Theo Aronson's "A Valley Couple"

(Extract from The Trumpeting Elephant newsleter May/June 1999. Editor: Margaret Walton)

Memories of Early Valley Life

Mr. Theo Aronson, world renowned author, who was born in Kirkwood and who now lives in England, has taken a keen interest in “The Trumpeting Elephant” to which he subscribes. To our great delight he has written the following article for us – we only hope that there will be more articles on his childhood in Kirkwood.

A VALLEY COUPLE

Theo Aronson

My mother came to the Sundays River Valley in 1910. Her name was Hannah Wilson and she was a teacher. As the township of Kirkwood was still being laid out, she lived and taught in nearby Bayville, on the banks of the river. I have a photograph of her at the time, in ankle-length skirt, white blouse and with her hair in a loose Edwardian knot on the nape of her neck, taken against a surprisingly empty, almost desolate background. My mother always looked very young for her age and many years later when I used to go out walking with her, her ex-pupils, who to me looked astonishingly old, would totter up to greet her as ‘Miss Wilson’. My mother was very proud of having started the first library in Kirkwood.

My mother seldom spoked about her childhood but after she died I did some research into her background. Her father, who had been born in Aberdeen in Scotland, was a sailor who jumped ship in Cape Town and spent a roving, restless sort of life. At the age of 60 he settled, strangely enough, in Aberdeen in the Cape Province, where he married a girl of 17. The couple had eight children, of whom my mother was the youngest. As I was not born until my mother was 45, I – who am not that old – had a grandfather who was born almost 180 years ago, in 1820.

Sometime during the First World War, my mother went to Cape Town to marry a man who left her, quite literally, standing at the altar in full bridal dress. She returned to Bayville and married my father; on the rebound, I suspect. She was then 32, he 30.

My father, Philip Aronson, was born in Riga, Latvia which was then part of the Tsarist Russian Empire. He came to the Valley in 1914, when he was 24. He had an older brother there, who died young. My father first had a shop in Tregaron, which I think is still there. Why it was called Tregaron, I don’t know. Many years later, when I was on tour of the United States to promote one of my books, I was in Los Angeles to appear on the famous Merv Griffin Television Show. As I left the studio I suddenly passed a small restaurant called for some reason, “Tregaron”. It made me feel that, in many respects, I had journeyed a long way.

My parents were married in 1919. In that same year they built the house in Harrod Street, Kirkwood, in which they lived for the rest of their lives and in which they celebrated their Golden Wedding in 1969. They died – first my mother and then my father – within three months of each other, in 1970.

One final anecdote. When I was in my twenties and working in London, I once put a pack on back and, all alone, hitch-hiked from Ostend in Belgium to Kirkwood. The journey – it was really in the nature of a Napoleonic pilgrimage and resulted in my first published book, ‘The Golden Bees: The Story of the Bonapartes’ – took six months. I arrived home in time for Christmas. Although my mother travelled quite extensively, my father never left Kirkwood except to go to Port Elizabeth. There he sat, for year after year, decade after decade, going only to Port Elizabeth on either the Uitenhage or the Addo road. Well, when I arrived home that Christmas, having completed a 6000 mile overland journey, my father asked me which way I had come. I started to explain that I had travelled all across Europe, through the Middle East, down Africa, but he cut me short.

‘No, no,’ he said. ‘Did you come through Uitenhage or through Addo?’

Early Valley Entertainment by Vivienne Gruskin

Early Valley Entertainment

The Trumpeting Elephant

Newsletter of the Sundays River Valley Tourism Forum

Vol. 4 No. 3

August 2001

It is very fitting that Vivienne Gruskin should have written the evocative and fascinating article on early Valley entertainment. Not only was Vivienne the secretary of the Play-reading Society but also chose the plays, cast the players and did the stage décor for more years than she cares to admit.

Memories of Early Valley Entertainment

Recalled by VIVIENNE GRUSKIN, assisted by PETER BURTON

When the pioneer settlers began arriving from the United Kingdom in the early 1920’s, the Valley must have presented a desolate scene. Having left behind the greener shores of the British Isles, bushes, dust storms, relentless heat and an almost permanent scarcity of water. They must have longed for some form of entertainment to brighten their lives. Cut off from Port Elizabeth by bad roads, insufficient transport, and an understandable lack of funds, it is easy to see how they were thrown back to their own resources for entertainment.

