Boer History1905 in South Africa: Brandt-Van Warmelo’s Irene, Rudolph at Maritzburg, and the Cape Records Closed
Brandt-Van Warmelo: Het Concentratiekamp van Irene at Amsterdam
At Amsterdam this year Johanna Brandt-Van Warmelo issued Het Concentratiekamp van Irene. She had done service as a nurse in the camp at Irene, one of the camps into which Boer families were brought from 1900 while their men were still in the field. Peace between Britain and the two Boer republics — the South African Republic and the Orange Free State — was signed at Vereeniging on the 31st of May 1902. The camps were broken from June 1902. The camps had cost 26251 women and children and 1676 men above 16, mostly greybeards. Between a quarter and a fifth of those brought in from May to December 1901 died in about 8 months. The book of 1905 was not a new count of that total. It was one named camp, written from a nurse’s diary, put into type at Amsterdam three years after the tents at Irene came down. [6]
Last year’s print had been Kritzinger and McDonald’s In the Shadow of Death at London, Luckhoff’s Women’s Endurance at Cape Town, Brink’s Ceylon en de Bannelingen at Amsterdam and Capetown, De Kok’s Empires of the Veld at Cape Town, and the Gedenkboeken at Amsterdam and Capetown. Those were general titles of the war and of banishment. This year’s book named a single camp. The bibliography that listed Blake at Boston in 1903, Brebner at Edinburgh in 1903, Brink at Amsterdam and Capetown in 1904, and Luckhoff at Cape Town in 1904 now listed Brandt-Van Warmelo at Amsterdam in 1905. What hung on that listing was that Irene, already named among the Transvaal camps, was no longer only a name in a list. It was a book. [6]
Irene stood in the Transvaal list with Barberton, Heidelberg, Johannesburg, Klerksdorp, Krugersdorp, Mafeking, Potchefstroom, Standerton, Vereeniging, Balmoral, Belfast, Middelburg, Nylstroom, Pietersburg, Volksrust, and the rest. It was called the model camp. It was also the camp that, in the week ending the 2nd of March 1901, registered 455 of the 927 persons under medical treatment in all the Transvaal camps — about half the total — so that one medical officer could not treat them effectively. The unsanitary conditions that held in the Transvaal and Free State camps until the end of 1901 held at Irene as they held at Belfast, Johannesburg, Balmoral, Standerton, Middelburg. The slaughterhouses at Johannesburg and Irene were found dirty and unhygienic. The book Amsterdam issued this year did not reopen that list as a list. It gave one of those names the leaves of a diary. [6]
E. B. Sargant himself took the first group of overseas teachers to Irene. They landed at Capetown on the 5th of January 1902, fetched by W. A. Russell and Dr W. A. Macfadyen; 10 destined for the Free State remained at Bloemfontein; 12 under Miss Firks, head of the Bloemfontein Normal School, left for the Transvaal. Sargant met them at Elandsfontein and took them to Irene, where they were housed in tents. Mr Munro took the 6 Scottish ladies — Mickie, McLeod, Kinnoch, Kerr, McKenzie, and Kirkwood — to Belfast; the 6 English ladies remained at Irene. The second group of 28 stepped ashore toward mid-January; 12 remained at Bloemfontein; 16 went on to Irene, and the day after their arrival they were taken to the Irene camp school and seemed much delighted with the teaching they saw and with the earnestness and docility of the Dutch children. At Irene the inspectors of the several districts met the teachers and saw to their conveyance to their destinations, even as far as Natal. Those tents, which housed the first imported staff, were the same camp from which this year’s nurse wrote. [6]
On the 27th of April 1902, after a visit to the Irene camp, she was able to note with joy that the people had had the whole summer an abundance of vegetables and received milk and syrup, good flour and enough frozen meat, so that they had not to complain in that respect. The children in their turn received daily a plate of good soup and more sterilised milk than they could use. That April note was written after the Ladies Committee’s reforms — better and more food, enough firewood, soup kitchens, camp matrons, zinc huts and frame houses, latrines reformed, water supply improved — had begun to work, and after frozen meat had begun to be issued. The book of 1905 therefore held both the May of 1901, when the meat could not even be made into soup, and the April of 1902, when the summer’s vegetables and the frozen meat had come. It was the one camp written through from the model camp’s sick-list to the later plenty, and put into type at Amsterdam while the new colonies still sat under Milner as high commissioner. [6]
