The excitement of a Karoo wedding day is electric. The ‘jolly host’ troops out to welcome each arrival, each new horse or cart, explains BA in the December, 1859, issue of The Cape Monthly Magazine. “All young men are ushered to an outbuilding to spruce up. (Damsels do this indoors). The lads are given a basin, a jug of water, and a solitary comb, which they all share. Each looks extremely satisfied as he completes his toilet and allows another to step up to the basin, towel and fractured mirror. At last each man finishes arranging his hair by the simple process of spitting on his palms and smoothing down the fretful bristles into fashionable sleekness. Then the young swains gather in little groups. Then, after the parson has done his bit, everyone moves to a large woolshed or barn to feast on venison, poultry, mutton and peacock, “an unequalled delicacy of the Karoo.” The air is filled with convivial speeches. Looking around it becomes apparent how many guests have made an attentive study of the fashion pages of the Illustrated London News. The first squeak of a violin has an electric effect. Chairs and tables are swept away while amateur fiddlers tune up like fifty stomach aches. Karoo lads, despite their heavy boots are extremely agile. They rush to partner solid sylphs and nymphs of impressive girth, but it soon becomes apparent that Karoo damsels are both light of heart and heel. Most are equal to tapping out the intricate steps of each dance. Older, more staid men puff rhythmically at their pipes talking of wool, weather and market prices. While mothers speak their eyes never leave the dancers, all the while checking that their daughter’s honour is in no way besmirched and constantly scouting out suitable sons-in-law.” BA and friends enjoyed the wedding. They left at four in the morning. On the way home their cart overturned and slid down an embankment. Sunrise found them all with unaccountable splitting headaches. “We felt these were caused when the horse lost his footing and the cart landed on top of us!” he writes.
To attain the status of married bliss on the frontier it was essential, said BA, for a young man to observe a few formalities. This young man, who simply called himself BA wrote in the December, 1859 issue of The Cape Monthly Magazine “Courtship must be conducted during a series of amorous visits. For these a good horse is essential. It must be brushed, burnished and gleaming. It must also sport a saddle and bridle of the finest shining leather. A quality saddle cloth, preferably red or blue, is essential and it should be set off with fringes and tassels. The idea is to impress all who see him along the road, as well as his intended.
“Once he reaches her home it matters little what he says to his adored. In fact, he need not speak at all. It seems the essence of a farmer’s love resides in the act of sitting silently in the “voorhuis,” staring silently at his own huge ‘veldschoens’. Then, by degrees, if the atmosphere warms, he may gradually, with a doleful smile, sidle his chair towards hers while she blushes deeply at his every move . This whole pantomime takes place after the day’s work is finished, so it is all done by the light of a short, stubby candle, which he brings along with him in his pocket. While the candle spits and splutters he may “visit,” but when it dies, the visit must end. So, the trick is to court mother and father and tickle them into consent. Oddly these courtships always seem to work out quite amicably and as intended.”
In 1859 a young Swellendam man was invited to a Karoo wedding. He was not one of those who fell instantly in love with the area. In fact, he called it “unique in its ugliness and wanting in everything to please the eye.” And, he declared: “Here the poetry of life is absent.”
Simply signing himself BA, in The Cape Monthly Magazine, December, 1859, he describes the Karoo as “A barren, brown stony plain stretching ahead for many a tiresome league.” He adds: “No sounds of life disturb its sullen solitude; no patch of verdure yields joy to the eye, no leafy tree sheds refreshing shade. Vultures, gorged with the remains of a starved horse, rise slowly into the air, depressed by the labour of flapping their wings. Here and there bleached bones of cattle, protrude from the arid plains, silently screaming “thirstland”. Stunted, ash-coloured bushes, prickly cactus and grotesquely-shaped euphorbia, mock the needs of animals. No fields of waving corn, no snowy flocks nor lowing herds, no cheerful gardens, nor social smoke-wreaths proclaim man’s presence, yet he lives here, in dwellings hidden amid hills or secluded in hollows. What induced anyone to settle here, I wonder. How do they survive in this world where the mountains are bare and the rivers dry. Here ravines, vales, depressions, ruts, and shallow water channels are all like wrinkles on the face of the country. Yet, even in this wilderness, there is happiness when Cupid’s bow strikes home! Love triumphs here undeterred by winter frost and scorching blasts of summer heat!”
