96. Blog Within a Blog & Matjiesfontein
I often wake up early when I have a blog to write. If I haven’t decided on a subject already, I lie in bed and scan through my life’s assortment of adventures. Sometimes, may my wife Hero forgive me, I recall some of my earliest girlfriends. On this occasion, Sally came to mind – but for the life of me, I couldn’t remember her surname. It was completely irrelevant: I had mentioned her in an earlier blog and had no intention of writing about her again today. But it bugged me. I circled around the name. I remembered her mother’s maiden name – weird! She was Irma Baumgarten who married Sally’s father Gordon…. I even remembered Sally’s cousin, Pat McCarthy, whose mother was Gordon’s sister. The McCarthys and the ____ (missing surname) lived in Hermanus, a wonderful little seaside town about 70 miles from Cape Town.
All the happy memories of school holidays spent in Hermanus came flooding back. I even ended up crewing aboard Gordon’s sailing dinghy, of the Flying Dutchman class. He was a fearsome person who could cuss with the best of them whenever I did something wrong, but I very quickly learned the ropes, literally, and was a reasonably good crew for Gordon in 1952 and ’53. Gordon went on to represent South Africa at the 1960 Olympics, sailing the one-man Finn class dinghy.
Years later, while researching an amazing true story of the wreck of the liner Dunedin Star on Namibia’s dangerous Skeleton coast in 1942 (my Blog 61 tells the story in detail), I discovered that Gordon’s father was the ship’s doctor aboard the Dunedin Star at the remarkable age of 75 and played a significant part in helping the survivors who ended up stranded on the edge of the Namib desert.
At this point, I leapt out of bed and went to my computer. Surely, there had to be some reference to Gordon or his father’s surname. I googled the Hermanus Yacht Club, which told me that it had been established in 1951 but made no mention of Gordon or anyone of that era. I then googled the wreck of the Dunedin Star, which gave a very abbreviated version of the story of the wreck and the eventual rescue of the entire complement of passengers and crew. No mention of the wonderful old man, Dr. Burnwood. What?
The mind plays all kinds of tricks and at my age the tricks become more and more frequent. As I wondered how I could further reference the good doctor, his name slipped easily into my mind and the mystery of Gordon Burnwood and Sally Burnwood’s names were resolved. Sally went on to marry a school friend of mine, whose name I have also forgotten – I know it was a Dutch name but…. Sigh!
Now, here’s the extraordinary part. While I was at it, I thought I would google “Dr. Burnwood, ship’s doctor aboard the Dunedin Star” and see if the heroic old man was at least mentioned somewhere. Google came up with a number of related websites which mentioned Dr. Burnwood, but to my amazement the first reference on the list was my Blog 61!
As you would know by now, I’m no great fan of current computing technology but this was truly astounding. Obviously, the search engines had picked up Dr. Burnwood’s name from my blog. In fact, I had written more about him than any of the other references. What can I say – fame at last!!!
Now for the other subject of today’s blog, Matjiesfontein. On the main road which runs just over a thousand miles between Cape Town and Johannesburg, there is an elegant historical hotel called Matjiesfontein. It is in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by the arid terrain of the Karoo, which starts about a hundred miles from Cape Town, after the more verdant Hex River Valley, and stretches across much of the central interior of South Africa. There is another region, known as the Klein (little) Karoo, which runs along the eastern edges of the Groot (Big) Karoo. It is somewhat more arable than its big brother. Many of the best wine farms are located there as well as the subject of my last blog, Oudtshoorn and the ostrich farms.
Matjiesfontein, however, is firmly situated in the Groot Karoo. Despite its location, it’s well worth a visit. Its existence was due to the bizarre and arbitrary way in 1875 that the Governor of the Cape Colony, John Molteno, decided that a railway line should be built to connect Cape Town to the fast-expanding town of Kimberley, where the discovery of a huge pipe of diamonds had changed both the economy and the political climate of South Africa forever.
