The Lost Graves of the Jameson Raiders
By:
Report by SJ De Klerk
Date:
Tue, 03/12/2024 - 10:15
Branch:
Northern
The Lost Graves of the Jameson Raiders
Report by SJ De Klerk
The audacity of the Jameson Raid was astounding, even in the age of imperial chicanery. Imagine two sizeable groups of well-armed mounted men departing from Pitsane, in present-day Botswana, and Mafeking (now Mahikeng) at sunset on 29 December 1895, for a three-day canter to Johannesburg to overthrow Kruger’s government and proclaim it a colony of the British Empire.

The audacity of the Jameson Raid was astounding, even in the age of imperial chicanery. Imagine two sizeable groups of well-armed mounted men departing from Pitsane, in present-day Botswana, and Mafeking (now Mahikeng) at sunset on 29 December 1895, for a three-day canter to Johannesburg to overthrow Kruger’s government and proclaim it a colony of the British Empire.
Plaque at the old kraal at Doornkop, south-east of Krugersdorp where the Jameson Raiders surrendered.
Perhaps the closest modern counterpart is the so-called ‘Wonga Coup’ of 2004 to replace the President of Equatorial Guinea with an exiled opposition leader in return for preferential oil rights to corporations affiliated with those involved in the coup.
Ever since that death-or-glory ride by the Jameson Raiders, the fate of several of those men of the Mashonaland Mounted and the Bechuanaland Border Police units has been lost in the fog of history. This article investigates where those bold policemen killed in clashes with the Boer burghers were buried.
By the mid-1890s it was obvious that the area immediately south of Johannesburg contained the world’s richest and greatest gold reefs ever. To the chagrin of Cecil John Rhodes, it also became clear that the extensive gold reefs he and other investors had hoped to find north of the Limpopo River did not exist.
To Rhodes and other like-minded Randlords, it was intolerable that an ignorant and supposedly corrupt Boer government should rule the country where all this immense underground wealth existed. Plans were laid to seize, if not the whole of the Zuid-Afrikaansche Republie (ZAR) then at least the area comprising the Witwatersrand goldfields.
With the covert backing of the British Colonial Secretary, Joseph Chamberlain, Rhodes and leaders of the Johannesburg Reform Committee, set in motion plans for an armed uprising of the Uitlanders in Johannesburg against Boer “corruption and misrule”. This would provide Dr Leander Starr Jameson, then Administrator of Mashonaland and Matabeleland with the pretext to invade the Transvaal, ostensibly to rescue the Uitlanders from the tyranny of Kruger and his government.
In October 1895, the High Commissioner in the Cape Colony proclaimed a strip of land within the Bechuanaland Protectorate along the border with the Transvaal as British South Africa Company (hereinafter Company) territory.
A contingent of 14 officers and 356 other ranks of the Mashonaland Mounted Police (MMP) were stationed at the village of Pitsane, ostensibly to protect the railway against marauding African Chiefs. But the real purpose of granting the Company administrative control of this strip of land was to provide a springboard for the Raid on Johannesburg, since Matabeleland would have been too distant.
A smaller unit of the Bechuanaland Border Police (BBP) was stationed at Mafeking, and when these two groups gathered at Malmani (now Ottoshoop), Jameson’s combined force totaled 511 mounted men, plus about 150 unarmed ‘Native’ drivers and leaders, etc. The column was considerably strengthened by the addition of one 12½ pounder and two 7 pounder cannons as well as eight maxim machine guns. Ammunition and baggage were transported on eight Scotch carts and three Cape carts. The two accompanying wagons sent ahead with fodder for the horses and mules would later become very useful for transporting the wounded.
Since there were no roads directly linking Mafeking with Johannesburg, a string of five galvanized iron sheds had been set up at roughly 50-kilometre intervals along the wagon spoor or track between the border and Krugersdorp. Seemingly established for a proposed mail coach service to Mafeking. They were stocked with bully beef, biscuits and fodder for 600 men and their mounts, without arousing the suspicion of the Boers.
By 29 December 1895, the impatient Jameson was no longer willing to await the long-awaited cry for help from the Johannesburg Reform Committee and he ordered the Raiders to depart for the Rand the following evening.
Both the Pitsane and Mafikeng Police contingents severed the nearby telegraph lines before departing at sunset on Sunday 30 December 1895. One version, probably apocryphal, is that some intoxicated troopers cut a wire fence instead of the telegraph line. More likely, when the two units met in Malmani the following morning, the alarmed telegraphist realizing that this was an armed invasion, hurriedly wired Pretoria, before this line too was cut.
Ignoring repeated instructions from the British High Commissioner, the Reform Committee, and the Boers, to desist from invading the Transvaal, the single-minded Jameson and his senior officers, defiantly pushed ahead.
Today, one can trace the route of the Raiders across the North West Province by drawing a line on a map from Ottoshoop to Boons and from there to the western approaches to Krugersdorp. Many years ago, I heard some older people referring to the road from Boons to Krugersdorp as ‘the Jameson Road.’ The little village of Boons was then merely known as ‘Mrs Boon’s Store’ and here the Raiders briefly halted.
With the intentions and the route of the Raiders becoming clear, the Boer commandos dug in on a ridge of the Witwatersrand, overlooking the present-day Krugersdorp Game Reserve, just about where Robert Broom Drive intersects with Rustenburg Road. On this escarpment, dominating the shallow valley below, traversed by the marshy Tweelopiespruit and ensconced behind large boulders, the substantial Battery House and tailing heaps of the Queen’s Mine, the ZAR burghers confidently awaited the arrival of the Raiders on New Year’s Day, 1896.
The literature of the Jameson Raid is vague on the losses suffered in this, the first real clash between the Raiders and the Boers. Marshall Hole merely states, the Raiders had ‘some losses.’ Ian Colvin maintains, ‘… they were driven back with the loss of a few men.’ Other authors claim between thirty and sixty of the Raiders were killed, wounded, or captured.
Rev Colin Rae, quoting from the Pretoria Press of 4 January 1896, gives the Raider losses as two killed and five wounded in their abortive attack. He mentions the names of the wounded and twenty-one captured officers and other ranks, but unfortunately omits the names of the two men killed.
The historic Burgershoop Cemetery in Krugersdorp contains the headstones of three Raiders, namely Captain W J Barry (BBP) and Troopers PS Wiid and D Frazer, both MMP. Barry and Wiid were mortally wounded in subsequent clashes with the Boers, and they died on 31 and 7 January 1896, respectively, after being nursed in a temporary hospital in Krugersdorp. They therefore cannot be the two troopers killed in action, referred to by Rae. Perhaps, Trooper Frazer was one of the two killed, but who was the other one and where was he buried? Because of this discrepancy some authorities believe that there might be a fourth Raider grave in this cemetery. However, notwithstanding crisscrossing it, I have not been able to locate the tombstone of any fourth Raider.

