The Carbutt family
Thomas Carbutt was a gentleman Squire in the Leeds district of Yorkshire when he decided to acquire land in South Africa. Thomas was consumptive and it was hoped that the sunny climate here would help him. His sons were brought up as Victorian gentlemen sent on the grand tour to Germany to study art and music. The most rollicking personality was a gay bachelor Thomas Munro who had his own private army in the Zulu war of 1879, “Carbutts Mounted Troopers, a unit that patrolled the Berg and cleaned up after Isandlwana.
In 1856 young Thomas Munro arrived alone to commence farming. He was then nearing 21 years of age and his doting parents decided to come out and see him settled. Old Thomas was so taken with South Africa that he bought a piece of ground in Umzinto. His enthusiasm grew and he purchased a second farm in Elandslaagte district, It was a lonely life for a spirited youth and Thomas sought out company. The daughter of the family friends, the Goods, had married a transport rider Willie Bowes, who farmed just over the hills at Doornhoek. Thomas Munro formed far too warm an attachment for this woman whose husband was away for long periods hauling loads up Collings Pass to Kimberly. News of this got to the old man in England and he decided that he must uproot himself and settle near the erring Thomas. With him came his wife and two sons Hugh and Charles Oberlin.
Young Thomas did not meet them in Durban, worse still after the weary journey north, he was not at Kruisfontein. His irate father confronted him ordering him, “to give up the intimacy with Mrs. Bowes – or be cast out!” Thomas was thrown out neck and crop and his father moved in, with Hugh and Charles to help, Hugh Lancaster inherited “Kruisfontein” which he shortly afterwards sold and he his wife Bessie, who was one of the Knights of “Anderson Manor”, moved to Dalton.
Charles Oberlin Carbutt in 1865 met Annie Christina Brooks, fell madly in love with her and without references to his Father married her. Inevitably he too was cast out. Charles and Annie had five sons and six daughters. From their humble beginnings in the sod cottage they built up considerable property and for three years they struggled. On the 23rd August 1866 was born their son Thomas, the first of the eleven children, who arrived to schedule every twelve or fourteen months.
Thomas Brooks married Dorothy Munnik of Cape Town in 1894. The eldest son was to write of his father: ‘He was energetic, but without enterprise as a farmer and in business matters he was most hopeless’. The patient Annie was pregnant ten times in 15 years, gave birth without the help of anyone other than native women and reared eleven children before she died in 1887, worn out by her exertions and blind.
In 1881 Thomas Carbutt was apprenticed to Mr. J. T. Spettigue, the Chemist in Ladysmith for a period of three years; Thomas recalls “I was then fifteen years of age, and my services were to be remunerated at the rate of twenty shillings per month for the first year; thirty shillings for the second year and fifty shillings for the third”. He completed this period to his employer’s satisfaction and became a monthly employee at the annual salary of 30 pounds! He almost came to grief one day with a prescription. “A man named Chauncey – reprobate remittance man – came into the shop and asked me for a Pick-me-up, as he was just emerging from a bout of heavy drinking, he named Hydrocyanic Acid as a specific. As I knew he had had it on previous occasions handed out by Mr. Spettigue himself, I had no hesitation, so measured out five drops and mixed it with a wineglass of water. In drinking, some of it went down the wrong way and Chauncey began spluttering violently and almost choked! When he recovered, he turned on me and accused me of giving him poison! Had he turned up his toes, I should have been in for it!”
When her eldest son Thomas Brooks wrote his memoirs in 1935 Annie was a shadowy figure. It was Charles Oberlin, his father, who filled the stage, presiding over the mystic ritual of the pig sticking, flaunting his horsemanship on his great stallion ‘Copper mine’, carrying his son in a mud sack on his back as he rode to ‘Kruisfontein’ to leave his son with that ‘gentle and kindly saint’, his grandmother Mary.
Francis Lancaster a courtly, tall man, married Helen Andrews of Howick, in a tragically brief and childless union. Francis and his brother Stephen married two sisters, Florence and Daisy Wright, George Wright’s daughters.
Charles Arthur, the third son of Charles Oberlin Carbutt, up to the time of the Boer War had done well as a transport rider, especially to and from Lydenburg. He had also had shares in ‘Matiwane’s Kop’. Charles Arthur served in the Natal Carbineers and led the charge at Elandslaagte. He was chosen to represent the Carbineers at Queen Victoria’s Jubilee.
Catharine Elizabeth was the maiden aunt whose job it was to maintain the old family home and to care for their ageing father, to move round the various homesteads to help with the new babies and to nurse the sick. She was a simple, kindly soul. There was great joy when she married a Mr. Davidson. It was brief idyll, on 14th August 1914 he was taken seriously and after a week’s suffering died of galloping consumption.
Thomas Munro, the “black sheep” inherited only the small piece of ground at Umzinto, which he sold for “a pittance” but it enabled him to buy the farm next door to the Bowes. His niece Elizabeth Henderson recalls being carried over on horseback to visit him when she was five. He never ceased to love Mrs. Bowes, never married, and when he died in 1900 his property was left to her.
Young Tom was forced to seek his fortune in Ladysmith because his happy-go-lucky Father had lost his Free State Farms. Charles had made a contract for the sale of oxen to the British Forces with a local Veld-Kornet and Tax-Collector Hendrik Truter, 100 head at 10 pounds each. Unfortunately for him, Truter had slipped away to help the Boers win Majuba, by the time he got to Ladysmith with the oxen his buyer repudiated the contract. Charles Carbutt had to sell land for a song to cover him. By now he had ten children to support, so Tom had to get out and support himself.
Catherine Mary, their only sister inherited another farm near Ladysmith, ‘Watersmeet’.
Old Charles Oberlin knew great sorrow. His wife died in her early forties. His second son Francis Lancaster, whom he looked to as his heir, was delicate and died in 1900 from enteric. During the Siege of Ladysmith he lost two daughters, Mary Catherine (aged 30) and Evelyn Grace (aged 18) as a result of enteric. His beloved eldest daughter Annie, who had married Walter Mitchell-Innes lost her only son Oberlin as an infant and died in 1906. Elizabeth Henderson of Balbrogie is the last of his children.