, having received five wounds to his legs, died a few days later from shock, after amputation of one of his shattered legs.

All the British dead were buried in a mass grave alongside the road, and if you know where to go on the farm, which still belongs to the descendants of the same family, you can stand on that old dirt road leading to Lydenburg in the east and to Pretoria in the west.

Because the British soldiers were buried as they stood, the peaches they carried in their pockets and haversacks were buried with them. In 1901, during the second Anglo-Boer War, a column of British troops was marching eastwards from Pretoria when they came across ‘two uncommonly fine orchards' of peach trees, growing out of the haversacks of those soldiers who lay buried beside the road. The old farmstead still has peachwood lintels over the windows and the family treasures letters and other relics of that skirmish.

The story of Sarah Heckford

The story of Sarah Heckford

On 30 June 1839, in Dublin Ireland, was born Sarah Maud Goff. From a landed gentry background, she inherited, on both sides of her family, a tradition of service. The army, the church and laws she learnt about from her father, and good works and community service from her mother. Along with a dose of puritanical intolerance and an independent turn of mind, this background in Victorian England assured her a position in society.

Her mother died when she was six years old and having contracted tuberculosis, she was doomed to be partially lame, with a slight hump on her right shoulder. She remained self-conscious about this and would never allow a photograph be taken from the left-hand side.

Sarah studied, becoming competent in music and painting and, at the age of twenty-two years found herself financially independent. At that time there were no women doctors in England and she began caring for the sick and poor. Sarah took her inspiration from Elizabeth Blackwell. Elizabeth was born in Bristol in 1821, emigrated to America in 1832, then studied medicine and was awarded a PhD in 1849. She obtained permission to study at St Bartholomew's Hospital in London. Both women met Florence Nightingale, who was at this time still living at home. What a tragedy it was that facilities in England for higher education were denied to women at that time!

In 1866 the great cholera epidemic, which had arrived from Egypt by ship, struck London. Extra nurses were desperately needed and Sarah volunteered. She met a doctor, Nathaniel Heckford from Calcutta, who was a mere twenty-two years of age, but had already won gold medals for medicine and surgery. On 28 January 1867, the twenty-six-year old Sarah married the twenty-three-year old Dr Heckford, much to the displeasure of her relations.

At this time there were no hospitals that would admit children under the age of two years, so Sarah took £4 000 of her debentures. In January 1868 they started the East London Hospital for children, in Butcher's Row. During this period Charles Dickens used to visit the hospital and they remained good friends until his death in 1870. Nathaniel, the love of Sarah's life, died in 1871 at the tender age of twenty-nine, and was buried in the Goff's cemetery plot in Woking, Surrey.

The British, represented by Sir Theophilus Shepstone, had annexed the Transvaal Republic in 1877, and the broken-hearted Sarah decided to make a new life for herself She purchased 100 shares in the Transvaal Mining and Trading Association. Lame, widowed and in poor health, she set sail for South Africa. She arrived in December 1878 in Durban. Having bought a horse and, in the company of a transport rider, she rode into the Transvaal, westward to Rustenburg, where the business venture she had bought into was supposed to have been situated. She stayed at the local inn, only to discover that the whole thing was a hoax. The scheme did not exist. Her money was now running low and she realized that if she did not get a job with lodgings, she would be in desperate trouble.

The local clergyman arranged a post for her as a private tutor to the two Jennings daughters on the faini Nooitgedacht, in the Hekpoort valley. The Jennings' were quite a family themselves, being second-generation 1820 settlers who had trekked up to the Magaliesburg and started farming. This was a pleasant period for Sarah. In the winter months the family would trek up to the Northam region for the cattle to enjoy the winter grazing, returning to the farm with the onset of spring.

Sarah, however, was becoming restless and, having learned quite a lot about farming, she persuaded William Jennings to sell her a portion of the farm Groenfontein. It was during this period that she employed an Englishman named Edgerton, who was ‘down on his uppers'. She then acquired a wagon and twelve ‘salted' oxen, and decided to become an itinerant trader, a ‘smous'. Male smouses were common then, but a woman smous – unheard of! She left Nooitgedacht and trekked to the markets of Pretoria, where she bought supplies of all sorts of commodities the farmers required. On the way home, she sold her goods along the valley. The northern part of the country was now being opened up, and she decided to ply her trade on the Great North Road. Northwards she travelled with Edgerton as her ‘voorloopee, leading the oxen. She would trade her goods at settlements such as Marulaskop and the Nylstroom district, and then head back to Pretoria. On one of these expeditions she entered an agreement with Makopane (Makapan), trading very successfully in grain with the Chief until the outbreak of the so-called ‘Gun War' in Basotuland caused a shortage of grain. She fell out with George Edgerton, her presumed lover, and he went off to the Basotu War never to be heard of again.

She soon realised that war between the Boers and their British rulers was imminent and moved onto the farm she had bought. The First Anglo-Boer War broke out in 1880. Anstruther was defeated at Bronkhorstspruit, Colley was defeated at Majuba, the British sued for peace and the Transvaal was returned to the Boers. This heralded the end for those farmers who had supported the British. Business in the Transvaal had collapsed. Banks were calling in their loans and many people were going bankrupt. She decided to head for Natal. On the way her oxen sickened and died, a Boer shot her beloved dog ‘Prince' and at Harrismith, she gave up. She eventually made it to Durban where she sailed for England.