In his account of the early days, Johnny Briggs recalled how his father, Kit, and Uncle Arthur, used to gravitate to the home of Eric and Kathleen Swann for musical evenings round the piano. Eric Swann was a prime mover in Valley entertainment in those days, also John and Nan Champion, and the Arthur Filmer’s, whose daughter later married the actor-playwright, Emlyn Williams. One can imagine the settlers inspanning their carts and horses, with a hanging lantern to light the way, or cranking their Model-T Fords, to travel the bad roads to these gatherings. Love of theatre is traditional to the English way of life, so it was natural that evenings where no doubt the ever-popular Gilbert and Sullivan operettas predominated, should branch out into theatrical discussions, concerts, and eventually into staging plays.

The first play, produced in 1925, was “TILLY OF BLOOMSBURY” by Ian Hay. An adventurous choice since it was presented at the Irrigation Board Hall, which possessed no stage or curtain. A wide variety of 15 characters ranged from clergymen to cockney bailiffs, with an Indian, an old lady and a 15 year old girl thrown in for good measure. The mind boggles as to how they achieved it especially with two changes of set from country house to Bloomsbury. Produced by Eric Swann, the cast included well-known names from the past like Arthur Clutton, Alice Elliott and Eric Swann.

This play was followed by others in the 1920’s, namely “Charley’s Aunt”, in which John Vincent took the title role. Also in the 1920’s, this adventurous group staged “Mr. Pym Passes By” at the Opera House as a festival benefit for the retiring city organist, Roger Ascombe.

A play “On Approval” by Frederick Lonsdale was put on at the Irrigation Board Hall with a cast of four – Arthur Clutton, John Vincent, Jane Bengough and Andora Toms. Arthur Clutton used to tell the story of how they took the play “on tour” to Uitenhage in the pouring rain over shocking roads, just managing to get there in Major Reddie’s farm truck, only to find they were playing to an audience of about 10, of whom three were Addo Supporters! Also in the early 1930’s, Noel Crawford’s “Private Lives” was produced at the Irrigation Board Hall and then in Port Elizabeth with the same cast of inspired actors – John Vincent, Andora Toms, Jane Bengough and Arthur Briggs.

By 1931 a Play reading Circle had been firmly established, due largely to the efforts of Nan Champion, Dr. Max Klaas and Jumbo Erskine, with about 30 members gathering at houses in the district. In the beginning, plays were not acted, but read sitting in a circle. Voices from those early days 1931-39 were John and Nan Champion, John Vincent, Arthur Briggs, Arthur and Joy Clutton, Mrs. Phyllis Rogers and her daughter, Andora, Eric and Kathleen Swann, Jane Bengough, Alice Wilkie, Bill and Peggy McIlleron, Nancy Boustead, Jumbo Erskine.

After the Valentine Hall was built by the Sundays River Women’s Institute in the late 1920’s, it was also used for plays and concerts – Theatrical personality, the late Taubie Kuschlik, used to relate how she played Queen Elizabeth at the Valentine Hall, with the dressing rooms in a tent pitched alongside. In later years, of course, the hall was gradually improved and adequate dressing rooms and toilet facilities provided.

The Play reading Society flourished until the war years, 1939-45, when most of the men folk left and the women were too busy coping with farming in those difficult years.

At the close of the war, the society was revived in 1945 with Joan Dowling as secretary. Among the returned soldiers was John Vincent who had, while a prisoner of war, been involved to a great extent in staging plays in the POW camp, making props and costumes out of virtually nothing. He brought his considerable theatrical experience to bear on the newly formed group. The first post-war play reading, “Gaslight”, was read behind a white curtain at the Vincent’s home, with a sort of black and white silhouette effect. Apart from the established readers, newly acquired readers in the years 1945 to the 1950’s, were Mollie Sullivan, Arthur and Joy Knight, Philip and Lucille Kirby, Vivienne Murphy, Denys and Oonagh Parkin. The year 1950 with “Blythe Spirit” and all the technical difficulties it presented – pictures dancing on the walls and so on – marked the year in which the society tackled just about everything. After that, there was no difficulty our technical men, John Vincent and Arthur Knight, could not overcome. There was no backdrop our chairman, John Vincent, could not paint, no prop he could not manufacture.

