‘My class of nineteen soon increased to sixty, and by the middle of November reached eighty-five … The school had suffered very little in the war, but there was absolutely nothing in the way of supplies except twenty cracked slates and two small, portable blackboards … with these meagre supplies we had to teach for nearly four weeks. Luckily we had a box of slate-pencils from Springfontein, and the children brought us scraps of chalk which they picked up in camp.’1
EARLY IN 1902, it was clear to the British government that the Anglo-Boer War could not go on much longer, and that during the rebuilding process, South Africa would need the assistance of teachers to teach the local children. So the government embarked on a programme to educate Boer children in the notorious civilian concentration camps, and advertised for teachers in newspapers across New Zealand, Australia, Canada and the United Kingdom. Over a thousand Canadian women applied for these jobs, but only forty were chosen. The latter were under contract with the Colonial Office to teach for a year, and the stipend included free rations, household necessities, medical attendance, a free second-class passage to and from South Africa via England, plus £100 in cash. The Canadian government supplemented this by upgrading the passage to first-class from the ports of Halifax and St John to Liverpool.
Among the chosen few was Maud Graham, a young woman from Owen Sound on the southern shores of Georgian Bay, Ontario, which, for much of its history, was known as the Chicago of the North with its access to the Great Lakes. Ellen Maud Graham was born on 6 September 1876 in Owen Sound, the daughter of Samuel and Lydia Graham. A talented student, she graduated from Toronto University with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1896, and was a fellow in history from 1896 to 1897 at Bryn Mawr College, in Pennsylvania. While she was well equipped educationally for the job in South Africa, it would clearly be something of a challenge to teach Dutch-speaking Boer children in a civilian camp in a faraway country, under quite different climatic conditions.
Undaunted, however, Maud, as she was more commonly known, and her Canadian colleagues stuck to their task in an admirable way, as her 1905 recollection reveals:
The forty girls from Canada were divided into two parties of twenty each, sailing on different dates. Of the party of twenty, to which I belonged, not one returned at the end of the contract year, as we were so interested in our work. After that period we were paid by the particular colony in which we happened to be stationed, and our passage home was eventually paid for by the same colony. Of these twenty, one, Miss Sylvia Lee of Waterloo, Quebec, fell victim to enteric fever, and was buried in the veldt.2 Six have married in South Africa. Six have returned home. The remaining seven, so far as I know, are still engaged in their work of teaching. Of the other twenty girls I cannot speak definitely, as they were so widely scattered that we could not keep in touch with one another.3
There was high praise for the work of the Canadian teachers in the British Government Report of December 1902. ‘To the judicious selection on the part of the gentlemen at the head of the educational departments in several provinces is due the admirable result of the undertaking; the entire contingent, it is gratifying to know, having given complete satisfaction, both as regards its personnel and the accomplishment of its purpose,’ the report read. ‘As the request, in itself, was a tribute to the systems of education in the Dominion, so the outcome may justly be regarded as a striking proof of their high standard of excellence and efficiency.’4
On 12 April that year, the first group of Canadian teachers sailed from Halifax on the Corinthian, while the second group, which included Maud, sailed from St John, New Brunswick, a week later on the Lake Ontario. Maud’s fellow teachers were Gertrude Arbuckle, Maude Bremner and Grace Dutcher from St Edward Island; Agnes Carr, Annie Burns, Ida McLeod, Winnifred Johnston, Mabel Elliott and Sophie Pickle from New Brunswick; Jessie Fleet and Sylvia Lee from Quebec; Susanna Younghusband and Edith Murray from Manitoba; and Ella Crandall, Ellen MacKenzie, Blanche MacDonald, Margaret de Wolfe, Bertha Hebb and Emma Ellis from Nova Scotia.
