The war reaches the Koup

The Anglo-Boer War came to these farms twice: up the road from Klaarstroom on 2 February 1901, when a running fight through Die Gang left a Boer of Scheepers's commando dead on Remhoogte; and quietly in 1903, when a woman from Tulbagh married into a Prince Albert family having buried two brothers in Natal thirty-four days apart - two brothers Deneys Reitz very probably names in Commando.

The Anglo-Boer War is usually told from Natal and the Free State, a long way from these farms. It came here twice all the same: once up the road from Klaarstroom with a commando behind it, and once in 1903, when a woman from Tulbagh married into a Prince Albert family and brought two dead brothers with her.

The skirmish at Remhoogte, 2 February 1901

Gideon Scheepers crossed into the Cape Colony on 16 December 1900 with Commandant P. H. Kritzinger's commando. His first attack came a fortnight later, a train taken and burnt at Sherborne. By the end of January his men were in the mountains south-east of Prince Albert.

On 2 February 1901 two patrols of the Prince Albert Mounted Troops rode toward Klaarstroom. They had taken three Boer scouts on the way and were pleased with themselves. They did not know that a large body of Boers had occupied the village the day before.

They rode in, understood, and left again quickly, with the Boers after them. The chase caught them near Remhoogte, in a valley between Klaarstroom and Prince Albert that the district calls Die Gang. It was good ground for whoever held it, and the Boers held it. The chase stopped there. The soldiers who got over the pass got away.

Two men did not. Trooper S. K. Gishford of the 2nd Brabant's Horse was killed. Lance Corporal J. Boyd, an Irishman who had spent years in Australia, was hit badly and crawled into Wolwekloof to hide. A Boer named Johannes Klue came across him there. Boyd shot him in the chest at point-blank range. Klue died shortly afterwards on the farm Remhoogte. Eight British soldiers were taken prisoner after their horses were shot from under them.

Johannes Klue was twenty-two years old and came from Aberdeen.

What the ground says

That account is not a despatch or a court record. It comes from the description of the eGGSA photograph album for the Remhoogte cemetery, which in turn credits a discussion thread. It is second-hand, and this page will not pretend otherwise.

And it is not the only telling. The Zeekoegat cameo has the same two days differently: in its account Lieutenant-Colonel R. K. Parke sent the two patrols, with five howitzers, up the Kredouw pass to drive the Boers out - a deliberate expulsion, not a surprised ride-in; the force it names is Yeomanry, not the Prince Albert Mounted Troops; and its Johannes Kleu is a twenty-three-year-old unarmed rebel walking home to Aberdeen, not a man of the commando. Both tellings are second-hand, they disagree on the unit, on the errand and on whether the man buried at Remhoogte was a combatant, and neither is chosen here. The farm's own history, De Claar Stroom, carries the cameo's telling.

What can be checked is the geography, and it holds. The grave sits at -33.2819, 22.4105. That is 14.5 km from Klaarstroom and 36 km from Prince Albert, 72% of the way along the road between them, which is precisely where a running fight that started at Klaarstroom and ended before the pass would have to end.

One thing in the account contradicts itself and is left standing rather than tidied away. It says Boyd and Klue were both buried in Wolwekloof. The stone is on Remhoogte.

And Remhoogte itself needs the care this page gives Koppieskraal below: more than one farm in this division carries the name. The grave's coordinate stands on Reim Hoogte No. 167; the cameo files the affair under Rhemhoogte No. 125, Middelwater's northern neighbour. Which ground the chase actually crossed is not settled here.

Who Johannes Klue was

Johannes Klue had been a name on a farm cemetery with an uncertain birth year and an open question about who he was. He is now a man with a date, a commando, a home town and a reason to be lying on that farm.

It also rules out the other candidate for this grave, a Johannes Paulus Kleu who died in 1902: a death on 2 February 1901 cannot be his. What stays open is the birth year: 1878 or so from the stated age, 1880 on the stone, and 1877 or so if the cameo's age of twenty-three is right. Three readings, none chosen.

The rest of the district's war

The village itself sat, as one account puts it, almost at the edge of where the commandos worked. The British kept a garrison there and fortified the Dutch Reformed church: the same building whose burial ground holds much of this family, including Ockert Almero Oosthuizen, who was sixty-two when the war began and eighty-five when he was buried there.

