At the Fireside Page 3

  All this was to have a dreadful effect on Holloway and Anne Helmore, living humbly but happily with their people at Lekhatlong, so far down to the south.

  For many and very convoluted reasons, mainly deriving from Livingstone’s vision of the future, the London Missionary Society decided that a party of missionaries already in South Africa should trek into the Makololo country on the northern side of the Makgadikgadi saltpans, namely the Helmores and the Price family – Roger and Isabella Price and four of their seven children, the remaining three being left in England with relatives.

  In July of 1859 the Helmores and Prices left for the Makololo country, about 1 000 kilometres away as the crow flies. It is easy to picture the scene of their departure from Kuruman. Four big, clumsy ox wagons, each with its 14 patient oxen yoked in place, and a commissariat wagon line-up in the dusty main street outside the mission buildings, the travellers standing with heads bowed as John Moffat leads them in prayer. Then the long whips crack and, with a grinding of iron tyres on sand, they set off into the unknown.

  Although a long ox-wagon trek was hardly a novelty in those days, they were surprisingly ill-equipped for such a massive undertaking. For example, they had no portable furnace, an essential piece of equipment for such a trek (it arrived later and when it finally appeared there were no tools for using it – tongs, hammers with which to beat the heated metal, bellows. It was, in other words, completely useless. Yet a day-to-day account of that entire journey I have in my possession makes it clear that broken disselbooms, axles and the like were about par for the course.

  For those of you who either know the country well or who are interested enough to look it up on a map, the route they followed went from Kuruman to Dithakong, then just west of Mafekeng into the Bakgwaketse country in modern Botswana, then Kanye, Kolobeng and Molepolole into the Bakwena country, Lophepe, Shoeshong, just west of Letlhakane (close to the modern Orapa diamond mine), and then northwards into the Ntwetwe pan in the Makgadikgadi.

  This is rough country now and was infinitely rougher for them. There was little or no water. They struggled to get local guides who refused – justifiably – to venture into the ‘area of delusion’. All – the missionaries, the children, the wagon drivers, not least the cattle – suffered from thirst, the worst of all earthly torture.

  They say there is no sound on God’s earth as ghastly as the lowing of cattle dying of thirst; it stays with you forever because it is burnt into your soul. Long after the event, in the deep hours of night, the pain wakes you from your slumber, sweating and gasping, and you remember.

  The travellers camped out at Chapman’s baobabs, pressed onwards to Khama-Khama and then hit the Mababe Depression whose flood plains become hellholes infested with tsetse flies and mosquitoes when they there inundated by the Chobe’s waters. From there they struggled on to the Chobe itself where they awaited the pleasure of Chief Sebituane because, by ancient custom, one did not cross into a tribe’s area of influence without permission from its ruler.

  Sebituane was in no hurry to allow them across the river because Livingstone had gone east quite a long time before and he had heard nothing from him since. The reason for this, so we are told, is that German missionaries were trying to gain a foothold with encouragement from the trekboers who believed that all of what is now Botswana belonged to them, and Sebituane knew that the English missionaries, like Livingstone, were going to urge him to move to a healthier climate. But he was not going to move until Livingstone returned in person.

  They waited a week before a team finally came to bring them across. After the customary gifts they enquired as to the whereabouts of Ngaka (The Doctor). Sebituane told them that Livingstone had been gone far too long and the tribe was still waiting for him to return (Livingstone had told Dr Tidman, head of the London Missionary Society, that the Zambezi was navigable, only to make the horrifying discovery that it was not when he stumbled on the Cahora Bassa falls).

  What happened after this is a tale that hardly bears telling. One by one the members of the party started dying – whether from poison or the belated effects of malaria no-one will ever know.

  They had arrived on 14 February 1860. On 2 March a drover named Molatsi died. Five days later, on 7 March, young Henry Helmore died. On the 9th, the infant Eliza Price. On the 11th, Salina Helmore and one Thabe. On 12 March, Anne Helmore. On the 19th, Sekloti. On 21 April, Holloway Helmore.