‘The voyage was an average one, broken by the usual details of a squall, seasickness, and games on deck – hopscotch, shuffleboard, quoits, etc.,’ recalled Maud. ‘The gentlemen, without exception, tried to make it pleasant for us, even giving us the freedom of their smoke room on deck, as the number of cattle on board made it very stuffy below.’ They sailed past the cold, foggy sea off the banks of Newfoundland, where they found themselves ‘in the midst of a fishing fleet, and some chapters of Kipling’s “Captains Courageous” passed before our eyes’. The Lake Ontario finally reached Liverpool, where the teachers disembarked and journeyed via London to Southampton. The large number of Khakis that packed the docks was the first sign of the war in South Africa. The ship that took them to Cape Town via Tenerife and St Helena was the Avondale Castle. It carried eleven British officers and 739 men, and set sail on 10 May 1902. The passengers looked out at the scene slowly disappearing from view that spring morning: ‘The bright sunshine over all and the background of soft green English hills made a charming picture to remember old England by.’5
The group arrived in Cape Town at the beginning of June, shortly after peace was declared on 31 May, and spent an enjoyable day exploring the city before leaving for the north. Maud observed:
Cape Town itself was very dirty, and swarming with all sorts of people, fashionable women, dusky Cape girls with gay scarfs on their heads, Kafirs, coolies – and khaki, khaki everywhere. The houses and vehicles presented the same picturesque jumble, a handsome, modern, cut-stone building jostling a long, low, stuccoed native cottage; in the roadways electric trams, donkey carts, handsome carriages, ox-wagons and troops of cavalry completed the mix-up.6
Their party was posted as follows: McLeod, Johnston, Ellis and Hebb at Vryburg, Griqualand West; Bremner, Dutcher, De Wolfe and Lee at Bloemfontein, Orange River Colony; Elliott, Burns, Pickle and Fleet at Brandfort, Orange River Colony; Younghusband, Crandall and Murray at Kroonstad, Orange River Colony; and MacKenzie, MacDonald, Arbuckle and Graham at Norval’s Pont, Cape Colony.
The teachers left Cape Town on the evening of 3 June by train, in two first-class coaches sandwiched between sections of a goods train; the going was slow, as the single narrow-gauge line was blocked with trains carrying homebound British troops. They woke to a morning of bright sunshine as the train twisted through the Hex River Valley. A group of soldiers shouted as they passed them on a siding: ‘You’re going the wrong way; the fun’s all over!’7 Gradually, the hills flattened and the vast plains of the Karoo spread before them. They stopped for dinner at Matjiesfontein, where there was ‘nothing but kopjes, covered with boulders, and sandy desert in every direction. The only vegetation was dusty, stunted sage-brush.’8 Maud found herself wondering ‘where the sheep, with their funny long legs and trailing fat tails, found food, to say nothing of water’.9
Though the war had just ended, signs of it still lay all around them. On each side of the railway were barbed-wire entanglements, and at intervals they passed blockhouses of various size and construction, some made of stone, some of mud-brick, some of corrugated iron – all abandoned in the desolate veld. They passed the military hospital Deelfontein, consisting of a number of white tents and a large cemetery where each grave was marked with a crude whitewashed wooden cross. Once they saw a column on the march: dusty scouts on scraggly horses, donkey wagons raising a cloud of dust, followed by more carts and men on foot.
At De Aar railway junction they were surprised to see the whole population rush out to meet a Boer commando that was coming in to surrender. ‘The dust there was beyond words,’ Maud wrote, ‘we actually sank to our ankles in it, as in snow.’10 They visited a little railway school headed by a Cape Colony Dutchman, and found it so up-to-date that it disturbed their preconceived ideas of South African schools. The teachers bound for Vryburg then took the train to Mafeking, while the rest continued along the Johannesburg track. The evening was chilly, and the temperature soon fell below freezing. They were due to arrive at Norval’s Pont the next morning, and so the remaining fifteen teachers decided to make a night of it. They all crammed into one compartment and spent the night singing. They reached Norval’s Pont, on the south side of the Orange River, early on the frosty morning of 6 June. There Maud, together with Misses MacKenzie, MacDonald and Arbuckle, waved goodbye to their colleagues who were continuing further north, and who were all hanging out of the car singing ‘Goodbye, Dolly Gray’.
