The remarkable and varied history of Africa over the years has seen the presence of several of the world’s greatest escapologists whose stories rival the adventures of other imprisoned soldiers who have dared to run the gauntlet to freedom from their armed captors.

One such character was Winston Churchill who, as a young English journalist, reported on the Anglo-Boer War in 1899 and made a daring escape from a high security gaol after being imprisoned in a dark and dank cell with only one small window about six metres above the hard stone floor.

When I worked in Africa as a foreign correspondent and journalist 51 years after that war, I made a point of researching Churchill’s incredible escape at the very place where it allegedly took place. My intention was to settle a minor historical controversy as to how he made his ingenious bid for freedom and eventual public acclaim as an imperial hero when he eventually arrived back in London.

I had read various versions of Churchill’s South African brave escapade when working with his journalist son, Randolph, but was always confronted by some conflicting facts. So, when I found myself in Pretoria — the former capital of the Boer Republic — in 1951, I sought out what little original evidence I could to try and clarify the story once and for all.

What I found was that Churchill had arrived in Cape Town by sea from England in 1899 supported by a box of Scotch whisky. He then made his way to the war front and, a few weeks later, was on board a British armoured train when it was partly derailed by Boer enemy forces.

My Pretoria informants told me that Churchill then stoically, in the face of heavy enemy fire, took over the command of the British soldiers travelling with him and got them to right the derailed coach. Before the train could get on its way again, however, the armed and defending Boer burghers managed to capture him — and discover that he was the son of an English Lord who could be held as a major prize for war ransom.

With or without his beloved whisky, Churchill was sent under guard to Pretoria and imprisoned in a building adjacent to a railway line for coal trains. Although he was the Boer Republic’s biggest wartime ‘find’ and was under constant guard, I was told that he had mysteriously managed to reach that high window which I saw so many years later — and achieve a dramatic Houdini-style escape from his wartime imprisonment.

I gathered at the time that the then would-be British politician must have been aided by someone to reach the high window and somehow jump onto an empty passing coal train which took him to a distant coal mine.

Once there, he apparently secretly boarded a loaded coal train heading for the seaport of Lourenco Marques 400 kms away in what was Portuguese East Africa. His only nourishment was two small bars of chocolate secreted in a pocket of his jacket and a broken biscuit. On arriving at the coast, he hurriedly obtained a berth on a Southampton-bound cargo boat under another name for fear that Boer informants mind find him to claim a reward for his capture, dead or alive.

I was fortunate enough to meet the former journalist and statesman, Sir Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill, while on a scholarship in Britain in 1960 and I asked him about his great escape from Pretoria which, at the time, made him a feted hero of the British Empire. His simple reply came in his famous well-known to-the-point words: “One can never give in! Never give in. Never, never, never!”