Introducing the Forbes diary | Whites Writing Whiteness

Introducing the Forbes diary

Please reference as: Liz Stanley (2019) ‘Introducing the Forbes diary’ www.whiteswritingwhiteness.ed.ac.uk/Collections/Collections-Portal/Forbes-Diary-Collection/Forbes-Diary-Intro and provide the paragraph number as appropriate when quoting.

Guides to the Forbes diary are:

1. The Forbes and their diary

1.1 The Forbes were 1850 migrants from Scotland to Natal, who then moved to the Transvaal. There is a brief summary of the main features of the diary, ‘Forbes diary in a nutshell’. A document containing information about the Forbes and other key people in the diary, ‘Forbes diary dramatis personae’, provides further detail. There are also two guides to the year-diaries and how they have been worked on: ‘Forbes diary overviews’ and ‘Forbes diary: working conventions’. This document introduces the main features of the diary and how they fit together.

1.2 As well as running the large farming estate, known as Athole, in the Ermelo/Amsterdam district of the south-eastern Transvaal (known at the time as New Scotland), the Forbes were also involved in prospecting and mining and a range of other business activities. Athole was an estate composed by a number of farms that reputedly added up to around 60,000 acres, plus the Forbes also engaged in many other business ventures as well. These included large-scale farming of diverse kinds, including crops for local, national and international markets; stock breeding and herding for meat and other products, breeding thoroughbred horses, droving and carting, as well as minerals prospecting, floating a mining company on the London stock market, and having interests in a coal concession.

1.3 In general, the information recorded in the diary concerns the economic activities – conceived broadly – of a number of interconnected organisational entities. These include the Athole Estate, the Home Farm, the Mining Company, the Coal Concession; and these organisational entities encompassed a range of people and their economic activities, and in particular: David Forbes snr; his wife Kate Forbes nee Purcocks; his brother James Forbes snr; and the Forbes children Nellie, Dave, Jim, Kitty, Maggie/Madge, and before his early death also eldest son Alexander jnr known as Alick, who as adults all became partners in the Estate and Home Farm.

1.4 The information recorded also encompasses the Estate workers who were peasant farmers/sharecroppers carrying out many skilled tasks, and the people who worked in the kitchen, the farmhouse, the kitchen garden, as well as the workers who provided the main labour power that made economic life on the wider Estate possible. In addition, there is information about white managers including Robin Forbes, Mr McNamara and Mr Churchman, as well as passing and often indigent white tradesmen who worked there for shorter periods of time.

1.5 Extended family members also played an important part in family economic life. There is much in the diary, for instance, about connections between the Forbes and Athole, and members of the Purcocks family, with Kate Forbes’s younger sister Sarah Straker nee Purcocks an important presence on an adjacent farm, Westoe. In addition, the Forbes’s sister Lizzie Forbes, who had remained in Scotland, was an important presence both in maintaining contact and in expediting aspects of family ventures in Britain, including buying and despatching goods, attending shareholders meetings and acting as a guardian for a number of family members.

1.6 Although interpreting monetary values of the day is not straightforward, it is nonetheless clear that the family became quite wealthy. This was due in part to the judicious purchase of farms when the New Scotland area was obtained by Alexander McCorkindale (a relative by marriage) from the Transvaal government via President Pretorius, in part due to minerals and in particular gold and coal discoveries, in part due to the entrepreneurial spirit with which the Forbes engaged in economic life. Succinctly, the Forbes became wealthy and remained highly active in an economic sphere, with this including women members of the family as well as the men.

1.7 The Forbes diary is a semi-public form of document, rather than the usual view of diaries as concerned with personal life, relationships and feelings. Many farmers in different areas of the country kept a diary with similar attributes, in focusing on activities and things rather than relationships and feelings and specifically being concerned with working routines, the arrivals and departures of both stock and people, and weather patterns. Because the Forbes were involved in many interrelated economic activities in addition to farming, so the Forbes diary records these things across the range of their involvements, with this giving it a particular edge in focusing on both the specifically local, and also on a range of wider concerns and interests.

1.8 In addition to writing a diary, the Forbes produced many other kinds of writing. The collection includes many thousands of business and family letters, as well as a very large numbers of receipts and bills, accounts, inventories, lists, and also a memoir. All members of the Forbes family were involved in the production of large quantities of paper records, although some did so more than others; and across the generations and different parts of the family, some members also became family archivists in retaining the letters and other documentation they received. A number of theoretical ideas for interpreting and understanding their linked writings have been developed around the key concepts of ‘the scriptorium’, and publications arising from this can be accessed via the WWW Hub page on the Home screen.

