Blog post 8

Sat 21 – Fri 27 Feb 2015

Still in Pretoria… for now

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Taking stock, Saturday and Sunday… 

Five days work are now been completed on the Forbes collection in the NAD, with each day having been 6.5 hours without a break for each of us, that’s 13 hours per dayIMG_0086 x 5 days. We have a division of labour: Sue makes a ‘dummy’, a database containing all meta-data for the letters in each folder/box; and then I read each letter and create extracts etc, generally filling in content, and also JPEG the 1 in 5 sample of documents we’re drawing, plus any ‘extras’ that are interesting/important. However, Sue’s first folder was really enorrmous, so I did all tasks on a smaller folder, then another… We’re now well out of synch, so she may have a day or two off next week while I work some full 8am to 4pm days, the hours the NAD is open, again without a break. But beyond these rather dull facts of ‘we go to work, we work hard, we will work harder’, what is there to say?

Firstly, there is a lot of the ‘what is it’ puzzles noted in Blog 7, for the Forbes people copied nearly  every incoming item and drafted everything they sent out if it was even vaguely to be seen as ‘business’. But what are copies to be seen as in an epistolary sense, and also how (ie. by what means) to tell their relationship to what is copied when all there is is something headed ‘Copy’?

Secondly, I’ve read some really interesting letters this week, with highlights including —

  • A Forbes farm manager (white) writes a note to David Forbes Snr saying the Swazi King has given permission for a group of boys (literal boys) to go to the coast to work, these have assembled, and Kate Forbes has fed them as much food ‘as they can stow away’ preparatory to leaving. This inscribes the fairly innocent start of a time-travelling word which is later deeply insulting and applied to adult black men.
  • The Alexander McCorkindale Estate (very complicated, huge amounts of land, many land investments) is finally settled, and Mary Ann McCorkindale (maternal aunt to Kate Forbes and Sarah Straker nee Purcocks) writes of her relief even through the Transvaal government will take most of it; she provides detail of the settlement terms, which have not been written about very accurately before. The sums of money and tracts of land involved are eye-watering.
  • James Forbes Snr sends via a legal friend a kind of bill to his brother David Snr for £50,000 for his part of some mining/concession rights. This is comparable to somewhat over £4 million in today’s terms, and finding this out leads to loud gasps from me, for other sums of £20,000 and £50,000 are bandied about frequently by them as they float that company and this. Were the Forbes at this stage not merely rich, but filthy rich?
  • On a scrap of paper, the very large sum of money – £200,000, about £16 million – that another mine concession was being offered for sale at is carefully written by David Snr. Below, in another hand, are very different sums, the £1-0-0 and £5-0-0 for wages recorded against 4 or 5 African men’s names. The eye goes from one to the other and back again, a moral as well as numerical shift around a labour theory of value.
  • A young Swazi woman who works for the Forbes goes to see a local Magistrate, sent by Kate Forbes to get some advice, and with her goes an older man who has been trying to sell her or perhaps rather indenture her services elsewhere. The Magistrate sees this as compelled and a kind of slavery and he recommends the protection for this young woman and others of having a formal contract with the Forbes. A double-edged sword, perhaps.
  • After David Forbes Snr’s death in late 1905, Kate Forbes writes to the Estate solicitors in Edinburgh (they have other solicitors, for different purposes, in S. Africa) specifying how her full ownership rights are to be secured over all the farms, no matter who runs and lives on them; she wishes to be fair, but ‘who can tell what the future brings’. Although not visible in many public activities, Kate was clearly a power in the land.
  • Following Jim Forbes Jnr’s death in 1921, Kate Forbes contacts the Edinburgh Estate solicitors to safeguard the farm that Jim occupied, which belonged to Kate but was worked by him. Out spills much detail of Jim’s failed marriage, his (unnamed) wife not letting Kate see her granddaughter, Jim’s will giving Dave Jnr guardianship of the granddaughter not being valid, all of which helps explain elliptical content across many other letters… There are almost no such ‘personal’ things in the thousands of Forbes letters, so this is a rare glimpse.

Briefly, I imagine trawling the entirety of the WWW data to find, say, a 100 really interesting letters, provide them (= retrievable data, which readers can have access to), and write about them using my knowledge of the whole lot (and indeed my 25 years of researching the South African past). A book? An online publication? But one project at a time!

And thirdly, it’s curious that estimating timings based on other collections doesn’t ‘work’ with these Forbes letters. I’m significantly slower – aka more engrossed with content – compared with Schreiner-Hemming-Brown, White, Pringle et al letters. So on Friday from 8.45 to 15.30, I read and briefly précised some 130 letters, wrote more detailed comments on a sub-set of around 45 of them, and jpeged these latter. Elsewhere my rate has been more like 200 per day. This slowness/being engrossed is a good thing rather than a bad, but it means I have to revise what will be accomplished by the time we pack up and leave some items/boxes for another trip. So Monday to end Wednesday I need to work like stink.

Another road trip ahoy

The long NAD days being contemplated are to enable us to finish up, to a point decided on Saturday, by the end of Wednesday. This point will be a neat and tidy one, but some untouched boxes will remain. Then we take off for two days – Ermelo, Amsterdam (earlier known as New Scotland), Athole, Westoe, Glen Eland, the Komati, Lake Chrissie, Lake Banagher… The names of these towns, farms and lakes are entrancing and accommodation has been booked and a two-day route planned for this look-see. The next blog, no. 9, will be a continuation of this one, but focused on the road trip.

Monday through Wednesday

We have a now revised plan for these three NAD days, but after 7 long working weeks we’re both knackered so who knows. Sue has produced dummies with full meta-data for every collection and every box, and made JPEGs and done side-research, at each archive we’ve worked in. And I’ve been reading and recording upwards of 200 letters per day from Monday to Friday, then during evenings and at weekends among other things I’ve been cleaning (aka tidying) files of their typos, mistakes and making lists of missing info to be repaired the next day. So now there will be one final immersion in Forbes in a less tidy way from Monday to Wednesday, with cleaning reserved for next Saturday, the last day of February. Then we pack up. Back in Edinburgh on I think 2, or is that 3 or 4, March; time and date in the present are a bit hazy to me.

The revised plan? Sue sacrifices her days off (or perhaps salvages just one) and she jpegs my selections of letters from the three final boxes for me, so I can focus on reading, reading, reading, summarising, listing, extracting. Also, regarding one box which consists of a massive letter-book, she will make the dummy and also JPEG sample letters, but I will break my usual rule and won’t work on these until back in the UK. That’s the plan, but we’ll see what Monday &c brings and briefly update in Blog 9.

Last updated: 22 February 2015


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