The toppled headstones of Captain Barry, who died from wounds suffered on 31 January 1896, and Troopers Wiid and Frazer. These headstones were erected several years later as the BSAP title that appears on them was only officially recorded on 22 August 1898.
Information about the Boer losses is equally vague. Elizabeth Longford in her Jameson’s Raid says not a single Boer was killed in this clash. The History of the British South African Police 1889 – 1980 (hereinafter The History) states that subsequent accounts disclose that one wounded trooper rather ungratefully shot dead a burgher who came to assist him. This sentiment is echoed on the monument to the five Boer burghers killed in action against the Raiders and interred in the Burgershoop Cemetery in Krugersdorp.

Monument and graves of the five Boers killed in action against the Jameson Raiders.
Monument and graves of the five Boers killed in action against the Jameson Raiders.
Unable to break through the Boer defenses at Krugersdorp, the Raiders swung south for about 8 kilometres to bivouac that night to the north of Randfontein. Here sporadic sniping during the night by Boers, shielded by the railway embankment of the line to Potchefstroom, denied the exhausted Raiders any rest. They had been on the move for two days and this was already their third night on the road with little in the way of proper food and rest. Their mule drawn fodder wagons were by now crowded with the wounded.
Again, there are contradictory reports as to how many troopers died that night, either from their wounds sustained during the previous afternoon’s failed attack on Krugersdorp, or because of the all-night sniping by the Boers. The History quotes A J Tomlinson, a future Acting Commissioner of the BSAP, that three men were killed. ‘Just before we moved off in the coming daylight, I remember seeing Corporals Stills and Beard had met their end and a man named Brown who had been transferred from the Town Police at Bulawayo, whom I turned over because I thought he was still asleep, was also dead.’
Elizabeth Longford claims two men were killed and buried with less pomp than the dead at Corunna. She also quotes a comment that the following day, ‘a visitor to the battlefield was shocked to see the feet of one of these two poor fellows sticking out from the heap of earth which his comrades had shuffled over him.’
Marshall Hole in a footnote states, ‘Two men were shot dead, and Sergeant Barnes and three men were wounded.’ Ian Colvin says only one man was killed. ‘Fortunately, as the camp was below the level of the plateau the men and horses suffered little – only one man and two horses being killed – but sleep was difficult and the men lay in a troubled dose (sic) with their rifles by their sides, while Jameson, Willoughby, and Grey debated what to do upon the morrow.’