1.9 The diary shares a particular feature with the other forms of Forbes writing, for it too ‘travels’ in a particular sense of the word. This most obvious example of this occurs regarding letters and their literal travels from writer to reader and back again. However, it also occurs regarding the movement of inventories and tallies, from registering activities (dead sheep, new-born foals, weights of fleeces), to recording their management (the action taken regarding these things) to documenting their oversight (in a diary entry). And similar travels, involving transferrals of information from concrete material activities through registration to oversight, can be traced for the other documents produced, such as receipts, bills and accounts – and also the Forbes diary. This is a very interesting features of the Forbes scriptorium and its interconnected character. The diary is focused around Athole Estate and its different components and gives oversight of this, and it forms a hub around which these other kinds of documents were organised, circulated and placed. At points these other writings are referred to, although often they might not be ‘seen’ on its pages in a direct sense. What is recorded in the diary is a matter of selection and representation on the part of the writer, and the way they did so could bracket but allude to the everyday documents of life, like counts of stock, weights of mealies and lists of money paid out to workers, that underpinned the meta-view which the diary provides.

2. The diary as a semi-public document

2.1 The Forbes diary consists of twenty-four year-diaries, written from 1850 through to 1917 and the first two months of 1918. There are some gaps in particular in earlier years when there are no diaries, which most likely occurred because of ordinary attrition rather than deliberate destruction. The twenty-four Forbes year-diaries add up to a remarkable document and its present-day interest lies in:

(a) the extensive record the diary provides of the diversity of farming, business and other interests of the Forbes,

(b) the extensive record it contains concerning the working lives of the peasant farmers and sharecroppers who formed the key group of workers on the Athole estate,

(c) the range and focus of diary contents regarding social and political events over the lengthy time-period covered, and also

(d) the distinctiveness of the diary in becoming a semi-public document recorded by a succession of diary-writers with an eye on a possible external audience, at the same time as also being written for practical everyday purposes.

2.2 The successive volumes of Forbes diary are primarily focused on recording shared economic concerns, rather than personal life and relationships, and later ones add to this because they developed as a specific form or sub-genre of diary, a ‘South African farm diary’. It is called South African because this sub-genre does not appear to have existed elsewhere, and a farm diary because its focal point is a farming estate and its unfolding activities and personnel. However, because of the breath of their economic interests, in the case of the Forbes diary its focal point is much wider.

2.3 The Forbes diary along with other South African farm diaries is not a ‘personal’ diary concerned with ‘I’, as noted earlier. It rather takes the form of a kind of ‘Captain‘s log’, and is an impersonal record by the person in charge which covers the disposition of people, activities and resources. Recording various aspects of farm life was needed from an early point in the settler presence in the two republics (the Free State and Transvaal) and two colonies (the Cape and Natal) that later composed South Africa, regarding such things as notifiable diseases in animals and crops, stock movements for similar control and prevention reasons, and also concerning temperatures and rainfall as well as bush fires. The formalisation and regulation of the farm diary as a sub-genre occurred in the Transvaal from 1903 on as part of the extension of British imperial governance and regulation in the period immediately after the South African War (1899-1902), in requiring certain kinds of content to be recorded and available to regulatory governmental bodies. However, from a much earlier period farmers in the different areas of South Africa had kept diaries with similar attributes, for practical purposes in acting as a kind of ‘work memory’.

2.4 There are variants of such farm diaries from as early as the 1820s, although the Forbes diary is a particularly full, detailed and long-lived example with a breadth of concern, and is distinctive in being so.

2.5 Earlier usages in what was recorded and how by the Forbes included the factual matters commented on above, and then from 1903 became amalgamated into a more formal version when systems of governance and the activities of the provincial Ministries of Agriculture were extended and sought to systematise farming practices. What was quickly reached was recording information in the Forbes diary around a kind of template of standard items to be included, discussed later. Among other interesting things of note about such diaries is that they could be used or indeed required in formal circumstances such as court cases, as well as some information having to be returned to government agencies.

2.6 A number of instances of this are recorded in the Forbes diary (and in other diaries that are part of WWW research). Recording such matters was important and necessary, so that, in the absence or indisposition of the main diary-writer, who was the person in overall charge, then another responsible family member took over.

3. The writing ‘I’, the ‘We’ and the written ‘They’

3.1 Over the period that the Forbes diary was written, from 1850 to the early months of 1918, there was a general shift in how people are represented in relation to the diary-writer. In the early diaries up to the 1870s or 80s, the entries concern a ‘We’ which includes the writer but as a member of a wider collectivity that was family-centred although it also included other people living and working in the area around the farm house and Home Farm. These other people formed a kind of ‘Them’, having more distant connections but still being closely economically linked.