We know very little about Sarah's life between 1881 and 1887, other than the fact that she helped out in the East End Hospital. However, as happens with so many people who leave this country, the memory haunted her. She longed for the African sun and the bush and, in May 1888 she arrived in the boom-town of Johannesburg, where gold had been discovered only two years before. The bondholders had foreclosed on her farm and she set herself up as a sharebroker in Booysens. Her timing could not have been worse! March 1899 saw the mines hit pyrites and yields plummeted. The boom collapsed almost overnight and the biggest slump in the history of Johannesburg began.

Sarah weathered the storm, found a buyer for her farm, settled the bond and, with the little that was left, she decided to go transport-riding and farming. She bought a ‘Burgher's right' farm out near Middelburg on the road to Mozambique, invested in two wagons with oxen and set about remaking her fortune by transport-riding on the Great North Road. It was here that she found the ideal faun, ‘Tobias zyn Loop', and, when the railway came, she was bought out at a handsome profit. The business grew, especially now that she had the capital for trading. She moved to the northern Transvaal, loaded her wagons and travelled the 110 kilometres down the Klein Letaba area, where she supplied the miners at the Birthday Mine with their requirements. She bought the farm Ravenshill and worked out the first farm-schooling scheme in the Transvaal, launching the Transvaal Women's Educational Union in 1898.

In 1902, after the Second Anglo-Boer, she sailed for England, where she was treated as a celebrity. She caused a sensation by attacking Emily Hobhouse, declaring how very little the latter actually knew about the entire situation! She soon returned to the Transvaal and took lodgings on the corner of Du Toit and Schoeman Street, Pretoria. In 1903 she took ill and on 17 April she died, at the age of sixty-three years. Her obituary which appeared in the Pretoria News, was written by Vere Stent, secretary to Cecil John Rhodes.

And so, a tremendously brave and indomitable woman of pioneering spirit lies resting peacefully in the Wesleyan section of the old cemetery in Pretoria. She is an example to us all.

The Po people

The Po people

In the late 18th century the area around what is now the small town of Magaliesburg, west of Johannesburg in the North West Province, was the ancestral land of the Po people. They are a sub-tribe of the Tswana and their totem is the elephant.

When Mzilikazi fled the wrath of Shaka and entered the Magaliesberg, many, though not all, of the Po fled their lands and migrated down to Thaba Nchu where they lived untroubled by the wrath of the warrior king, who ruled supreme in the Transvaal. When the Voortrekkers arrived, Mzilikazi suspected their intentions and fell upon the Erasmus family near present-day Rustenburg. The scattered Trekkers consolidated in the Parys area and in the Battle of Vegkop that followed, a mere forty families drove back an impi of more than 3 000 Ndebele. The Voortrekkers then attacked and ransacked Mosega, one of Mzilikazi's kraals near Zeerust. At the same time a Zulu impi attacked from the east and, although Mzilikazi himself was safe at eGabeni to the north, his power in the Transvaal was broken. Hendrik Potgieter, the Boer leader, took advantage of this and in a nine-day running battle, Mzilikazi was driven out of the country and up through present-day Botswana to the north, where he went on to form the great Matabele nation.

The Po who had fought alongside the Trekkers against Mzilikazi, then settled in the valley of the Nagakotse (Magalies) River. In 1841 they again fought on the side of the Boers when a group of Ndebele warriors raided into the Transvaal. This, however, did not help the Po. The Boers moved inexorably onto their land. They surveyed and cut it up into farms and the Po had to dig irrigation furrows from the river for them. Anybody who has driven through the Hekpoort Valley will know how fertile the land is. The Po were devastated and deeply resentful of the Boers who had stolen their land. In 1847 their Chief Moghali Moghali (after whom the Magaliesberg range is named) was accused of gunrunning and conspiring with chiefs hostile to the Boers. He was summoned to appear before Commandant Kruger, the father of Paul Kruger. Suspicious of the whites' justice, however, Moghali Moghali left his home with a few followers and fled to Thaba Nchu. Years later he and his people came back to make their peace with the then president of the Transvaal, Marthinus Wessels Pretorius. After negotiations the Boers decided to allocate some land north of the Magaliesberg range to the Po, but the fertile valley between the Witwatersberg and the Magaliesberg was not returned.

The Po were told that they would have to purchase the land from the Transvaal Republic, so Moghali Moghali called the tribal elders together and they decided to send all the able-bodied men down to the Cape Province to find work. They then levied a tax upon the men's earnings and in this way were able, in 1863, to pay the Transvaal Government for the return of a portion of their sacred lands. The Po settled just south of the present-day town of Britz at a place called Tlhogokgolo Mountain or Wolhuterskop.

It was no wonder that, when the Anglo-Boer War broke out, they sided with the British, hoping to retrieve their lands, but that too was in vain and the Po still live at the foot of Wolhuterskop to this day.