Port Elizabeth

A Visual History

By Kin Bentley

Introduction

• No city in South Africa has had its history recorded in pictures quite to the extent that Port Elizabeth has.

• Using photographs and other images sourced mainly from the internet, I have produced a visual history of the city since its inception in 1820.

• So, in a sense, this is a “people’s history”.

• I have provided background detail where I can, but am mainly interested in the visual impact of the images.

• This is also a very personal record of a town which grew virtually from nothing following the arrival of the British settlers, among them my great-great-great grandparents, although they ended up living in Grahamstown.

• For this reason I have also included some verbatim extracts from the writings of their contemporaries, the likes of explorer William Burchell and British settlers Thomas Pringle and Jeremiah Goldswain.

• A debt of gratitude is owed to all those who shared images of Port Elizabeth online, and of course to the original photographers.

• Please see my special tribute to former Africana librarian Margaret Harradine at the end.

Thomas Baines’s painting, The British Settlers of 1820 Landing in Algoa Bay, was painted long after the event, in 1853. But Baines, who was born at King’s Lynn, Norfolk, in England in 1820 and died in Durban in 1875, researched his subject thoroughly. The original is in the Albany Museum,

Grahamstown. He visited Port Elizabeth several times, the first in 1848.

Cape Governor Sir John Cradock proposed that British emigrants settle on the colony’s eastern frontier, and in 1819 the British parliament voted £50 000 for that purpose. This ship, The

Chapman, was the first of the settler transport ships to anchor in Algoa Bay, on the 10th of April, 1820. The name Algoa Bay dates back to at least the 16th century and comes from the Portuguese

navigators who called it Bahia da Lagoa – Bay of the Lagoon.

Lieutenant John Bailie led the party which included my direct ancestors, George and Mary Futter. There were 256 people in Bailie’s party and they were to be settled at Cuylerville in the Albany

district. (This and the following screen grabs are from 1820settlers.com.)

This is a cross-section of the names of those on board the Chapman. Near the middle is the name, Futter, with Godlonton to the right.

My great-great-great grandfather George Futter, a London shoemaker, was 38 when he came out to the Eastern Cape frontier with his wife Sarah, 35, and four children. Their descendants are to

be found across the length and breadth of this country, while many have moved abroad.

A sketch of Port Elizabeth by Sir Rufane Donkin, the acting Governor of the Cape Colony when the settlers arrived, done in 1821. Donkin’s famous pyramid can be seen at the top of the hill on the right. He had been on a voyage home from India, following the death of his wife, when he was requested to serve as acting governor during the temporary absence of Lord Charles Somerset, who was on leave back in the UK. He arrived in Algoa Bay on 6 June 1820. (See details overleaf.)

Notes on Sir Rufane Donkin

• Sir Rufane Donkin, the acting Governor of the Cape Colony, welcomed the roughly 5 000 British settlers who arrived in Algoa Bay in the course of 1820.

• They were to be settled mainly on small farms in what became the Albany district around Grahamstown, where there was already a British garrison.

• Donkin was clearly also a bit of an artist, and he did this drawing of the town-to-be. • He declared an open section of land overlooking the beach a reserve and had a pyramid built

there to commemorate his wife, Elizabeth, who had died of fever on 17 August 1818 at Mirat in Upper Hindustan, India.

• The eldest daughter of Dr George Markham, Dean of York, she was just 27 years old. • Her bereaved husband named the town in her honour: Port Elizabeth. • “To the memory of the most perfect human being who has given her name to the town

below,” reads a plaque on the pyramid. • Another says she “left an infant in his seventh month, too young to know the irreparable loss

he had sustained, and a husband whose heart is still wrung by undiminished grief”. • The pyramid was erected by soldiers from Fort Frederick in August 1820, by which time most

of the British settlers had arrived and been taken to their plots, there to struggle to eke out an existence with little support from the colonial government, back under the harsh rule of Governor Lord Charles Somerset.