The four teachers were taken by cart to the concentration camp some three kilometres away. Maud recorded:
As we rounded the huge, steep kopje separating the military from the refugee camp, we exclaimed with delight at the picture before us.11 To the left were enormous kopjes; at their base was the Orange River, winding along between green banks; to the right, and sloping up the opposite hillsides was the camp, with its long lines of tents glistening white in the morning sun. The tents were pitched in regular rows, with broad streets between, edged with lines of white-washed stones for guides on dark nights. The camp officials’ and teachers’ tents were farther up the slopes by themselves.12
The teachers were welcomed by a chaperone, as well as by Mr Hermans, the camp superintendent, Mr Gunn, the district school superintendent, and Mr Erasmus, the camp school headmaster. There was already a group of six English teachers at the camp, who were accommodated in three marquee tents. The school buildings and tents were about a kilometre from the tents at the furthest edge of the camp, with plenty of space in between for playgrounds. About 3 500 people lived in the camp, and of these 1 300 were children, all of whom, apart from the babies, attended school.
Maud took over part of Miss Daniels’s class, which was accommodated in a corrugated-iron building with a mud-brick extension. She and her 130 pupils were given a room in the corrugated-iron section, while Miss Daniels taught the remaining 170 pupils in the mud-brick room. The desks were makeshift, and consisted of uprights in the ground with a single plank laid across the top. Miss Daniels offered to go over the class register so as to give Maud an idea of how to pronounce the Boer names, but on hearing names such as Wilhelmina Kachelhoffer and Abraham Oosthuizen, the Canadian teacher decided it would be a better idea if her Dutch assistant called the roll for a while. Taking a good look at the children, Maud was pleasantly surprised to find the majority ‘fat, healthy, ragged, dirty, but quite happy-looking youngsters’. The children seemed to be ‘fond of their teachers from the way they clustered around them’, and their new teacher was immediately impressed with their ‘pretty manners’.13
Each pair of teachers was accommodated in a large marquee tent, and their equipment consisted of two woollen rugs; two green canvas folding camp beds, with mattresses, pillows and three blankets per person; a folding iron washstand, folding canvas easy chairs, upright chairs and a bath; two folding tables, a water filter and small mirror; and a canteen with a stove and cooking utensils, dishes and cutlery. They were allocated a Dutch woman to cook for them and a boy to be their messenger.
Apart from tents for the inmates and school buildings, the camp also had a small hospital with not more than a dozen patients. At the other end of the camp was a comfortably furnished orphanage that consisted of a mud-brick building and several tents, and which was supported by both the British and Dutch governments. The orphanage accommodated about forty-five children whose fathers had been killed during the war; the children were healthy and hearty and well cared for, and were scheduled to leave at the end of August 1902. By this stage, the British No. 10 hospital, which had formerly been stationed in Bloemfontein, had also been moved to Norval’s Pont.
The teachers’ first night was one that they were unlikely to forget, as there were many unwelcome interruptions. Firstly, the bell rang at nine o’clock for the Boer inmates to put out their lights; then, during the night, the watchmen stumbled around; at some point a few stray donkeys got tangled up in their tent ropes and violently shook the tent; and finally, at daybreak, the silence was broken by ‘the most doleful sounds I had ever heard’, as Maud described it. This turned out to be the Boers singing their psalms, which they sang every morning and again at sunset.
The new teachers were also puzzled by a peculiar smell that drifted along the rows of tents – but soon discovered its cause: once a week, the floors were smeared with manure and water to keep them hard. They learnt that this technique was customary, and that the doctors did not regard it as unsanitary – in spite of the odour.
Soon after the women’s arrival, they were told that the camp did not require the services of so many teachers, and that Misses MacKenzie and MacDonald were to move on to Springfontein, where there was a need for teachers.14 That left Maud and Miss Arbuckle (referred to as ‘Miss Carbuncle’ by some of the sisters at No. 10 hospital) as the only two Canadian teachers in the camp.