  On 19 June Sebituane allowed the survivors to leave. By this time he had robbed them of almost everything they possessed, and as a parting shot demanded Holloway’s wagon. The survivors, weakened by fever and sometimes almost completely delirious, had no option but to give him his way. But the old robber-chief had not finished with them. As payment for letting his people help them across the river he demanded – and got – all their blankets.

  Now Roger Price, his delirious wife and the two remaining Holloway children started the long journey back through the Mababe Flats. Two days later his beloved Isabella died in his arms. He left her in an unmarked grave, so very far from her family and the soft green fields of England, and carried on – devastated to his very soul, kept going only by his promise to a dying Holloway to see the orphaned Holloway children on a ship home.

  Price decided to turn south-east towards Lake Ngami where, he knew, Livingstone had friends. Most likely Price would never have reached Lake Ngami except that another missionary, the Rev John Mackenzie, had decided to come to the expedition’s rescue. When he heard the story of what had transpired he found it almost unbelievable, but he set off towards Lake Ngami and caught up just in time with a delirious Price and the handful of emaciated survivors.

  Yet this terrible tragedy had a happy ending of sorts. Mr Mackenzie got them all safely back to Kuruman, and in due course the Helmore orphans took ship for England. When he had recovered Roger Price married John Moffat’s other daughter, Lees, and – believe it or not – stayed in what is now Botswana, ministering to the people of Shoshong. That is what you would call indomitable spirit.

  But, as Stella Kilby so rightly says, ‘There are no crosses that mark the spots.’

  Nottingham Road and its Famous Hotel

  NOTTINGHAM ROAD AND ITS FAMOUS HOTEL

  The first white settlers in the Midlands were the Voortrekkers who arrived there in the 1830s after their part of the Great Trek had split in two at Winburg. One group pressed on northwards to what eventually became the ZAR, then the Transvaal and finally Gauteng. The other group crossed the formidable Drakensberg range and dropped down to Natal where they formed the Republic of Natalia.

  The Republic of Natalia was short-lived. The British were close behind and on 12 May 1843 Sir George Napier, the Governor of the Cape Colony, proclaimed Natalia the crown colony of Natal. Its inhabitants knew it was time to take to the road once more if they wanted to avoid becoming British subjects, and bitterly started loading their wagons and gathering their livestock.

  Then, having sold their farms for a pittance to the newly arriving British settlers, they trekked away. By the 1850s there were very few of the original Voortrekker families left in the district, although many farm names had and still have Afrikaans/Dutch names.

  To mark this second trek there is now a famous statue of a Voortrekker woman with her arm around a little child, both of them barefoot, standing with their backs to Natal, and on the statue there is the inscription: ‘Liewers kaalvoet oor die berge, as onder die Britte ly’ (Better to walk barefoot over the mountains than suffer under the British).

  To encourage families to settle in the interior of Natalia, the British established the ‘Byrnes Immigration Scheme’ which paid each adult male the sum of £10, sponsored the cost of the voyage from England and provided each man with 20 acres of land. Packed with would-be settlers, ships like the Washington, the Wanderer, the Helvetia and, of course, the famous Minerva headed for Natal.

  The first British settlers
in Nottingham Road were the King and Ellis families. The Kings – John King and his wife Janet (née Ellis), their two children James (three) and Helen (three months), Janet’s brother James and sisters Helen and Elizabeth – took possession of their 20 acres at Slangspruit, near Pietermaritzburg, and James Ellis settled down at Wilde Als Spruit (now renamed Nottingham).

  The families arrived on 10 October 1849 and found, like many others, that their land allotments were infertile, rocky and too small – totally unsuitable for farming, in other words. That left them with only two choices: to return home or find more suitable land. Fortunately the Kings and Ellises had some private means, so that they were able to keep the allotted land while searching for better prospects further away.

