Background
Edward Dyke"s father was a cashier in Cape Government Railways and in that respect Dyke followed in his father"s footsteps. He was a railway employee most of his life.
Edward Dyke"s father was a cashier in Cape Government Railways and in that respect Dyke followed in his father"s footsteps. He was a railway employee most of his life.
He associated with the leading botanical lights of the day, including Rudolf Marloth, to whom he donated many specimens and many of the photographs that appeared in Marloth"s monumental work, “The Flora of South Africa”. Some plant species were named after him. As a young man he fought in the Second Boer War.
In World War I he was one of the first to die in the campaign in South-West Africa.
At first he was stationed at the Cape and later in the Transvaal. Possibly however, he merely used his salaried employment as means to more adventurous pursuits.
Nearly all his spare time, he devoted to camping and mountaineering, and he had fought in the Second Boer War as a young manitoba Eventually, at the outbreak of the First World War, he enlisted as a Trooper in the Imperial Light Horse Regiment.
While on patrol in Walvis Bay he was mortally wounded and died shortly afterwards on 21 January 1915, aged 42, one of the first victims of the campaign in South West Africa.
Doctor Marloth, in his obituary for the Mountain Club Journal, mentions the last delivery he received from Dyke: 50 species of plants collected during a week of camping on Mont-Aux-Sources. Marloth considered Dyke’s landscape and botanical photography among the best to date, and published many examples in his Flora of South Africa (1913-1915).