One must read books twice, once to chase the plot and then slowly, to enjoy the writer’s craft. I read my favourite books three times or more, because from the first I was besotted with the stages, the settings. The houses and their interiors captivated me in every new story I read: the hanging tapestry behind which Shakespeare hid his murderer and victim from one another, Brideshead’s Chinese Drawing Room, Mandalay’s gardens, and Tara’s windows. The toasted scones on Enid Blyton’s minute hearthstone inside a toadstool house, and a flickering candle on a raw, scrubbed oak table in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, were delicious distractions for me. A neatly raked yard with plump clucking chickens, the intertwined embroidered initials on unstained wedding bedsheets strung on a washline in a pale yellow hayfield, or a silver picture frame removed from a suitcase and placed on a shelf inside the cupboard beside the uncomfortable new boarding school bed.
In school our teacher told us about Pompeii and in the slides she showed us I saw people frozen in death at their most mundane moments; here lay a man as if he had just sat down for a good session of cogitation on his lavatory one morning, and the shit had instead hit the proverbial fan, and there he lay for all eternity, caught with his pants down, but it was his pottery jug and bowl that held my attention.
Because of my father’s abiding interest in Eastern Cape history, historic buildings were always accessible for my childhood fantasies, and I have been lucky to experience as much of our historic domestic landscape as I have.
History is just boys saying to each other “give that back it’s mine”, or “I’ll swap you two ghoens[i] for that country”, and women, grown-up, tired women, saying to each other “what the hell are we going to give the children to eat tonight and where will we all sleep?” Alan Bennet said, in his brilliant play The History Boys: “History is a commentary on the various and continuing incapabilities of men. What is history? History is women following behind with the bucket.”
And those same women wanting to soften it all up a bit, to have something nice. A comfortable chair or two, a bed and a crib with a gingham quilt, a pretty carpet on the stairs to be worn thin by future feet stumbling down to breakfast.
That’s why I believe that heritage is the food and homes, and not the screeds of pages detailing the battles, or the memorials to the flag-bearing men in uniform that make up the black and white facts of history.
Give me a world of hearths and window frames, higgledy-piggeldy roofs and skew stone kitchen walls, a garden well, a staircase leading nowhere and a wooden floor with the pockmarked secrets of a thousand stiletto heels, and I go to pieces.
The women who arrived here in 1820 were my ancestors, and their vital relationships with their domestic environment have been of specific interest to me. These were not the landed gentry everyone imagines. They were the wives, often after brief courtship or by arranged marriage to relative strangers, of men who were dissatisfied with England and who grabbed at the British government offer.
It took them a long, horrific time to get here, and then the bleak wait for a house to be built during years of drought and failed crops, while fighting the perpetual wars.
And then that King who had given them this dream forgot all about them. Cut them off. Their King ghosted them, in modern idiolect. But more about that in a future post.
Life was hard and deviation from a strict discipline didn’t happen. They took it as the wind blew it in. They coped, and – sometimes – they celebrated. I have always wanted to know what the food was and how the women managed it. I chase the stories of their kitchens, their relationships within this alien environment, and their place in the greater world.
They came hopeful and honoured by their inclusion in the adventure, under the benediction of their legal King: Tell me you wouldn’t take your President’s call to you as a patriot to go and have yourself a piece of unoccupied land and build yourself a life there, to help him protect your country. I dare you; tell me you wouldn’t join the Scheme, tell me you wouldn’t urge your young adult children to go. In return he, your King, would pay your transportation there and give you a monthly stipend for a while to get yourself set up there with a small farm to feed your future children, or a place to ply your trade. Tell me you wouldn’t line up for days to be selected to be one of only 4000 to take up this fantastic offer from your King, your government, or your lifestyle guru, for that matter? It would be the young man’s ticket to Utopia.
There would be no return ticket, no sea route to take them back to England; their motto would become take root or die. But they didn’t know that then.
Imagine a young man in early-1800s Britain who found himself up shit creek without a paddle, his situation not unlike the youth of today: the government was a mess, there weren’t any jobs, he couldn’t dream of ever owning his own home. God, pollution and putrid sanitary conditions would probably kill him before the hunger did. For such a young man, with his dream of a small life with his like-minded girl on their own piece of land where he would build themselves a self-sufficient world, for such a young man the newspapers must have seemed what we would call in today’s pop-psychology lingo a sign from the universe.
