Robert Godlonton

Born in London, England on 24th September 1794 and died at Grahamstown on 30th May 1884, politician, journalist and businessman, was orphaned at the age of twelve. A delicate child, he. was adopted and educated by a married sister, and apprenticed to a branch of the King’s Printing Office at Shacklewell. On 9.12.1819 he and his wife, Mary Ann, whom he had married on the 17th October 1813 at St. Boltophs without Bishopsgate Parish, sailed with Lieutenant John Bailie’s* party of British Settlers in the Chapman, accompanied by their four-year-old daughter, Mary Ann, and by Alex (Hex) William Godlonton, who was probably his younger brother. The manager of the printing office, Mr Rutt, had presented a wooden printing-press to Godlonton., Thomas Stringfellow and Dr Edward Roberts, but, when they arrived at the Cape on 17.3.1820, the acting governor, Sir Rufane Donkin,* afraid of their ‘scattering firebrands along the eastern frontier’, had the press seized and the purchase price remitted to the donor.

Marriage record

After nearly eighteen months of unsuccessful farming the Godlontons left their place of sojourn at Cuylerville, G. having obtained a position as a constable, possibly in Grahamstown, though he may intitially have been in Bathurst. On 1.7.1823 he became a clerk in the office of the landdrost, H. Rivers, and there he remained for over ten years, being promoted to first clerk to the civil commissioner of Albany and Somerset on 1.1.1828. As such, one of his duties was to make an annual tax-collecting tour of the two districts; he made use of the knowledge which he had acquired on these trips to write two articles, one on the Kat River settlement and the other called ‘Travelling sketches’, his nom de plume being ‘A traveller’. These were published in L. H. Meurant’s* Grahamstown Journal on 28.6.1832 and 16.5.1833. In the first weeks of 1834, having concluded an agreement with Meurant to act as editor, he began to write leading articles. These, and the general tone of the Grahams-town Journal were regarded with disapproval by the civil commissioner, Duncan Campbell,* as a result of which G. resigned from the civil service on 31.1.1834. A few months later he accepted a partnership in Meurant’s printing, bookselling, stationery and binding business.

G. was always active in the public affairs of Grahamstown and Albany. Although never elected a municipal commissioner, he took a prominent part in town meetings and served on committees of the municipality. In the Sixth Frontier War (1834-35) he became a captain in the infantry division of the Grahamstown Volunteer Corps, and, on the conclusion of peace with Sarili, he was one of four citizens elected at a public meeting to present an address to the Governor, Sir Benjamin D’Urban. After the wars of 1835 and 1846 he served on the Claims Board and in the wars of 1846 and 1850 was elected a ward captain, during the last war also becoming a member of the Board of Defence formed to assist the civil commissioner of Albany. He became the representative for West Kowie and Bathurst on the Albany Divisional Road Board and by 1852 was a justice of the peace for Albany and Fort Beaufort.
A staunch Methodist, G. was elected a trustee of the Bathurst church and in 1838 donated the land upon which the Cuylerville school chapel was erected. He was elected to the committee of the Wesleyan Auxiliary Missionary Society and became actively associated with the Wesleyan School of Industry and the Grahamstown Auxiliary Bible Society, general visitor to the Wesleyan chapel and circuit steward of the Grahamstown Wesleyan church. Among his friends were prominent church leaders such as William Shaw,* John Ayliff,* H. Dugmore* and Henry Calderwood.*

G.’s interest in the British Settlers is evident from his constant defence of their interests and good name in the Grahamstown Journal, and the energetic assistance which, in 1844, he lent to the organization of the commemorative celebrations of their landing. During the 1870 celebrations he was chairman of the British Settlers’ Jubilee and laid the foundation-stone of the British Settlers’ Jubilee Memorial Tower in Grahamstown, an honour which reflects the regard in which he was held.

His business interests were extensive, both within and beyond the borders of the Colony. By 1825 he was treasurer to the Albany Ship-ping Company and, during the thirties, became a general agent, secretary to the Eastern Province Joint-Stock Sheep Farm Association and a director of the Grahamstown Savings Bank. During the 1840s he was a shareholder in the Grahamstown, Bathurst and Kowie Shipping Company and in 1852 presided at a meeting of the Kowie Harbour Improvement Company. He became a member of the Uitenhage and Albany Agricultural Society and a committee member of the Association for Introducing the Cultivation of Cotton. In 1852 he was elected a director of the Frontier Commercial and Agri-cultural Bank and chairman of the board of directors of the newly formed Frontier Fire Insurance Company. Until 1869 he retained an interest in the Marine Insurance Company in Natal.

