Thirty-seven members and friends of Arch Soc joined this outing, led by SJ de Klerk, to the Staats Model School in Pretoria. This was the very site of Winston Churchill’s famous escape from Boer captivity during the South African War, 1899 - 1902.

His escape made Churchill an international celebrity and launched his career as the UK’s most famous politician of the twentieth century. The Boer ultimatum had barely expired on 11 October 1899, when Churchill was appointed war correspondent for the Morning Post at the princely salary of £250 per month.  The earliest available Cape liner, the Dunnottar Castle departed on 14 October 1899, with General Sir Redvers Buller, his Headquarters staff and Churchill on board.

Two days before Cape Town, a passing steamer posted startling news on a large blackboard:  

BOERS DEFEATED.    THREE BATTLES₁.  PENN SYMONS KILLED₂.

    1. Talana Hill, Elandslaagte and Nicholson’s Nek.

    2. General Officer Commanding at Dundee. Mortally wounded 20 October and died 23 October 1899.

Stepping ashore in Cape Town, Churchill quickly grasped that the first heavy fighting would come in Natal. He hastily travelled via rail to East London, coastal steamer to Durban, and finally by rail to Estcourt, which he described as ‘a tiny tin township of a few hundred inhabitants, beyond which the trains no longer ran.’ 

Here he met up with Captain Aylmer Haldane, whom he knew from India. Haldane was in temporary command of some Dublin Fusiliers and an armoured train to reconnoitre the twenty-five kilometres of intact railway line towards Ladysmith. When Haldane invited Churchill to join him on this risky venture, he readily agreed.

The locomotive and tender pushed three railway trucks and pulled three. The foremost truck was equipped with a seven-pounder naval gun from HMS Terrible, manned by some sailors. The trucks were reinforced with steel plating and had loopholed firing ports. The rearmost truck contained breakdown equipment and a small number of civilian platelayers. Staffed by 120 soldiers, the train departed from Estcourt at dawn on 15 November 1899.

Moving slowly, the train took an hour to reach Frere, where an iron bridge crossed the Blaauwkrantz (Bloukrans) River. Here Haldane was ready to turn back but Churchill’s enthusiasm convinced him to proceed to the next station, the tiny outpost of Chieveley. At Chieveley a brief halt was made to telegraph Estcourt that the line was clear. Just then Boer horsemen were seen six hundred metres to the rear. Reversing hastily, with Boers shells speeding it along, the train crashed into rocks the Boers had placed on the railway five kilometres south of Chieveley. The three leading trucks derailed with a thunderous crash, injuring several men.

While Haldane and his men with the seven-pounder tried to counter the Boer fire, Churchill hurried to the derailed trucks to assess the damage. The leading truck had overturned and the next two had jammed together, one derailed and the other one half on and off the rail. Fortunately, the locomotive, although damaged, was still in working order. Using the locomotive as a ram, the soldiers pushed and pulled the two derailed trucks aside so that the engine and tender could squeeze through. The coupling to the rear trucks was also damaged and the overturned truck blocked the locomotive from linking up with the undamaged ones. Therefore, only the locomotive and tender, carrying the injured and wounded, trundled back to Estcourt,  leaving the rest of the force behind to face the encircling Boers.

With surrender the only option, the dejected Churchill must have thought his Boer War adventure had ended ignominiously before it had even started.

The POWs were marched to Elandslaagte Station to entrain for Pretoria, where the officers, together with Churchill, were incarcerated in the Staats Model School. 

The school still appears much as it did when Churchill and Haldane first laid eyes upon it. Designed by Sytze Wierda of the ZAR’s Department of Public Works and completed by the firm Te Groen in December 1896, it is a single-storied building of red brick with ochre dressings, typical of the late 19th century neo-Renaissance style. The façade is divided into five sections with embellishments, such as the oversized stone finials topping the gables. The school accommodated 400 scholars and students but closed when war broke out.

Churchill’s room was at the front of the building, facing Van der Walt (now Lilian Ngoyi) Street. 

Haldane and Sergeant Major Adam Brockie of the Imperial Light Horse Regiment, who had previously worked on the Rand mines, planned a speedy escape. Haldane selected Brockie because he was familiar with the country and spoke Dutch and Fanagalo. Churchill, hearing about their plans, insisted on being included. Brockie was dismissive of Churchill, considering him unfit and likely to slow them down.

Churchill wrote, ‘After anxious reflection and continued watching, it was discovered by several of the prisoners that when the sentries along the eastern side walked about on their beats, they were at certain times unable to see the top of a few yards of the wall near the circular lavatory office’. 

Late in the evening on 12 December 1899, Churchill strolled across the quadrangle and into the circular toilet to observe the sentries. Suddenly one turned and walked over to his comrade. They started talking with their backs to Churchill. Seizing the moment, he drew himself up and clambered over the corrugated fence.  Initially he waited for the other two to cross the fence, but when they were unable to do so because the sentry had become suspicious, he pushed on alone. 

Sauntering through the adjacent garden, Churchill exited into Skinner (now Nana Sita) Street, passing the sleepy sentry less than four metres away. 

Walking along Skinner Street, he reviewed his situation. He had four pieces of chocolate and £75. This would have to suffice to get him to Lourenco Marques in Portuguese East Africa. A short distance along Churchill crossed over the Apies River. Apparently, there is no written evidence that he ever claimed that he ‘swam the mighty Apies River’. After walking south for about a kilometre, he came to a railway that he followed eastwards at a brisk pace.

