Peter Merrington, Department of English, University of the Western Cape, Bellville

This paper sketches the work of the Cape author Dorothea Fairbridge (1862-1931) during the South African War of 1899-1902, and in the years leading up to South African Union in 1910. The paper argues that there is a continuation in ideas and initiatives, from the war to the forging of Union, from a Cape and South African ‘loyalist’ point of view. The war was seen as an opportunity for ‘Closer Union’, within the political auspices of the British empire, with particular themes such as reconciliation and the establishing of a typically South African public cultural identity emerging out of the tragic years of 1899-1902. This perspective is very different from that of Dutch or Afrikaans-speaking South Africans who experienced the war primarily as destruction, atrocity, bereavement, and loss of independence. While the special pleading of the empire loyalists, and their personal agency, is long forgotten, much of their work towards a united South African cultural identity remains, as images, institutions, icons, and ideas which have come to be regarded as ‘naturalized’ features of South African public cultural life.

Historians will point out that Union, in actual fact, was largely driven by the political will of Generals Botha and Smuts, with the support of Het Volk. The ‘loyal unionist’ vision was mainly propagated by Milner’s ‘kindergarten’, following the Selborne Memorandum of 1905 (which was the work of their leading strategist Lionel Curtis), and into 1909. This vision tended to ignore political realities and cleaved to a strong affiliation with England and a British imperial world-view. The change of government in Britain in 1906 allowed the political initiative to shift, towards more clearly republican interests; yet constitutionally the institution of Union which was achieved in 1910 was largely within their envisaged framework. The focus here is on cultural initiatives, which were begun by the loyal unionists as early as 1905 and which continued into the 1920s.

Their initiatives were, on the whole, elite, Anglophone, and white, highly idealistic in many respects, but also, in others, laying the basis for abiding and transformed national institutions such as the National Monuments Council (now the Heritage Commission). This was begun by Dorothea Fairbridge and her friends, in Cape Town, as a private association known as the South African National Society for the Preservation of Items of Historic Interest and Natural Beauty, and it continued in this guise until taken over as a state organization in the late 1920s. One of the first concerns of the National Society was the preservation of old Cape Dutch architecture, as well as indigenous flora. These two emphases set the tone for much of the work of Fairbridge and her coteries.

The general approach in dealing with Fairbridge is to tackle history, fiction, aesthetics and Africana, as forming a mutual field of influence. South African history was popularized by events such as the great historical pageant staged at Cape Town in 1910 to celebrate Union, and the process of selecting a popular canon of South African history fell to several overlapping coteries whose interests ranged from architecture, archives, and Africana, to botany and horticulture. Philosophically they were profoundly influenced by the Oxford-educated members of Sir Alfred Milner’s ‘kindergarten’ of young administrators, who espoused a neo-Hegelian idealist and organic view of society, interpreting South African union as an algorithm for imperial or commonwealth union on a greater scale. Culturally, Fairbridge and her associates were influenced by the 1890s vernacular revival in England, driven by the Arts and Crafts Movement of William Morris and John Ruskin. The inventing of a cultural identity for South Africa, a ‘heritage’, in fact, to use a term which was in philosophical parlance at the time, was, for them, tantamount to identifying a Cape vernacular and applying this to the nation at large. The most obvious and inevitable emphases here, following the work in England of the gardener Gertrude Jekyll, and the architect Sir Edwin Lutyens, were gardens, and Cape vernacular or Cape Dutch architecture. Fairbridge and her immediate predecessor in the field, Alys Fane Trotter (who was the first to publish on Cape Dutch buildings), both published on Cape vernacular architecture and related topics in Edward Hudson’s Country Life magazine, in England, which had been founded in 1895, the same year that the English National Trust had been established - the primary influence for their formation, in 1905, of the South African National Society referred to above.

Dorothea Fairbridge was the daughter of the Cape Victorian attorney and member of parliament Charles Fairbridge, trustee of the South African Library and the South African Museum, and compiler of the noted Fairbridge Collection, his personal library of over 7,000 books, which Sir Abe Bailey bought and donated to the SA Library in 1925. She was mentored in Cape history by her father’s neighbour, Reverend H.C.V. Leibbrandt, the first Cape Colonial Archivist. He had a long-standing feud with the historian Theal, which expressed itself in rival interpretations of a critical moment in early Cape history. Theal understood the Dutch governor of the Cape in the early eighteenth century, Willem Adriaan van der Stel, to have been justly impeached for monopolizing trade and for corruption, whereas Leibbrandt made it his mission to redeem Van der Stel’s good name. Fairbridge took Leibbrandt’s position as the basis for much of her own work on Cape history and architecture, identifying Van der Stel as a martyr, a nation-builder, and a visionary comparable to the British imperial figures of Cecil Rhodes and of Lord Milner, both of whom fell out of public and political favour for different reasons. Fairbridge was closely acquainted with both these men, and she interpreted Van der Stel’s downfall as a type of their own careers. The debate which ensued in the Cape concerning Van der Stel broadly reflected the political differences between those who supported the imperial cause and those who supported South African independence, for whom the stance of the eighteenth-century freeburghers in contesting Van der Stel’s privileges was exemplary of modern political rights.