Pondering life in the hinterland BA concludes that here needs are few. “Men are comfortable with two rooms for their shelter and a stable for their horse. However, add a wife to this and a full quiver of children and their cup of happiness fills to the brim,”
Modern communications is not all it’s cracked up to be. Over a bad cellphone line the name of the man who made the windows of the Sacred Heart Catholic Cathedral in Bloemfontein sounded like Leonardus Albertus. ”It is in fact Lambertus Emundus (Leo) Monsma.,” writes his son-in-law, Tony Nell. “ and he was responsible for fixing stained glass windows in some churches in the Karoo.”
“Leo was born in Holland on July 5 1909. On October 10. 1934 he married Cornelia Helena Francina Hamers. They had eight children – four sons: Wiebe, Johannes (Han), Innocentius (Inno), and Alfonsus (Fons), and four daughters Annette (Netty), Lydwina (Lydia), Veronica (Ronnie) and Odelia (Diel), the youngest, who was born in South Africa.”
Leo, a leather tanner by trade ran his own business in Holland. During World War II he was active in the Dutch Resistance Movement. His tannery was damaged in a bombing raid. In 1948 Leo then decided to move to South Africa to create a new life for his family in a country not ravaged by war. He arrived in February, his family followed in October. In South Africa, Leo did not follow his trade as a tanner, but held various posts in companies such as General Chemicals, where he became acquainted with liquid latex.
“This became the core of his stained glass business. As a hobby, he started making glass mosaic items, such as tabletops, using various colours of broken glass. They were an instant success. He then experimented with different colours and pigments. More artistic pieces such as lampshades and furniture followed. Before long Leo had developed his own colours and pigments, methods of mixing these with the latex and effectively applying the mix to glass sheets. He patented his methods and Glasparents was born.”
Before long he was accepting commissions for huge stained glass projects in Bloemfontein and throughout South Africa. He also fixed up windows for many small churches across the Karoo.
“In 1962 Leo and Helena, returned to Amstelveen, in Holland, with their three youngest children. He continued doing stained glass work in Holland until he died on September 25, 1980,” said Tony.
Post cart travel had little to recommend it according to John Widdicombe, a mid-nineteenth century traveler. He described the carts as looking like a square water tank with rails on two wheels. “The mailman stored mailbags inside the tank and, when it was full, tied extra bags on top. The carts, which were not covered, were designed to carry three passengers. One sat next to the driver and two sat back to back with them their feet on the tailboard. The roads were poor, horses untrained and many drivers unskilled. Except for a short stop now and then for a hasty meal at a farm or wayside inn, the coaches drove on relentlessly. Passengers got no rest. They constantly had to be on their guard against dozing off and falling from the cart. It was dangerous to tie oneself to the rail as there was a very good chance of being crushed to death if the vehicle overturned, which they frequently did,” said Widdicombe.
In 1883 a steamer, shipped from Cape Town, arrived at Beaufort West station. Locals watched incredulously as bits and pieces of this 11m long steel-hulled ship, its 4kW engine and two propellers, were off-loaded, then packed and lashed onto two ox wagons, under the supervision of English adventurer, John Thorburn. As the wagons trundled off across the dry Karoo veld Beaufort Westers wondered what on earth he was going to do with a ship in the middle of the South African hinterland.
Thorburn had left England for America at an early age. There he tried his hand at many things. He was a planter, a slave trader and a soldier during the American Civil War. The discovery of diamonds drew him to South Africa, but he did not succeed as a miner, reports Eric Rosenthal in Shovel and Sieve.
So, at the cost of £4 000, he built a steam-powered boat, that could hold 300 tons. His aim was to ship goods down the Vaal to Kimberley, but his plan failed because the Thembe, with its 2,5m beam and 55cm draught, drew too much water.
