At the Fireside Read online

  Killie spent a great deal of her time in England browsing through bookshops for Africana. On one occasion she lost herself among some narrow streets and, quite by chance, came on an old bookshop run by an aged man with white hair and threadbare clothes – a scholar, she said, with long, sensitive fingers.

  ‘I asked him for books on South Africa. He looked vaguely about his shelves and said: “I had forgotten I had this – I haven’t seen it for years.”’ He sat down on a rickety chair and completely forgot not only about Killie but about the entire shop as well. So Killie served customers who came in, and in between also immersed herself in the books.

  When it was closing time she roused the old man from his reading and, with a deep sigh, he said: ‘Haven’t we had a glorious afternoon? Please come again, I cannot remember when I enjoyed myself so much.’ And they had only spoken about six words to one another!

  Killie found a great many treasures while browsing like this. Once she came across a very precious volume and, in her excitement, upset an entire shelf of books to the annoyance of the woman behind the counter. When Killie hesitantly held out the little gem she had found, the irate proprietors snapped: ‘Yes – it’s just a load of old rubbish. You can pay sixpence.’ Killie did not hesitate. She handed over a silver sixpence and hastened away with her new treasure.

  Back in Natal, Killie’s ever-growing collection began to fill her father’s home in Marriot Road, named Muckleneuk after the original Campbell estate. It was a wonderful setting. In accordance with Sir Marshall Campbell’s wishes, all the main rooms look out towards the sea over a beautiful garden set in 2.5 acres of ground; the garden was laid out by Killie herself and contains a special Bougainvillea variety named after her.

  Killie devised her own system of classification which had nothing to do with the one used in orthodox libraries. Black history was in the ironing room, for example. Byrne Settlers went into the Black Sash room and politics into the drawing room. But Killie’s and William’s collections were not confined just to books. There are also other printed items, manuscripts, pictures, maps and photographs. Pictorially the library is very rich in originals by sought-after South African artists like Bowler, Baines, L’Ons and Burchell.

  After their father’s death, Killie and Mack – neither of whom ever married – stayed on in the house, steadily building up their collections. In 1950 her work was recognised when the University of Natal awarded her an honorary MA degree and in 1954 she received an honorary doctorate from the University of the Witwatersrand. Then, in 1965, she was honoured by the City of Durban.

  None of this recognition went to her head. She remained the same Killie Campbell as always – unassuming, genial and bubbling with enthusiasm. But now she had reached the end of her long, productive life, and on 27 September 1965 she was gathered to her ancestors.

  But her vast collection was not broken up, the sad fate of so many such painstaking gathering of treasures. Muckleneuk was bequeathed to the Durban Corporation to be preserved for posterity and Killie’s Africana to the care of the University of Natal (which, I might add from personal experience, does a sterling job of administering such a precious part of our heritage).

  What a privilege it is to have had such pioneers in this beautiful country! Let’s hope we never forget them.

  Early Theatre in Johannesburg

  EARLY THEATRE IN

  JOHANNESBURG

  Many people think that in the early pioneering days Johannesburg had no theatrical or performing arts culture, but this was not so. Almost from its inception the city had its own theatre, a barn-like structure very close to where the old Empire Theatre once stood in Commissioner Street.

  The original theatre was renowned for its melodramatic shows and also the free-for-all fights, complete with chairs being flung about, for reasons which might be no more than a refusal by the management to play the national anthem!

  In time Johannesburg acquired some other theatrical venues, among them the Globe at the west-central end of Commissioner Street and The Standard in mid-town, although they were definitely on the low-brow side. But in 1889 all this changed when a determined and volatile little man called William Luscombe Searelle arrived on the goldfields with a full Australian operatic company and his own mobile corrugated-iron theatre.

  The early Johannesburg theatrical entrepreneurs were all characters in their own right, but Luscombe Searelle, with his black beard and retroussé nose, stood out head and shoulders above his contemporaries. He had great style and he was not only a showman of great skill but a theatre person of genuine talent.

