The Englishman's Grave - Cederberg, South Africa

This story first appeared in SA Country Life Magazine - June 2018

 The Englishman’s grave stands on high ground next to the quiet Pakhuis Pass.  Enclosed by a wrought iron fence and marked by a military headstone, it overlooks the rocky, khaki-clad Cederberg Mountains located a couple of hours drive north of Cape Town.  Somewhere below the road are the trenches dug by British soldiers in the gravelly mountainside during the second Anglo Boer War.  I’ve heard that time and weather have all but erased them.  But I can’t look for them today because I am travelling with dogs and they are not allowed on that land.  Anyway, there is little there now but ghosts and the cool breeze.  And I’ve already found other defensive positions at the southern end of the range.

My visit is in the winter and the light is soft and pleasant.  The Englishman who lies in the grave nearby died in the summer and would have known the dry, weighty Cederberg heat sucking the moisture from his body.  He’d have known the hard light turning everything into monochrome.

His name was Lieutenant Graham Vinicombe Winchester Clowes of the 1^st Battalion The Gordon Highanders .  His unit was here to stop Boer guerrillas from infiltrating the Cape Colony.   He was killed in a skirmish on the 30th of January 1901. 

Today, the mountain range is popular with rock climbers, hikers and campers.  Off road enthusiasts test their 4x4 driving skills here and mountain bikers seek adrenaline rushes.  Mostly people come for the peace.  Large parts of the Cederberg have been declared a Wilderness area and hikers with permits can wander the range and camp wild pretty much wherever they like.  Visitors search the rocks and caves for art left behind by hunter gatherer San people who sought refuge in the range from African pastoralists and the encroachment of European settler farms.  They created rock paintings depicting people and the animals they revered and hunted.  Stories that we may never understand have been left as beautiful puzzles for those willing to seek them out.   Some of the paintings are mapped and easily accessible; others stumbled upon by sharp-eyed explorers.

I have driven from Cape Town through the pretty, fruit growing valley that surrounds the little town of Ceres.   For several hours I made the journey along the 4x4 only route, through the isolated hamlet of Eselbank and on to the Moravian mission village of Wuppertal with its pretty white church.   4x4 route is a little misleading as I meet a crowded, rusting Corolla crawling along in the other direction.      I wonder how much of its undercarriage has been left behind on the rocky track.

It’s a slow, rewarding journey through some of the more remote parts of the range. Dramatic red sandstone formations wind-carved from the sediment of what was once a warm shallow sea. The landscape wouldn’t have looked much different when Lieutenant Clowes was patrolling the range on horseback just after the turn of the previous century.

On the way to the Englishman’s Grave, I stop at the Mount Ceder resort in the southern part of the range.   I’ve been told that there are more old British trenches near here and I want to find them.  I’d searched for them unsuccessfully on a previous expedition.  I’d expected them to be on the river bank protecting the ford.  They weren’t there.

 This time a helpful staff member from the resort directs me back up the pass.  Here, with a commanding view of the valley and the road through it, I find the remains of the British defences.  A pile of rocks, once organised, now a jumbled crescent from the past.  It’s not surprising that the little fortification consisted of a rock wall and not a trench.  The ground here is stony and hard, an infantry soldier’s dread. 

This is an obvious defensive position situated above the road as it crests a saddle.   It was built just below the ridge so that the soldiers manning it would not be silhouetted against the sky.  I imagine them here, bored and homesick and drinking warm water from sun-heated canteens.  It was then and is still an out of the way part of the country.

One of the things about war is that the stories are often lost or smudged by time.  And so it is with the Englishman buried on the Pakhuis Pass.  There are variations on his tale.  The one I find most likely is that Clowes’ patrol crossed paths with Boer scouts.  A brief skirmish ensued and the young Lieutenant lay dead on the stony mountainside.  Simple, brutal and tragic.

The Cederberg wasn’t a major theatre during the war.  General Jan Smuts came into the area with a commando in a largely unsuccessful attempt to recruit Cape Boers but there were no major battles here.  According to the stories, Clowes had previously fought at the big battle of Magersfontein in 1899.   The British force had been deployed to relieve the siege of Kimberly.  Due to poor British reconnaissance and clever Boer tactics they suffered a defeat that stunned the Empire. 

It may have come as some respite for the young lieutenant to find himself posted to this backwater of the war.  Though there is no telling whether it will be a significant battle or an insignificant skirmish that will do for you in the end.

Lieutenant Clowes’ story doesn’t end with his death.  The story goes that his mother, so overcome with grief, travelled to the Cape Colony to visit his grave.  It is told that she had his body moved from where he was buried after the skirmish, to its current site higher up the mountainside.  It is said that she returned every year on the anniversary of his death.  This would have been quite an achievement.  First a long voyage from England, then an arduous journey by wagon from Cape Town which would have taken several days.  The long winding Pakhuis Pass through the Cederberg, now a good tar road, would have been little more than a wagon track.  Even one visit would have been an impressive undertaking by someone more familiar with the cool, green lanes of England.  Clowes was, after all, from Hitchin in the gentle landscape of Hertfordshire.

That evening I sit by my camp fire with the dogs sleeping at my feet and reflect.  In the great sweep of history, wars are reduced to a series of dates and famous battles and names of generals.  Occasionally one is reminded that the true costs of war play out in the lives of many individuals.  Some who live and some who die, forgotten by history but remembered by the families who survive them.   In the case of the young lieutenant who lies buried here, his mother remembered him by travelling to this hot arid place to visit his grave and to mourn his death, family paying the painful price of keeping an empire. 

Today there were flowers on Lieutenant Clowes’ grave.  Someone is still remembering him more than a century later.