Emma Krogh

(b. **/**/1884 - d. Warrenpoint, Northern Ireland, **/**/1960). Actress and drama teacher. Born Emma Krogh, she was the daughter of a Deputy State Secretary in the administration of Paul Kruger’s Zuid-Afrikaansche Republiek, and could claim to be the first identified actress in a South African film. She played the heroine in The Great Kimberley Diamond Robbery, filmed and directed by R.C.E. Nissen for Rufe Naylor’s Springbok Film Co. and first shown on 11 December 1911 at the Tivoli (afternoon) and the Orpheum (evening) in Johannesburg.

She was a music teacher and also the mother of Stella Blakemore, an Afrikaans and English playwright and the author of extremely popular Afrikaans children’s books, notably the Maasdorp series for teenage girls and the Keurboslaan series for boys, the latter written under the pseudonym of Theunis Krogh, which was the name of her maternal grandfather.

Though a document in the National Archives Repository identifies Emma Krogh as "very anti-British", she nevertheless married Captain Percy Blakemore, a British officer who had fought in the Anglo-Boer War and had remained in South Africa to become a farmer. He later deserted his wife and daughter to return to England, reportedly to become a professional gambler. For some time Emma ran a music and drama school in Pretoria where her daughter, who had married David Owen, a Welshman who was in the British colonial service in Swaziland, subsequently took over some of her duties. When Owen was transferred to the Gold Coast (today's Ghana), the couple's adopted children were sent to school in Wales, where their grandmother joined them. In 1954 they all moved to Warrenpoint in Northern Ireland, where Emma died in 1960. (FO)