Irene’s Meat, Meal, and Sugar as She Wrote Them
From the beginning of May 1901 the complaints of the quality of the meat issued in the several camps grew. Miss Johanna van Warmelo, who had done service in the camp at Irene, reported at the beginning of May that the meat there issued was of such a quality that soup could not even be boiled from it. On the 6th of June she further reported that the people could not use it, and hung it everywhere on the tent-lines to dry in the sun. The meat, she went on, was even unfit for a dog, but when the women complained the superintendent Scholtz and his officials became furious, as if the women had committed a great sin. Her testimony was confirmed by the camp authority itself. The same Scholtz, in his report for the month of May, mentioned a great murmuring in the camp over the quality of the meat. The sheep were in the most pitiable condition, and yesterday 2000 averaging in weight 15 pounds each were so taken for the use of this camp; but, he added by way of excuse, the meat compared favourably with what was to be had in butchers’ shops in large towns at present. Those leaves, already in the diary, were the leaves Amsterdam printed this year. [6]
Dr Kendal Franks, who on the 11th of July held inspection in the Irene camp — precisely in consequence of Miss Van Warmelo and other ladies’ statements — gave special attention to the meat supply. He reported that the carcasses of what had not been rejected as unusable and buried were skin-and-bone. He understood that the average weight was about 15 and 16 pounds. Nevertheless he regarded the meat as sound meat. An average grown sheep weighed from 45 to 60 pounds. At Johannesburg on the 18th of July the same physician found the average weight of sheep 15 pounds, about 50 per cent of it bone, about 15 sheep a day discarded as unfit for human food; at Krugersdorp on the 31st of July still worse, 13¾ pounds, of which a good half was bone. The name vrekvlys was given almost generally to that particularly lean meat. Luckhoff at Bethulie wrote that the vrekvlys became nauseous as the days rolled by, a dreaded nightmare; Channing in the Commons said it was not a ration of meat but of skin and bone. Irene’s nurse wrote the same meat before Franks came, and this year’s Amsterdam book still carried her May and June pages. The slaughterhouses themselves, at Johannesburg and Irene, were found dirty and unhygienic — a lure for flies. By September 1901 the sheep flocks held at the camps for slaughter were nearly used up. Corned beef was then issued; the Ladies Committee was satisfied with neither the lean mutton nor the tins, and recommended frozen meat, or else that camps be moved to places where fresh meat could be obtained. On the 19th of December 1901 increased railway facilities made it possible to arrange for frozen meat instead of tinned meat at a number of camps. On the 23rd of December the military governor at Pretoria told Milner that arrangements had been made for frozen Australian meat at camps where the army supply of fresh meat failed. That was the frozen meat Van Warmelo would note with joy at Irene the following April, and that this year’s Amsterdam book still carried beside her May pages. [6]
Meat was not the only rationed food of miserable quality. As example for what took place in the camps throughout the Republics, the model camp at Irene could serve. “In the meal” — so nurse van Warmelo noted in her diary on the 14th of May 1901 — “were large lumps and it swarmed with living worms. I saw how the little ones played with them …. the doctor will send up a complaint and ask for a fresh supply …. As for the sugar and coffee — well, they are something scandalous and I think they are the cause of the terrible number of diarrhoea cases in the camp.” An English lady, Mrs Bodde, confirmed that testimony in a letter written from Pretoria on the 23rd of May, in which it was argued that the meal was often bitter and uneatable, the coffee consisted largely of roasted acorns, and the sugar was only the scum of the boiling-kettle. Those sentences, written at Irene in May 1901, were the sentences this year’s book still had to carry. [6]