  Searelle was no mountebank. He began working as a pianist in Christchurch, New Zealand, and later graduated to become a conductor. He was also a singer, writer, stage director and composer of such ability that he was just 22 when his comic opera The Wreck of the Pinafore was produced at the Gaiety Theatre in London.

  His comic opera Estrella, co-written with Walter Parke, became a smash hit in Australia in 1884 and even went on the boards at New York’s Standard Theatre – only very briefly, unfortunately, because after just three performances the theatre caught fire and burnt to the ground.

  Another of his comic operas, Bobadil, was well received in Australia, with one Melbourne critic writing: ‘Mr Searelle is a sworn foe of dullness and a warm friend of variety.’ For one reason or another, however, this theatrical success could not save him from having to declare bankruptcy in 1886.

  That was to be the pattern of Searelle’s life. In spite of his undoubted theatrical genius and his sporadic hits, he was dogged throughout by financial misfortune. He struggled endlessly with debt and litigation, leaving in his wake a story of financial misfortune. But in the process he had a remarkable career.

  Nothing daunted, Searelle decided to try his luck on the newly discovered South African goldfields, although he knew only too well the difficulties that would be involved in transporting an entire temperamental operatic company, complete with scenery, costumes – and even the theatre itself – over a great stretch of execrable roads to the back of beyond.

  Searelle’s journey to Johannesburg is an adventure story in itself. Having arrived at Durban, he loaded everybody and everything onto a train and sent them up the line to the railhead. There he transferred his following to a stagecoach and his knocked-down theatre to a string of ox wagons. The principal players, naturally, got the stagecoach, which enjoyed the dubious luxury of stopping off at wayside farmhouses. The humbler members of the crew, including the wardrobe mistress, had to walk next to the laden wagons.

  One evening the coach drew up to a lonely farmhouse where the passengers alighted and asked for bed and board. The humble Boer family did their best to accommodate them and brought into the living room two great bowls of food, of which one, we are told, contained grease and the other a queer type of stew.

  The travel-weary 19-year-old prima donna, Miss Amy Fenton, flatly refused to touch either and had to be content with keeping the hyena from the door, so to speak, with bread and stout which the chief tenor, Vernon Reid, had had the foresight to pack in his trunk.

  Her bed for the night was an enormous four-poster, so high there was a ladder at its side for climbing up into it, and the lady of the house warned: ‘It is President Kruger’s bed, and if he arrives tonight, you will have to get up and sleep somewhere else’ (for the record, ‘Oom Paul’ did not come visiting).

  Luscombe’s pioneering players eventually reached Johannesburg. The intersection of Eloff and Commissioner Streets became a no-go area for all traffic as the ox-wagon convoy trundled in and work began on off-loading and then hammering together the components of Searelle’s ‘Theatre Royal’.

  Johannesburg being what it was in those days, however, this did not cause a traffic jam. ‘The material blocked the road for days,’ Headley A Chilvers tells in his book Out of the Crucible, ‘but the blockade mattered little, for traffic p
assed easily by taking detours over the veld.’

  A theatre of corrugated-iron sheets might sound primitive, but the Theatre Royal was impressive once it had been put up. It had a stage, stalls, comfortable boxes and a bar; and backstage there were dressing rooms for the stars and space for the costumes and scenery.

  And so, odd as it might sound, this raw, rough and dusty mining town, which boasted a bar to every five men and as many prostitutes, could enjoy serious entertainment in its very early days (Searelle opened his first season with Maritana and the Bohemian Girl).

  Searelle stayed in South Africa for all of a decade, and he brought it entertainment such as it had never seen before. Searelle’s most famous import was a former opera star turned actress, Genevieve Ward. One gathers that her initial impression of Johannesburg when she arrived in 1891 was a baffling one; she described the city of gold as having ‘no pavements of any kind, yet the streets lighted by electricity, and the place but five years old!’

  In 11 weeks she played in 16 stage productions which included six by Shakespeare – Macbeth, Hamlet, Othello, The Merry Wives of Windsor, The Merchant of Venice, and Much Ado About Nothing – an exceptional feat, considering that at 54 years of age she was no spring chicken.

