No cable of political purport could be sent from Pretoria safe from mutilation. I therefore despatched Mr. Hammond’s secretary to Cape Town with a message to the American press, reporting Mr. Wessels’ plea for the Reformers, the statement of the four leaders, and the sentence. I did this, believing that, if the American public fully understood the circumstances of the case, popular sympathy would allow no stone to remain unturned to protect their unfortunate countryman from so violent and unjust a sentence.

Pretoria seethed with overwrought wives. In the prison the men were suffering real hardship. The sanitary arrangements were shocking. Twenty-two Reformers were crowded into a room thirty feet by ten. This room had been hastily built of corrugated iron, and leaked at every seam. Draughts were strong enough to blow the hair about their temples; the men slept on straw mattresses laid on the floor, and there was scarcely room enough for a man to get out of bed without stepping on his neighbour. Rations of mealie pap a coarse, insipid porridge with a hunk of hard, dark-coloured bread were given to each prisoner in tin pannikins not particularly clean. At mid-day a little greasy soup and soup meat were added. This unsavoury fare caused many of the Reformers to go hungry rather than eat it. Others ate it, but their stomach afterwards rejected it. They were locked in the cells at 5 o’clock and without lights. Prison regulations were most strict at this period.

Mr. S., one of the Reformers, had the misfortune to have his teeth drawn a short while before the trial. A new set was completed the day after his incarceration, and although his friends used every effort to convince the jailers of the perfect harmlessness of these false teeth, and explained Mr. S.’s painful predicament in being without them when he had nothing but hard food to chew, they insisted upon considering them contraband, and would not allow them to pass. Poor Mr. S. lived for three days on a half-tin of condensed milk, smuggled in by the wife of a fellow-prisoner. The world has never seen such wholesale smuggling as was practised by these devoted women. Mrs. Solly Joel as she passed daily through the prison gate was a complete buttery. The crown of her hat was filled with cigars; suspended from her waist, under her dainty summer silk skirt, hung a bottle of cream. Tied to her back by way of a bustle was a brace of duck, or a roasted fowl wrapped neatly in linen. She said this gave her a slightly out-of-date appearance, but she did not mind that. Under her cape Mrs. Clement wore a good-sized Bologna sausage around her waist as a belt; this was in time adroitly removed by Mr. Clement. Another lady supplied the prisoners with tins of sardines and beef essence, which she carried concealed in her stockings. Occasional vagaries on the part of these affectionate wives were subsequently explained to the complete satisfaction of their captive lords. Mrs. Butters’ coyness and refusal to be embraced because of the flask of coffee in her bosom is an instance of this. All this sounds very funny now, but it was desperately earnest work then. In time the stringent rules relaxed. The prisoners were allowed to buy their own food, and Mr. Advocate Sauer made the same arrangement with the Pretoria Club to supply food for the Reformers as had been done during their former imprisonment. Those were boom times for little Pretoria. Hotel-keepers and tradesmen coined money, and the cab-drivers were able to open an account with the bank.

Mrs. Lionel Phillips closed up her beautiful home in Johannesburg, sent her babies to her people at the Cape, and took permanent lodgings in Pretoria. She was most faithful in her visits to the prison, and was kind to the three room-mates of her husband in many ways.