The significance for her work lay in her central emphasis on the two Cape homesteads of Vergelegen (built by Van der Stel) and Meerlust (home of Henning Huysing, one of his primary accusers). In 1917 her friend and patron Florence Phillips, wife of the Randlord Lionel Phillips, bought Van der Stel’s farm Vergelegen, restored it, and made it the centre of their wide and productive cultural coterie. Fairbridge wrote two early valuable works on old Cape architecture, and a historical novel That Which Hath Been (1910) dealing with the question of Van der Stel and his detractors. All her work, novels and documentaries, emphasise the value of land and architecture, interpreting these as features of nation-building. Progressive husbandry, good stewardship, dynastic pride, arboriculture, horticulture, and good taste in building and in ornamentation, become leading motifs for a virtuous South African public cultural identity. She published her first articles on these topics (including a series on ‘Old Cape Homesteads’) in the magazine The State, edited by Phillip Kerr and Lionel Curtis of the kindergarten on behalf of the Closer Union Movement, and intended to propagandize, between 1908 and 1912, the concept of a South African Union. This is a remarkable magazine, an archive of attempts at nation building at the time of Union, dealing with issues such as the language question, race relations, and the need for public institutions such as national parks, a botanical society and national botanical gardens, art galleries, universities, and the like. Herbert Baker wrote in it on ‘The Architectural Needs of South Africa’, and his colleague Francis Masey published a series on old Cape antiquities.

Fairbridge’s public work began, however, during the SA War, with the formation in 1900 of her ‘Guild of Loyal Women’ which was intended to provide a forum for women to support the imperial war effort. This was launched in March of that year with a large garden party in the celebrated Claremont gardens of Henry Arderne, partner in Fairbridge’s father’s legal firm. Mrs Arderne was appointed Chair, Dorothea was the Honorary Secretary, and the ladies of the Currey family, into which her sister Ethelreda had married, also held positions of office. The Guild was her first venture into public life, and was prompted by her admiration of Alfred Milner, the British High Commissioner for South Africa and Governor of the Cape. The most significant aspect of the work of the Guild of Loyal Women was in their ‘Central Graves Committee’, which was established to identify graves, and care for the cemeteries of British and Boer dead during the South African War. The records of the Central Graves Committee reveal a set of issues which become guiding concerns for Dorothea Fairbridge and her acquaintances in the years between the war and Union, in particular questions of national identity, reconciliation, and memorialism.

Soon after the formation of the Guild in 1900, its members were requested by the Federation of the Daughters of the Empire, in Canada, to look after the graves of Canadian volunteers. That same year the Cape Parliament passed the ‘Imperial, Colonial and Republican Forces Burial Act’ (Act No.14 of 1900) and a deputation from the Guild’s Central Graves Committee, led by Dorothea, arranged with the Prime Minister, T.L. Graham, that they should work with the Cape government in the care of graves and cemeteries. The Guild undertook to be responsible for graves in cemeteries (categorised by the Act as ‘Class I’ graves) throughout South Africa and Rhodesia, to correspond with relatives and friends in Southern Africa and abroad, and to co-operate with the government regarding ‘Class II’ or outlying isolated graves. The Guild understood their work as to ‘locate, set in order and permanently mark all known graves’, and ‘to provide for the due order and maintenance of these graves in the future’. Soon after the Guild was begun, Fairbridge’s friend (and romantic rival), Lady Edward Cecil, who was in South Africa for a time with her husband, a colonel in the Guards, began her own venture, the Victoria League, with headquarters in London. She raised funds and passed on enquiries from relatives in England regarding individual graves.

This work of the Guild is remarkable, in that it points to a shift in sentiment regarding warfare and commemoration. The SA War was the first war fought by British troops where large numbers of volunteers from the middle classes were involved, and this led to a high-profile and articulate concern by their families, for proper identification and commemoration of the dead. Fabian Ware, who began the Imperial (now the Commonwealth) War Graves Commission during World War I was a junior administrator in South Africa at the time, and it appears that the work of Fairbridge’s Guild was his inspiration for the later world-wide initiative, in which, again, Fairbridge’s colleague Herbert Baker, as well as her acquaintances Sir Edwin Lutyens, and Rudyard Kipling, were centrally involved.

