Sat 23 Aug: The photographs of invoices to Mrs Harriet Townsend (1817-1874; daughter of Elizabeth Hockly, and entrepreneur and widow of ineffectual trader Edward Townsend) accompanying this blog are for various kinds of goods. They stand for many hundreds, indeed thousands, of invoices, sometimes for highly specialist or quality items (including silk purses and photographs of art works), at other times from wholesaling concerns that provided bulk goods across a wide spectrum. Reading folder after folder of amassed invoices ranging from small scraps of paper acknowledging payment of a few shillings for repairing boots to long elaborate orders of goods worth over £100 may not seem exciting to some. However, I’ve found them incredibly interesting because they’re helpful in starting to piece together how Mrs Townsend developed the business both before and especially after her first husband’s death.

What does this rich minutiae of invoices and payments help bring into sight concerning ‘the business’ of Mrs Townsend? There is an infuriating absence of other equally important information, such as diaries, personal letters, or concerning her undoubtedly many customers because there is only a small number of letters in which named people ordered goods from her. But what remains is still sufficient to reach some provisional points which can be picked up and researched further, as follows.

Harriet Townsend nee Hockly came from an entrepreneurially-minded family. Her mother Elizabeth Hockly nee Moore came from shop-keepers and property owners – before her parents’ deaths, they had owned a chunk of prime real estate in Chelsea in London, for instance and all the daughters owned or worked in businesses. After emigrating to SA in 1820, Elizabeth Hockley ran a school for younger children in PE followed by Graff-Reinet followed by G’town and Cradock; then after she was widowed she ran what seems to have been a dress- and bonnet-making business as well as renting premises she had bought in Cape Town and Cradock.

Harriet Townsend nee Hockly’s husband Edward too was part of his (British based) family business; but in his case he was just not very good at it (what he really wanted was to be a missionary). So this led Harriet to become involved and she then took it over after his early death in 1840, when she was still only 23. She placed her children as boarders in a school ran by one of the Miss Pringles. She ran the business in two key towns that the local white populations congregated in (Grahamstown while Edward was alive, then moved to Cradock). She mainly sold goods of a kind that no one else did. She paid her bills expeditiously to local businesses, although those to her Cape Town Agent (who held her power of attorney) for the businesses in Britain from which she bought goods were usually paid late and only after being chased. She was respectable and her respectable family surrounded her, in Cradock literally so. She married Dods Pringle in (probably) 1848, just before the Eight Frontier War, which adversely affected many businesses, commenced. She seems to have ‘retired’ as a business woman as she began to have children with him, although the dress and bonnet-making business as a family enterprise continued and involved her sisters and cousins as well as her and her mother.

Not a bad set of things to have retrieved from dusty piles of invoices, cancelled promissory notes, accounts! And work on the collection continues.

Last updated: 23 August 2014