On the 22nd of May 1901 a number of women from Pretoria, among them the mother of nurse Van Warmelo, paid a visit to the Irene camp and took away samples of the sugar — in which among other things the head of a lizard was found — of the meal, and of the coffee, as a “curiosity.” Some of the women, at the sight of the conditions in the camp, made on the 24th of May a first appeal for help to the Consul-General of Portugal and other representatives of foreign powers in Pretoria. D. Cinatti was the Portuguese consul-general; baron Ostmann represented Germany, baron Pitner Austria. In respect of the food and other necessaries in the Irene camp the women set down: their food is mostly unusable; we know of a case where the mother in the space of 16 days had to see 3 children carried away; they died of stomach illness, caused by spoiled meal, bad meat, sugar, and coffee; other food the imprisoned women and children do not receive; no soap or candles have they yet in all that time received; those are called luxury articles; the Afrikaner people cannot live on flour, even of the best; the poorest is accustomed to plenty of milk and simple but nourishing food. A copy of the document was sent by the consuls to the Military Governor, J. G. Maxwell, who in his turn handed it to Lord Kitchener. [6]
When no improvements followed, the ladies were obliged on the 1st of July 1901 to address a second writing to the consuls. By a curious chance Maxwell paid a flying visit to the Irene camp on the same day. Miss Van Warmelo accompanied him and answered in certain sections. To a question of Maxwell’s why some persons did not wash, the answer came that there was no soap. Even Dr Kendal Franks declared in a report on the Irene camp that the quality of sugar supplied there during some months had been black and bad. Johanna van Warmelo branded it black and sour. Emily Hobhouse, who visited several camps, declared that she had coffee and sugar in her possession which a London analyst had pronounced in the first case to be 66 per cent adulteration, and in the second the sweepings of the warehouse. Those were the pages of Irene that Amsterdam issued this year: not a new count of the dead, but the nurse’s own meat, meal, sugar, soap, and the governor’s question why some did not wash. [6]
The Model Camp, Maxwell, and the Children’s Scale
Dr Turner, appointed to keep a watching eye over the camps after the civil authority took them over, reported at the beginning of March 1901 that in the Irene camp the number of sick was apparently great. If all the other 52 weeks were equally sickly, it would mean that every man, woman, and child would come under the doctor’s hands 6 times per annum. Measles and diarrhoea reigned severely, and no fewer than 154 persons out of a population of 1324 were bedridden. Nevertheless there was in the Irene camp only one medical man, Dr J. Bulpin, and no hospital at all. The death-rate — 16 persons between the 6th of February and the 3rd of March, that is 174 per thousand per year — Turner branded enormous. On the 24th of May the superintendent Scholtz at last reported that he then had hospital facilities and was also having a building put up for persons who should fall prey to lung complaints. That was the model camp whose nurse’s book this year issued at Amsterdam. [6]
In following of a circular of the General Superintendent of the Transvaal camps the physicians from March 1901 submitted weekly reports on the health of the camps, with statistics of sickness and deaths, to the camp superintendents, who then sent them to head office. Circular A.5 from Pretoria was dated the 25th of February 1901. The first list for the week ending the 2nd of March 1901 indicated that 927 persons in Transvaal camps were under medical treatment. Of that number the model camp Irene registered 455: about half of the great total. It was therefore impossible for one medical man to treat them effectively. Dr Percy Green of the Irene camp himself conceded that there was more than enough work for another medical officer to do in the camp, as it was quite impossible for a man to visit more than 50 patients and give them proper attention in one day. To say that the prisoners of war in the Transvaal camps were medically badly cared for was no exaggeration; Green of Irene admitted it. [6]
A last matter that struck one in studying the ration scales that existed until the end of 1901 was that no special food for children was provided. Small and great received exactly the same food. The ration scales made no provision whatever for fresh milk, and tinned milk was placed on the list of medical comforts, or — in the case of Free State camps — supplied in the quantity of 1/12 of a tin a day, which was of course wholly insufficient. The little children could definitely not live on the same foodstuffs as adults or soldiers, and they wasted away. The coarse food they had to eat caused diarrhoea, and on account of the deficiency in diet they wasted and practically lost their whole resistance against disease. It was heart-rending, one camp superintendent declared, to hear the whimpering of the children for food, and to see the thin little bodies and faces. Mothers had to wean their children too early because they could not, from manifold privations, keep up feeding them, and it was therefore necessary that a generous provision of milk at least should be supplied to the babies. Nurse van Warmelo’s Irene pages already said that small and great received the same food, and that the Afrikaner people could not live on flour. [6]
