The early Addo community and a meeting with elephants

The early Addo community and a meeting with elephants

By 1921 the Addo community was slowly starting to become more settled. More people were acquiring horses with the names like Pegasus, Toby, Dominic, Cornelius, Venus and so on. The two Briggs brothers named their property Rawdon, after a farm owned by their grandfather in Yorkshire, and acquired a two-wheeled buggy, pulled by their two horses Alban and Venus. There is also a photograph in my father’s album of a lucerne mower pulled by two oxen, but his diary ended in 1920, so it is not clear whether they owned this machine or hired it. But at least they must by then have had some producing lucerne lands to mow, grown presumable mainly in rainfall. One does not know how much water Caesar’s dam collected from natural run-off. The Company constructed the dam, originally an elephant wallow, as a stopgap to supply water to the settlers in the Addo area while Lake Mentz was being constructed. Unfortunately 1919 and 1920 were drought years in the Addo area, so that scheme also failed the first settlers. However some water must have been available because there is a photograph in my father’s album of lands being water levelled in January 1921, but where the water comes from is not clear.

Charles Rogers, Mary Elliott, Meg Mereweather, Miss Wadmore, Felicity Rogers and Elizabeth Dyke

The acquisition of horses made the young settlers more mobile and their social activities more variable. Picnics were often held on the banks of the Sundays River, wherever there was a good bathing pool. The older folk would arrive in buggies and the younger ones on horseback. In February 1924 my father joined a group riding along the ridge of the Zuurberg to Lake Mentz, taking four days to get there and camping along the way. Lake Mentz was finished by then, but standing empty while the Karoo suffered one of its periodic long droughts. My father developed an interest in hunting, acquired himself a 7mm Mauser hunting rifle, and spent a lot of time roaming the Addo bush around the Addo Heights, most of which belonged to the Harvey family. He made friends with the Bean family and often walked through the bush, over the Heights to their farm The Gorah, now better known as Schotia Safaris. He told me that once he came across of herd of elephant while walking through the bush, but fortunately they ran away.

Based on the fascinating writings of Mr Johnny Briggs, of Good Hope Farm, Selborne, based on the diary of his late father, ‘Kit’ Briggs, a Valley pioneer.