3.2 The entries begin to change in particular when they are recorded in a printed diary which has half of a week per page, rather than a whole page per day, for entries. What then emerges is a pattern of entry-writing that is more concerned with the wider ‘They’ of Home Farm and also Estate workers and their activities in ploughing, planting and the like. And this remains so even when the printed diary later used for recording entries again allocates a whole page per day. To an extent this maps onto David Forbes snr being the first main diary-writer, and then Kate Forbes taking over after his death; but it is more than personal preference or style, for her earlier entries when he was absent differ in this same way from his.

3.3 Also, across these changes over time, the diary rarely uses the ‘I’ pronoun, even when entries are written by different people, which occurred at various points when the main diary-writer (David Forbes snr and after his death Kate Forbes) was absent. These include residually Dave jnr, Madge and Nellie Forbes. Also, for one period there are some entries by a young cousin at remove who worked for a time at Athole, Robin Forbes, and one of the farm managers called McNamara.

3.4 Examples of occasions when ‘I’ does appear include:

David Forbes’s 1871 diary as an example of the absence of ‘I’ apart from at a number of specific points, where ‘I’ is articulated to make particular points
When Kate Forbes is part of a group of people doing something, she often adds ‘& I’ at the end of the list in her diary-entries
On occasion when Kate Forbes is outraged by something happening or not happening, the general tenor of an entry changes and she uses ’I’ in recording her dis/approval

3.5 However, the general pattern still holds and these uses of ‘I’ are atypical.

4. The emergent conventions

4.1 The existence of tacitly used conventions regarding what a farm diary should be like is demonstrated in a clear way by the diary for ‘1912 ^and 1913^’. Dave Forbes jnr wrote the diary at this point, due to his mother’s absence from Athole, and in doing so he pared down the entries in a way that reveals what he saw as the basic requirements for recording the farm diary:

Activities on the Home Farm and Estate
The coming and going and activities of workers
Details about stock of all kinds
Details about crops of different kinds including breaking ground, fencing, planting, hoeing, winnowing, watering, picking etc
The coming and going of people more generally, including himself and other members of the family (referred to in this diary in the third person and using titles, such as Mr Forbes for himself and Mr James Forbes for his brother Jim jnr)
Temperatures, rainfall; and some entries also include wind directions and velocity

4.2 Dave jnr’s father, David Forbes snr, was the main writer of the diary from 1850 up to circa 1904 and the first half of 1905, and then around his final illness Kate Forbes took over responsibility for doing so, although she had also written the diary for 1868 and most likely wrote other diaries no longer extant, as well as writing entries when her husband was absent for any reason. Typically, they both provide more detail about such matters than Dave jnr, in particular about people and activities and not just narrow farming ones. However, the basic shape of what is recorded is the same. As a result, although entries by them have more of conventional ‘diary feel’ because of the detail included, they are still notable for the omission of an ‘I’ way of writing the daily records and for taking a broadly ‘Captain’s log’ form.

4.3 Thus, even in the more detailed entries written by David snr and Kate Forbes, these still record in a descriptive and largely non-evaluative way what the main daily farming and other activities involved were and who did them. And regarding the latter, it tends to use collective words and particularly ‘Kafirs’ and later on ‘Boys’ for the unskilled workers, while combining this with referring by name to the long-term valued ‘inner’ group of skilled workers like Bismarck, Mangaka, Gubasie, Intima and a number of others, who were peasant farmers also sharecropped on the Athole Estate.

4.4 How and when did these ideas about the farm diary as a form come to be practiced by the Forbes diary-writers? Even in earlier diaries, there are signs of these categories of information being recorded. However, in mid-1902 the Forbes returned to Athole from a rented farm in Natal, where most of the family had farmed over the period of the South African War (1899-1902). From this point, a short sentence or so given in a formulaic way about the day’s examples of these categories of information above are recorded fairly systematically. These became rapidly codified in the first few months of the 1903 diary and thereafter shaped entries.

4.5 The broad context was that Departments of Agriculture in each of the four states published journals encouraging the systematic recording of information about temperatures, and rainfall etc and also required returns concerning notifiable diseases. These ideas were picked up and acted on, with comments about this in diary entries, such as when a thermometer that would record highs and lows was purchased.

5. Absences and presences

5.1 As compared with the thousands of Forbes letters, the diary overall does not record many of the persons and events that appear in these. Important examples of the ‘things that do not appear’ in the diary are the sixty year-long correspondence between Kate Forbes with Lizzie Forbes in Scotland, the relationship with Jemima Condie nee Forbes and her daughter Susie Condie also in Scotland, details of visits back to Britain, and most importantly the to-ing and fro-ing of thousands of business letters of a large variety of kinds pertaining to all aspects of the Forbes’s economic life, including the Forbes Mining Company and the Coal Concession and also the dense everyday economic transactions that their activities overall entailed.

