We all know Harry Potter, the boy wizard with his little round glasses and lightning scar on his forehead, created by JK Rowling for her books and turned into a successful film franchise. But what happened to Harry after the fact? Did he perhaps exchange the cold of England and Hogwarts for the warm sun of Cradock and Africa?
Cradock’s old cemetery can get quite spooky in the early mornings when the fog hangs around the gravestones of settlers, frontiersmen, nuns and soldiers who fell in the Anglo-Boer War. It gives the cemetery a magical feel. In their mids lies the grave of one Harry Potter, ‘beloved husband’ who died on 27 July 1910 at the age of 46. I’ve always wanted to see the grave for myself but never knew where to look. That was until I found the GPS coordinates for the grave and my phone took me straight to it. If you want to find it, just follow the compass arrow to S 32° 09.557 E 25° 36.835
Elsewhere in the cemetery another unique “resident”. Dr Reginald Koettlitz (1869–1916) was Chief Medical Officer to the legendary Scott of the Antarctic on an earlier Antarctic trip. After working all over the world he bought a medical practice in Somerset East and then eventually moved to Cradock for health reasons where he died of dysentery in 1916.