Violet Milner, in her memoirs, writes of the Guild as follows:

All the movement for the Victoria League, for the Ladies’ Empire Club in far away Grosvenor Street and for much else started over the tea-cups at Rondebosch [where the Curreys lived in Rhodes’s house, Welgelegen] and Claremont [the Ardernes and Dorothea Fairbridge]. The brain of all these things was Miss Dorothea Fairbridge; she came of old British stock, she was of the third generation of British South Africans and she was the author of several agreeable books about her country. She guided my steps and helped me to get to know both the place and the people of Cape Colony. She was fertile in ideas and tactful in suggestion and never put herself forward as having done or suggested anything. It was owing to her influence and patient work that a great society called ‘The Guild of Loyal Women’ was started in the very crisis of the war. This body contained many Dutch-descended women as well as English-descended women, for it is a delusion to suppose that all the Dutch were anxious to be quit of England. (1951:153)

The young, talented, attractive and very ambitious Violet Milner came to South Africa during the war, to be with her husband Lord Edward Cecil, son of the Earl of Salisbury, who was a colonel in a Guards regiment. She stayed as a guest at Cecil Rhodes’s Groote Schuur, and struck up a romantic relationship with Milner which lasted for two decades. When her estranged husband died she married Milner in 1924. She became the editor of the conservative National Review in the 1930s on the death of her brother Leo Maxse who was proprietor and editor, and for all these decades worked closely with Milner’s vision for South Africa and for ‘empire unity’. With Fairbridge and numerous others she lobbied for the promotion of immigration to South Africa of prospective farmers from Britain, a move which was intended to play the numbers game politically speaking, increasing the English-speaking electorate. As it happened British emigrants between the two world wars preferred by far Canada or Australia. She began the Victoria League in London in 1901 in response to Fairbridge’s Guild, and the ladies of the Victoria League, with immensely influential patronage, began fundraising for the graves and cemeteries project. They also raised funds for the assistance of Uitlander refugees, and for Dutch women and children, and explored the matter of the return to the Boers of looted Bibles among many varied projects of their own.

A topic which arose in connection with the Guild’s memorial work was the nature of the South African climate and the aesthetics of South African cemeteries and memorial gardens. Fairbridge’s sister-in-law Mary Currey writes as follows:

When I was in England last year, on a lovely day in the Spring I was wandering with a friend through part of the New Forest; we came to a picturesque village church with beautiful old cedar trees on one side and the village churchyard on the other - the whole cemetery, every grave in it was a mass of primroses and daffodils in full bloom. It spoke of peace and rest and was very beautiful, and as I stood there my thoughts went back to the Soldiers’ graves on our South African veld and kopjes and there came to mind letters which I had received, asking whether I would see to the planting of daffodils and other English bulbs if they were sent out: or requesting me to have yellow and crimson Rambler roses planted alternately round the grave, and so on. The pathos of it all struck me for I realised how impossible it was for many people to understand what I had so often tried to tell them, - that the Soldiers’ graves in South Africa can never have the appearance of an English country churchyard. It is only those who know this land who can understand what an enormous task it has been, and though there is still much that we could wish otherwise we can only say that we have done what we could. (annual reports of the Guild of Loyal Women)

Mary Currey continues as follows:

It should be remembered too that the South African veld and kopjes have a beauty all their own the long grass may not always be green but it often takes gorgeous colours under the bright sunshine and there is something in the vast solitude and wonderful silence which appeals to many, and I have sometimes thought that one could hardly imagine a more peaceful resting place than these little enclosures in the veld. And so we leave them - alone with Nature and with God.

We do not wonder that an English lady, whose husband sleeps there [the Woodstock, Cape Town, military cemetery], was moved to tears at what she at first thought was the utterly neglected appearance of the place. We deeply sympathise with her, and with all to whom the appearance of our South African cemeteries must be a shock, but we are sure that only a short stay in the country, and an intelligent observation of our climate and the vagaries of our vegetation, which at some seasons has the vitality of Jonah’s gourd and at others the apparent dryness of Aaron’s rod, it requires, we say, only a short observation of these conditions to exonerate the Members of the Guild of Loyal Women of South Africa from the charge of betraying their trust. (ibid)

The Guild designed an iron cross to serve as a pattern grave marker, to which was fixed the personal details of each soldier. The crosses were made at an ironworks in Cape Town, and shipped out to cemeteries throughout the country by the monumental mason firm of Robert Cane and Sons, based in Wynberg in the Cape Peninsula, who had a reputation from Clanwilliam in Namaqualand, to Kuruman in the Northern Cape, and to Port Elizabeth and Natal. They were also charged with the reception of headstones which families or regiments shipped to the Cape, and the transportation and erection of these.

