At the Fireside Page 10
This whole conglomeration could be viewed from the splendid residence of the managing director, Sammy Marks, about a mile and a half away at Swartkoppies (these days you, too, can enjoy Marks’s view because the house is a national monument and museum).
By 1889 the factory employed over 150 people and was producing 1 000 gallons of proof spirit a day. It was not all plain sailing, however. In mid-December that year there was a mysterious fire which was thought (although this was never proven) to have been the work of arsonists hired by the bootleggers who smuggled cheap German, Spanish and Italian liquor from Delagoa Bay to sell in the mine compounds.
The fire stopped production for two months, which gave Sammy Marks the opportunity of raiding the old Demarillac’s distillery in Scotland, hailed at the time as one of the largest in the world, and hired its talented Thomas Strachan as a replacement manager.
Marks needed more capital to finance this expansion, which he solved by going public in November of 1892. In exchange for £122 000 and shares, the holders of the concession made it over to Eerste Fabrieken Hatherley Distillery Limited. The Hatherley Distillery had the advantage of being listed on the London Stock Exchange and was able to attract international as well as national capital.
Now the company stood on the threshold of a period of spectacular expansion and seldom, if ever, could more ambitious plans for industrial expansion have been launched into a safer or more sympathetic business environment. After all, what more could capitalists ask for than a government-granted monopoly in a rapidly expanding market?
And so, as the ZAR’s sole producer of cheap spirits for African consumption, Hatherley Distillery found itself catering for a market of 14 000 black miners in 1890, rising to the total of 88 000 by 1897, and an enormous 100 000 by 1899. With this sort of growth, Hatherley could not help but be a huge success.
Both Nellmapius and Sammy Marks were visionaries and men of extreme courage – and loyalty. Sammy was on friendly terms with many of the ZAR’s leading lights while it existed, and he did not forget those friendships when the ZAR was destroyed.
One story is enough to show what kind of man he was. On a day a little while after the end of the Anglo-Boer War, when the ZAR had been plunged into dire poverty by the British scorched-earth policy, Sammy saw the General Koos de la Rey, one of the greatest of the ZAR’s war commanders, heading into a bank with a very official-looking brown envelope.
He guessed immediately what it meant, so without hesitation he took De la Rey into his own office, sat him down and said: ‘Koos, you are not going to pawn your farm to those banking swine,’ and opened his vault. ‘How much do you need?’ he asked. ‘You can pay me back when you can afford it.’ Such was the character of this huge man, and we shall be discussing him again.
The War of Bezuidenhout’s Wagon
THE WAR OF
BEZUIDENHOUT’S WAGON
Some time ago I paid a visit to Day Coulter. She still lives on the farm where she and Tom, her late husband, spent more than 60 happy years together, and I have known the family since I was a boy of 13. The farm is situated at the eye of the famous Mooi River, just north of Potchefstroom in the Northern Province – the same one mentioned in that famous Boer War song of love and war, ‘Sarie Marais’, which ended up being sung by everybody, whether they were descendants of the old commando fighters or not.
The Mooi is a beautiful river, as its name implies, It is also a source of life because from its eye gushes just over six million litres of crystal-clear water every hour, at a temperature of 19 degrees that never changes from season to season. It also harbours an interesting secret and has seen some strange things happen.
The secret involves the Mooi’s renowned weeping willows. They were there when the little town was established by the Voortrekkers in 1838, at which time they were mature trees whose age was estimated at about 50 years, and when James Chapman passed through in the 1850s he also saw them and duly noted it down in his journal. So the weeping willows of the Mooi have been there since at least the beginning of the 19th century or even earlier.
This is where the secret comes in. The weeping willow – ‘Salix Babylonia’, to give it its botanical name – is native to the Middle and Far East, but not South Africa, or anywhere else in Africa, for that matter. We do have an indigenous willow, but it does not look anything like the weeping willow. So who introduced this alien species from the East, long before the arrival of the first known outsiders to the area?
Surely the story of how they came to be there must have existed at some time. Such stories tend to be handed down from generation to generation, admittedly becoming a little distorted from all the re-tellings, but this one seems to be irretrievably lost in the mists of time.
But back to the farm. It is such a tranquil place that it is hard to believe that this was ground zero for an entire war that changed the face of southern Africa!
Let me take you back in time to the days before 1880 so that you can understand the circumstances that gave rise to the war of the wagon. In those days the Boer communities along the Mooi River, many of them former Voortrekkers and many others descended from the old pilgrims, were a tight-knit bunch in every way, formed by extreme hardship, great isolation and a deficient education which usually did not extend beyond reading the family Bible. They were maniacally independent and suspicious of authority, narrow-minded, hot-headed and ultra-conservative Calvinists.
One group, nicknamed the ‘Doppers’, for example, even went as far as putting aside their deep suspicions of the Roman Catholic church to opine that the Pope was right to persecute Galileo, for who was he to declare that the earth was round when everyone knew it was perfectly flat?
