Episode 283 - Warren’s Great North Road Balloon and Telegraph Escapade

Welcome back to the History of South Africa podcast with me your host, Des Latham. Episode 283 and it’s 1885.

And boy! Do we have a plethora of happenings to report.

This is a year before the discovery of gold in the Transvaal, and global events are full of war, innovation, ethnic carnage, economic ups and downs, world firsts, medicine, and a dose of snot and trauma.

The year 1885 opened with a strange and ironic trial by fire across England, balancing state-sanctioned progress against lawless destruction. In January, Irish rebels shattered the peace by detonating dynamite inside Westminster Hall and the Tower of London, raining literal fire and brimstone upon the ancient symbols of British authority.

Amidst this chaotic violence, a far more orderly kind of incineration took place.

That same year, the widowed painter Jeanette Pickersgill of London, a lady "well known in literary and scientific circles," became the first person to be legally cremated in England by the Cremation Society at Woking, Surrey.

It was a classic Victorian paradox: while the state scrambled to suppress the lawless Irish bombs threatening to burn the old order down, it was simultaneously finalizing the bureaucratic regulations on how its most respectable citizens could legally burn themselves to ashes.
In Southern Africa, 1885 saw two major geopolitical moves - In March the United Kingdom Established the Bechuanaland Protectorate - modern day Botswana. The second event was the incorporation of the tiny Boer republic of Stellaland into Bechuanaland.

It was all part of a grand plan partly initiated by Transvaal president Paul Kruger.

He had sailed to London in 1884 and met Secretary of State of the Colonies Lord Derby where the two struck a deal. Derby would drop the British claim to suzerainty over the Transvaal and reduce the Transvaal’s debt, and reduce the powers of the British representative in Pretoria, in exchange Kruger agreed to decrease tariffs on imported goods and to drop claims to Stellaland and Goshen, thus opening up Cecil John Rhodes’ important North Road.

The agreement promised a rare season of peace and stability for the fractured region. Yet, its true survival rested entirely on whether both sides would honor the principles they had so recently espoused.

They did not.

Or to be more accurate, Pro-Boer and Pro-Imperial activists did not. Transvaal commandos rode into Zululand and into Bechuanaland, cocking a snook at their own leadership. On the British side, all manner of colonials looked askance at the Kruger/Derby Deal. One was missionary and humanitarian, Reverend John Mackenzie, a prominent member of the London Missionary Society. He had spent most of his adult life proselytizing amongst the Tswana people at Kuruman and Shoshong.

Mackenzie was the Boer’s arch enemy, denouncing incursions from the pulpit in South Africa, then back in the UK when he was on leave in 1882 and 1883. The Road to the North worried him because of how dominant the Transvaal Boers were in this region.As King Leopold of Belgium, the French, Bismarck of Germany and others met to finalise who got what in Africa, the British Foreign Office suddenly woke up. They were concerned about the Transvaal and German South West Africa. The British Government did a volte-farce, and sent a powerful army up the North Road. Four thousand regular troops, including the famous Inniskilling Dragoons cavalry regiment from Ulster in Northern Ireland, along with three observation balloons, all headed towards Stellaland from Kimberley.