Karel Schoeman is mildly disparaging of the Guild, in his biography of Olive Schreiner (Schoeman, 1992:85-92). Equally disparaging is C. Louis Leipoldt, writing in his SA War novel, Stormwrack, of the misplaced jingoism of members in the local branch of the Guild in his fictional valley (based on the Clanwilliam Hantam region):

[Old Mrs Quakerley] was now the Lady Chair of the small local League of Loyal Women, a post which satisfied her yearning to shine in whatever circle she found herself, as well as her prejudice against everything that she considered as antagonistic to the peculiar brand of Imperialism that she flaunted.

No one really knew what the object or aim of the League was. Those who were antagonistic towards it said frankly that it was merely an association designed to cause ill-feeling between the two sections [Dutch and English speaking] by sharply differentiating between the aggressive loyalties of the one section, and the tolerant, negative attitude of the other. The ladies who supported Mrs Quakerley ... vigorously denied any such implication, and maintained that the League existed for the sole purpose of demonstrating their own affection for ‘Home’ and for all that this word denoted, and that nobody had any right whatever to prevent them from manifesting their feelings.

.... The tenor of [the League’s] resolutions was an almost monotonous reiteration of the resolve of the League to support the Home Government in its demand for justice and fair play to the Uitlanders on the Rand, or to have complete confidence in Her Majesty’s representative, Sir Alfred Milner. (Leipoldt, 2000:117-19)

Leipoldt describes the meetings as customarily ending with readings of ‘some of Mr Kipling’s poems’, and Henley’s poem ‘England, my England’. Leipoldt’s tone is amused and dismissive, but the purpose of the ‘Valley’ trilogy was to argue for an inclusive South African identity, and mutual respect and toleration between Dutch, German, English, and black South Africans. Thus, for his purposes, the League offers a ready source of satire against partisan feeling. The South African War finds its way, in Stormwrack, to the tranquil Namaqualand valley, and the novel is a tragedy, where the tragic hero is a collective - perhaps wishful - sense of tolerance and nineteenth-century laisser-faire liberalism, focussed in the person of the old gentleman farmer Andrew Quakerley. His pride and joy is his garden, cultivated assiduously for many years in difficult circumstances, and reduced overnight to a shambles during a vigorous action fought between a Boer raiding party and a column of mounted infantry. For many South Africans of privileged background in the early twentieth century gardens serve as a central theme in the narrative of national identity. Fairbridge, who wrote a book on The Gardens of South Africa, says, in her History of South Africa (1918) that ‘a garden was the fons et origo’ of the country, referring of course to the Dutch East India Company’s vegetable garden in Cape Town. She was a friend of the botanist Harry Bolus, and she and her coterie began the South African Botanical Society and the immensely valuable botanical gardens at Kirstenbosch on land which belonged to the Rhodes estate in the Cape Peninsula.

Fairbridge herself parodies the zealous Englishwoman on a mission, in her novel, The Torch Bearer (1915), where Miss Agatha Lumsden sails with her young niece to South Africa to teach the Dutchwomen of the Cape how to cook. She is armed with a chafing dish, a recipe for Lobster Neuburg, and a magic lantern show. Her incredibly ill-informed but lofty views run to refusing to share a drawing room with a ‘dissenting cleric’ (a minister of the Dutch Reformed Church). Her young niece accompanies her to South Africa, with a clutch of reproductions of quattrocento art which she got on a trip to Florence; and some locals are scandalized by the pagan nudes and Catholic cardinals. There is much comic misunderstanding within the etiquette and conventions of conversation, with a fine imitation of the nuances of Afrikaans. The niece ends up marrying the local magistrate, Alwyn le Sueur, whose mother is English and whose father’s forebears are French Huguenots.

The Torch Bearer dwells on the connection between aesthetics, identity, and politics. Those Dutch who are not ‘loyal’ generally have bad taste, and have allowed their patrimony to deteriorate. The ‘loyal’ tend to have Huguenot ancestry, and their homesteads are studies in understated elegance and original beauty while the disloyal are not only politically recalcitrant but rebarbative in their tastes. The novel was written against the political background of the 1915 rebellion when Generals Beyers, De Wet and De la Rey led a military rebellion against Botha’s decision for the Union to enter World War I. These are issues which spring directly from the South African War, and which clearly point to the fact that reconciliation (which was a recurring political theme in the two decades after the SA War) remained an idealist motif, expressed customarily in rhetoric, and in cultural symbolism such as the architecture of Sir Herbert Baker. A character who is in league with agents from German South West Africa, and working towards a conspiracy with Germany, tendentiously lives in a ‘modern’ villa with corrugated iron roof, ‘pepper pots’, a tin verandah painted in strips with the colours of the old Transvaal, and linoleum-covered floors. These features are very typical of most old South African country towns, but for Fairbridge they suggested that the rural Dutch or Afrikaans had lost touch with their own patrimony.