His main business activity was devoted to his press and bookshops. In July 1839, when his partnership with Meurant had run its agreed five years, G. bought the newspaper and the bookselling, printing, stationery and publishing concern. He admitted his nephew, Robert White, as a partner. In 1850 he founded with him The Friend of the Sovereignty and Bloem Fontein Gazette under the editorship of Thomas A. White,* another nephew. When Britain withdrew from the Sovereignty in 1854 G. and Robert White relinquished their business interests there in Thomas’s favour. Yet their experiment had already been repeated else-where. In September 1853 they launched a Dutch language weekly, De Grahamstad Register en Boeren-vriend, but by 1860 insufficient patronage had led to its absorption by the Journal. Another branch of the firm was founded at Kimberley, and at several other centres not merely stores but also newspapers were established: the King William’s Town Gazette and Border Intelligencer, the Queenstown Free Press, the Uitenhage Times, and the Natal Courier in Pietermaritzburg. In Port Elizabeth George Impey and James Richards edited the Eastern Province Herald and managed the firm which had been purchased from John Paterson* in 1857.

G. acquired landed property in several frontier districts. In 1836 he purchased Palmiet Farm on the Palmiet River and in 1845 sold it to Colonel Henry Somerset.* By 1838 he was also farming Klip Drift, four miles south of Grahamstown and by 1846 he owned a farm on the Sundays River. About 1850 he temporarily acquired Wardens, near Fort Beaufort, from Major H. D. Warden.* In his will he bequeathed a house in Grahamstown, two farms near Fort Beaufort, Hammonds and Papkuilsfontein, and an erf at Port Alfred.

A year after the death of his first wife at Fort Beaufort, G. married, in March 1845, Sarah Richards, only daughter of Richard and Ann Attwell, formerly of Toddington, Bedfordshire, and the widow of Joseph Richards. A son and a daughter were born of this marriage. One of Sarah’s seven children by her first marriage, William Attwell Richards, was taken into the Godlonton business, probably in 1853. Of the five children born of G.’s first marriage, only two daughters had survived childhood, and, when he finally vacated the editorial chair of the Journal in January 1866, he entrusted the family business to William Richards, to his son, Benjamin D’Urban Godlonton, and to T. B. Glanville.*

Having declined nomination to the newly created Legislative Council in 1834, as did all Easterners until 1847, G., the journalist, rapidly emerged as self-appointed champion of the interests of the Settler community. The failure of the colonial government to deal with the prevailing insecurity of the frontier districts prompted him to demand the implementation of the proposal of the 1823 commission of inquiry – that a separate government be granted to the eastern districts. The Frontier War of 1834-5 seemed vividly to illustrate the helplessness of the frontiersmen. G.’s Introductory remarks to a narrative of the irruption of the Kafir hordes … (Grahamstown, 1835-36) and his Narrative of the irruption of the Kafir hordes … (Grahamstown, 1836) blamed the reversal of Sir Benjamin D’Urban’s much-lauded annexation of the Province of Queen Adelaide on the influence of impractical theorists in the western districts. Contrary to their avowed aims, neither book contributed much of value to an understanding of the sources of frontier conflict, the war being attributed simply to the perfidy of Hintsa* and the avarice of the tribesmen, while for the Settlers it was ‘a war of necessity, and not of choice’. G.’s next publication, Sketches of the eastern districts of the Cape of Good Hope as they are in 1842 … (Grahamstown, 1842), was designed to stimulate the flow of British immigration to the eastern Cape as a means of bolstering the White frontier community, while his record of the Settlers’ commemorative celebrations of 1844, Memorials of the British settlers of South Africa (Grahamstown, 1844), depicted the solid achievements of the Settlers against overwhelming odds.

In 1847 G. was a member of the committee appointed to collect information for the Lieutenant-Governor Sir Henry Young,* on the proposed establishment of a resident government in the east. Although Young was transferred to South Australia before anything could be done, renewed agitation for a resident government, either by the establishment of separate institutions or by the removal of the seat of government to the east, was provoked a year later by the failure of the Colony’s leading officials to take account of the grievances of the Easterners in the constitutional changes which they recommended to the Colonial Office. The case of the colonists of the eastern frontier of the Cape of Good Hope … (Grahamstown, 1847) condemned the imperial government’s alleged ignorance and neglect of Settler interests, while The Eastern Province directory and almanac for 1848 … (Grahamstown, 1848) aimed ‘to bring out prominently, though not altogether exclusively, the actual conditions and resources of the Eastern Province, as contradistinguished from those of the Western’.

