At the Fireside--Volume 1 (7 page)

The man got out and said, ‘Please give me the packet I slipped into your pocket when I thought the police might find me.'

‘What packet?' asked Scotty. ‘I don't know anything about a packet. You must be making a mistake – look for yourself' The pedlar ran his hands over Scotty's person but found nothing and, in spite of the man's protestations, he denied all knowledge of the stones. The pedlar kept on wailing, moaning and threatening, until at last Scotty could take no more. He grabbed the man by the shoulders and shouted, ‘I've had enough of this nonsense, I hid you from the police and that's all the thanks I get. You accuse me of being a thief! Clear out of here or I'll put a bullet through you, as sure as my name is Scotty Smith!'

A look of horror and fear appeared on the man's face when he realised to whom he had entrusted his precious diamonds and, jumping off the wagon, he ran off across the veld.

Many are the recorded stories of our hero and villain, but there was a side to this cattle thief that touched many hearts, especially women's, in those very harsh times.

During a certain Bloemfontein court case, which Scotty attended – not so much for the court proceedings as for the general information he could pick up from the farmers – he noticed that the Landdrost possessed a particularly fine horse. That evening he slipped into the Landdrost's stables and led the horse out without anybody noticing a thing. He hadn't gone far out of town when it started raining and, soaked to the bone, he knocked on the door of a rather run-down homestead. A woman opened it rather hesitantly.

‘Can you put me up for the night?' Scotty enquired.

‘I would like to, but my husband isn't here and he made me promise not to admit any strangers while he is away and now I hear that Scotty Smith is in the neighbourhood.'

The older generation, from whom these stories were learnt, told me that when they were children, their parents always used Scotty's name to make them behave. ‘If you don't stop that I'll tell Scotty Smith to put you on his saddle and ride away, and you'll never see your poor mommy again!', or words to that effect.

However, on this occasion, Scotty just laughed. ‘You have nothing to be afraid of', he said, ‘That scoundrel won't show his face while I am here. As a matter of fact, I am after Scotty myself, and the local Landdrost has lent me his personal horse. Don't you recognise it?'

‘Yes,' said the woman, ‘I know this animal well! I'll give you a room for the night. Take the horse around to the stables whilst I make some supper.'

After they had finished eating they sat and talked for a while and Scotty noticed that his hostess was somewhat sad and distracted.

‘What's wrong?' he asked. At first she would not say, but later the story came out.

‘I don't know what's going to happen. I told my husband not to do it, but he wouldn't listen to me. He backed a bond for a friend for £200, and now the man has cleared out, and we can't find him anywhere.'

‘Don't worry', Scotty comforted her, ‘and don't sit up for me either. As soon as the weather clears I'll be off on Scotty's trail.'

He thanked her for her hospitality, paid her, and she retired. Sometime later the storm passed and Scotty got up and rode off into the night. In the morning his hostess rose and went through to the kitchen and there, under a plate on the table, was £200 in bills with a note: ‘Best wishes from Scotty Smith.'

Of course the old freebooter did not usually have so much money at his disposal, but he always kept his promises. If he promised a certain farm in the area that their stock would be safe, it was never touched and if he said he would pay for what he called ‘borrowed' horses, he always did so, without fail.

Mr David Cowan, a well-known citizen of Victoria West in days gone by, was away on a visit to Beaufort West. A stranger turned up at his house asking for accommodation for the night. His wife was dubious about taking him in, for the usual reasons. But when she confided her fears to the stranger, he laughed. ‘You needn't be afraid of Scotty Smith', he said. ‘He has never been known to harm a woman.' Mrs Cowan was still rather doubtful but eventually took him in, gave him an outside room and took him his supper. The next morning she sent him some coffee. The maid brought it back. ‘The man has gone,' she said, ‘but he left a letter on the bed.'

‘Thank you for the room and food', it read. ‘I am sorry I have had to borrow two of your horses. When your husband returns, tell him to go to the Beaufort West Hotel in ten days time, and he will find them there.'

Mr Cowan did this and found the horses waiting for him at the Hotel.

But it was when it came to befriending the poor and lonely widows in distress that Scotty was in his element. There seems to have been a plentiful supply of poor, lonely and distressed widows in the Orange Free State and western Transvaal at that time. As always, Scotty arrived, looking for a place to sleep and, with his usual tact, had very little difficulty in discoveiing what the widow's problems were. The farm was bonded and the bondholder was foreclosing the following day. ‘How much is the bond?' Scotty asked. ‘1400' was the reply. Without any hesitation, he dug his hand into his pocket, extracted a thick wad of notes and counted off £400. ‘Now, when the man comes tomorrow, you must pay him in full and demand a receipt – that is very important.'