Play readings in those years were performed in private houses, which explains the advice on notice cards, “Please bring your own cup and cushion”! Hostesses might well remember moving out furniture and bringing in lug boxes to seat audiences. In those days citrus was not transported in bulk trailers or pallets, but in those useful and very accommodating lug boxes. While reading in private homes were very enjoyable and intimate, it soon became evident that there were only a limited number of houses with the necessary large interleading rooms, and audiences were beginning to complain of discomfort. In 1950 the Women’s Institute took the play reading society firmly under its wing and granted the use of the Valentine Hall at minimal cost. Society subscriptions in those days were five shillings (50 cents) a year, and ‘a couple of bob’ for tea served at interval. It was also the year Vivienne Gruskin became general secretary where she has remained ever since.

The first play read at the Valentine Hall was “The Dover Road” by A.A. Milne. With the help of Arthur Knight the stage was reconstructed with interchangeable stage flats, which he designed, and built, making it, as a visiting dramatic society once described it, “one of the finest small stages in the Eastern Cape”. Arthur always told the story of how he designed the central light fitting using his old Morris car’s hub cap!

Play readings became an integral part of Valley entertainment. Operating in the cooler months, plays were put on once a month, the most popular times being school leave-outs and vacations. There was always the noisy front row of small children who produced unexpected laughs when a child would recognise a reader with a loud shout, “There’s my Daddy!” or a small boy yell during a tense thriller, “Mind! He’s behind you!” On another occasion when we had produced a wonderful man-made tropical bird in a cage, as essential stage prop, a small voice piped, “Huh! That’s not a real bird!” (A youthful Peter Slement, of course!).

Apart from the noisy front row, the more sedate centre rows, there were always the back rows where teenagers, more interested in one another that the play, launched their assorted holiday romances. Nevertheless, it was gratifying just how many of the front row and the back row graduated into becoming fully-fledged readers. There is no doubt, apart from filling a need for entertainment, the play readings fostered a love of live theatre and were extremely popular monthly gatherings. The plays were obtained from the ever helpful and efficient Drama Library in Bloemfontein. The rehearsals were great fun, trying to make the necessary gestures or passionate embrace with a book and a drink in one hand and sometimes a revolver in the other. The crew behind the scenes had to man the  “Thunder Machine”, a sheet of corrugated iron, or roll an ancient “Bushman Stone” along the floor for deep rumbles, ring a telephone bell on cue or make the appropriate off-stage noises.

During the years, 1950’s to 1970’s, many dramatic societies presented plays at the Hall for local charities, particularly Uitenhage and Port Elizabeth. Bookings were done at Gruskin’s store – the ever-present order book with pencil attached, which went on the delivery rounds, often saw more seats being booked, than grocery orders placed! The cast members were always treated to a sumptuous meal beforehand – traditional Valley hospitality being a tremendous draw. In similar fashion the play reading presented plays to other groups – I recall evenings at what was then Sandflats, and also at the Port Elizabeth Women’s Club.

1951 Was also the vintage year in which the Addo Play reading produced a play, “Murder Out of Tune”. Apart from two performances at the Valentine Hall, we toured Sandflats, Redhouse, Uitenhage and Port Elizabeth. In the play, a thriller, two shots had to be fired. Our noises-off “gun” was unreliable and sometimes only one shot went off. A runner was always dispatched to the dressing room to warn the actress off-stage, “one shot went off” or “we got two shots”. When she came on-stage, Mollie Sullivan would then know she had to say, “I heard one shot” (or “two” as the case may be!). In this successful play, which produced so much hilarity for us backstage, the cast consisted of Philip and Lucille Kirby, Valaine Murphy, Anthony Swann, Mollie Sullivan, Denys Parkin, Alice Elliott, John Vincent and Vivienne Gruskin – the latter also produced the play.

1952 Onwards were good years for the play reading – a nucleus of enthusiastic and experienced readers, as well as new faces and voices – Rosemary Elliott, Stella Austen, Aileen Grier, Eve Pike, Florence Stein, Michael Richardson-Berl, Geraldine Walton, Margaret Walton, Philipp and Tienie Maske, Joan Stretch, Norman and Charmian Slement, Ian Moore, Oonagh and Denys Parkin. We were able to put on plays with large casts like Dear Octopus, Worm’s Eye View, and The Happiest Days of Your Life, and not turn a hair.