The most abiding legacy of the Cape-based loyal Unionists was indeed their rather patrician concern for Cape Dutch architecture and farms. The Cape vernacular revival was first publicized by Edmund Garrett, the young editor of the Cape Times from the fateful year of 1895, up to1900. He worked closely with the Governor and High Commissioner Alfred Milner, having befriended him in Cairo in 1892 when Milner was Under-Secretary of Finance under Lord Cromer. (At the start of his career Milner had also been a journalist with Stead on the Pall Mall Gazette.)

Garrett took on the cause of the urban environment, writing an editorial (‘The Lungs of Cape Town’, 17 December 1895) on the need to sustain open spaces in the city, in which he took his lead from Octavia Hill, one of the co-founders of the National Trust which had been established in England that same year. Garrett pushed for the rebuilding of the outdated and cramped Anglican Cathedral of St George in Cape Town, in due course redesigned by his friend Herbert Baker in a suitable massive Norman style using Table Mountain sandstone; and he wrote a leader on the preservation of old Cape houses which appeared on 25 November 1898.

By this time Herbert Baker, who arrived at the Cape in 1892, had already explored the Dutch homesteads:

In my visits to the old farms on the Peninsula and in the rich valleys among neighbouring hills I was thrilled to discover the dignity and beauty of the old homesteads …. I carefully studied and made sketches of the architecture of the old houses. When I talked about them to my friends at the Cape, I wondered how little their beauty seemed to be known or appreciated.

My interest in the discovery, as it really seemed to be, got to the ears of Cecil Rhodes at the time when he was contemplating restoring and adding to an old house, Groote Schuur …. Rhodes, too, had seen the old homesteads and he knew by a natural instinct that they were good, and formed a living part of the harmony of the Cape landscape. Their beauty was being rapidly destroyed by the discordant methods of building that were fast spreading over the country. (Baker,1944:23)

Alys Fane Trotter, wife of Alec Trotter the electrical adviser to the Cape government, wrote an extended essay for Garrett’s Christmas Number of the Cape Times in 1898, which may well be the first occasion on which a detailed public study was made of the old Cape homesteads and their historical background. Baker comments that ‘these treasures of art had never before been written about or illustrated …. Then afterwards Dorothy Fairbridge produced her excellent series on the history and art of the Cape’. (Baker, 1944:46)

Garrett writes a preface welcoming Trotter’s essay. ‘The wonder is that it was not long ago forestalled’:

It is something for a Colony to possess a Past at all: a reliquary Past embodied in monuments. But these old farmsteads, the older of which go back two centuries, embody something more than that, something still rarer, namely, a Colonial style in an art, the art of domestic architecture. Except in New England, you will hardly find elsewhere a distinct school or style existing in a Colony in the New World, matured and complete in its development, and not exactly the double of any existing school or type in the Old World.

The essence of the style, then, is indigenous. It is the outcome of local conditions, therefore to be cherished by the patriotic; it is the outcome of conditions which belong to the past, therefore to be cherished as irreplaceable.

The populous and busy modern South Africa of the future will make pilgrimage to the Old Homesteads of the Western Province as Americans make pilgrimage to-day to see old Manor Houses of England.

Trotter illustrated her essay with her own sketches, made while bicycling round the country districts of the Western Cape with her husband. She expresses an urgency in the recording of the homesteads, noting that the late seventeenth-century farmhouse of Zandvliet was in fact being demolished on the day she visited it. The essay is the framework for the text of her book, Old Cape Colony: A Chronicle of her Men and Houses from 1652 to 1806 (1903). Trotter, very much one of the ‘new women’, dedicates the book to her ‘unpunctured bicycle’: ‘brown as the dust, silent as the veld we traversed together’. In 1900, on the Trotters’ return to England, she had also published a quarto volume of fine photographs and sketches of the homesteads, with short explanatory notes and with an introductory chapter by Herbert Baker on the ‘Origins of Old Cape Architecture’.

The Cape Times Christmas Number of 1898 was sandwiched between studies that dealt with Southern African imperialism: the 1896 supplement had 64 pages on the Jameson Raid; the following year’s topic was ‘Rhodesia: Its Goldfields and Prospects’; and those of 1899 and 1900 were preoccupied with the war. The next year sees a lapse, with the uninspired editorship of J. Saxon Mills, but the new editor in 1902, Sir Maitland Park, who was recruited by Rudyard Kipling from the Allahabad Pioneer, brought a return to the standards for which the Cape Times was known. He also brought, as assistant editor, his nephew Ian Duncan Colvin, a fellow Scot who had worked with him in India. Colvin was a talented writer who contributed a great deal to the invention of heritage for the Union.

