Mafeking 1953 photo: guess who?

[John Ashworth]

Some of you may recognise the little chappie fourth from left in the back row!

Thanks to Martin Langley for supplying the photo.

[Martin Langley]

I recently joined FOTR to see if could find any photos of the railway station in Mafeking, where my family lived from 1949-1955. I searched the forum but came up empty. However, a couple of posts mentioned the Dadford brothers and what really got my attention was a post that mentioned John having met his wife "at school in Mafeking". Well, Mafeking+school+Dadford=Std 3 Mafeking Primary School 1953, and I remembered my classmate Robert Dadford. Via John, I was able to contact his daughter Jacqui who confirmed that my brain's RAM (random access memory) was still functioning reasonably well in spite of 70 odd years of use!!

Robert and our little circle of friends in dear old dusty Mafeking had such a good time in those days. Life was relatively simple, unspoiled by TV, iphones, ipads, video games and all the other electronic distractions and clutter of the late 20th century. We did have a bioscope in town but other than that we made our own fun. We were always outdoors playing cowboys and indians, cricket, marbles, sliding on a foofee slide, riding our fiets, making home made canoes from sheets of corrugated iron ripped from a roof or shack, boating and swimming in the Molopo river, bok-bok etc ... do they still play bok-bok in SA? We got up to all kinds of things. In the early 50s the odd shell or bomb dating from the Boer War surfaced and once, a group of older boys found one of those shells built a fire around it and tried to melt it down, hoping to make pellets for their catties. Unfortunately it was still live and exploded, killing one of the boys; it was a huge tragedy in the community!

Our first house in Mafeking was a short distance from a level crossing that the locomotives and trains crossed over when pulling into the nearby station and sheds. With Mafeking being an important junction on the Bechuanaland/Rhodesia line, there was a large railway community living near the station and train yards. I was fascinated by the steam engines, especially the big Garratts, and enjoyed watching them at the station where I went to buy a Coke or a Rondies ice cream. In 1955, my father was transferred to Uganda and the family relocated to Kampala. It was then 6 years of boarding school in Nairobi and the commute from Kampala 3 times a year was a 24 hour journey on East African Railways in a train hauled by a Garratt ... read about it on http://www.oldcambrians.com/Train4.htm. The article may take a while to load as it includes a couple of sound clips including 53secs of a SAR GMA Garratt pulling out of a station, which may not play on a Mac computer ... better to view it on a PC.

Anyway, glad to have found FOTR and on my next visit to SA will get reacquainted with my old chum Robert, and try to fit in one of the FOTR train outings from Hermanstad.

PS - If anyone has any photos of Mafeking, particularly in the 50s and 60s, please post ... thanks!
Having said that I did find some pics of locos at the Mafeking sheds taken in 1983 ... lots of atmosphere! https://www.flickr.com/photos/trains-tr ... 2089519186

[Philip Martin]

Interesting seeing Mafeking up close after reading about its siege in the Boer War.