Pub: Collins, London, Johannesburg, Vivien Allen is currently working on a revised |
Lady TraderA Biography of Mrs. Sarah Heckford 'It is not an extravagance to call Mrs Heckford one of the most extraordinary women to whom the British nation has given birth.' Obituary, The Times, London, April 21, 1903.
Why I wrote Lady TraderI first encountered Sarah Heckford while living in Melrose House. I found her book A Lady Trader in the Transvaal in my great grandfather George Heys' library and read it with interest. Who was this extraordinary woman? She became one of the subjects of my second Pretoria News series, 'They Came To Pretoria'. Later I was sent on newspaper assignment to a farm, Nooitgedacht, west of Pretoria which had been the scene of an important battle in the Second Anglo-Boer War. The same family still lived there and the grandmother showed me round. This happy coincidence led to the writing of my second book and this picture is reproduced in Lady Trader, opposite page 183. |
Sarah Heckford in October 1902, drawn by Lady Sarah Nicholson |
I was surprised to see a picture of Sarah Heckford hanging in their sitting room and asked how they came to have it. She replied, "Because she was my governess." From the Dust Cover
After her husband’s death she travelled and nursed in India, then in 1878 moved on to South Africa. By this time she had given away almost all her money and, unable to earn her living by conventionally genteel methods, set up as a trader. ‘A widow of forty, small and slight, lame into the bargain, subject to severe attacks of malaria and probably tubercular as well’ might hardly seem ideally suited to a rugged, often dangerous life of travel by ox-cart across the still turbulent countryside of the Transvaal. Sarah Heckford was indomitable.
Accused by some of being pro-Boer, she was in fact fiercely independent and in a campaign in The Times and elsewhere, defended the concentration camps against the attacks of well-meaning but ill-informed critics. It was in the same paper two years later that an obituarist described her as ‘one of the most extraordinary women to whom the British nation has given birth’. In this vivid and well researched biography Vivien Allen does justice to her splendid theme.
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The original East London
The wagon camp in the |
‘No romancer that I know of has had the boldness to prefigure the life of this young husband and young wife in the Children’s Hospital in the East End of London.’ So Charles Dickens wrote of Sarah Heckford and her husband Nathaniel, and yet the pioneering work which Sarah did in the field of child welfare, defying the taboos of sex and class to achieve her ends, was only the first chapter in a life of astonishing adventure.
When war broke out in 1880 she was in Pretoria and endured the siege of that city. In the re-established Boer republic of the Transvaal she resumed her trading, then set up as a share-broker’s agent, selling mining shares. This venture foundered, so she bought two farms in the North Transvaal and became friend and adviser to Modjadje, the ‘Rain Queen’ of the Loboda tribe and original of Rider Haggard’s She. In 1901 war was resumed and, now aged 65, she rode sixty miles non-stop through hostile territory to warn Roberts of the presence of Boer troops near her home.