Samuel Thomas Isaac Hughes

The man who left a trail

Samuel Thomas Isaac Hughes arrived in South Africa from Wales in the 1920s with a Welshman's stubbornness and a dreamer's heart. He bred racehorses at Shannon in the Orange Free State — a stud that produced winners and built a reputation that spread across South Africa.

He also created a remarkable herbal remedy called Black Forest Tea — a formula using three flowers from three different continents that he spent years perfecting. The formula was never completed in his lifetime. CJ Barnard holds two of the three pieces. The Namaqualand flower — the third piece — was the missing link.

In 1947 ST went to court — not as a defendant, but as a plaintiff — to fight for the Black Forest Tea company that CJ Barnard had seized from him in 1936. The legal route failed. But the fight itself confirmed something the family would only piece together decades later: ST was still in Johannesburg. Fourteen years after vanishing from his family's lives, he was in the same city, fighting the same battle, and nobody who loved him knew.

He left behind four letters to his daughter Daphne. Each one ended with the same two words: Not yet. The last one arrived in 1946. He knew she was following the trail. He told her he was proud of her. And then — nothing more.