WOMAN OF SIX REIGNS

Evening Star, Issue 19020, 15 August 1925, Page 21

WOMAN OF SIX REIGNS

107 YEARS OLD BEDRIDDEN AND POOR. Blind, bed-ridden, and almost deaf, Mrs Louisa Trollop, believed to be the oldest woman on the Rand, is spending the last days of an eventful life in a lowly i'uidsburg cottage (states tho Johannesburg ‘Sunday Times’). She was 107 years of age on May 8. She lies all day in a tumble-down bed covered by a tew ragged coats, and mumbles brokenly the tale of her long life. Sometimes she smiles. Her voice is sweet when she utters the names of the friends and places of her youth. Sho speaks harshly of the Kaffirs who raided her homestead and carried off all the cattle and horses. Mrs Trollop was born in 1818, and in 1836 married the son of an old sailor ivho had settled at the Cape. A few years Inter the family moved to a farm at Aliwal North, where hardships and'sufferings awaited them. During the Kaffir wars hordes of natives scoured the countryside for animals and food. At dawn they would swoop down on a defenceless home, where the bravo father snatched up his gun and a few desultory shots rang out. A few hours later a smoky ruin would mark tho grave of stern ambitions and great hopes. CARRIED OFF BY KAFFIRS. Mrs Trollop relates a story of her capture by the Kaffirs, and their subsequent pursuit by a small body of Europeans. The marauders were surprised at their camp-lire, and lied in all directions, leaving the white woman lying on the vela in the rain. “ Put me in the tent! Take me out of tho mini” the old woman sometimes cries when she wakes from her sleep. “I think my mother will die soon,” Mrs Trollop’s daughter, Mrs Elizabeth Theron,- told a ‘ Sunday Times ’ representative yesterday. “ She is very weak and ill, and keeps on calling for me.” Mrs Trollop is a great-grandmother. She has one daughter, Mrs Theron, still living. She came to the Rand in search of her fortune shortly after the Jameson raid. “ We wore told that everyone could get rich here,” said Mrs Theron, “and we left our farm and came north. My father died here shortly afterwards. I was left with my mother, I married and have a grandchild.” Mrs Trollop has lived during the reigns of six British Sovereigns. She has known war and peace, political upheavals and great changes. She used , to speak of the Voortrekkers as the j most daring men of her age.