The first Rice blockhouse built in South Africa during the Anglo-Boer War was in Middelburg.
This is the interesting revelation made by Simon C Green during the National Heritage Foundation’s symposium at the Middelburg Country Club.
The bad news is that only a pile of stones remains of the blockhouse.
The blockhouse stood north of Kanonkop and was equipped with a giant light that shone over the town in the evenings.
Another revelation was that there was a factory in Middelburg where the blockhouses were manufactured.
Green, author of several history books, does not know where the factory was, but said that it was possibly near a railway line.
In the journals of the British engineers who manufactured the blockhouses it is written “Major Rice’s company soon became an extremely well organised blockhouse team, the construction of each separate part being in the hands of the same men.
Every part was made template and consequently these blockhouses fitted well together, which was far from being the case with those made by contract at the coast.”
Green challenged the local heritage association to restore the Rice blockhouse to its former glory.
- Lord FS Roberts had set up a series of forts to guard the railway during the Anglo Boer War, when General Christiaan de Wet started blowing up his lines of communication in June 1900. The forts were a series of trenches reinforced with stone walls or singers surrounded by barbed wire..
Roberts handed over the command of the British Army in South Africa to Lord H. Kitchener on 29 October 1900 thinking the war was over and only a few rebels roaming the country.
It was during November and December that wrecking of the railways had reached its climax during the war and construction of the masonry blockhouses started in December that year. Each blockhouse took up to three months to erect.