At first the widow demurred and would not accept the money. ‘It is quite all right,' said Scotty, ‘I will not lose on the deal. You can be sure of that.' She did not understand, but eventually gave way and agreed to do as he said.

The following morning, the bondholder arrived and found, to his great annoyance, that the widow had the money. However, there was nothing he could do about it but give her a receipt and ride away. He had not gone far when, from out of the bushes, appeared a man holding a pistol, who robbed him of all the money he had just received, took his horse from him and galloped away. The following day Scotty visited the farm. The widow was very grateful and asked for his address so that she could eventually repay him. ‘Don't worry, the debt has already been settled in full', said the stranger. ‘You don't owe me a penny. Goodbye.' And he rode away.

When the First World War broke out in 1914, Scotty Smith was one of the first to offer his services to the Union authorities and was attached to Military Intelligence with the rank of Warrant Officer. Dressed in khaki slacks and shirt, he wandered about, spying on the rebels and reporting their movements and activities to Headquarters.

Soon after war was declared, some of the men who had been Boer leaders during the Anglo-Boer War thought that they now had an opportunity to overthrow British rule in South Africa, and went into open rebellion. Among them were Commandant General C F Beyers, one of the renowned bittereinders, along with General Christian de Wet, whose original farm Roodepoort is now a suburb on the West Rand of Gauteng. His farmhouse, by the way, was the first one burnt in the Transvaal by the British. I have no doubt that General Koos de la Rey would also have joined these rebels, but he had been tragically shot in a roadblock incident in the Johannesburg suburb of Booysens. But that's another story.

In South West Africa, the Germans had concentrated powerful units at Nakop and Raman's Drift, while across the border at Upington and Kakamas were large detachments of the Union Defence Force, under the command of General Manie Maritz, another Anglo-Boer War hero. In October 1914 there was a sensational development. General Maritz deserted to the enemy, taking a large number of men with him. This might have proved a very serious matter, but for some reason, the rebels received very little support from their countrymen. The rising had to be suppressed, however, before Louis Botha could invade South West Africa.

Scotty took part in the invasion of South West Africa, and this story was related by Mr Greeff, who at fifteen had joined the 20th Mounted Rifles (later known as Breytenbach's Light Horse). The campaign took place in the middle of summer, and the sun beat down mercilessly on them. It was not too long before the water carts were empty and, to make matters worse, the commissariat department had broken down and there was no immediate prospect of obtaining fresh supplies.

The position grew more and more critical. In order to spare the horses, the men dismounted and led them. Fortunately, they knew they were near Lutzputs where there were wells of drinking water, and this thought alone kept them going. However, they arrived only to find, to their horror, that one of the wells had dried up and the retiring enemy had polluted the other. A fight had taken place between the rebels and the 8th Mounted, in which the latter had been defeated. The enemy had collected some of the bodies and thrown them into the well before they withdrew. Many of the soldiers were in a state of collapse and the horses were in an even worse plight. The stench from the well was so terrible that the animals refused to drink. One of the men then had a brainwave.

He smeared axle grease up some of the horses' nostrils and in this way gained some relief for the animals, but quite a few actually died of thirst. The officer in charge was desperate and began sending heliograph messages appealing urgently for help.

‘Luckily for us', he reported, ‘Scotty Smith was in the area and came to our assistance. He arrived at midnight, and we were told to fall in. With Scotty at our head, we set out, leading what remained of the horses, staggering and stumbling through the desert. Fortunately we did not have far to go. Scotty led us straight to the dry bed of the Molopo River. He quickly chose a spot and told us first to picket the horses, then to dig. We had no entrenching tools, so we began excavating a fairly large hole with our hands. The men formed a line and the sand was stuffed into nosebags, and passed along. The sand was soft and before long we were down about a dozen feet. Suddenly one of the men let out a hoarse yell. In a parched, croaking voice he shouted, “Water, boys! Water!” And there, seeping up between the smooth, round river stones, was a thin clear trickle of fresh water. Thank goodness Scotty had had the foresight to picket the horses, otherwise there would have been a stampede.'

True to the tradition of a crack Imperial Cavalry Regiment, these irregular volunteer Union troops looked after the needs of their horses first, before relieving their own thirst.

The year 1919 was a black one for Scotty's admirers all over South Africa. The old veteran contracted influenza and was confined to bed. He became weak but refused to give in. Every now and again a faint smile would cross his lips, as he remembered perhaps something of the full life he had led. Just before his death, he sent a Bushman to call his friend, the priest but, alas, by the time the priest had arrived, Scotty was no longer in need of human sympathy and comfort.