Gerald Shaw, chronicler of the Cape Times, tell us that ‘the Cape Peninsula made an enduring impression on the sensitive and romantic young Colvin’ who ‘found something "magical and poetic in that town under the mountain" and in South African history a fascination that never lost its hold’. Colvin ‘explored the South African Library, discovering old volumes of travel and adventure. He was befriended by H.C.V. Leibbrandt, the Archivist, who laboured in the cellars beneath the Houses of Parliament, and he wrote historical sketches for the Christmas numbers of the Cape Times, using a pseudonym, "Rip van Winkle"’. (Shaw, 1975:130)

The supplement for 1903 was entitled ‘In Days of Old’, and included a ballad by Colvin as ‘Rip van Winkle’, on ‘The Flying Dutchman: A Legend of the Cape’. This edition also included an extended article on ‘The Castle and its Story’, with a related feature on ‘The Story of Noodt: A Weird of the Castle’, concerning unpopular Governor van Noodt and the legend of his peculiar death. There is a short whimsy on the commonly used Cape slave surname of Cupido, as well as articles on old shipwrecks and ‘Early Art at the Cape’, and an essay by the historian A. Wilmot on public figures at the Cape in the nineteenth century. The issue of 1904, ‘Romances of the Cape’, is particularly interesting in its exploration of folklore and traditions. This subject is dear to the Arts and Crafts movement with its pre-Raphaelite interest in folk history, in which regard Rudyard Kipling’s family connection to Burne-Jones points to his own role as a folklorist. The 1904 issue has an article on ‘The Romance of our Pilgrim Fathers’ about the Huguenot French at Franschoek, an essay, ‘The Mystery of the Kapok Doctor’, on the army surgeon Dr James Barry, who concealed her female sex to pursue a military career in the early nineteenth century, a delightful ballad by Rip van Winkle entitled ‘A Museum Idyll’, and a poem by John Runcie, which celebrates in verse the work of the early eighteenth-century Cape sculptor Anton Anreith .

In 1905 the Christmas Number was dedicated to the interesting topic of ‘Native Folk Lore: A Retrospect and Appeal’. This is at the time when the Bleek-Lloyd family and the historian George McCall Theal, among others, were publishing their translations or versions of San and Xhosa folk tales. At much the same time, in early 1904, Dorothea’s cousin Kingsley Fairbridge, setting out on his literary career in Umtali, Rhodesia, ‘translated several folk-lore stories from the oral Chisenna, some of which afterwards appeared in Mr Andrew Lang’s Orange Fairy Book.’ (Kingsley Fairbridge, 1927:140)

The 1906 number, which acknowledges Fairbridge’s mother for the loan of photographs and illustrations of old Cape Town, celebrates the centenary of the British occupation of the Cape in 1806. It includes an article on ‘Sheik Joseph, A Cape Pilgrim’, by Rip van Winkle, illustrated by his colleague George Smithard. This is the locus for Dorothea’s own description of Sheik Jusuf’s kramat or shrine at Macassar near Eerste River, which (as described above) includes a fictionalised portrait of these two journalists at their work. In the same issue Colvin writes an intriguing ballad, ‘The Deserted Garden’, about a Cape urban legend. Behind a high wall concealing a house on the slopes above the city can be heard the playing of a flute. The flute player is a recluse, disfigured by leprosy which he caught as a child from the lip of a flute that had been infected by a servant, carrying the disease, who taught him to play the instrument. Fairbridge develops a similar theme in her Boer War story, ‘Pamela’, which she published in The State a few years later.

Colvin wrote an essay, illustrated by Smithard, on Anton Anreith in the Christmas Number of 1906. Shaw claims that this was the first significant study of Anreith’s work. In the short span of time he spent at the Cape he became an expert in Cape history, and, as Shaw tells us, ‘with Leibbrandt, a vigorous defender of Willem Adriaan van der Stel in the controversy that raged among scholars in the columns of the Cape Times in late 1909’. Colvin ‘did much to awaken Cape Town to its cultural heritage and to make known beyond a narrow circle of scholars the riches of the South African Library.’ (Shaw, 1975:131-2) Colvin worked for the Cape Times until 1907 when he was offered the editorship of the Transvaal Leader (which had been bought by the Cape Times in 1902), but he suffered a serious nervous breakdown that same year and returned to England. His full oeuvre deserves further study for its range of South African connections. He published his satire on Cape politics, The Parliament of Beasts, and Other Verses under his customary pseudonym in 1905 while editor of the Cape Times. After his return to England he published a volume on South Africa for the Romance of Empire series (illustrated by his colleague Smithard), as well as one focussed on the Cape (The Cape of Adventure, 1912). Also in 1912 he wrote a study of Cecil Rhodes (1912) which was followed a decade later with the Life of Jameson (1922), and a novel based on the subject of his earlier poem , titled The Leper’s Flute (1920). His preface to Sidney Mendelssohn’s South African Bibliography (1910) is regarded as a classic study of Africana.