  Periodically Searelle and his company also went on tour throughout South Africa, Rhodesia and Mozambique. In 1892 he brought the partners Cora Urquhart Brown-Potter and the romantic lead, Kyrle Bellew, out from Australia. They toured South Africa with Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet, although their Cape Town run was cut short when the Exhibition Theatre was razed by a fire.

  As the 1890s approached the halfway mark, however, Searelle began to run into stiff competition from the Globe Theatre. In 1894 it changed its name to the Old Empire Theatre, and it catered to a less theatrical patronage. The Cornish miners who had flocked to the Rand used to have their wage cheques cashed at the bar and since they were earning something like £150 a month – a very large sum for a worker of that time – the bar enjoyed a thriving business. Even the barmaids prospered because they often found bank notes lying around the floor once all the patrons had left for the night.

  After each night’s stage performances – the conductor of the Old Empire’s orchestra was Dave Foote, who had a four-decades-long career on the Rand leading orchestras, particularly of the vaudeville variety – there were boxing matches, with (illegal) professional pugilists beating the daylights out of each other to the loud joy of the well-oiled spectators. The fact that periodically the police would swoop down on the theatre and arrest everyone concerned did not detract from the fights’ popularity.

  The Old Empire’s attractions cut into Searelle’s takings and his operation became unprofitable. Various non-theatrical business ventures all failed. He bought a 1 600-hectare coal mine that yielded no coal; he prospected unsuccessfully for tin in Swaziland. Eventually Searelle gave up, sold the Theatre Royal just before the Jameson Raid in 1896 and went overseas, but his bad luck followed him like a shadow.

  In 1905 he staged Bobadil in America, but his principals took off with his money, leaving him destitute. He survived by selling dusters from door to door and occasionally received a pittance from The New York Journal for poems he submitted; often he did not have the price of a bed and had to sleep on a park bench.

  Then his luck seemed to change. The famed American poet and prose writer, Ella Wheeler Wilcox (she was the one who coined the phrase ‘laugh, and the world laughs with you; weep, and you weep alone’) read some of his poetry, and together they wrote the opera called Mizpah which was based on the Biblical story of Esther.

  It was successfully mounted in San Francisco, but for Searelle it came too late. He was dying of cancer and was so weak that at the premiere he had to be pushed on stage in a wheelchair to receive his ovation. Searelle’s spirit remained strong even though his body was failing rapidly, and he set off immediately for England to make arrangements for staging the opera there as well.

  But the great showman’s time was almost over and he died there on 18 December 1907 before he could begin negotiations. He was only 54.

  Luscombe Searelle was not the only famous personality to enliven the digger city in its early days, however. Among the entertainers who visited there in the 1880s was the violinist Remenyi who was famous for inveigling his patrons into giving him their antiques. Amy Sherwin, the Australian soprano who was known as the ‘Tasmanian Nightingale’, visited on a tour in 1896 and so did Leonora Braham, the English singer and actress who was primarily known as the creator of principal soprano roles in the hugely popular Gilbert and Sullivan comic operas.

  Another visitor of renown was that icon of British culture, Sir Charles Hallé – conductor, pianist and educator, founder not only of the famous Manchester’s Hallé Orchestra but also of its Royal College of Music. He was Britain’s musical ambassador across the Continent and in Australia and South Africa, and was knighted by Queen Victoria.

  Yet another truly renowned singer to tread Johannesburg’s dusty streets was the internationally renowned bass Signor Foli (who was actually an Irishman called Allan James Foley), on an operatic tour in 1893, and for royalty-watchers in 1906 brought a tour by Lillie Langtry, who was not only a famed actress and singer but also the mistress of the Prince of Wales, later King Edward VII.

  This entire glittering company is long gone now, of course, often appearing rather comical in their old-fashioned clothes when we look at the sepia-toned photographs that show us what they looked like. But ‘all the world’s a stage’, as that great playwright Shakespeare noted, and in their time they were its kings and queens.