Boers took the mail coach and its horses at a farm called Botterkraal, on the road between Prince Albert Road station and the village. Two farms of that name are recorded here and neither is on that road, so which one it was is an open question rather than an answer.

Gideon Scheepers was captured on a farm called Koppieskraal, sick with what a doctor diagnosed as a bowel obstruction, abandoned by his own commando, alone. He surrendered to Captain E. R. A. Shearman of the 10th Hussars on 11 October 1901. He was tried at Graaff-Reinet and shot on 18 January 1902, aged twenty-three.

That Koppieskraal is not the farm of the same name in this district. Kopjes Kraal No. 123 lies out toward Klaarstroom at 22.71° east, and the capture farm lies west of Prince Albert near Bosluiskloof, about 102 km away. The names are identical and the farms are not, which is the oldest trap in this district.

The war that came by marriage

Johanna Fredricka Malherbe was born at Tulbagh on 31 May 1875, the tenth of eleven children. She married Almero Jacobus Hitge Oosthuizen at Prince Albert on 19 May 1903, and it is through her that this family is here at all.

She was the last of her household to arrive at that wedding, and she came to it out of three bad years.

Two brothers, dead in Natal, thirty-four days apart.

A photograph of one of them

There is a picture of the elder of the two, taken before any of this. A studio portrait of Johannes Barnard Malherbe with his wife, inscribed on the back "Jan en Gussie Malherbe" with a pencil arrow drawn under each name so nobody could read it the wrong way round. He is at the left in a dark coat and a bow tie, already bald above the forehead, with a pointed beard. Gussie is at his shoulder in a high-necked bodice with the sleeves in full leg-of-mutton.

Those sleeves are the only date the photograph has. They reached their extreme in 1895 and had collapsed by 1898, so the sitting is somewhere in the middle nineties, three to seven years before Spion Kop. He was thirty-one or thereabouts. It is the only likeness here of anybody who died in that war.

Deneys Reitz was standing next to them

One claim would have joined the two halves of this story in a single man. The Zeekoegat cameo puts Reitz himself in the Klaarstroom raid this story opened with, riding with Scheepers. The memoir has now been read against it [SRC-437], and it does not support the claim.

Commando does not name Klaarstroom, Prince Albert, Meiringspoort or the Kredouw anywhere. Reitz never rode with Scheepers either: Scheepers appears three times, and each time Reitz is learning at second hand - once from captured court-martial papers taken off a colonel, once from talk on the road - that the man had already been captured and executed for train-wrecking. Reitz did cross the Swartberg, and the passage is one of the most vivid in the book, but he crossed it southward with Smuts into the valley that runs to Oudtshoorn, and he did it after Scheepers was shot in January 1902 - a year after the raid this story opens with.

So the two halves stay two halves. That is worth saying plainly rather than quietly dropping, because the join was attractive and this page argued for it.

The two dates are not obscure. They are two of the best-documented days of the war, and a seventeen-year-old who was there wrote the most famous account of it in the language.

Deneys Reitz rode with the Pretoria commando. His corporalship, about twenty young men who had elected their own leader, was led by a man he calls Isaac Malherbe. Reitz's Commando, published in 1929, names him again and again and admires him without reserve.

On the evening of 23 January 1900, waiting below Spion Kop, Reitz sat at the fires with them. He wrote afterwards that he had spent a quiet hour with men "who were mostly dead next morning."

Climbing the hill the next day, through the dead and the dying, he found one of them:

the body of John Malherbe, our Corporal's brother, with a bullet between his eyes

When the British finally withdrew, Isaac came up off the ledge, and Reitz records him as "grim and worn, grieved at the death of his brother." Towards midday Isaac ordered the Pretoria dead collected. They were carried down in blankets, loaded on the commando wagon, escorted to Ladysmith and sent on to Pretoria for burial.

Isaac had thirty-four days left. On 27 February 1900 the corporalship was holding an advanced position at Pieters Heights, above Colenso, when the British came through it. Reitz was elsewhere and heard afterwards:

Thus our corporalship was wiped out, with its leader, Isaac Malherbe, the bravest of them all

Reitz's pair is this family's pair

The dates said yes and one detail said wait. The detail has been set aside, by Frans, and the reasoning is worth having on the page rather than in a note.