Their housekeeping arrangements included taking turns in managing the monthly accounts (apart from the cook’s wages, which were paid by the government, and the messenger boy whose services were also paid for, any other help had to be hired). They had the same rations as other people in the camp, including meat, vegetables from the large camp garden, as well as flour, salt, sugar, candles and such things. ‘Yet,’ Maud complained, ‘we were always hungry with living in the open, and bought quantities of things besides.’ But she was grateful too for gifts of venison and frozen fish, and the simple pleasure of good drinking water: ‘The officers also brought up many a welcome present of spring-buk (venison) or cold storage fish from Cape Town. We were fortunate also at Norval’s in having excellent water, brought down in pipes from springs in the kopjes.’15
The women started teaching four days after their arrival at the camp. Their hours were from nine o’clock to half past one, with a break from half past ten to eleven o’clock. The school day began with twenty minutes of religious instruction, but because the Dutch assistants took charge of this, the two Canadians could relax a little before taking their classes. Their first day of teaching was memorable for a fierce storm that blew up in the evening: the rain poured down, the wind howled like a hurricane and it began to snow; within ten minutes their marquee had collapsed and, drenched and shivering, they took shelter in the mess tent.
There is pathos and pleasure in Maud’s description of an ordinary school day in the camp:
I would arrive when the class was finishing a morning hymn … Then, at first with Miss Collins’ assistance, I would call the roll … I went around and examined feet, hands, necks and ears; specially dirty children were sent back to their tents to wash, and any with veldt sores were sent to the line nurses for treatment.
The children suffered dreadfully from chilblains and these veldt sores, similar to boils, caused by bad blood and poor food. The poorer Dutch women hadn’t the faintest idea of cooking anything properly; the rich, hot soup given the children by the camp, at recess, being the only nourishing food they had, in many cases. The soup was of the best, and many a time we teachers took it in preference to our own lunch sent down from our kitchen …
When I had finished this inspection, the big cupboard was unlocked, and the slates given to half a dozen little ones to pass around. All slates, pencils, books, etc., were supplied by Government … I had also a number of picture rolls of different sorts which were hung to the scantling, on which the corrugated iron walls were nailed. It was a great relief when the sun began to warm the air so that the windows could be opened. These had no glass panes, but the frames were filled with pieces of calico tacked in.
Meanwhile the class was carefully copying figures or letters, from large models on the blackboard … I went around to correct the work, and those who had done well were allowed to draw on the side of the slates marked in kindergarten squares. Those who had done badly were obliged to do it again. Then they laid down their slates and sat straight for a reading lesson off the big reading sheet … After that everyone was getting tired of sitting, so the class stood to sing … The kindergarten action songs proved the quickest way of teaching English.16
During break, the boys’ favourite game was marbles, while the girls enjoyed rope skipping. When they went back to class, they read from books and had a simple lesson in mental arithmetic and spelling; after this they memorised verse, listened to a story, and had an illustrated talk about something in nature. When it was time for the teacher to return to her tent, there was always a lively row as to who would accompany her, till two happy children skipped next to her, holding her hands all the way to her quarters.
‘Boer children … were shy with strangers and were never so quarrelsome and boisterous as American children, but they were just as fond of fun as any children I ever met,’ Maud wrote. She also observed that the little girls were cleaner and neater than the little boys. ‘But even of the very poor some were scrupulously clean,’ she added. She further opined:
All this class benefited by the camps. They had free schools, free medical attendance, wholesome food, and were obliged to be decently clean. But there was also a large class who undoubtedly suffered many hardships in camp … There were in our camp numbers of people whose homes I afterwards saw – beautiful places, with numbers of servants – and it is simply nonsense to pretend that it was not a fearful trial for such people to live huddled together in a bell tent, or a mud room, doing their own work, and carrying their own wood and water in all sorts of weather.17
The two farms across the river were well irrigated, and their fine vegetable gardens were tended by the men in the camp. Generous supplies of vegetable rations were issued three times a week to the inmates. Conditions were tolerable in the camp, and it wasn’t all work for the staff. They enjoyed afternoon teas, they played tennis – ‘at which the Dutch people were experts’ – and field hockey, while the men in the military played horse polo.18 The staff also held concerts in the big corrugated-iron school shed.