Strange things can be born of that sort of thinking. One group, led by a man named Enslin and calling itself the ‘Jerusalemgangers’ (Jerusalem travellers), actually trekked northwards from Potchefstroom to find the Holy Land. They got as far as the Mogalakwena River, just outside Bela Bela – formerly Warmbaths – and then halted. As far as they were concerned they had reached Egypt. A nearby hill called Kranskop was obviously a ruined pyramid, and therefore the Mogalakwena must be the Nile. So they outspanned their wagon and founded a little town called, naturally, ‘Nylstroom’.
These were some of the people the British had to deal with when they annexed the ZAR in April 1876 without bothering to ask the inhabitants how they felt about it. In fact the locals felt very hostile about it.
They had trekked away from the Cape in the 1830s to get out from under the damned English, they said, and after much ado, which included some shooting, the British had recognised their independence at the Sand River Convention. And now they had gone back on their solemn undertaking and it was 1836 all over again.
What did not help either was the insensitive and pompous attitude of many newly arrived British soldiers and officials who were still cock-a-hoop about defeating Cetewayo and incorporating the Zulu kingdom into the Natal Crown Colony. All in all, it was a powder keg looking for a lighted match, and the British now supplied that as well.
The match, so to speak, revolved around the question of taxes. The Boers did not like paying taxes and, as if that were not bad enough, the British administration in Pretoria often made mistakes. There were many instances of Boers being summonsed to pay their taxes and then having the cases dropped when they stood up in court and produced receipts showing that that taxman had, in fact, got his pound of flesh.
The original owner of the Coulter farm, one Pieter Lodewyk Bezuidenhout, received a tax bill for £27 and 5 shillings. He duly appeared before Landdrost Andries Goetze and insisted that he only owed £14, which he was prepared to pay. Goetze referred the case to Pretoria and was told to accept the £14 but to order Bezuidenhout to pay costs of £13 and 5 shillings.
Bezuidenhout refused point-blank to get taken by this obvious scam and said he would not pay the costs, so Landdrost Goetze
ordered that a wagon belonging to him be impounded and put up for sale at a public auction the following month. With that the match dropped into the powder keg. On the day of the sale, 11 November 1880, about 100 armed men, led by the staunch Republican who was later to become the most senior Boer War general – Piet Cronje – arrived at the auction. There they disrupted the proceedings and made off with Bezuidenhout’s wagon.
This was an intolerable affront to law and order, and in Pretoria the Administrator, Sir Owen Lanyon, took immediate action. He appointed one Captain Peter Raaff as a court messenger and sent him off to recover the wagon, and as a precaution ordered a contingent of troops to Potchefstroom. Then he sent a telegram to the Colonial Secretary in London which could not have been more wrong in its reading of his disgruntled subjects’ feelings: ‘Whilst the occasion that prompt measures should be taken to support the civil authority and to show these misguided people that the law cannot be defied, I do not anticipate that any serious trouble will arise out of this affair.’
He was soon disillusioned. The Boers had gone from disgruntlement to open rebelliousness, and Lanyon’s choice of emissary aggravated the situation. Raaff was a flamboyant little man, just over 5 feet 4 inches (1.75 metres) tall, whose past record guaranteed that he would not be acceptable.
He was one of a number of mercenaries of doubtful origin who had been hired by President TF Burgers to fight in the Sekhukhune War in 1876. Then he turned his coat and took his crew of roughnecks to fight in the Zulu War in 1879, and now he was well in with the new British overlords in Pretoria. So the Boers knew very well who he was and they didn’t want him in their affairs.
When Raaff arrived in Potchefstroom he issued a warrant of arrest for the ringleaders of the wagon hijacking – Piet Cronje, Pieter Bezuidenhout, Johannes Basson and Cornelius Coetzee – all living on farms along the Mooi River. Raaff then tried to arrest Cronje and Coetzee but was chased away by armed men, and Cronje warned Raaff that if any other government officials came into the district to collect taxes or to arrest men, they would be shot.
As if that was not enough, a contingent of British soldiers marched into Potchefstroom under Major Charles Thornhill on the 18th – and the powder keg finally blew up.
A meeting that Paul Kruger, Pieter Joubert, Piet Cronje and other leaders had called for January was brought forward to 16 December – an immensely significant date, because it was the commemoration of the victory at Blood River.
On that day thousands of Boers arrived at Potchefstroom, laagered their wagons, and settled down to be addressed by their leaders. All the festering old wounds were ripped open, and in short order they had been whipped into a frenzy. At the end there was a cairn of stones, each placed there by a man who had picked one up and sworn on it to fight to the death for the Boer nation’s liberation from the British yoke.
Thus started the first Anglo-Boer War of 1880–1881. To the astonishment of all concerned the Boers inflicted several embarrassing defeats on the Redcoats. The most embarrassing of all was the Battle of Majuba, and after that the British swallowed their pride and sued for peace.
Of course they could have overwhelmed the little backveld republic, but at the time there were several international hotspots in Europe and India which claimed their attention, and they really did not want to add to their burden by becoming involved in a small but possibly protracted and quite messy small war in Africa. So after negotiations a deal was worked out that in effect gave the ZAR men most of what they wanted – including self-rule – but also saved Britain’s face to some extent.