Scotty Smith was buried in the Upington cemetery and a simple metal plaque was erected over his grave. It reads:

George St Leger Gordon Lennox.

Gone but not forgotten. Never will his memory fade.

Wife and Children.

And so South Africa lost one of its folk heroes. Scotty had said to a friend over a fire one night: ‘I was born two hunderd years too late. You see, my weakness is that, when I see a bunch of good cattle, I want to own them. In modern times this is looked upon as stealing. Two hundred years ago taking other people's cattle in Scotland was knows as rieving, and a successful riever was a highly honoured member of his family group. And if the cattle had been rieved from south of the border, the riever was acclaimed a Scottish hero.'

Maybe he had a point.

The Kariega News

The Kariega News

Preserved in the Cory Library of Rhodes University in Grahamstown are the last two surviving copies of the newspaper,
The Kariega News
. This is an Eastern Cape story that is well worth the telling, even though the paper, a weekly that ran for just over six months, only ever comprised four pages, had an annual subscription of two shillings and six pence and reached a circulation of only about fifty copies.

Our story starts on Orange Grove, a pretty farm on the Kariega River, some 15 km from Grahamstown. In 1870 it was owned by Lieutenant Charles Bell, who had two sons, the younger of whom, W H Somerset Bell, was fourteen years. His brother Fritz was a year older. Their ambition was to start a newspaper, and so
The Kariega News
was born. When the two young partners had pooled their resources, the total capital of the venture amounted to five shillings in cash and a regular income, if the boys did their chores at home, of threepence a week. This, they felt, was sufficient to launch their careers as aspirant newspaper magnates.

Somerset Bell set out for Grahamstown with the entire capital of the business. He was able to purchase two pounds of second-hand long printer's type and he and his brother manufactured the rest of the printing apparatus themselves. By mixing lamp black and linseed oil in the proportions obtained from an old recipe in an encyclopaedia, they produced printer's ink and, using an old roll of ceiling paper found in the loft, they went to print. There was only enough type for one page, so each time a new page was to be printed, the type had to be reset and each page placed separately under the press. When they ran short of a particular letter, they altered the last paragraphs of the page accordingly.

The amazing thing is that the youthful Somerset Bell has left us a complete record of how the printing was done. Suffice to say that by using such things as a piece of flat duct iron, the back of a fire-grate, and a leaf from a mahogany table, this triumph of ingenuity was accomplished.

The first number of
The Kariega News
appeared on 12 September 1870 and many subscribers, aware of the boys' brave effort, paid their annual half crowns in advance, thereby augmenting the enterprise's capital base. This enabled newer and better equipment to be obtained and the standard of the publication improved dramatically.

Like true professionals, the two newspapelinen announced that they had secured an exclusive scoop – news from the Franco-Prussian war front would be published regularly. The letters were actually written to Lieutenant Bell from the front by a family friend, Dr H S Taylor, who accompanied the Prussian army during the conquest of France.

And so the paper prospered and its fame spread far beyond the Kariega River. A Mr William Dewey from the town of Alice, who founded a newspaper called
The Chumie Banner
, wrote to ask the boys for advice on how to acquire a small printing press.

Being entirely unaware of the law of libel, they published an anonymous letter sent to the newspaper, referring in rather sneering terms to the habits of one of the new arrivals in Grahamstown. They soon received a missive from Mr J Montague Stone, a well-known Grahamstown attorney, demanding the name of the author of the letter, an apology and payment of costs, or £200 in damages. They immediately ran to their father for help and, taking his advice, they published Mr Stone's letter with an addendum saying that they hoped that the author of the anonymous letter would correspond directly with Mr Stone. Fortunately the matter rested there and no more was heard.

But the days of
The Kariega News
were numbered. Their father, Charles Bell, was appointed resident magistrate at Leribe in Lesotho and the two budding newspaper magnates were bundled off to boarding school at St Andrews College. On 4 April 1871, with sad hearts, they published the last issue of
The Kariega News
. The printing press was dismantled and, like true businessmen, they sold it for a profit to Mr Dewey in Alice.

So, this incredible venture in youthful initiative and enterprise drew to a close. But people like that are not kept down for long. Somerset became a lawyer in Grahamstown, subsequently building up a big practice in Kimberley and then Johannesburg. In 1896, he was a member of the Reform Committee which invited Dr Jameson to invade the Transvaal. He was arrested along with others such as Sir Abe Bailey and Percy Fitzpatrick and lodged in Pretoria prison, eventually released with a fine of £2 000.

However, I don't think anything ever gave him a bigger thrill than when, at the age of fourteen, he stood in Grahamstown holding in his hands the first copy of
The Kariega News
.