Webster At the Fireside

True South African Stories
1. Auflage 2013
ISBN: 978-1-86842-570-9
Verlag: Jonathan Ball
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 300 Seiten

Roger Webster published his first volume of At the Fireside stories in 2001. It became an overnight bestseller and he went on to write three more books filled with magnificent stories from southern African. Now, more than ten years later, Roger Webster is back with another, all new volume of fireside tales of people and events that have shaped this remarkable country. The author brings to life anecdotes from the country's past, either forgotten or, perhaps, left untold as a result of political prejudice, These are tales of courage and failure, honour and greed, hope and despair, unexpected and extraordinary achievements but, ultimately, stories of real people.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Webster, Roger

Leseproben

Nottingham Road and its Famous Hotel NOTTINGHAM ROAD AND ITS FAMOUS HOTEL The first white settlers in the Midlands were the Voortrekkers who arrived there in the 1830s after their part of the Great Trek had split in two at Winburg. One group pressed on northwards to what eventually became the ZAR, then the Transvaal and finally Gauteng. The other group crossed the formidable Drakensberg range and dropped down to Natal where they formed the Republic of Natalia. The Republic of Natalia was short-lived. The British were close behind and on 12 May 1843 Sir George Napier, the Governor of the Cape Colony, proclaimed Natalia the crown colony of Natal. Its inhabitants knew it was time to take to the road once more if they wanted to avoid becoming British subjects, and bitterly started loading their wagons and gathering their livestock. Then, having sold their farms for a pittance to the newly arriving British settlers, they trekked away. By the 1850s there were very few of the original Voortrekker families left in the district, although many farm names had and still have Afrikaans/Dutch names. To mark this second trek there is now a famous statue of a Voortrekker woman with her arm around a little child, both of them barefoot, standing with their backs to Natal, and on the statue there is the inscription: ‘Liewers kaalvoet oor die berge, as onder die Britte ly’ (Better to walk barefoot over the mountains than suffer under the British). To encourage families to settle in the interior of Natalia, the British established the ‘Byrnes Immigration Scheme’ which paid each adult male the sum of £10, sponsored the cost of the voyage from England and provided each man with 20 acres of land. Packed with would-be settlers, ships like the Washington, the Wanderer, the Helvetia and, of course, the famous Minerva headed for Natal. The first British settlers in Nottingham Road were the King and Ellis families. The Kings – John King and his wife Janet (née Ellis), their two children James (three) and Helen (three months), Janet’s brother James and sisters Helen and Elizabeth – took possession of their 20 acres at Slangspruit, near Pietermaritzburg, and James Ellis settled down at Wilde Als Spruit (now renamed Nottingham). The families arrived on 10 October 1849 and found, like many others, that their land allotments were infertile, rocky and too small – totally unsuitable for farming, in other words. That left them with only two choices: to return home or find more suitable land. Fortunately the Kings and Ellises had some private means, so that they were able to keep the allotted land while searching for better prospects further away. They also managed to sell their unfarmable land at a small profit when they found a suitable property at Wilde Als Spruit (near the present-day Nottingham Road) and bought it from Petrus H Potgieter, one of the last of the remaining original Voortrekkers. The property was bought by Janet King, her brother James and sisters Helen and Elizabeth Ellis. Being from Scotland and linked to Thomas Graham – Lord Lynedoch of Balgowan whose estates were named Balgowan, Lynedoch and Blairgowrie – they named their property after Lynedoch and Balgowan, with John King living at Lynedoch and Ellis at Balgowan. Potgieter offered every assistance to the new owners, and helped them to relocate themselves and their effects which required a number of trips to and from Pietermaritzburg. At first the King family lived in a makeshift shack consisting of a large waterproof tarpaulin stretched over wooden poles. From there they moved into a wattle-and-daub house with a sod-walled kitchen annex where they stayed until their new stone house was completed in 1856. King prospered. He built the first viable English-styled dairy farm, which was later to win many a prize at the Pietermaritzburg agricultural shows, and in 1858 bought another farm which he called Gowrie where the village of Nottingham Road was established. He later donated a portion of his farm for the establishment of a Presbyterian church and this corrugated-iron structure, which became known as St John’s Gowrie, still proudly stands today. The small community encroached on the already diminishing domain of the hunter-gatherer Bushmen who now found themselves