The cultural climate for these explorations in Cape architecture was set by the Arts and Crafts Movement and the vernacular architecture movement in England, which was a reaction against the excesses of High Victorian gothic. The ‘Queen Anne’ style is the name which was given in the 1870s to a renewed interest in English domestic architecture from the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, regarded as quintessentially English. Ruskin, who championed the Gothic Revival, had himself tired of its excesses and with William Morris turned to this vernacular tradition. Olive Schreiner is cited as having heard the following from William Morris, ‘in about 1888’, in a lecture on ‘Socialism and Art’:

‘He [Morris] was dwelling on the fact that art must grow out of the lives of the people; and made the statement as to what Ruskin had said in the matter of the Cape farmers having invented perhaps the only new order of architecture that had come into life in some hundreds of years ….’ (Schreiner to Baker, 1912, cited by Doreen Greig, c.1960:266)

Both Baker and his colleague Lutyens were trained in this transitional phase of British architecture, between the nineteenth-century Gothic or neo-classical, and modernism, and both of them became noted for their use of vernacular styles and materials. Their work was published by Edward Hudson, the founder of the English Country Life magazine in 1895 (the same year that the English National Trust was established). The celebrated gardener Gertrude Jekyll (Hudson’s friend and co-worker with Lutyens) promoted the merits of the vernacular garden over those of formal garden schemes. Jekyll in her days as an art student in London ‘appears to have won [Ruskin’s] respect as well as that of many of the artists of her day, especially G.F. Watts, Edward Burne-Jones, and Frederick Leighton’. (Arts Council of Great Britain, 1981:19) She enjoyed a central place in the Arts and Crafts movement, and worked in a variety of media. As a gardener she advised Baker when he was engaged in restoring Rhodes’s Groote Schuur and its gardens. Ebenezer Howard’s Garden City movement from the turn of the century also had its influence on the architectural landscape of the Cape Peninsula.

The Cape vernacular style was taken on as a national building style, promoted not only by the Cape coteries but also by proponents of Dutch-speaking republican independence or of Afrikaner nationalism, notably the Dutch Pretoria artist J.H. Pierneef. Over the next few decades most public buildings in South Africa were designed with versions of Cape Dutch gables, with fanlights, mullioned windows, and brass escutcheons, to differing degrees of cost and credibility. This applied not only to large and stately edifices such as Government House in Pretoria (1907), the Pretoria Railway Station (circa 1909) and City Hall (1935), and the homes of wealthy families such as can be seen on Parktown Ridge in Johannesburg, but to magistrates’ courts, police stations, and even electricity sub-stations throughout South Africa. In the 1920s modest single-storey middle class suburban homes in most towns and cities (bungalows, in the British sense) acquired a stodgy gable over the living room façade where previously there would have been a sketchily gothic frontage. A suburb in the Natal city of Pietermaritzburg has leafy streets of matching villas with anglicised versions of the gables, pinched and elongated in a kind of Jacobean idiom.

A fascinating case in point is the architecture of the sugar estate of Tongaat-Hulett in the province of KwaZulu-Natal (or simply Natal as it then was known). The setting is radically different from the ‘Mediterranean’ climate of the Western Cape, and so too is the history of the region, yet for reasons of aesthetics, taste, and national sentiment, Tongaat became a simulacrum of the Cape baroque experience. Fairbridge’s friend and associate, the impressionist painter Robert Gwelo Goodman, was the inspiration for this peculiar phenomenon. In 1936 he was invited by the proprietors of Tongaat estate to design a ‘model native village’ for the plantation workers. The Tongaat management wanted to improve the sordid living conditions of the cane workers following the severe malaria epidemic which occurred in 1930. Goodman designed this village drawing on Cape Dutch architectural idiom, using the simple one-storey town house designs from the Cape ‘Malay Quarter’ for the workers’ houses, and features such as the Bosheuvel gates, Elsenburg estate slave bell, baroque garden seats from Groot Constantia, and so forth, for landscape improvement. After Goodman’s death in 1938 the Tongaat authorities continued this plan, and the towns of Tongaat and Maidstone now have public buildings which are close simulacra of the Groot Constantia wine cellars, the old Customs House in Buitenkant Street, Cape Town, the facades of the Old Supreme Court, Grosvenor House in Stellenbosch, and even the Kat Balcony of the Castle of Good Hope as a summer house. This is a remarkable exportation of Cape Dutch from a ‘Mediterranean’ environment into a semi-tropical landscape with lush cane fields, palms, banana trees, and flamboyants, testimony to the huge prestige which the loyal Unionist coterie placed on the architectural idiom as a form of national heritage.

