Magical Matjiesfontein
Matjiesfontein Village sails on like a Victorian ship of state in the Great Karoo. With its Anglo-Boer War relics and its famed railway station, it’s the perfect weekend destination.
Note: This article is dedicated to the memory of the owner of Matjiesfontein Village, David Rawdon, who passed away in the first half of August, 2010.
And When It Rains
When it rains in the Karoo, everything stops to take notice. Birds halt their chirping, locusts cease their melodramatic back-leg fiddle solos and farmers park their bakkies in the middle of lonely dirt roads, look up to the quickening heavens and smile. Gentle cloudbursts are blessings in the dry country. Karoo people have been known to scoop smears of ground to their lips just to taste the fresh rain.
So it was not surprising to find the Laird of Matjiesfontein, David Rawdon, sitting in his high-ceilinged office at the Lord Milner Hotel, looking out of his window at the driving summer showers, with a celebratory glass of bubbly to hand.
Matjiesfontein Station
The Blue Train had just been. Rovos Rail was expected to pass by. Even the Shosholoza Meyl was coming at some stage. Matjiesfontein Station, unlike hundreds of other desert sidings throughout the Karoo, was alive and working. Tourists, driving overland through the vast plains from Three Sisters, had come for a quick pub lunch before pushing on to Cape Town on the N1.
More than a hundred years ago, Matjiesfontein was an international icon for consumption sufferers, who came here, recovered briefly and returned to a world where the Industrial Revolution had turned the air foul. The founder of the village, one Jimmy Logan, also had weak lungs. So did Cecil John Rhodes and his arch-enemy, Olive Schreiner. The clear Karoo air was said to taste like the finest champagne for “lungers”.
Jimmy Logan, a railways man, had the ‘knack of the Karoo’, which involves the ability to look past bleak landscapes and barren horizons and see opportunity. He worked out that locomotives crossing the Karoo would each need 250 000 litres of water. Logan found a source of water in the area and piped it down to Matjiesfontein where, in November 1889, he launched an elaborate ‘water world’ in the desert.
A London Suburban Street
With the money he made catering to the railways, Logan began to import building materials and recreated a London suburban street. Jimmy Logan was the first man to bring electric lighting to his nearby farm, Tweedside, where he also pioneered the flush toilet system. He kept finding excellent water sources and establishing huge fruit orchards in places where only dust and hardy succulents had grown before. The man was incredibly busy. There were London street lamps, cooldrink factories and when the Anglo-Boer War (now called the South African War) broke out, he put together a 100-man squad to fight the Boers on behalf of his queen.
In the 1960s, David Rawdon’s mother Marie told her son about Matjiesfontein. She recalled stopping here for a meal at the hotel while on a trans-Karoo train trip.
“Logan was very clever,” she told David. “You’d pay for your meal in advance, but the soup was so hot you barely got through that before the whistle blew and it was time to board the train again.”
The Toilet Museum
At the railway station is the lavish Marie Rawdon Museum, possibly the largest privately owned collection of Victoriana in South Africa. If there’s even a hint of crow in you, if you like the shiny bits of life, this museum is good for at least two hours of fossicking.
On the ground floor, oddments include a collection of opera glasses, 19th century shampoo bottles, hydrometers, smoking pipes, a cake made in the shape of the Lord Milner Hotel (its sugary turrets showing signs of imminent collapse), plated tea sets and a leather-bound book commemorating Lord Hawke’s cricket tour of SA in 1898.
Downstairs is the real Aladdin’s Cave: the Toby Jug collection, the Toilet Museum and military memorabilia, including a poster noting that the Anglo-Boer War had cost 320 million British pounds and a defiant quote from Queen Victoria saying:
“There is no depression in this House … and we are not interested in the possibilities of defeat. They do not exist.”
A London Bus Ride
Sunset found us in the Motor Museum across the road, when a jolly man called John Theunissen blew on a bugle and invited us on board a red London bus for a ten-minute tour of the village. And then it was back to the pub…
Contact: www.matjiesfontein.co.za