In 1819 as this young man and about 4000 others began their preparations to cross the seas, the world was a shambles. He dreamed of Utopia, for he was tired of London.
During Tessa King’s address to the West Rand GSSA in 2005, she said:
I don’t think that the British Government ever expected this scheme to be as successful as it was in terms of the numbers. They were absolutely bombarded with applications and the various sources give the figures at between 10,000 to 90,000 applications as emigration frenzy gripped the people. When visiting Britain in 2004 I spent some time at the National Archives at Kew Gardens and this time round, instead of a film, which I had been given in 2001, was given the actual letters to peruse. Some were quite heart wrenching with people begging to be included in the scheme so that they could support their families and escape the poverty in which they were living.
Suddenly a way had opened up for the poor to be able to own some land and have a freedom which they were not experiencing in Britain with its various social classes from Royalty down to the common labourer. They would never own land in England and so the letters just poured in to the Home Office. In most instances the letters were written by the applicants themselves, with the illiterate folk finding sponsors to write letters on their behalf. The first parties were thus formed and their lists submitted to the Colonial Department. Others just sent in their letters of application hoping to be accepted in their eagerness to start a new life somewhere. Many were from the middle to lower class of society and fell outside the parameters of the emigration scheme. Because of the sheer number of applicants the Colonial Department answered these applicants via printed circulars posted in various areas such as taverns and in the daily press. Applications were initially whittled down to approximately 50,000 and of those less than 4,000 people actually emigrated. There were more than 20 counties involved including Ireland and Scotland. Some folk gravitated from their hometowns to London and were then included on the London lists of the larger parties making it difficult today for us to establish exactly where they were born and bred.
Downing Street recorded the fact that each day large numbers of people gathered outside in the hope of hearing whether they had been accepted. For many the initial euphoria began to be dampened by the political opposition putting out various versions of what would happen to them in the Cape Colony. There was much being written in the press both for and against the Scheme. There were exaggerated claims of the settlers being eaten alive by lions and hyenas in the wilds of the country on the one hand, to this vision of English villages and parks on the other. Ultimately there were three distinct types of parties that were formed.[ii]
If critics in Britain had been fully cognizant of the challenges awaiting the immigrants, hostility to the scheme might have been more pronounced. Booster literature conveniently failed to mention that the farm plots assigned to the settlers were intended to serve as a buffer between “more established western regions of the colony” and amaXhosa and amaThembu communities further east, African polities who had recently lost the territory to European commandoes. In other words, the 1820 settlers (as they came to be known) were to be situated within a region that had recently undergone “ethnic cleansing”, a former “contact zone” between colonial troops and local African groups, sides who had already engaged in a series of frontier wars. To make matters more complicated, most of the new arrivals, while soon to be engaged in a monumental agrarian endeavor, were merely “tradesmen, artisans [and] mechanics” from Britain’s industrial towns and cities, some of whom “passed themselves off as rural folk, and sailed to South Africa with grand dreams of finding a natural paradise that would support them with little effort”. Yet even if the settlers had been adequately prepared for the rigors of agricultural development, some experts (Burchell notwithstanding) believed that the region chosen for settlement—known as the Zuurveld or “sour field” in Cape Dutch—was “unsuited for crop-farming”. The plots were thought to be too small, rainfall was often unpredictable or scarce, and the soil retained an abnormally high level of acidity, “which is harmful, even fatal, to cattle in autumn and winter” . From performing the most ordinary tasks, then, all the way up the chain of the imperial command, the 1820 settlement scheme appeared somewhat precarious. “The operation,” as one historian recently put it, “was probably the most callous act of mass settlement in the entire history of empire” [iii].
As the debate over South African immigration continued, the rhetoric surrounding it took a curious detour into domestic politics. Some believed the scheme was simply devised to displace Britain’s poor and unemployed onto foreign shores—and though the four thousand applicants (out of some forty thousand) selected for the scheme represented “a neatly sliced section of early nineteenth-century British society in all its layered complexity from parish indigent to gentry,” the depressed climate at home fostered an impression that Parliament was solely attempting to displace the lower orders of society abroad [ibid].
[i] marbles
[ii] https://www.eggsa.org/1820-settlers/index.php/articles-2/1820-history
[iii] https://www.getaway.co.za/travel-ideas/destinations-travel-ideas/looking-back-200-years/
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[…] Continued, Please click here to read Part One. […]