Fairbridge wrote a short story for The State in which the subject of the SA War is combined with the idea of Cape vernacular architecture, and with romance. This short story, ‘Pamela’, also raises some peculiar questions about relations between colonial subjects and people from Britain. Several years after the end of the war two Englishmen climb Table Mountain, and look down over the city of Cape Town, Table Bay, and Robben Island. One, Wilfred Hayes, falls into a troubled reverie, then shares his story with his companion.

He was an officer with a troop of mounted infantry in the war, billeted in the Boland. His duty was to find fresh food for the men, and he visited local farms for this purpose. One farm was particularly attractive in the picturesque old Cape manner, and Hayes found the proprietor equally so, a demure young woman, Pamela, of mixed English and Huguenot parentage. They struck up a friendship which bloomed into a romance, and she expressed her longing to see England, ‘home’ in her late father’s vocabulary. Her brother was very ill and she was preoccupied with his health. A while later, returning to her farm, Hayes is stopped short by the elderly neighbour who tells him to go away. Pamela cannot see him. Pamela has gone, to tend her brother. A mystery shrouds the tone of the speaker, and the circumstances. Hayes is profoundly troubled, and writes her a letter of commitment. He hears nothing from Pamela save for a scribbled tragic note, but the old neighbour brings the kindest news he can. Now, however, some years later, having returned to Cape Town en route to a sugar-farming future in Natal, Hayes has found the secret: a cutting from a local newspaper announces the death of Pamela Mary North, December 1st, 1908, ‘on Robben Island’. ‘Why Robben Island?’ asks Hayes’s companion on the mountain top. ‘The grey tint in Hayes’s face spread to his lips. "Robben Island," he said quietly, "is the leper settlement"’. It turns out that Pamela’s late father contracted the disease from a black African whose wound he dressed, and that both his children inherited the congenital leprosy from him.

Two final points can be drawn from this. First, the question of inheritance and legacy is writ large in public culture, and in fiction, in the Edwardian world. It applies in all sorts of ways, from literal bequests and legacies such as those of Cecil Rhodes, Abe Bailey, and the Beit brothers, to spiritual discourses, senses of national destiny, and concepts of history. It is a very common theme in the fiction of the day, refracting the preoccupation in the early twentieth century with the passing of an old order, the effects of burgeoning modernisation in England and in the colonies or dominions. It is manifest in social-evolutionary theories and eugenics, and emerges in South African fiction in the merciless eugenic narratives of Sarah Gertrude Millin. This historical heritage paradigm or heritage discourse is the subject of an extended study by the present author, but it also applies directly in the sense that Fairbridge and her coteries, just as Gustav Preller and his, were constructing a sense of public heritage for the new nation and state of the Union of South Africa.

The second point is related to this. From a loyal Unionist point of view there is a concern about miscegenation, about mixing English and colonial ‘blood’ and identity, dealt with in detail in Fairbridge’s novel Piet of Italy (1913), but expressed in this short story in terms of a common phobia at the turn of the century. This was a phobia about sexual diseases, prostitution, syphilis in the military, and the tainting of the metropole with illnesses from ‘abroad’. The enormous popularity of stories about vampires from the last decade of the nineteenth century bears witness to this phobia, as does the series of paintings by later pre-Raphaelite painters dealing with female femmes fatale, Keats’s La Belle Dame sans Merci, Lamia, and so forth. Pamela is a tragic and self-sacrificial rather than sinister figure, but in the broadest terms she fits into the pattern. The colonial patrimony is a gift of ambivalent virtue; the colonial heroine is a self-sacrificing figure, perforce unavailable to the most eligible imperial hero.

Fairbridge went through this angst herself, ‘carrying a torch’ for Lord Milner all her life, with Viscountess Milner both her friend and her rival, and Pamela’s tragic romance is a kind of sublimation of her own romantic disappointment. It culminated in great sadness in 1930, after Milner’s death in 1925. Fairbridge was invited by Lady Milner to edit the Milner papers, a considerable scoop for her and for her publishers at Oxford University Press. The experience proved too intense for both of them, and with a good deal of trauma. She abandoned the project to the historian Cecil Headlam, and died a year later, in 1931, at the height of the Depression, the year when the Statute of Westminster brought about a full independent status for the British dominions including South Africa, and rendered the political and social vision of the loyal unionists a thing of the past. Perhaps ironically, a fine obituary to Fairbridge by the French historian Henri Deherain praises her for inspiring the Afrikaner South Africans to recover their own past in their identity-forming initiatives during the 1930s.