confined to the foothills of the Drakensberg since Sir Theophilus Shepstone had relocated the AmaHlubi and the AmaNgwane between them and the settlers. For the Bushmen the arrival of the settlers brought a welcome new source of food. As a result, the settlers were constantly raided by groups of between 4 to 14 men, some on horseback and armed with guns or poisoned arrows, who swooped down from the Drakensberg to steal cattle and horses. In 1853 the farmers became so desperate about the situation that they wrote to the acting Governor of Natal requesting protection from this constant threat. He decided to establish a small military outpost in addition to a ‘pensioners’ village’ west of the existing settlement as a second ‘buffer zone’, and allocated 13 000 acres of commonage for the village of Fort Nottingham which was proclaimed in 1856. That year 16 men of the 45th Regiment of Foot (later to be named the Sherwood Foresters) from Nottingham in England’s Robin Hood country under Lieutenant Arthur Smythe were sent out to the settlement and built a one-room Fort Nottingham in which all 16 of the rank and file slept. In 1857, the year Lieutenant Smythe died, the Sherwood Foresters were replaced by a detachment of the Cape Mounted Riflemen under Sergeant John Quick for whom a small cottage was built at the Fort. It was not a happy occupation: the CMR was a top fighting regiment and the men grew bored when the raiders stayed away, leading to a certain amount of ill-discipline, and in 1860 they were replaced by another small detachment, this time from the Natal Mounted Rifles. The year 1882 brought some excitement which had nothing to do with cattle raiders. As farmer Charles Smythe wrote in his diary in July 1882: ‘The railway has at last commenced, and there is a large staff of men on Gowrie busy putting up buildings and beginning the earthworks. The station is to be just at the crossing of the road to Fort Nottingham, about two miles from Strathearn.’ Legend has it that one of the early settlers, Duncan McKenzie, was partly responsible for the location of the Nottingham Road Station, just 11 kilometres east of Fort Nottingham. He owned most of the land around the fort, and one day he found a surveyor knocking in pegs on his farm. ‘What do you think you’re doing?’ he asked. ‘I am surveying the railway line for the government,’ the surveyor replied. MacKenzie turned his horse around and rode home where he fetched his Martini-Henry rifle and rode back to tell the surveyor that he could help the government to save some money. ‘How?’ the understandably puzzled surveyor asked him. ‘Well,’ McKenzie replied, ‘they’re going to have to advertise for a new surveyor if you keep on doing that on my land!’ So it came about that when the government started building the railway station in 1884, it was a safe distance away from Duncan McKenzie’s farm. When it was completed in 1885 the station was given the name Harrison’s Camp after the contractor who built it. Then it was changed to Karkloof Station, but in 1887 the name changed again, this time to Nottingham Road Station because the locals had decided that it was too far from Karkloof to justify its current name, and as it was on the road to Fort Nottingham, the village that sprang up around the station became known as Nottingham Road. Legend also has it that there has been an inn situated in the vicinity of Nottingham Road since 1854. While the current building is not that old, it is believed that there could have been an inn or a pub for the soldiers who were stationed at Fort Nottingham and also to serve as a ‘Railway Halt’ to serve passengers passing through. Nottingham Road might have been a mere speck on the map, but it was obviously a place where the inhabitants thought big. On 26 October 1887, for example, 11 prominent Nottingham Road men got together and formed one of the first farmers’ associations in the country, the chairman being James King (son of John and Janet). The area’s prosperity was underlined in 1889, following the deaths of James Ellis and his sister Janet King, when one George Orwin bought the land from their family who needed the money to pay off the estate of the balance of the Ellis family. The price Orwin paid was £125 pounds per acre which was extremely high in those days. The same George Orwin took Nottingham Road another step forward when he had the Railway Hotel built by C Morgan. It was completed at the beginning of 1891, and except for some disruption caused by a fire later in the 1890s (the damage was soon made good), it soon became the centre of most social activity at Nottingham Road. In its original form the hotel was a gracious two-storey building set amid rolling lawns which boasted many comforts not previously seen in the area – lighting (provided by gas), a billiard room and tennis courts – and it offered extramural activities such as shooting and riding. It soon became the ‘in’ place to visit and enjoy the beautiful grounds, fresh air and the abundance of things to eat and drink. All sorts of social gatherings were held there, particularly in the pub, and the hotel was also the venue for the Nottingham Road Farmers’ Association...