Saturday 30 Aug: The Pringle part of the Pringle Papers seems to raise very different points about figurations and connectedness from the Hockley/Townsend element within them (see Blog 42 on this latter). William Dods Pringle, arriving in the Eastern Cape as a young man as an 1820 Settler seems a very head down sort of chap, buying up land, pursuing his farming concerns, defending his property and the locale around it against the ‘Savage Enemy’ in a succession of frontier wars (that may or may not have been wars in a definitional sense), being litigious, marrying and being widowed twice, the second time with Harriet Townsend born Hockly. Dods Pringle was primarily a farmer and a ‘Lord of the Glens’, naming everything in his part of Baviaans River after Scottish glens and hills, with his one attempt to move into politics and a wider sphere failing. There isn’t even any sense that Dods Pringle was associated with the very active if very narrow racial politics of Robert Godlonton and his connections such as Robert White, William Cock and others in Grahams Town. By comparison with his older half-brother, the famous poet, journalist and anti-slavery figure Thomas Pringle, Dods seems a very parochial man, and Thomas a cosmopolitan living in a wider world of ideas, causes and people. The connections for Dods Pringle centre on the Harts, Ainslies, Bowkers and the list goes on of local Baviaans and other families which became multiply interconnected over two and three generations through marriage, and there is little sense of anything more from the extant letters.
In some contrast, Harriet Townsend with her far and wide links in a very real sense represented the wider world. What’s going on in this contrast bears a number of interpretations – but one of them is surely place and locale. The Baviaans River of the Pringles is still even now fairly inaccessible, along 50 miles of dirt road with barriers and major potholes and river fording points to reach one glen and farm and then the others; those without 4x4s should not be tempted! But Harriet Townsend was a townswoman, with London dissenting roots which continued to play an important part of her life in S. Africa, and she lived in the then bustling and prosperous towns of Grahams Town, Cradock and had connections also in Graaff-Reinet, not to mention her trading associates in Port Elizabeth and Cape Town. Country and remote rural fastnesses, and towns with bustling fermenting populations, come into view.
NB. No water, high winds, storm all-night torrential rain, plummeting temperature, still no water but flooding… and my baby I-Pad seems overnight to have died, trapping yesterday’s blog in its silent carcass, so I’m in grim lamenting mode all round. PE, a functioning shower, and an Ocean Basket restaurant beckon, just two car driving hours distant but a world away! It is still dark, Grahamstown still sleeps, the rain still rains, and we leave later today.
Last updated: 30 August 2014