After walking for two hours, Churchill saw the lights of a station that he circled around, not daring to show his face. Here he waited for a train to arrive, which it did an hour later. When the train departed, he dashed for the carriages. It was a goods train and, after crawling under sacks covered in coal dust, he fell into a fitful sleep. Waking up well before dawn on 13 December, Churchill realised he had to leave the train while it was still dark.  Positioning himself on the couplings, he jumped and promptly sprawled into a ditch next to the railway. He found himself in the middle of a wide valley surrounded by low hills. In a nearby gully he found a pool of clear water, from which he drank copiously. With relief Churchill saw that the railway line ran steadily towards the sunrise. He had taken the right line after all. Setting out for the hills to find a hiding-place before daylight, he entered a small grove of trees that grew on the side of a ravine. From this elevated spot he saw a few kilometres to the west, a little tin-roofed town (Balmoral). His only companion was a gigantic Cape vulture, ‘who manifested an extravagant interest in my condition, and made hideous and ominous gurglings from time to time’. After sunset Churchill walked back to the railway and then east to the top of a steep gradient, hoping for a passing train, but in vain. He walked further along the railway for several hours, circling any guarded bridges and stations. It was slow going and soon he was exhausted. Past Brugspruit (now Clewer) station, he saw fires glowing in the distance. Thinking the fires might be those of an African homestead, he walked towards them, then changed his mind, and retraced his steps. But changing his mind again, he proceeded towards the glow of the fires only to discover they were further away than he had estimated, and that they were the engine furnaces of a coal mine.  

Before escaping, Churchill had learned that some English residents had been allowed to remain in Witbank and Middelburg to operate the coal mines. Perhaps there might be a chance of meeting up here with a sympathetic countryman. Exhausted, hungry and desperately needing help, he would just have to chance his luck. In the glow of the fires Churchill made out a house surrounded by some smaller structures. He rapped on the door. A man’s voice called out, ‘Wie’s daar?’. Churchill froze, but then said that he was an English-speaking burgher who had fallen from a train on the way to join his commando at Komati Poort. The man, who turned out to be the mine manager of the Transvaal and Delagoa Bay Colliery, John Howard, suspiciously interrogated Churchill who soon identified himself and confessed that he had escaped from Pretoria and was making his to the border. ‘Thank God you came here!’, Howard exclaimed. ‘It is the only house for twenty miles where you would not have been handed over. But we are all British here and will see you through’. Feeling like a drowned man pulled out of the water and informed that he had won the Derby, the famished Churchill remained in the dining room with a leg of mutton and whisky and soda while Howard left the house. Nearly an hour later he returned and told Churchill he was to be hidden down the mine.  After being led towards a nearby shaft, Churchill descended underground. From the bottom of the shaft he was guided some 500 metres to a newly constructed stable for pit ponies, that was to be his shelter for the next thirty-four hours. In a comfortable mood but speeded by intense fatigue, Churchill ‘slept the sleep of the weary – but of the triumphant’. Once the hue and cry had died down, Churchill spent four days in an inner room at the back of the mine office. He finally left from Witbank Station on 19 December 1899, hidden among bails of wool in a rail truck bound for Lourenco Marques. He arrived dirty and dishevelled in the late afternoon at the British Consulate in Lourenco Marques. The secretary dismissed him with, ‘Be off. The Consul cannot see you today. Come to his office at nine tomorrow if you want anything.’ According to oral legend, Churchill then strode to the entrance and bellowed towards the first-floor office of the Consul.  ‘I am Winston bloody Churchill. Come down at once!’. Which the Consul immediately did. Haldane, Brockie and a Lieutenant Le Mesurier escaped from the Staats Model School during the middle of March 1900. Hearing that the prisoners were about to be transferred to a newly erected and larger POW camp near the Pretoria Zoo, the three of them took advantage of a temporary failure of the school’s electric lights, by pretending to have escaped but instead hid under the floorboards for the next seventeen days. Waiting until all the other prisoners had been transferred, they emerged at night. Following much the same route as Churchill, they also arrived at the Transvaal and Delagoa Bay Colliery. From here John Howard smuggled them across the border in similar fashion as he had done for Churchill. 

Only Churchill (1874 – 1965) and Haldane lived to old age. 

Alfred Adam Brockie (1878 – 1904), having resumed his career as a gold miner after the war, was killed on 31 August 1904, in a rock fall at the Wit Deep Gold Mine in Germiston. He is buried in the Braamfontein Cemetery in an unmarked grave. Churchill donated £10 to Brockie’s widow and children.

Captain Frederick Neil Le Mesurier, (1875 – 1915) like so many others of his generation, was killed in action on the Western Front during WW1. He died on 25 April 1915, during the Second Battle of Ypres and is commemorated on the Menin Gate Memorial to the Missing in Ypres, Belgium.

General Sir Aylmer Haldane (1862 – 1950) rose to military high command and after WWI was appointed General Officer Commanding Mesopotamia, before retiring in 1925.

The Transvaal and Delagoa Bay Colliery where Churchill was secreted underground, closed in 1953 and is now one of the most environmentally degraded mining sites in Mpumalanga. Underground fires caused by spontaneous combustion have raged for decades giving rise to air pollution, soil subsidence and acid mine drainage.

SJ de Klerk 

Images obtained from the internet, unless otherwise indicated.

Sources and Further Reading:

    • Bolsmann E. Winston Churchill. The Making of a Hero in the South African War. Galago Books, Alberton. 2008.

    • Churchill W. S. My Early Life 1874 - 1908. Fontana Books, Glasgow. 1980.

    • Haldane A. How we escaped from Pretoria. Africana Book Society, Johannesburg. 1977.

    • Millard C. Hero of the Empire. The Making of Winston Churchill. Penguin, UK. 2017.