One sunny day in late June, there was a wave of excitement when a Boer commando that had just surrendered marched into the camp. Some of the men’s wives, however, refused to believe that peace had been signed; they shouted at their husbands and sons, calling them ‘hands-uppers’, and beat them with brooms, or whatever else was at hand. Two days later, General Christiaan de Wet arrived and spoke to the parents and their children, explaining that the Boer soldiers could do no more for their cause; he advised them to be pragmatic, to take advantage of the schools, and to work hard on their farms.19
On 30 June, the teachers left on a ten-day trip to Johannesburg to attend a teachers’ convention. When the overnight train pulled into Johannesburg station early the next morning, Maud and Miss Arbuckle were taken to stay at the beautiful residence of Mr Harry Freeman-Cohen – the man who would launch the Rand Daily Mail a few months later – where the Canadian teachers posted at Bloemfontein were also residing.20 They were all pleasantly surprised by the City of Gold, as Maud recorded: ‘Altogether we all felt ashamed of our preconceived ideas of Johannesburg, which we had imagined to be a rough mining town with few of the comforts and none of the luxuries of civilization.’21
The two Canadian teachers left Johannesburg again on 12 July, and stayed over in Bloemfontein, where they strolled past some of the fine shops along Maitland Street, near Market Square. They were less impressed with the drabness of the landscape on their train journey home, however: ‘The railroad journey from Pretoria to the south of the Orange River Colony is the dullest possible, the land being an almost unbroken plain; therefore, when we saw the kopjes increasing in size and number we knew we would soon be home.’22
During the women’s two-week absence from Norval’s Pont, the military camp had grown, while the camp for Boer inmates had shrunk. Large numbers of families had trekked away, and when school re-opened Maud found that her pupils numbered only 100 or so.
Sometime after their return, a mixed hockey team, of which Maud was a member, made a trip to Colesberg for a challenge match.23 Maud described Colesberg as ‘a typical country village, clustered about a large central market-square, the houses one-storeyed, of mud-brick, limed over white or pink, with wide verandahs, and shaded by pepper trees or blue gums. All houses were built on the street, with gardens behind. There were no sidewalks, and whites, blacks, horses, donkeys and oxen mingled indiscriminately in the roadways. There were some quite good general stores.’ The hockey match was played at the recreation grounds, within view of the well-known Cole’s Kop hill. After a fun-filled day, the team only arrived back at Norval’s Pont at midnight, with Maud wryly remarking that ‘the speed of a goods train is not breathless’.24
As the end of August approached, camp life deteriorated; not only were the camp inmates eager to move out, with a steady stream of children coming to say goodbye, but the women also had to contend with the relentless August dust storms. At this time, many Boer prisoners of war were returning from camps on St Helena, Ceylon and other islands, and British troops were returning to the British Isles; among the latter was the Manchester Regiment, which left Norval’s Pont on 1 September. Things livened up for a while when a party of six Australian teachers stayed over for a week on their way to Springfontein, where the remaining inmates from Norval’s Pont were headed. The authorities decided that the camp would finally be closed by mid-September. At this stage, Maud had only twenty pupils left.
Maud and Miss Arbuckle’s next posting was to Fauresmith.25 They left camp on 12 September along with two English teachers (Misses Daniels and Gillingham), as well as Mr Gunn, the district school superintendent, and Mr Robertson, the assistant camp superintendent. The original plan was that the women would overnight at the Springfontein camp, and then travel on from there the following day in Cape carts. A heavy rainstorm rendered the roads impassable, however, so they were forced to stay in Springfontein for a few days. They were accommodated in a large unused hospital ward, along with the Australian teachers who had visited Norval’s Pont shortly before. Maud was happy to see the Australians again, as she had found them to be bright and pleasant company during their brief stopover a week or so earlier.