When, in 1849-50, the protest campaign against the sending of ticket-of-leave men to the Colony by the Secretary of State for War and Colonies, Earl Grey,* began to be exploited for political purposes, G. incurred considerable odium for defending the acquiescence of the Governor, Sir Harry Smith,* in the docking of the Neptune. The Legislative Council having been ‘extinguished in mud’, Smith tried to ensure at least a measure of popular support for its successor by inviting the municipalities and road boards throughout the Colony to recommend candidates for selection by him. He appointed the four at the top of the list submitted to him, and on the grounds that the east should receive adequate representation, appointed also G., who had been only eleventh. The four so-called popular members resigned in protest. William Cock* and G. retained their scats and participated in the constitutional discussions until 1853, when the Council was dissolved prior to the elections for the first Cape parliament.

Meanwhile the outbreak of the frontier war of 1850-53 seemed to G. to reinforce his arguments and to provide him with valuable ammunition for his political campaign. A narrative of the Kaffir War of 1850-51 (Grahamstown and London, 1851), was written in collaboration with Edward Irving and extracted in large part verbatim from the Journal itself. Published in instalments from March 1851, it was never completed, probably because the termination of the war and the nature of General Sir George Cathcart’s* frontier settlement seemed for the moment to make further propaganda unnecessary. Taking full advantage of disillusionment at the rebellion of the hitherto loyal Hottentots, G. republished, in mid-1851, the chapter on the Hottentots and the Kat River settlement as a separate pamphlet entitled Review of the condition of the frontier Hottentots from 1799 1851, and of the incipient stages of the rebellion of the latter year (Grahamstown, 1851).

In 1854 G. was returned as one of the seven eastern representatives in the upper house. His condemnation of the reversal of D’Urban’s frontier system and the role of his main political antagonist, Sir Andries Stockenström,* was reiterated in Sunshine and cloud; or, light thrown on a dark page of frontier history, of 1837.. . (Cape Town, 1855). In the house he confirmed a reputation which he had already acquired, that of being an inveterate though usually ineffective speaker. Repeatedly foiled in his attempts to secure acknowledgement of the validity of eastern demands, he led the eastern members in a dramatic joint resignation from the Legislative Council in June 1857, a futile and ill-timed re-enactment of the gesture of the ‘popular members’ in 1850.

In 1858 G. and his family left for England on holiday. When, two years later, the Colonial Secretary of the Cape announced the intention of the government to tax wool, the staple product of the east, the separatist movement was stirred into life and the separation league was founded. G. published Notes on the separation of the eastern from the western province, and concession to the former of its local government (London, 1860), sketching the separatist agitation since the 1830s and urging that for the east separation was ‘essential to its future security and to the full development of its resources …’. By 1862 the success of the movement had again been sacrificed through disunity over the question of a capital. G., returning to Grahamstown, produced his last pamphlet, A brief memoir of the Rev. John Ayliff, Wesleyan missionary (Grahamstown, 1862), which, ostensibly a tribute to Ayliff, enabled ‘Moral Bob’ once again to moralize on the plight of the Settlers.

Elected once more to the Legislative Council, G. took a last-ditch stand against the introduction of responsible government, believing that it would give the western districts an even greater political preponderance over the east. As chairman of the commission on federal devolution (1871), he was able to secure a recommendation that the Colony be divided into three provinces with local legislatures subordinate to the Cape parliament. But the introduction of responsible government in the following year gave the coup de grâce to the separatist cause. G. retained his seat until the dissolution of parliament in 1878, when he finally retired from public life. He died in his sleep at Beaufort House, Grahamstown, and was buried in the Wesleyan cemetery.

G.’s writings have had a more enduring impact upon frontier historiography than they had upon the politics of his own day. That at times he exercised considerable political influence among the Settlers (and particularly among his fellow Wesleyans, who comprised the majority of the Settlers and usually the majority of the municipal commissioners of Grahamstown) is evident from the vehemence of the attacks upon himself and the Journal, the so-called Settlers’ Bible. Moreover, such periodic concessions as were made to the east owed most to his unrelenting pressure, Yet he could not ultimately prevail against the parochialism of Cape politics and the mushroom growth of rival organs of the newspaper press. He himself had the defects of his virtues: his tenacity too readily took the form of arrogance and self-righteousness; his sincerity offended by its bluntness; his commitment to his cause increasingly expressed itself as intolerance.

The Fort Beaufort Museum has reproductions of cartoons of G. from The Observer (9.8.1877 and 18.4.1878) and there is a portrait of him by J. L. Mayall, of London, in the city hall, Grahamstown. This portrait is reproduced in G. E. Cory, The rise of South Africa, v. III (London, 1919), There is a bust of G. in the Houses of Parliament, Cape Town, and though it has not been traced, it is known that a portrait in oils was done by F. T. I’Ons.* A cartoon by W. H. Schröder,* which appeared in Zingari, is in the Mendelssohn Library, in the Houses of Parliament, Cape Town. A reproduction of a photograph of G. appears in H. E. Hockly, The story of the British settlers of 1820 in South Africa (Cape Town, 1948).

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