• According to Margaret Harradine’s Port Elizabeth – A Social Chronicle to the end of 1945, Donkin saw the need for a seaport and “offered land [in the town] to those who had capital to buy it”. For instance, settlers from Deal in Kent acquired land in the present-day Deal Party.

Margaret Harradine records that Donkin’s knighthood was only proclaimed after Elizabeth’s death, so she cannot be called “Lady Donkin”. The pyramid memorial was designed by settler draughtsman Thomas Wilson and was “similar to that of Caius Cestius in Rome”. Donkin took her embalmed heart back with him to London where it was buried in the family tomb at old St Pancras Churchyard. Donkin’s “campaign sword and stall plate,

bearing his arms and originally intended for the Chapel of Henry VII in Westminster Abbey, are in the possession of the Port Elizabeth Museum”. I wonder if they’re still there.

As will be noted further on, when the European settlers arrived, they found indigenous folk virtually everywhere they went. Many of the Khoikhoi were used as indentured labour. But a

dissident member of the London Missionary Society started a mission station for some of these people to make a difference. These alms houses, built at Bethelsdorp in 1822, are a reminder of

that time. (Please see the next page for details. This image is from the city’s official website.)

Notes on Bethelsdorp

• The city’s website tells us: “Located on the little Swartkops River, Bethelsdorp was established in 1803 by Dr Johannes Theodosuis Van der Kemp and was the first organised settlement in the Algoa Bay area, bar the military command post at Fort Frederick. He was sent by the London Missionary Society and arrived in the area in 1801. He built a permanent settlement to fulfil his missionary work.”

• The Van Der Kemps Kloof Church was built in 1803 (and rebuilt in 1903 and 1926), a market square with mission bell dates to 1815, while a square stone house, named Livingstone Cottage, was reported to have hosted explorer and missionary Dr David Livingstone.

• The row of alms houses was built in 1822. They are in Water Road, just off Stanford Road, near the top end of which can be found Livingstone Hospital, named for his links to the area. The church is said to still house Van der Kemp’s Dutch Bible, the oldest in the country and printed in Holland in 1664, as well as his pulpit chair and baptismal font.

• Another website, www.southafrica.net, informs us that Van der Kemp’s activities were much frowned upon by the colonial government. It puts the establishment of the mission at 1802, and says Van der Kemp and James Read established it as a kind of refuge for some 600 Khoikhoi people. It “was seen by local farmers as a hotbed of rebellious behaviour by indentured workers. Said workers saw things differently. For them, Bethelsdorp was a refuge from a harsh colonial system that thrived on their labour but often lacked qualities like compassion, charity and a willingness to pay a fair wage.”

We’ll meet him again, but this extract is from a book by anti-slavery crusader Thomas Pringle, who came out with the 1820 British settlers. It explains how, while waiting for his party to be

landed, he visited Bethelsdorp. He speaks about being accompanied by young “Hottentot” boys, and of meeting a “Caffer woman” (referred to here), by which he means a Xhosa woman as

opposed to a Khoikhoi woman. Such terms were obviously not deemed slurs at the time.

Interest in South Africa in Britain was encouraged by the tremendous amount of information which explorers like William John Burchell acquired and wrote about. This is the title page of

Burchell’s Travels in the Interior of Southern Africa, which was published in London in 1822, so would not have been seen by the settlers before they embarked on their journey. But, as we’ll

see, they might well have heard of him.

In the introduction to his two-part book, Burchell explains what he set out to do and what he achieved. This is a small excerpt, taken from the digitised version placed online by Google, from

the original book in the library at Oxford University.

This shows something of the vast scope of his achievement, which is covered in minute detail in the book. The fact that at least two common species – Burchell’s zebra and the rain bird,

Burchell’s coucal – are named after him, shows the sort of impact his work had.

Here, from the first page of the adventure, which he undertook between 1811 and 1815, we get a sense of the excitement he felt as he approached Cape Town in a sailing ship. Next, we’ll read a

bit more about the man.