5.2 The diary meticulously records visitors who arrive, and also visits by family members and workers to places elsewhere. It amply conveys that Athole Estate was by no means isolated in spite of the great distances involved and that people travelling were reliant on horse/mule/ox transport, and there was a fairly constant to-ing and fro-ing of people. This is perhaps surprising, but it certainly conveys the richness of settler networks and the divisions as well as shared concerns that existed between them.

5.3 However, as compared with the letters, the diary gives less of a sense given of how the Forbes were tied into various interconnected networks that spanned different places in South Africa, as well as South Australia, Scotland and England, composed of family members and business associates and with these groups significantly overlapping.

6. The quotidian and the eventful

6.1 The dominant trend in the diary is recording the unfolding and only incrementally changing aspects of life (as in the conventions above regarding what is recorded) on the Athole Estate and Home Farm. This is spasmodically punctuated by events of different kinds occurring in the local area and at points more generally. If the diary overall can be seen as a kind of Captain’s log of the temporal voyage from 1850 to the early months of 1918, when the last entries were made, then these events are akin to squalls and occasional storms that punctuated the general tenor of the voyage.

6.2 Such events include:

Disagreements and controversies with or among workers
Major events in the lives of workers

PLUS

1870-1871 David Forbes snr’s trading and mining trips
1900 Sense of persecution from local Boers
1903, 1907-8, 1912 Potolosie’s madness
1905 Death of David Forbes snr
1906-7 Amsterdam library controversy
1906 Bambatha uprising in Natal
1910 Halley’s comet
1912 Death of Sarah Straker nee Purcocks
1913-14 Mining and railway strike reports and rumour
1913-1914 Boer Rebellion reports and rumours
1914 ‘Kill all whites’ scare
1914-16 South African Defence Force in German West and also German East Africa
1915 Accidents and illnesses among family members
1917 Fires deliberately set by local Boers
1917 Court case against Jim Forbes jnr by Golach & Cohen

6.3 A diary that is kept long-term is above all a sequential document marked by seriality. Time, then, is of the essence. With regard to the Forbes diary, some important aspects of its temporal character are:

Times changed and so the context and circumstances in which the diary was written and the Forbes’s life at Athole occurred also changed
The diary-writers changed over time, both who wrote, and how/what
The character of the entries changes over the long run, for while the diary throughout recorded primarily economic activities, its inscription of ‘We’ and ‘Them’ changed
From a diary of economic activities in general, there is an over time shift to the farm diary format

6.4 The Forbes diary is fairly consistently written in the past tense, about daily time gone by. And while sometimes it appears that entries were written at the end of the day, there is clear evidence that others were written up after the event, with such records kept on loose sheets and sometimes tucked into diary-pages, and there is also evidence that on at least one occasion some original entries were removed and replaced with re-written versions (in a handwriting that is difficult to pin down).

7. The diary and the collection

7.1 How best to consider and use the Forbes diary in relation to the letters in the Forbes Family collection, and indeed in relation to the collection as an entirety?

7.2 The diary, and the letters, are different forms of writing. They each have their own conventions and expectations of what should, and what should not, be recorded in them. At times, the contents of diary and letters come closer together, while at other times they seem almost to concern different entities. Indeed, to an extent they do concern different entities, for the one (the diary) is primarily concerned with the Athole Estate, and the other (the letters) with a wider set of activities and people. Succinctly, they were produced for different purposes by people located in different parts of the Forbes scriptorium engaged in producing different forms all genres of writing, but both are important and at basis interconnected aspects of the scriptural economy that resulted.

7.3 Using the letters and the diary therefore needs to take into account such things as who writes, who receives, the prevailing conventions, how these are handled within the scriptorium, the other forms of writing to which they are intertextually connected, and related factors. It is also important to remember that these are all forms of representation. They do not give unmediated mimetic access to ‘what really happened’. They are mediated by circumstances and context, by who writes and the form in which they write, and their particular take on the activities and people involved and the form of writing they are engaged in. As a result, they cannot be taken as straightforwardly providing ‘the facts’, although they are nonetheless immeasurably valuable as historical sources so long as these rich complexities are recognised.

7.4 As noted earlier, a detailed guide to the Forbes Letters is provided elsewhere on the website. A number of guides to the Forbes diary are also provided on the appropriate website pages. These explain the main points of note about each of the year-diaries, a dramatis personae of the main people featured, and how the diary has been sampled and transcribed.

Last updated: 28 August 2019