At the time, in Springfontein, there were large numbers of Boer inmates who had been rounded up by the authorities, and had no farms to return to. It was decided to close all the camps in the area and to start government works, which would provide the inmates with employment.
When it was finally safe to leave Springfontein, Maud and her companions encountered another problem – because no carts were available, they were forced to travel to Jagersfontein Road in an open truck carrying meal bags.26 After an uncomfortable two-hour journey, they were relieved to reach the station. Maud gave a lively description of the trip:
This was really our first acquaintance with the veldt, for at Norval’s we had been surrounded by high kopjes. We had a thirty mile drive ahead of us, to Jagersfontein, and then some six miles more to Fauresmith.
For the first two hours the road was perfectly flat, and the country absolutely featureless. At noon we reached Fischer’s Farm, where we ‘outspanned’ and ate our lunch. There were people living in the farmhouse, which was in fairly good condition compared with others we saw later. In the afternoon we passed several farms, most of them deserted and the buildings destroyed. All along the road there were burnt and battered articles of furniture and skeletons of animals. We saw now for the first time what war did to the prosperity of a country, for all this section had been under fire repeatedly. Along the railroad, of course, things had been repaired quickly.
This Jagersfontein road, like all roads on the veldt, was simply a track leading from one farm to another. The land was an immense open plain, used for great stock runs, the only enclosed fields being the house gardens. In the distance a clump of fruit trees, a green oasis in the general brownness, marked our approach to a new farm. Cattle kraals and gardens were surrounded by low stone or mud-brick fences, or hedges of prickly pear, the ordinary cactus which grows wild all over South Africa.27
Maud also observed a number of large, dignified birds stalking about – probably secretary birds – and solemn-looking vultures around some of the carcasses.
The group stayed over at Jagersfontein, and found time to look around the area the next day.28 ‘Jagersfontein was full of people, had several shops open, and hoped to have the diamond mines working soon,’ Maud wrote. They travelled on to Fauresmith in Cape carts over a severely rutted road, and reached the town at noon. Maud was clearly entranced by the picturesque approach to the town: ‘It was very pretty, lying in the valley between big kopjes, with large, well-built houses and plenty of shade trees.’ However, once inside Fauresmith, they were met by scenes of littered streets, broken houses and boarded-up shops.29
The plan was for the teachers to board with one of the town’s three English families for a period of two weeks or so, until the school house was repaired. The latter had been vandalised by troops of the Yeomanry, Highlanders and Colonial Army respectively: every stick of furniture was smashed, mattresses were ripped to pieces, and shards of crockery lay scattered all over the floor. The school house was one of the better-class abodes in the town, with eight rooms and a large verandah that was shaded by poplar, pepper and honey-locust trees, and it was not long before the women had made it quite liveable.
At school, Maud’s original class of nineteen soon grew to sixty, and by the middle of November the number had increased to eighty-five. The school was able to accommodate a total of 150 pupils.
The school had suffered very little in the war, but there was absolutely nothing in the way of supplies except twenty cracked slates and two small, portable blackboards. But with these meagre supplies we had to teach for nearly four weeks. Luckily we had a box of slate-pencils from Springfontein, and the children brought us scraps of chalk which they picked up in camp. I printed short reading lessons on slips of paper, we divided the broken slates, and managed somehow.30
It soon became clear to Maud that the children had taken a strong liking to her. Every morning, groups of children waited on her front doorstep, and, as she stepped outside, she was surrounded by girls who wanted to walk with her to school, their arms around her waist.
Soon after the heavy rains of September, a swarm of locusts descended on the school, causing consternation. It was almost the end of the school day when ‘the windows suddenly darkened by a number of what looked to us like enormous flying grasshoppers’.31 The children were in such a state of excitement that Maud had to let them go, and they all ran around chaotically trying to kill the locusts, swatting at them with whatever was at hand.