After the abnormally high death-rate among children under 5 in the camps, the Ladies Committee did not hesitate to ascribe it to the insufficient food supply. Wherever a community of little children is found who have to be fed without fresh milk, fresh vegetables, or eggs, a high death-rate will follow as certainly as night will follow day. The scale they thought needful, proposed on the 12th of December 1901, was a condemnation of the existing scale: for adults, per week, 7 pounds of bread, Boer meal or flour, 4 pounds of meat, 3½ pounds of potatoes, carrots, onions or equivalents, coffee, tea, salt, wood, and soap; for children of 3 to 12, 3½ pounds of bread, meat, the same vegetables, syrup or jam, milk; for infants under 3, 2 bottles of milk daily, oatmeal, syrup, sugar. It was not a luxury ration, but it was of such a kind that a healthy constitution could be built up. Irene’s nurse wrote the want of that scale before the Committee proposed it; Amsterdam this year still printed the want. [6]
L. M. Leibrandt was among the camp teachers named at Irene, as S. F. L. de Beer at Heidelberg, J. H. Gauché at Volksrust, W. J. van der Merwe at Middelburg. The Ladies Committee, visiting Irene, found Mr Richardson teaching a huge class and addressing them wholly in Dutch, the rule that all classes should be taught in English disregarded there as at Harrismith. Sargant wrote to Milner on the 14th of June 1901 that the opportunity during the next year of getting them all to speak English was golden. The first imported teachers were housed in Irene’s tents in January 1902; the 6 English ladies remained there. What this year’s book added to that school-story was not another Gazette of a thousand names, but the nurse’s camp in which those teachers were tented, written from the inside and issued at Amsterdam while the farm and town schools still inherited English first and Dutch for the catechism. [6]
The Friend and Pretoria News Still Issuing
The Friend was named for 1904 and was named again for this year. It was not a new paper. It was the Bloemfontein paper still issuing after Vereeniging, after the camps were broken, after the director’s report had closed to February last, and after last year’s war print had named Kritzinger, Luckhoff, Brink, and the Gedenkboeken. What this calendar could still put beside Brandt-Van Warmelo at Amsterdam was that the Friend still came out through 1905. The camps’ account was no longer only in books issued overseas; it was still in a Free State paper printed in the town from which the first Free State camp had taken its name. Bloemfontein had been the Free State capital; the first Free State camp took that name; the Friend was the English paper of that town, still coming out in the third full year after Vereeniging. [6]
The Pretoria News was likewise named for 1904 and was named again for this year. Pretoria was the town whose military governor Maxwell on the 1st of July 1901 paid his flying visit to Irene, and whose consuls received the Pretoria women’s memorial on the food of that camp. It was the town from which Mrs Bodde wrote on the 23rd of May, and from which nurse Van Warmelo’s mother went out to Irene on the 22nd of May to take the samples. That the Pretoria News still issued through 1905 was the Transvaal paper still in motion while Amsterdam printed Irene’s diary. [6]
De Volksstem was named through 1902–1904 and was not named for this year. De Kerkbode, Land en Volk, and the Natal Witness were named through 1901–1903 and dropped from last year’s list. The Cape Times and the Cape Argus were named for 1900–1902; the South African News for the same years. What this calendar had to name, besides the Amsterdam book, was therefore not the whole war-press still in motion, but the two papers that the later list still carried through this year: the Friend and the Pretoria News. Those two, with Brandt-Van Warmelo at Amsterdam, were this year’s print and this year’s papers. [6]