Molteno called for a map of South Africa and a ruler. He then drew a straight line between Cape Town and Kimberley and declared that was where the railway line should go. In reality, the line had to circumvent numerous obstacles on its journey through the Cape winelands and into the Hex River Valley. After the Hex River Pass took the line into the Karoo itself, the straight line became more feasible. In 1878 a small station was established at Matjiesfontein (Afrikaans matjie, a small mat, and fontein, fountain), a place named after the mats woven by the KhoiKhoi tribes indigenous to the area.
Douglas Logan, superintendent of the railway section which included Matjiesfontein, settled there and opened a refreshment station for passing trains. This prospered and a small village grew up around the station, including an elegant Victorian health spa, which took advantage of the dry and healthy climate of the Karoo. It was later to become the Lord Milner Hotel and, because of its unspoilt Victorian charm, the entire town was declared a national monument in 1975. This was largely due to the efforts of hotelier David Rawdon. David, his brother and mother had built Rawdons Hotel in the Natal midlands in 1953, which was a forerunner of fine Country House hotels scattered across South Africa in the 1950s and thereafter.
I was still at school when Rawdons was being built only about five miles from Michaelhouse. My friend, Bruce Johnstone, knew the Rawdon family well and we walked to the building site on occasions to have a cup of tea with Mrs. Rawdon. She was a wonderfully eccentric but charming lady who insisted that she tell our fortunes in the teacups. She even hinted to me that I would one day get into some form of show business, possibly television, which I completely rejected, having no interest in anything except playing rugby. Nevertheless, four years later, she was to be proved right when I joined BBC TV in London.
In 1983, I wrote and later directed a film for the South African Tourism Board, called “South Africa, the Best Kept Secret.” We had by far the biggest budget I had ever worked with. The idea was to show not only the obvious tourist attractions of the country, such as the Kruger National Park, Cape Town (one of the most beautiful cites in the world), the Drakensberg mountains, etc., but also some of the lesser-known wonders of South Africa.
Matjiesfontein was one of those places. We had arranged to film aboard the Blue Train, at the time one of the most luxurious trains in the world travelling nonstop between Cape Town and Johannesburg via Kimberley. The Tourism Board used its influence to permit the train to stop at Matjiesfontein to allow myself and the film crew to get off the train. We had already filmed all we needed between Cape Town and Matjiesfontein. (This, by the way, included the use of two models recruited in Cape Town to be filmed as passengers. One of them was an American model called Joe, passing through the country on his way back to the States. A year or two later, I was in Los Angeles and showed the film to a Hollywood movie company. When Joe appeared on the Blue Train, three of the guys watching the movie yelled out “Hey, that’s Joe!” It’s a very small world.)
We filmed the hotel and Matjiesfontein village extensively. It is a charming trip back into the Victorian era. I met with David Rawdon and reminded him of the time that Bruce and I had visited his mother at the Rawdons Hotel building site. He remembered us and was delighted that we were putting the Lord Milner Hotel on the international map. Lord Milner, by the way, was Governor of Cape Colony who became embroiled in the conflict between the British Government and the Boer Republics of the Transvaal and the Orange Free State. Milner was a controversial figure who learned to speak Dutch as well as the local dialect of Afrikaans in an effort to persuade President Paul Kruger to grant voting rights to the “Uitlanders” (British and other nationalities living in the Boer Republics).
If you happen to travel to South Africa at some point, Matjiesfontein is definitely one of the country’s “best kept secrets” in the same way that ExoTech has been “a best kept secret” until now. As we fast approach the final stages leading to our launch, the cat is out of the bag – and it’s a cat we team members can all be really proud of.
An ExoTech Ltd shareholder, Chris is currently authoring two of the four books to be published the day ExoBrain launches and has helped to create ExoBrain’s introductory video to the Confidential Technical Briefing. Chris has spent his working life in the film and television industry, starting with BBC Television in London, then ATV in Birmingham becoming, at the time, the youngest Studio Manager in Britain.
Later, in South Africa, he wrote and directed film and TV commercials, having four South African entries at the Cannes Advertising Festival. After a number of years of writing and directing or producing documentaries (eight international awards) and corporate videos, he concentrated on writing feature film screenplays (five screened) and television series (seven screened). He has a novel, ”Pursuit of Treachery,” with a literary agent and is currently obtaining finance for an action adventure feature film he has written and is co-producing. He is a published poet and has given many readings.