The five-week Christmas holidays came and went, and by March the classes were full to capacity, as farm children also came to town to take advantage of the free schooling. There was, in any case, very little work on the farms for these children because of the drought. Maud was appalled at the devastation on the land, and described farmlands with ruined crops, sheep dying by the thousands, and fruit shrivelling and dropping from trees.32
The following year, around August, she was posted as an assistant at the high school in Kroonstad.33 A fee-paying school, it was one of three government schools in town; the other two were free. By now, after living in the countryside all this while, Maud had a very healthy appearance. ‘I was tanned almost as brown as a Kafir from the outdoor life I had been leading with hockey, tennis, or paper-chases on horseback every afternoon,’ she wrote. ‘With my white Panama, bound with a dull red puggaree, I might have posed as a western cowboy-girl just off the plains.’34
She described Kroonstad as ‘very prettily situated on the banks of the Valsch River’ and ‘a new type of town, much busier than Bloemfontein’. Kroonstad was rumoured to be experiencing a boom, but as time went on she failed to find any evidence of this. Owing to the drought, prices were still exorbitant in 1903, fifteen months after the war had ended.35
There was much activity in the town, with many social events, ‘yet the social life lacked entirely the spontaneity and unity characteristic of the previous year at Fauresmith. People were beginning to feel the shortage of money keenly; banks were calling in their loans, causing numbers of people to become bankrupt; all classes were blaming the Government, as people usually do, for their woes, and Dutch and English were not only drawing apart, but were dividing into numerous cliques.’ However, Maud went on to say that, individually, she ‘found the people of Kroonstad more hospitable, if possible, than the people of Fauresmith had been. The inhabitants were about half and half British and Dutch, with many nice families of both races.’36
As captain of the ladies hockey club in town, Maud made a concerted effort to bring the various sections of society together through the sport. The club had an equal number of English and Dutch members, nearly 100 in total. They arranged a regular schedule of matches, and as there were always a number of spectators, the hockey field became a sort of social club. Fortunately, a season of good rains had also done much to raise the spirits of the people, so that when the time came for Maud to leave, a hopeful atmosphere prevailed in the town. This made it easier for her to say goodbye to her friends when she eventually left South Africa the following year.
She taught at Kroonstad High School until the middle of 1904, and left from Cape Town for Canada on board the Gascon on 7 July. With her was Miss De Wolfe, who had been part of the group of teachers Maud had left with two years before. Maud wrote:
Watching Table Mountain and the Twelve Apostles looming dimly through the rain and mist, a counterpart of the scene two years before, we naturally began to contrast our first and last impressions of South Africa. In 1902 there had been curiosity mingled with hope; in 1904 there was hope mingled with anxiety, vague and formless, it is true, as the tablecloth of mist hanging over the mountains, but none the less depressing. It seemed as if those veiled mountains were typical of the hidden future of the vast, silent country to which they belonged.37
After her return to Canada, Maud continued teaching, and was principal of the Girls High School in Quebec from 1906 to 1908. In the latter year, she married a fellow teacher, Frederick Gourlay Millar, a Bachelor of Arts graduate from the University of Toronto, who in 1915 was made principal of Hawkesbury High School. The couple had two sons, Owen Bruce and Frederick Graham, and a daughter, Helen Mary.
A woman who favoured female suffrage, Maud led an active and varied life in her community. She was a member of the Daughters of the Empire and the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, and was president of the Hawkesbury Ladies’ Music Club. She also wrote various magazine articles on South Africa and French Canada, and retained her interest in outdoor sport, enjoying horse riding, golf, tennis and snowshoeing well into her later years. Two decades before her husband, Maud passed away peacefully on 21 January 1950 in Hamilton, Ontario. She was seventy-three years old, and had lived life to the full. Her writings reveal that, despite the hardships, her South African sojourn had provided many moments of fun and laughter, and equipped her with an abiding spirit of enterprise.