  They also managed to sell their unfarmable land at a small profit when they found a suitable property at Wilde Als Spruit (near the present-day Nottingham Road) and bought it from Petrus H Potgieter, one of the last of the remaining original Voortrekkers.

  The property was bought by Janet King, her brother James and sisters Helen and Elizabeth Ellis. Being from Scotland and linked to Thomas Graham – Lord Lynedoch of Balgowan whose estates were named Balgowan, Lynedoch and Blairgowrie – they named their property after Lynedoch and Balgowan, with John King living at Lynedoch and Ellis at Balgowan.

  Potgieter offered every assistance to the new owners, and helped them to relocate themselves and their effects which required a number of trips to and from Pietermaritzburg. At first the King family lived in a makeshift shack consisting of a large waterproof tarpaulin stretched over wooden poles. From there they moved into a wattle-and-daub house with a sod-walled kitchen annex where they stayed until their new stone house was completed in 1856.

  King prospered. He built the first viable English-styled dairy farm, which was later to win many a prize at the Pietermaritzburg agricultural shows, and in 1858 bought another farm which he called Gowrie where the village of Nottingham Road was established. He later donated a portion of his farm for the establishment of a Presbyterian church and this corrugated-iron structure, which became known as St John’s Gowrie, still proudly stands today.

  The small community encroached on the already diminishing domain of the hunter-gatherer Bushmen who now found themselves confined to the foothills of the Drakensberg since Sir Theophilus Shepstone had relocated the AmaHlubi and the AmaNgwane between them and the settlers.

  For the Bushmen the arrival of the settlers brought a welcome new source of food. As a result, the settlers were constantly raided by groups of between 4 to 14 men, some on horseback and armed with guns or poisoned arrows, who swooped down from the Drakensberg to steal cattle and horses.

  In 1853 the farmers became so desperate about the situation that they wrote to the acting Governor of Natal requesting protection from this constant threat. He decided to establish a small military outpost in addition to a ‘pensioners’ village’ west of the existing settlement as a second ‘buffer zone’, and allocated 13 000 acres of commonage for the village of Fort Nottingham which was proclaimed in 1856.

  That year 16 men of the 45th Regiment of Foot (later to be named the Sherwood Foresters) from Nottingham in England’s Robin Hood country under Lieutenant Arthur Smythe were sent out to the settlement and built a one-room Fort Nottingham in which all 16 of the rank and file slept. In 1857, the year Lieutenant Smythe died, the Sherwood Foresters were replaced by a detachment of the Cape Mounted Riflemen under Sergeant John Quick for whom a small cottage was built at the Fort. It was not a happy occupation: the CMR was a top fighting regiment and the men grew bored when the raiders stayed away, leading to a certain amount of ill-discipline, and in 1860 they were replaced by another small detachment, this time from the Natal Mounted Rifles.

  The year 1882 brought some excitement which had nothing to do with cattle raiders. As farmer Charles Smythe wrote in his diary in July 1882: ‘The railway has at last commenced, and there is a large staff of men on Gowrie busy putting up buildings and beginning the earthworks. The station is to be just at the crossing of the road to Fort Nottingham, about two miles from Strathearn.’

  Legend has it that one of the early settlers, Duncan McKenzie, was partly responsible for the location of the Nottingham Road Station, just 11 kilometres east of Fort Nottingham. He owned most of the land around the fort, and one day he found a surveyor knocking in pegs on his farm.

  ‘What do you think you’re doing?’ he asked.

  ‘I am surveying the railway line for the government,’ the surveyor replied.

  MacKenzie turned his horse around and rode home where he fetched his Martini-Henry rifle and rode back to tell the surveyor that he could help the government to save some money.

  ‘How?’ the understandably puzzled surveyor asked him.

  ‘Well,’ McKenzie replied, ‘they’re going to have to advertise for a new surveyor if you keep on doing that on my land!’