Undaunted Thorburn set off on an incredible, 2 000km journey, fraught with immense challenges. He set a course for the Mocambique coast, building roads where none existed. Ever onwards he dragged the Thembe, the largest parcel ever conveyed across the South African veld. En route he painted and re-painted the vessel several times. It was tough going. One place was so rough it took four days to cover two kilometers. At another point on the epic journey a wagon overturned smashing the Thembe’s cabin to smithereens. Still Thorburn kept going. In 1886, with the end in sight, Thorburn walked to the coast, returned, built his final road, and within days launched the Thembe from the mouth of the Rio Spirito Santo. Three years had passed since his wagons pulled out of Beaufort West’s station.
Things happened very fast once gold was discovered on the Witwatersrand. Virtually everything was in short supply in the fledgling mining camp that was to become Johannesburg. Realising this, a Mr Van Rensburg from Colesberg set up a transport business, bringing much needed produce to the miners.
On one trip he was stunned at the prices oxen were fetching in Johannesburg, so he sold his whole team. He left his wagon behind Auctioneer Morkel’s office for safe keeping and hurried back to his Karoo farm to fetch another team of oxen.
“Morkel was not in his office when Van Rensburg parked his wagon there, and the clerk with whom he left instructions forgot about it” writes Robert Crisp in The Outlanders. “Six weeks later, when Van Rensburg returned, he found that the open space behind the auctioneer’s office had been completely built over to make an auction room.”
Oddly enough his wagon had not been moved. He had to dismantle his wagon on the spot and carry it out piece by piece through the front door of Morkel’s office. Van Rensburg then had to reassemble the wagon in the street, while the restless team of oxen milled about, and Johannesburgers with nothing better to do, looked on in great amusement.
In the 1900s everyone who was anyone “took in a show,” when travelling theatre groups came to town. Then, suddenly this social tradition was threatened by a spate of poor performers. One of the worst groups, according to The Courier, was Will Morgan’s Australian Juveniles, a troupe of variety artistes.
In Beaufort West a printer’s devil led to their show being billed as “Vaudeville Vile,” instead of “Vaudeville Live.” However, after seeing the show, The Courier reported: “The inaccuracy is pardonable. This group has neither talent nor stage deportment. The first night was a flop, the second cancelled due to lack of an audience. So, the troupe could neither pay its bills, nor hall hire costs.”
Heated arguments erupted. According to The Courier: “Some actors were arrested for theft. Others tried to leave on a Worcester-bound train without tickets. They too were arrested and did a stint in jail.” Just as the furore died down, the troupe reappeared in Beaufort West under a new name. One angry theatre-goer wrote to the The Courier on February 18, 1904, protesting about “the frauds we are suddenly seeing masquerading as ‘refined Vaudeville troupes’. Their shows are third rate, undesirable and questionable, both as regards elegance and competence. I was shocked to see sham actors trying the honour of the stage a second time in Beaufort West. This will ruin things for good groups. The theatre-going public will have a surfeit of spurious histrionics and soon will not buy tickets, fearing to be duped. The Actors’ Association must save the public from these frauds, and its own good name from becoming permanently besmirched.”
Travellers peacefully dozing, serenely watching the Karoo pass by through the windows of a luxury train narrowly escaped death near Beaufort West, early in May, 1903. As the train cheerfully chugged along, billowing smoke and periodically shattering the peace with its shrill whistle, passengers, could never have imagined a brush with death waited at the bottom of a nearby hill.
A report in The Diamond Fields Advertiser stated: “Only luck, good fortune and quick action averted a serious catastrophe. As the deluxe train began descending towards a culvert, the driver suddenly saw a runaway engine and trucks hurtling towards him. He slammed on brakes. The runaway engine plunged across the culvert, dragging its trucks up the incline. It smashed into the luxury train, still roaring downwards, with brakes screaming, instantly turning that engine turned into a heap of twisted metal.
Eye witnesses described the noise of the impact as terrifying. A mail coach, bound for Johannesburg, was smashed beyond repair. Newspapers, letters and other postal items were strewn widely across the veld. Fortunately the impact did not occur at the culvert. If it had, the luxury train’s carriages would have hurtled down a high embankment. Many would have been injured. As it was flying debris hit the roofs and windows of the luxury carriages alarming the passengers, but miraculously, not injuring a soul.
The driver and fireman of the luxury train emerged shaken, but without a scratch. This amazed all who saw the accident site,” wrote the DFA reporter
