The Town That Saved Churchill

It was 1899 and a young war correspondent named Winston Churchill was sent to South Africa after losing a by-election in Oldham, England. After being beaten by the conservative candidate he returned to his normal day job, of being a war correspondent for The Morning Post.

He was captured on November 15, 1899 after boarding an armoured train which ended up being ambushed, and although most of the passengers escape, Churchill did not. He was then taken to a makeshift prison, but he wasn’t captive for long. On December 12, 1899, Churchill jumped over the wall, and made it onto a passing train.

He then boarded a train for Mozambique, but when the train stopped at Clewer siding, Churchill disembarked and in an attempt to find food starting knocking on doors. And as luck would have it, one of the doors he knocked on was that of Briton, John Howard. Howard helped Churchill hide in a coal mine for a few days before being moved to hiding behind some packing cases in the office.

It only took six days since arriving for Churchill to fashion a way out of Witbank as he boarded another train transporting wool to Mozambique. At the end of the 1800s, Witbank was still predominantly regarded as an agricultural town. However the discovery of gold in the towns of Barberton and Pilgrims Rest boosted local coffers enormously as prospectors poured into the town in search of supplies. Ironically Witbank, was sitting on a “gold mine” of its own and with the discovery of coal and steel deposits in the early 1900s, the town became far more successful than those that relied purely on the hysteria of the thousands who poured into the region in search of gold.

It’s because of this boom and the economic expansion that followed that it has become much more desirable to buy a property in Witbank over the years, but it is truly amazing how the Boer’s lack of interest in finding Churchill lead him to escape and to eventually lead England and the Allies into the Second World War.