Mutare

A boy in a wagon bedroom and the town that moved for a train

The boy came over Christmas Pass with the ox wagons and reached Umtali at dawn. He was eleven, it was 1896, and the Central Hotel had a double row of sandbags along its verandah because the Mashona were in rebellion and there was fighting in Makoni’s country to the north-west. His father was in hospital. A storekeeper handed him the key to the family house, which turned out to be two tiny mud rooms with calico tacked over the windows and a table of poles and packing cases. Jam tins served as cups. Kipper tins, long and shallow, did for porridge plates.

Kingsley Fairbridge told all this in an autobiography published three years after his death, and nobody left a better picture of Mutare before it was a town. He hated it at first and said so, often. His father, Rhys, the surveyor, gave him a choice between going back to St Andrew’s College and staying at Umtali to work. He stayed. They jacked an old wagon up onto a low stone wall, built in the gaps between the wheels for an office and pitched a tent on top as his bedroom. One morning a transport rider let off a shot down the Salisbury road and the bullet went through the canvas. A leopard took his favourite goat from under the verandah. The family ate the goat anyway. Malaria found him in those first months too. He called it the Grey Thief, and it never really let go of him.

Chaining out the new town

Early in 1897 father and son went over the pass to survey New Umtali, the town’s third site, picked because the Beira railway could not climb the escarpment anywhere else. Kingsley dragged the front of the chain and knelt to put in the pins. The wood and iron houses of the old town were taken apart and carried over Christmas Pass in clouds of red dust. Gangs of labourers from Tete and Sena in Mozambique dug the trenches that drained the two streams either side of the new streets. Many of the men who dug them, he wrote, died of fever afterwards.

Rhys built on the highest point of the plan, a small kopje of red clay and diorite boulders with fig trees and marula on top. His builder took stone from the round walls of an older settlement at the foot of the hill, so people had lived on that spot long before any surveyor. He called it Utopia. The money ran out when the walls were about four feet high and the rains were coming, so poles and thatch went up with reed mats hung in the gaps, and for a while it was known as the house with doors but no walls. It is a museum house now. Look at the office door, which has a bullet hole in it. The story told there is that Rhys, too ill with fever to call out, fired his gun to bring help.

The toy train and the 2 pm rule

The railway that decided where all this went was a narrow line, two feet between the rails, running up from Fontesvilla on the Pungwe. George Pauling, the contractor, later wrote that he wished he had never heard of it. He lost six white men in one fortnight, and lions killed two gangers in a single month. The first construction train pulled into Umtali on 4 February 1898 behind what is thought to have been locomotive No. 212, named Rhodes, and the town threw sports, a rifle shoot and a ball at the Court House.

Mary Blackwood Lewis rode the toy train up a few months before it reached the new town, in November 1897, coming out to marry a man called David. The wood-burning engine threw sparks that burned holes in the passengers’ clothes, and when the carriages came off the rails everyone climbed down and helped push them back on. At Fontesvilla she passed a cemetery of white crosses. She got into New Umtali at about three in the afternoon, too late, because the rules allowed no weddings after 2 pm. Her letters also catch Cecil Rhodes, camped in the Residency grounds rather than sleeping indoors. Fairbridge had shaken his hand in 1896, on a hut verandah at the Sabi Ophir mine above the Penhalonga road.

Three days without food on the Inyamutshura range

At twelve Kingsley took a job from his father for ten pounds, building two huts at a claim called Hygeia, about eight miles out near Shitaka’s kraal. He went with his dog Vic and Jack, a middle-aged man from Sena. The food ran out, nobody nearby would sell them any at a fair price and it rained for three days. Walking back over the range, light-headed and weak, he kept asking himself why there were no farms on those empty plateaux. Then he said it out loud: some day he would bring farmers here. When he got home to Utopia he ate hot scones until he passed out.

That walk is where the Fairbridge farm schools began. He went to Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar in 1908, the Chartered Company turned his plan down, and in 1912 he took it to Western Australia instead. The farm at Pinjarra took in its first boys the next January, and 3,580 children went through it before it closed. Many were told they were orphans when they were not. In February 2010 Gordon Brown, as prime minister, apologised to the families for Britain’s child migration schemes. Fairbridge died in Perth in 1924, aged 39.

Mutare remembers the boy and not the controversy. The Queen Mother unveiled a statue of young Kingsley, Jack and Vic on Christmas Pass on 8 July 1953. It was moved in 1982 to the garden at Utopia, and the suburb of Fairbridge Park carries his name. If you are heading on to the Bvumba, it is a short stop on the way out of town.