For it: two brothers named John and Isaac Malherbe, one killed at Spion Kop on 24 January 1900 and the other at Colenso on 27 February 1900, and this family's two brothers, Johannes Barnard and Isaak Johannes, dead on those same two days, in Natal and at Colenso. Two pairs of brothers of one surname dying on the same two days in the same theatre is not something to expect twice.

Against it: a modern account of the corporalship calls its leader the 25-year-old Malherbe. FamilySearch puts Isaak Johannes Malherbe's birth at Tulbagh on 29 August 1859, which made him forty. That is not a rounding error and it is not waved away here, and FamilySearch does not settle it either way.

Two things are worth saying plainly. The age comes from a secondary account and not from Reitz, who gives no ages at all. And these were Tulbagh men in a Pretoria commando, ordinary enough for men born in the Cape in the 1850s and 1860s, thousands of whom were living in the Transvaal by 1899.

The second doubt does not survive his marriage register. Venterstad, 12 February 1895, and under woonplaats tijdens het huwelik it says Pretoria. He was thirty-two and gave his trade as slager, a butcher. So five years before the war Johannes Barnard Malherbe was not a Tulbagh man who might have gone north. He was living in Pretoria. A Cape-born butcher resident there in 1895 is exactly the man who rides out with the Pretoria commando in 1899.

It settles nothing about his brother, and the age objection stands untouched by it. What it removes is one of the two things standing against the identification.

The other was removed by reading the memoir itself. Commando names only two Malherbes in its whole length — Isaac, over and over, and John once, as the Corporal's brother. It says five brothers named Malherbe were the leading spirits of the commando, and that Isaac was the eldest of them. This family's four brothers are Isaak Johannes of 1859, Johannes Barnard of 1862, Hendrik Lodewyk of 1867 and Petrus Jacobus of 1871, and Isaak is the eldest of them — which is the one specific thing Reitz says about the man he elected.

Against that stands a single number in a modern retelling, and Frans's judgement is that it is simply wrong: men do not elect a boy to lead them, and Reitz — who was seventeen himself and gives no ages anywhere in the book — describes a corporal his men deferred to. A secondary account's twenty-five against a baptismal register's 1859 is not a contest between equals.

So this record now says it plainly: Isaak Johannes Malherbe, born at Tulbagh on 29 August 1859 and killed at Colenso on 27 February 1900, is the Isaac Malherbe of Reitz's corporalship — and his brother Johannes Barnard is the John found on Spion Kop with a bullet between his eyes. The age discrepancy is not hidden; it is named above and left where it belongs, on the account that carries it.

So this family buried its Spion Kop dead in Pretoria rather than in Natal, and the grave is there still.

There is a third man. Hermanus Karel Andreas Venter, born 1856, a grandson-in-line of the Venters this whole Karoo story descends from, died on 24 January 1900: the same day as Johannes Barnard Malherbe. The family tree gives his death place as "Spionskop … During Anglo Boer war". Of the thousands of place strings in that file, it is one of a handful that names the occasion instead of a town, and it is the only one here that says the war out loud.

The petition

The family holds that after the sons were lost, the remaining son was taken prisoner, and that his mother went to Cape Town and petitioned the governor for him, and that he was then kept in South Africa rather than shipped to St Helena with the rest.

That mother was Isabella Johanna Jacoba Zulch, born 1837. She had buried two of her sons in Natal inside five weeks and had two left. Both of those two, Hendrik Lodewyk and Petrus Jacobus, lived on into the 1930s and 1940s.

Some twenty thousand men were taken prisoner in that war, and the camps at the Cape filled so fast that the British sent them to St Helena, Bermuda, Ceylon and India. Two men in this family's wider tree died in those camps: one at Diyatalawa in Ceylon on Christmas Eve 1900, one in Bermuda on 30 December 1901. So the fear behind the petition was not imagined. Being kept in South Africa was worth going to Cape Town for.

A mother who had lost two sons going to Cape Town to keep the third out of a camp on an island in the South Atlantic is exactly what the dates describe. Whether she went, and what she wrote, is not yet proved.

What this story is about

• set on Reim Hoogte No. 167
• about Johannes Kleu (d. 1901, Remhoogte)
• about Johanna Fredricka Malherbe
• about Johannes Barnard Malherbe
• about Isaak Johannes Malherbe
• about Hermanus Karel Andreas Venter
• about Isabella Johanna Jacoba Zulch

Research notes

The research behind this page, kept separate from it: dated working notes, open questions, and what is not yet settled.