  An African Masada

  AN AFRICAN MASADA

  If you are ever travelling along the highway from Pretoria to Lydenburg you will see very little evidence of the wars that once took place in that vicinity in former times. But take place they did, and one of them ended in a sort of South African version of Israel’s legendary Masada.

  I found this story in a very well-researched article by David Saks in the Military History Journal which dealt with the defence of Mapochstad and the chiefs Nyabela and Mampuru.

  Let me set the backdrop. By the 1880s the once-powerful Zulu and Pedi empires had been crushed, and the days of independent tribal nations in the southern part of Africa were virtually over. Only a few tribes and clans north of the Vaal had yet to succumb, and it was in a brooding mountain fortress in this area that we find the last stand of one of the remaining independent entities, the Ndzundza of Chief Nyabela – some 15 000 people who occupied 84 square kilometres of mountain country.

  The Ndzundzas were a people of Ndebele extraction who are thought to have trekked into the area from what was not yet Natal around the beginning of the 17th century, but had not lost the customs and traditions of their original (and now faraway) homeland – a fact that was to have an effect on what happened centuries later in 1882.

  The settlement of Konomtjarhelo was built by Nyabela’s father Mabhogo (whom the Boers called Mapoch) in the 1830s. It was situated in the mountains, in an area of ravines and caves, and was laid out with cattle pens and cultivated fields watered by springs, with an interlocking system of fortresses and subterranean tunnels. On the surface there were rock barriers and underground there were bunkers.

  There had been a somewhat fragile truce after Chief Mapoch had succeeded, after a long war of attrition in the 1860s, to compel the ZAR to recognise his clan’s ownership of the land they occupied, but by the time the ZAR had regained its independence from Britain in 1881 the relationship had began to fray when Nyabela made it clear that he was his own man. He refused to pay taxes (presumably on ‘no vote, no pay’ grounds), conduct a census or allow a boundary commission to beacon off his lands.

  Now, let’s be honest and admit that the Boers were willing to go to great lengths to get their hands on enough land to comply with the statutes of the time, in terms of which a Boer lad was
entitled to two farms of no less than 6 000 hectares each on gaining his maturity. No prizes for working out just where this land had, and still would, come from! But what became known as the ‘Mapoch War’ actually started as a tribal squabble among the Pedi people which had nothing to do with either Nyabela or the ZAR.

  The crunch came as a result of an internal convulsion among the Pedis whose aged chief, Sekhukhune, was a ZAR ally. A long power struggle between Sekhukhune and his half-brother, Mampuru, came to a head in mid-1882 when Mampuru and some of his followers swooped on Sekhukhune’s kraal and murdered him.

  This was, of course, intolerable to the ZAR government as well as the Pedi loyalists, and it tried to arrest Mampuru, but he had taken refuge with Nyabela who would not give him up.

  As a result a large commando was raised, and at the end of October a force of over 2 000 men under General Piet Joubert started arriving in the area, accompanied by a large number of Pedi warriors who were loyal to their slain legitimate chief, Sekhukhene, and were eager to avenge his murder.

  It would seem that the matter could have been settled by negotiation; Joubert did not favour fighting in the open because this would be no old-fashioned gun-versus-assegai conflict – gun-runners had supplied Nyabela’s people with firearms, and Joubert did not want to spill any Boer blood if it could be avoided.

  There was good reason for this. He himself might have been willing to fight through to the end, but there is ample evidence that for one reason or another his men were none too enthusiastic about risking their lives in this particular war; unlike professional soldiers, they did not fight for medals or glory, but to win so that they could return to their daily pursuits.

  The problem was that Nyabela had no intention of giving Mampuru up, because it was against Ndebele custom to hand a refugee over to his attackers. Nyabela famously made this clear when he responded to Joubert’s request that he relinquish Mampuru by saying that he had swallowed Mampuru, and that if the Boers wanted the fugitive they would have to kill him and cut Mampuru out of his belly.