The future of the play reading, like that of all amateur groups throughout the country, became threatened with the advent of television from 1975 onwards. People no longer needed to leave the warmth and comfort of their homes to sit in a hall on a cold winter’s night. For the first time in the Valley’s entertainment history, the theatre was there, on tap, or rather, at a touch of the on-switch. Friday night, instead of play reading night, became “Bonanza” night! The history of organised entertainment came to a voluntary end. No one declared it over – it just folded for lack of support. We rung down the final Curtain and the play readings carried on by presenting the annual play at the Institute’s December Founders’ Day meeting – one-act plays with all-women casts always the most difficult genre to obtain.

So many faces gone – and yet remembered. The fun we had – the side-splitting things that went wrong backstage, the welding together of the cast, the spirit of comradeship, almost like soldiers going into battle, the feeling of achievement when a difficult play went off well – all these were the rich rewards of many years of entertainment. Things have come a long way since those early settlers had singsongs round the piano. Who knows – the days of live theatrical presentations might come again as the pendulum swings. It only needs a few theatrical enthusiasts with sufficient energy and dedication.

Editor

Margaret Walton

Sub-Editor: Helga Fraser

Typesetting and layout by Janine Briggs & Margie Tarr

Jane Meiring: Author and early feminist

Newspaper article 0n 26.03.2006 (Care of Johnny Briggs):

JANE Meiring, who has died at the age of 86 in Kenton-on-Sea, in the Eastern Cape, was a prolific author and historian.
    She wrote the first comprehensive biography of Thomas Pringle, who started the country's first newspaper, the South African Journal, with John Fairbairn. Pringle also waged a relentless battle with the governor, Lord Charles Somerset, for freedom of the press.
    Meiring was the first historian to tackle the life of Francois le Vaillant, a colourful French artist and early traveller to South Africa in the 1780s. Her book, Truth in Masquerade, examines Le Vaillant's controversial journals - which were considered far-fetched even in his own time - and provides a fascinating account of his travels into the interior.
    Its publication in the mid-60s coincided with the publication of 165 of his water colours, the originals of which were in the parliamentary art collection in Cape Town.
    Jane Meiring (nee Rose) was born in Johannesburg on February 24 1920. Her father was an American mining engineer who had been recruited to work on the South African gold mines in the early 1900s, when technical skills were badly needed to support the booming industry.
    The family moved to a farm in Addo in the Eastern Cape when she was eight and she was educated at St Dominic's Priory in Port Elizabeth.
She demonstrated an early talent for story-telling. When the children had to collect and clean eggs, her siblings were happy to do her share of the work provided she told them stories while they went about it.
    Her first stories were published in Outspan magazine when she was still at school. She continued submitting stories to magazines for the rest of her life and was published in the likes of Blackwoods magazine in Britain, among many other British and US titles.
    After reading History and English at Rhodes University, she did radio work for the SABC during the war years, which paid her £1 a story.
    In 1943 she married Pieter Meiring, a citrus farmer in Kirkwood in the Sundays River Valley, one of the early farmers in the valley.
    Meiring was an early feminist. Her heroines were Olive Shreiner and Emily Hobhouse, who highlighted the inhumane treatment of Afrikaans women and children in British concentration camps during the Anglo-Boer War. Meiring's mother-in-law and sister-in-law were among them.
    The last book she wrote, Against the Tide, is a history of the role of women in that war, and includes an in-depth investigation of the camps. Meiring was correcting the final proofs when she died.
    In 1965 she moved to an estate in Mazoe, north of Salisbury in the then Rhodesia, for 10 years when her husband was put in charge of Anglo American Farms.
    They retired to Kenton-on-Sea in 1976. Pieter Meiring died in the early '80s. In 1985 she married Eastern Cape ear, nose and throat specialist Dr Melville Marquard. He died four years ago.
    Meiring had a powerful personality and brooked no interruptions while writing. She pursued her projects with relentless self-discipline, rising early in the morning and spending a good six or eight hours at her desk.
    When friends saw the "Gone Fishing" sign on her door they knew better that to disturb her.
    Meiring is survived by three children and two step-chilren.