The Transvaal blue books of 1902–1903 still stood on the shelf; Cd. 369 and Cd. 426 of 1900, and Cd. 1789 on the war’s military preparation, still stood with them. A command paper was a numbered parliamentary print: Cd. meant a paper presented by command of the Crown. Cape Hansard of 1901–1902 and the Parliamentary Debates, Fourth Series, volumes LXXXVII to CVII, 1900–1902, were already the bound debates of years closed. This year added no new command paper to that shelf in the list that named the Friend and the Pretoria News. What it added was the Amsterdam book of Irene, and the two papers still issuing. The Education Gazette for the Transvaal and Orange River Colony of the 1st of July 1902, with its 1046 names, remained the last great camp muster of the staff; the July count of 1903, written into last year’s director’s report, remained the muster after the tents were down: 475 overseas of 1306 taken into service. This year’s paper did not recount the Gazette; it named Irene in type at Amsterdam and the two papers still in the towns. [6]
Rudolph at Maritzburg, the Cape Records Closed, and Elias Finished
At Maritzburg this year the Voortrekker G. M. Rudolph gave a lecture, and it was printed in pamphlet form at Greytown, Natal. A Voortrekker was one of the farmers who left the Cape Colony in the 1830s to settle beyond the colonial boundary. Rudolph was a man who had been in the looking-out of 1834, still speaking in 1905 at the Natal capital, while Brandt-Van Warmelo’s Irene issued at Amsterdam. Natal was a British colony. Maritzburg was its capital. Greytown was a Natal town inland from the coast. The lecture mattered because it was not a London official history. It was a Voortrekker’s own account, spoken this year in the Natal capital and put into type at Greytown, of the looking-out that had taken men of 1834 into that same Natal. [4]
The lecture was cited for the years before the great going out. Early in 1834 a party consisting of Stephanus Maritz, P. Uys, G. Rudolph, Hans de Lange, J. Moolman, and 6 others followed in the track of a Dr Andrew Smith, who had made a tour of scientific exploration in those parts. They visited Natal and returned with a most favourable account of that country. A project of a general emigration was then entertained, and three parties set out in different directions — one to Natal, another under one Scholtz as far as the Zoutpansberg in the present Transvaal, the third under Johannes Pretorius to Damaraland. All seemed to have returned to the Colony after the war of 1835. S. Maritz then travelled about the country and brought the subject of a general migration before the notice of the scattered Boers. That was not this year’s war. It was this year’s lecture, given by a man who had been in that 1834 party. [4]
The same printed page that carried Rudolph’s lecture still told how a party of emigrants under the patriarchal Jacobus Uys, consisting of about 100 individuals, left Uitenhage in April 1837 and passed through the northern outskirts of Grahamstown, encamping for a time on the flats above the town near where the Cradock road now passes. As soon as it was known that Uys’s party was approaching, a public subscription was started, and with the money collected a massive Bible in handsome Russia leather was obtained, inscribed on the outside in gold letters as a gift of the inhabitants of Grahamstown and neighbourhood to Jacobus Uys and his departed countrymen. The lecture of 1905 did not reopen Blood river. It stood as a Voortrekker’s own account, spoken this year at Maritzburg and printed at Greytown, of the looking-out that preceded the going out. [4]
Records of the Cape Colony, begun at London in 1897, closed this year. Last year’s page still said that those records ran. This year’s close was the close of that London series: from 1897 to 1905, the printed records of the Cape whose gardens were laid out in 1652. They were not this year’s war print. They were the older paper of the Cape itself, finished at London in the same calendar that Amsterdam printed Irene and Greytown printed Rudolph. Leibbrandt’s Précis of the Archives of the Cape of Good Hope issued at Cape Town in 1896; the Council of Policy’s minutes, letters, and the Dagh Register remained the older official records behind that précis and behind these London volumes. What this year finished was the London series that had run beside them for 8 years. [9]
De Vroedschap van Amsterdam of J. E. Elias, begun at Amsterdam in 1903, likewise closed this year. A vroedschap was the town council of Amsterdam; Elias’s compilation was genealogy, not war print. Last year’s page still said that the vroedschap issued through the calendar. This year’s close was the close of that Amsterdam compilation: 1903–1905. It sat in the same bibliography with the Cape records and with the older Dutch genealogies. Amsterdam this year therefore issued two finishes and one beginning that was not a finish: Elias’s vroedschap closed; and Brandt-Van Warmelo’s Irene, which was not a series but a single book, issued. The Cape records were now a closed series. The Amsterdam vroedschap was now a closed series. Irene was now a book. Rudolph had spoken at Maritzburg and been printed at Greytown. [6] [9]