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How Tom's widow, Catherine, coped with his death financially we can only surmise. But no
doubt she, as well as her two eldest children, had jobs, and lived as frugally as she had done all
her married life. Her son, George, must have been employed already as a clerk, which was his
occupation when he married at the age of 33. And when the family moved to the adjacent
suburb of Fitzroy after his father's death, George's future position as Town Clerk of Fitzroy was
assured.
Back in South Africa, Jack Honeycombe, the youngest of the three Honeycombe brothers, had
remained in or near Johannesburg during the closing stages of the Boer War.
Lord Kitchener was now in charge, Lord Roberts having returned to England at the end of
1900 after a successful campaign. In dealing with the hit-and-run attacks of the Boer
commando units led by General De Wet, (Kruger
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had fled to Europe), Kitchener adopted a scorched earth policy, destroying forms which might
shelter or support the Boers and incarcerating their women and children in concentration camps.
He also covered the countryside with barbed wire to impede Boer horsemen and built
blockhouses along railway lines, to protect and facilitate the passage of armoured trains.
Dispirited, diminished, but not defeated, the Boers sued for peace.
A peace conference was eventually held at Vereeniging, and a treaty signed in Pretoria on 31
May 1902. The Transvaal and the Orange Free State were annexed by the British, but before
long both colonies were given self-government, and the Union of South Africa was created -
along with the system that led to apartheid in 1910.
Noisy life had returned to Johannesburg, as well as its polyglot citizens, before the end of the
war, and the gold-mines were soon in full production again.
In 1902, probably about the time the peace treaty was signed, Jack Honeycombe, a full-time
carpenter again, sent for his wife and four children. He must also have sent them sufficient
money for the voyage. We know the family were resident in Footscray, at 16 Buckingham St, at
the beginning of 1902. But after that they disappear from the street directories, and after a
separation of about six years, Jack was reunited in Johannesburg with his wife Jane.
Jack was 41 in November that year. Of his children, Olive was 18; Rosa was 15; Fred was 13;
and young John was 9. The journey to South Africa must have been the most exciting thing that
had ever happened to them. For none of the children, nor Jane, had probably ever been far
from Melbourne; Jane, whose father was a baker, had been born at Collingwood. But the
wrench of leaving their friends and familiar surroundings must have pained Jane and her two
daughters. They may have consoled themselves with the thought that one day they would return.
But it seems that only Jack, and Olive, ever did.
A dim light illumined an aspect of that voyage to South Africa when the son of that 9-year-old
John (also called John) spoke to me in Durban in 1982.
He said; 'Dad told me they'd apparently never seen electric lights before, and my father's bunk
in the cabin was right by this light and they couldn't put it out. His mother [Jane] kept blowing on
it, thinking it was a gaslight. A steward came in and showed them how it worked. They'd never
seen electric lights... It was a rough passage apparently and they were all very seasick. That light
stayed on all the way from Australia to here... They all went to live in Johannesburg, in Mayfair.
My grandfather Jack was a carpenter and my father was one as well. They both worked in the
mines, the Crown Mines, near Mayfair. That's why they all lived in Mayfair. It was closest to the
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