  So it came about that when the government started building the railway station in 1884, it was a safe distance away from Duncan McKenzie’s farm. When it was completed in 1885 the station was given the name Harrison’s Camp after the contractor who built it. Then it was changed to Karkloof Station, but in 1887 the name changed again, this time to Nottingham Road Station because the locals had decided that it was too far from Karkloof to justify its current name, and as it was on the road to Fort Nottingham, the village that sprang up around the station became known as Nottingham Road.

  Legend also has it that there has been an inn situated in the vicinity of Nottingham Road since 1854. While the current building is not that old, it is believed that there could have been an inn or a pub for the soldiers who were stationed at Fort Nottingham and also to serve as a ‘Railway Halt’ to serve passengers passing through.

  Nottingham Road might have been a mere speck on the map, but it was obviously a place where the inhabitants thought big. On 26 October 1887, for example, 11 prominent Nottingham Road men got together and formed one of the first farmers’ associations in the country, the chairman being James King (son of John and Janet).

  The area’s prosperity was underlined in 1889, following the deaths of James Ellis and his sister Janet King, when one George Orwin bought the land from their family who needed the money to pay off the estate of the balance of the Ellis family. The price Orwin paid was £125 pounds per acre which was extremely high in those days.

  The same George Orwin took Nottingham Road another step forward when he had the Railway Hotel built by C Morgan. It was completed at the beginning of 1891, and except for some disruption caused by a fire later in the 1890s (the damage was soon made good), it soon became the centre of most social activity at Nottingham Road.

  In its original form the hotel was a gracious two-storey building set amid rolling lawns which boasted many comforts not previously seen in the area – lighting (provided by gas), a billiard room and tennis courts – and it offered extramural activities such as shooting and riding. It soon became the ‘in’ place to visit and enjoy the beautiful grounds, fresh air and the abundance of things to eat and drink.

  All sorts of social gatherings were held there, particularly in the pub, and the hotel was also the venue for the Nottingham Road Farmers’ Association meetings; it is said that often the farmers only arrived home safely because their horses were so used to the route that they could find their own way back to their stables! This worked well until someone decided to play a prank on a group of more than inebriated locals and swopped the horses in the different traps and carts with the result that sundry farmers woke up next morning to find themselves in the wrong stables on the wrong farms.

  Well over a century later ‘Notties’ is still there, one of the most popular boutique hotels in the KwaZulu-Natal Midlands. Its cosy wood-panelled pub with its roaring log fires on colder nights offers excellent pub fare and beer on tap.

  It also has something no colourful old hotel worth
its salt can do without – a resident ghost. It has been reported that the spirit of a beautiful woman named Charlotte roams the hotel and grounds. Room No 10 is supposed to be her favourite place to drop in, and she has often been seen on the hotel’s landing. But she is fussy about the company she keeps and reportedly only makes her presence known to a select few.

  Charlotte’s story is lost in the mists of time now, but during the 19th century the hotel was a popular stop-over for British soldiers on their way to the interior, and she is said to have been a beautiful prostitute who fell in love with one of them.

  How and why she died is another subject for speculation. One story has it that she was told that her lover had been killed in a skirmish up-country and was so heartbroken that she threw herself over the balcony and died of her injuries. Another story is that Charlotte was – ahem – entertaining a client who then refused to pay her, after which there was a fight in which she was beaten and then flung over the balcony.

  But whatever the case, it seems that Charlotte chose to remain, and so her ghost is still there more than a century later. The balcony over which she reportedly plunged to her death is still there as well although it is now the hotel’s reception area.

  And she makes her presence felt when she feels like it. The proprietor, Clive Foss, says that guests have reported having their bags unpacked by hands other than their own, taps being mysteriously turned on and off during the night – and apparently she loves to rearrange the flowers. She also likes to move mirrors around, some say in order to show herself off to her best advantage ...