Naturally that was not the end of it, because wars tend to leave loose ends lying around. One loose end was a farm not too far from Pretoria, owned by one James Pratt. For one reason or another, the reinvigorated ZAR government expropriated the farm and unceremoniously deported Pratt. No big deal, you might say – except that the farm later became the site of Johannesburg.
The second loose end was much more serious, and tying it was a long and bloody affair. Within less than two decades the ZAR and Orange Free State were the only independent small countries left in southern Africa – all the others had gradually been annexed or conquered. Then in 1899 it was their turn as well, and the result was the Second Anglo-Boer War.
And all this happened because an arrogant official in Pretoria tried to bilk a stubbornly independent farmer out of £13 and five shillings!
All that is ancient history now, of course, and the country – and the world – have changed almost beyond recognition in many ways. But one thing remains the same: the eye of the Mooi River, which still delivers its six million litres of pure water per hour, to the benefit of all who live downstream.
Killie Campbell
KILLIE CAMPBELL
The Killie Campbell Africana Library certainly needs no introduction to reading South Africans, and I personally have spent many an hour researching the history of our country in that wonderful institution which is now administered by the University of KwaZulu-Natal. In her day Killie Campbell was one of the top South Africans and certainly a Grande Dame of Natal; one hopes that her legacy will live on forever.
The Campbell family were Byrne Immigration Scheme settlers who arrived on the brig Conquering Hero somewhere between 1849 and 1851 – William and Agnes Campbell and their three children; Marshall, who was to become Killie’s father, was only 18 months old.
Like many other Byrne settlers the family struggled to survive at first because their allocated land was unsuitable, but in 1857 William found an abandoned cotton plantation on the Umdloti River just north of Durban and the Campbells moved in, renaming it Muckleneuk. William died in 1865, but his sons William and Marshall took over as the then Natal Colony started developing (among other things the first indentured Indian labours arrived in 1874 to work on the prestigious sugar farms, thereby adding yet another ingredient to South Africa’s exotic mixture of races and cultures).
By now the Campbell family had started spreading its wings. When William senior died, Agnes moved to Pietermaritzburg because she wanted the children to have a decent education, and Marshall married Ellen Blamey and in 1880 moved to a cane farm named Cornubia on the North Coast near Mount Edgecombe.
At first it was a struggle, but Marshall eventually prospered and bought Cornubia. By then Ellen had given birth (in 1881) to a daughter whom they christened Margaret Roach but who was known as ‘Killie’ because as a child she thoroughly disliked both her given names. Why Killie? Nobody knows, but that was the name that was destined to become famous.
Meanwhile Marshall became a director of the Mount Edgecombe Sugar Company; the company bought Cornubia, and he built Mount Edgecombe House for his family, an impressive structure with its wide verandas and great baronial dining hall. This was where Killie and her brothers spent their childhood.
Killie grew into a purposeful, robust young woman with broad-boned features, a wide mouth that smiled easily and a very broad, high forehead, and was possessed of a striking personality that made her the antithesis of the average Natal colonial girl of her period and station in life.
From childhood she disliked the upper crust’s snobbery and social frivolity. The environment around her was a source of constant fascination: her black playmates and their families, the Indian labourers, the singing and music that were part of the work in the cane fields. All these were defining influences which were to characterise the fascinating collections Killie and her brother William put together in later years as anyone who has been to the Muckleneuk House in Durban would be able to testify.
Killie was educated at St Anne’s College and her brother at Hilton College, and at 18 she was sent to St Leonards in Scotland which she enjoyed thoroughly and where she became an enthusiastic reader of poetry. She returned home in 1901; the Second Anglo-Boer War was winding down towards its tragic end, and the memory of this conflict and its influence on her family left an indelible impressio
n on her and a deep-rooted antipathy for war.
Killie scorned the idea of settling down to a mundane social life like her contemporaries; she had other things in mind. By 1910, when her father was elected to the new Union Parliament, she had already accumulated a modest collection of Africana – which is best defined as things relating to Africa – and persisted – to her mother’s annoyance – in using her dress allowance to buy books which she hid in boxes under her bed.
Her father’s parliamentary duties, which involved a six-monthly annual stint in Cape Town, gave her career as a bibliophile a kick-start when she met Sir Meiring Beck, a veritable Renaissance man who was born in the country town of Worcester and became a physician, composer and senator. Beck so inspired her that she began systematically collecting books, a passion that continued for the next 30 years.
She was also inspired by the prolific writer Dorothea Fairbridge, author of several books on South African history and architecture, including one on Lady Anne Barnard, and that great historian, Sir George Cory, and she was fascinated by the stories of the 1820 pioneers who had preceded the Natal settlers.
Killie’s mother strove valiantly to ‘put some polish on her’ by taking her on a visit to England almost every year, but not much of the polish rubbed off because she didn’t take kindly to the process: she had discovered the Public Records Office and spent many days with her nose deep in the documents lodged there.
She made many fascinating finds. Years later she said that she would never forget the time she took down the personal papers of Colonel Graham (after whom Grahamstown is named), her hands shaking with excitement; the histories of all the great British families were there, she added, and there was many a juicy morsel of scandal to be found in those boxes.