Unbeknown to most people living in the Clarence Valley, South Grafton’s natural emerald, green riverside holds a strong lasting 122-year connection to Britain’s most famous Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, who helped steer the Western Allied military forces to victory during World War 11.

As a young 25-year-old determined adventurer, Winston was employed by the London Morning Post newspaper to work as a foreign correspondent covering the Boer War in the late 1800s.

He duly arrived in South Africa and, while travelling in a British armoured train, was taken prisoner by a posse of Boer fighters who had succeeded in derailing the locomotive carrying him to a new war front.

As the son of a prominent British Lord, Winston was regarded by the Boer hierarchy as one highly miraculous find in a million.

As a result, they intended to hold him as a valuable hostage for future possible war negotiations with the British. But our ardent young journalist managed to make an almost unbelievable and sensational Houdini-style escape from the most highly guarded gaol in Pretoria, the then capital of the Boer Republic.

After evading possible confrontation with the enemy, Winston managed to secretly hitch rides to freedom on coal trains to the port of Lourenco Marques in Portuguese East Africa. There, he donned a disguise for fear that the 25 English pound sterling bounty placed by the Boer Government on his head, dead or alive, may entice someone to have him re-captured.

In making his final getaway to the safety of Britain’s Natal

Province, Winston bought a ticket on a 190-foot and 700 gross ton coastal steamer, the S.S. Induna, named after Zulu warrior kings.

On his arrival in Natal’s main port of Durban, he was heralded as an absolute hero for his great escape from Boer custody as a prisoner of war.

As he later explained, that day was the start of his long history as a leading politician and statesman.

Historians have claimed that his safe arrival in Durban on the S.S. Induna was, in fact, a good omen for the British during the Boer War and gave impetus to his later well-known Allied war efforts from 1939 onwards and his being awarded a knighthood.

But what has all this to do with South Grafton, one may ask? I recently wrote an article on Churchill’s great escape which was published in our leading Clarence Valley Independent newspaper. This caused me to be duly contacted by Mr Stephen Tranter, president of the Clarence River Historical Society.

This genial man, surrounded by the important ageing records of the Clarence area and surrounds, revealed to me that South Grafton’s Earle Page Park still held a little-known connection with Winston, the one-time war escapee, and the S.S. Induna which took him to safety.

Absolutely amazed on hearing this news, I soon learned that the vessel, which had so successfully carried Britain’s future Prime Minister to freedom at such a young age, had continued to work as a merchant coastal vessel from Lourenco Marques and further south until it was sold to Burns Philp’s commercial and maritime interests in Sydney before the First World War.

At the start of hostilities, the ship was working in the Pacific when it received word at gun point from a German sea-going merchant raider, the SMS Wolf, of the outbreak of war between Britain and the German homeland.

The S.S. Induna immediately tried to flee but was chased under full steam by the enemy vessel to the waters of the Marshall Islands where it was literally impounded and its crew held in virtual custody — and with all its crucial stocks of steam coal being confiscated, totally crippling the unfortunate island cargo and passenger ship.

When the invading German army and navy were, however, eventually forced by the Allies to leave the Pacific zone, a passing and friendly Japanese vessel supplied the stricken S.S. Induna with sufficient fuel to enable it to return safely to Australia.

This ship, well known to have sailed most of the seven seas during its life, was eventually sold to the New South Wales Department of Railways and was sent to the then still busy port of Grafton on the mighty Clarence River.

It was bought by the Government in 1932 to assist another official vessel, the S.S. Swallow, as a giant river ferry between South Grafton in the south and Grafton City in the north.

This was before the construction of the old but existing Grafton ‘bent’ road and train bridge over the Clarence, and the two steamships were used to carry railway coaches across the river on board their specially levelled deck and superstructures to join up the Sydney to Brisbane rail line broken by the gap caused by the very geographical presence of the Clarence and no available bridge.

Once South Grafton and Grafton City were physically coupled by the opening of the ‘bent’ bridge in 1933, the hard-working S.S. Induna was pensioned off and was moored in retirement on the water’s edge adjacent to Earle Page Park near to what is now the South Grafton Ex-Servicemen’s Club.

The most important ship in Winston’s life had been sold to Webber’s Sawmill in the area. She was then tied up on the Clarence River’s South Bank adjacent to the park to work as a temporary wharf.

Slowly but surely the upper deck housing and funnel were sold off and the hull was initially all that was left, to sink partially into the Clarence River sand with land vegetation later encasing much of its historic remains.

Grafton City Council was concerned at the time about the possibility of the old ship breaking adrift during a flood and striking the then new ‘bent’ bridge. As a consequence, the sawmill owners were prevailed upon to cut holes in her hull and finally sink her in the river beside the mill.

Before this final act was carried out, however, 200 tons of steel rails,

originally concreted to the bottom of the hull as ballast, were removed together with the ship’s boilers. This was then sold to Japan as scrap iron.

Anyone travelling north over the old Grafton bridge today can still see the old S.S. Induna’s naked bow reaching up to the sky on the left bank of the Clarence as if to say it is there for all time as a reminder of important days long past — and, particularly, that of a man of considerable destiny.

Any reader interested in the history of the S.S. Induna can find further evidence of the vessel in Grafton’s comprehensive museum at Schaeffer House in Fitzroy Street.

Footnote: As a former foreign correspondent and journalist with a history of working in Africa I have been particularly taken by the S.S. Induna’s Zulu name. The reason for this is that another Englishman many years before had run a coastal shipping company along Africa’s East Coast and had christened his ships with similar Zulu names such as Indaba and Indema.

This man was Mr George Rex who, it was claimed, was the pretender to the English throne, being the alleged legitimate son of King George 111 in the 1700s.

The story often retailed in Knysna, South Africa, is that George and his English mother were sent there when King George 111 took to the throne, were well looked after financially, and started a timber milling company and coastal shipping service with ships bearing Zulu names.

I wonder whether the former British Prime Minister’s S.S. Induna, now lying quietly in the Clarence, may have been related in some way to those other old-time ships said to have possibly been allied to royalty and to the Zulu nation by name.