William John Burchell

• Who was Burchell? Wikipedia tells us: “William John Burchell (23 July 1781 Fulham, London - 23 March 1863 Fulham) was an English explorer, naturalist, traveller, artist and author.

• “He was the son of Matthew Burchell, botanist and owner of Fulham Nursery, nine and a half acres of land adjacent to the gardens of Fulham Palace. Burchell served a botanical apprenticeship at Kew and was elected F.L.S. in 1803.”

• (F.L.S. stands for Fellow of the Linnean Society, which was founded in London in 1788 and “dedicated to the study of and the dissemination of information concerning natural history and taxonomy”, says Wikipedia, which adds: “A product of the 18th century enlightenment, the society is historically important as the venue for the first public presentation of the Theory of Evolution.”)

• On Burchell, it adds: “In 1810 he sailed to the Cape on the recommendation of General J W Janssens to explore and to add to his botanical collection. Landing at Table Bay on 26 November 1810, after stormy weather had prevented a landing for 13 days, he set about planning an expedition into the interior, leaving Cape Town in June 1811.

• “Burchell travelled in South Africa between 1810 and 1815, collecting over 50 000 specimens, and covering over 7 000km, much over unexplored terrain.

• “He described his journey in Travels in the Interior of Southern Africa, a two-volume work appearing in 1822 and 1824, since reprinted in 1967 by C.Struik of Cape Town. There is little doubt that a third volume was planned, since the second volume ends long before completion of his journey. On 25 August 1815 he sailed from Cape Town with 48 crates of specimens aboard the vessel Kate, calling at St Helena and arriving back at Fulham on 11 November 1815.”

William John Burchell (last)

• Incredibly, he followed this up with a similar five-year exploration of Brazil between 1825 and 1830, “again collecting a large number of specimens, including over 20 000 insects”, says Wikipedia.

• “The journals covering his Brazil expedition are missing, as are his diaries relating to his later travels. His field notebooks, detailing his plant collections, survive at Kew, and from those the latter part of his trip can be reconstructed.

• “His extensive African collections included plants, animal skins, skeletons, insects, seeds, bulbs and fish. After his death by suicide, the bulk of his plant specimens went to Kew and the insects to Oxford University Museum.

• “He is known for the copious and accurate notes he made to accompany every collected specimen, detailing habit and habitat, as well as the numerous drawings and paintings of landscapes, portraits, costumes, people, animals and plants.”

• Of particular significance for my ancestors is the following:

• “Burchell was closely questioned in 1819 by a select committee of the British House of Commons about the suitability of South Africa for emigration, given his experience and knowledge of the country.

• “It was no coincidence that the 1820 Settlers followed a year later.”

• According to Margaret Harradine’s Social Chronicle, Burchell visited Algoa Bay in 1814.

Another to write extensively about his time in South Africa was Scotsman Thomas Pringle, (5 January 1789 - 5 December 1834), who arrived with the British settlers in 1820 on board the Brilliant. This is the title page of his 1834 reflections on the dozen or so years he spent in the

Cape, first with his party along the Baviaans River near Cradock and later in Cape Town.

Pringle was a poet, writer and pioneer of press freedom in South Africa after he moved to Cape Town to set up an independent newspaper in the 1820s, during which he clashed head-on with

Governor Lord Charles Somerset. On Page 1 he describes his arrival at the Cape. You’ll notice the use of the word, “Cafferland”, which in those days was clearly not deemed derogatory.

In this section, a few pages further on, Pringle writes about his impressions as he arrived in Algoa Bay in 1820. It is a fascinating account written by a highly educated man who would later play a

prominent role in the anti-slavery movement. (This account continues overleaf.)

Here Pringle describes the arrangements for the settlers before they set off for their destinations in the Albany district – although his party had chosen the Baviaans River area, with its more

mountainous nature better suited to the Scots.

Here Pringle introduces us to the “tall Dutch-African boors”, who would ferry the settlers to their allocated plots by wagon. (This section continues overleaf.)