Episode 83 - Boer Secret Service Spy Johanna van Warmelo and the Petticoat Commando

In this episode Easter Sunday had come and gone on the 7th April and for most combatants stretched across the vastness of the South African veld, it was characterised by fear and loathing. The concentration Camps were filling and women and children were beginning to die of diseases like enteric and typhoid. The numbers were in the hundreds a week, by August 1901 more than 1,800 would be dying a month - and a similar number of black men, women and children who’d also been herded into camps to keep them from supplying the Boers with food and logistic support. So it was just over a week after Easter, on April 15th, that Johanna van Warmelo and her mother took a train to try and see her brother, Dietlof, who’d been captured by the British and was being sent to Ceylon. There was no freedom of movement because of the war, and after initially being rejected for not having the correct signatures and paperwork, they made it on board and then chugged off for the 40 kilometre journey to Johannesburg - which even then Johanna calls the Golden City. All along the line one sees the signs of the war, here a blown-up bridge, there, the ruins of a whole train of trucks and carriages. They also took note of the British defensive positions along the line, the plates of iron leading to trenches, covered with sand bags, all around the network of barbed wire. That laughter dried up as they passed Irene just beyond the station, where they saw the women’s concentration camp. Thousands of women and children were living there in tents, they were the families of the men still fighting. Remember Lord Kitchener had ordered that these camps be set up across the north of the country to incarcerate families of the guerrilla soldiers, in an attempt to hurry the end of the war. Johanna was 24 years old. What is remarkable about her, is that she was keeping three diaries. One was her secret military diary, the second her secret love diary, and her third which you could call her open diary. Johanna and her mother were collecting information and spying on the British then sending their intelligence gathering to colleagues across South Africa - and the world.