-Chris Brown

Early Sundays River Valley Farming - citrus, cows & farming methods

Early Sundays River Valley Farming - citrus, cows & farming methods

Addo in 1937 saw the Brigg’s family expanding when Johnny was born in October. Johnny’s father took the plunge and built the present farm homestead on the hill overlooking the farm, the Coerney River valley and on towards Addo Heights. Building seemed to take up most of that year, Johnny’s dad, Kit, uncharacteristically ambitious with his building plans. Eventually, photographs show the venerable model T Ford lorry, as well as their car, a Plymouth, carting furniture and household goods up the hill to the new family home. A farm foreman, Mr. Sweetman, was installed in the old cottage to help Kit run the farm of some 2000 citrus trees and a few dairy cows. This was the norm of the times. Cows kept on the farm, the milk separated, and cream sent three mornings a week by train to the dairy in Port Elizabeth. This little exercise entailed much work: lucerne was grown, mown and stacked; cows were herded, kraaled and milked twice a day. Milk and cream cans were washed out and filled with milk and cream separated in the dairy. A lot of activity, it seemed, for a small sideline, but that was how one farmed during those times. The cows were kraaled each night as well as the two mules that were a major factor in the daily farming activities, and every six months or so the manure was dug out of the kraals and carted into the orchards. Whenever a cutting of lucerne was spoiled by rain, it was also carted into the orchards to use as a mulch, which conserved the moisture in the soil, and helped control the weeds, as well as improving the fertility of the soil. The two mules that Johnny can remember were called Kaptein and Rooiland, strong and hardy, and were inspanned every morning, outspanned at lunchtime and inspanned again in the afternoon. September Makeleni was the muleteer. They pulled a four-wheeled wagon that was used to cart lug-boxes in and out of the orchards during the harvesting season. The lug-boxes were stacked near the sheds and when one hundred lug boxes were ready, Mr. Whittle, Thurston’s father, who ran a transport business with Chevrolet three-ton lorries, came to load them and transport them to the citrus pack house. Out of season the mules were used to cart lucerne, manure, fertilizer etc., and were used to pull a plough, cultivator, leveler, dam-scoop or whatever else was being used at the time. Kit Briggs spent a lot of time repairing the leather harness room cleaning and oiling the harness. The McCormick Deering tractor was started up once a month, quite an operation, to disc the orchards, and the mules did everything else.

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.

Addo Polo Club beginnings

Addo Polo Club beginnings

The Addo Polo Club, in Addo, Eastern Cape, was started in 1923 largely through the initiative of Cecily Fitzpatrick (daughter of Sir Percy Fitzpatrick, author of Jock of the Bushveld) in 1923. Cecily found many supporters among the British settlers’ wives, all keen horsewomen. Dorothy Gibbs, Noel McBean, Margery Merewether, Phyllis Pearce, Iris Rathbone and two Apthorpe girls joined Cecily as players. Cicely FitzPatrick married Jack Niven – there has been a Niven playing at Addo throughout the club’s history – and men began to join the fray. It was not until the late 1940s and ‘50s that women’s polo started in South Africa.

The Addo Polo Club got going again, boosted by the Niven family team of father and three sons with Cecily (Sir PercyFitzpatrick’s daughter) as Umpire. Dougal McBean, a tall, austere and aristocratic Englishman, who owned Stellenhof farm, pressed for the exclusivity of the club, declaring that he had no desire to drink at the same club as his farm manager, who was in fact quite an educated Frenchman called Chevaux, but not an Englishman of course. Val Sullivan, the Archetypal Ladies Man and enthusiastic Polo player regarded it quite acceptable to swear loudly at the opposition during a chukka, so long as his blue-tinged outburst ended in “Sir”. Bull Oxenham always rooted for the pony rather that the player. Buller Pagden, always the showman, had his groom Willie bring his change of mount between chukkas to the front of the clubhouse so that spectators could watch him mount his fresh pony. Polo was very serious, posh, and rather high society.

Polo is still played at the Addo Polo Club today but not to the same degree. Ladies are now allowed in the bar and all are welcome! Bull Oxenham’s son, Futa, and grandsons, Ray and Hugh, still live up the road and play Polo for Addo. Addo History continues!

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.