Page 47 - KBHA BULLETIN 4
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Marais Carse’s younger brother, Johan, went to sea professionally and rose rapidly in the
Merchant Marine to be a Master Mariner and captain of various ships. At one stage he was a
navigator in the Canadian Coastguard. When oil was discovered in Alaska, in 1969, his ship, the
2nd biggest icebreaker in the world, was chosen to lead a giant 150,000 ton tanker with a 56-foot
draught from Halifax through the North West passage from the North Atlantic to the Prudhoe
Bay region in Alaska, and back. Johan is now the Marketing Manager of the Port of Cape Town.
Tromp van Diggelen, friends and acquaintances
I have been asked to talk about my father. Hendrik Cornelis Tromp van Diggelen was publicly
known as Tromp, but his personal name was ‘Cottie’, the diminutive of Cornelis Tromp.
Tromp was born on 5 December 1885 in Dewetsdorp, son of Landdrost Fanie de Beer’s petite
daughter, Meta. He weighed 12,5 lbs and Fanie was pleased as he was well over 300 lbs and was
reputed to be the strongest man in the Free State Republic. However, Tromp only grew to a
relatively modest weight of 185 lbs, a light-heavy weight.
In 1902, Tromp was in London for his first wrestling match. The posters said: “Mr Ted
Scholfield aspirant for the British Middleweight Wrestling Title will defend scientific wrestling
methods against Mr. Tromp van Diggelen, the youthful prodigy from South Africa.”
Tromp won and went on to win over 100 amateur matches in Europe and England, and more
victories were to come in South Africa and Rhodesia. Fifty years later when I asked Dad for
some wrestling tuition he said slightly sadly, “Maarten I have long since forgotten what I knew,
and anyhow it was largely brute force.”
However, when he was a teenage prodigy the reports were different. The German ‘Sports
Newspaper’ in 1904 said: “Young Tromp van Diggelen is startingly swift and enormously
strong, he remains undefeated amongst the amateurs .... He will become as famous as an amateur
as Hackenschmidt is as a professional.”
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