Frans Petrus Bester

Frans Petrus Bester was born at Oostenwal, Langebaan in the Cape on the 21 August 1875 and died on 31^st August 1956 in Paarl. He was a  medical doctor and the second eldest child of Andries Jacobus Hester and his wife, Johanna Alida Mocke.

Bester first went to a mission school for Coloureds at Paternoster and later to Panorama, F. D. Changuion’s school at Langebaan. When he was thirteen he went on to the Stellenbosch Gymnasium where he passed the School Higher Examination in 1890; he matriculated (1892) at the Victoria College, and passed the Intermediate B.A. Examination in 1893. He subsequently left for the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, to read medicine and obtained an M.B.Ch.B. in 1898. After this he worked for a year at the Royal Infirmary, Edinburgh, at the Birmingham Children’s Hospital, and the Coombe Maternity Hospital in Dublin, before returning (1899) to South Africa, where he began practising at Porterville. Here he was appointed additional district surgeon for Piketberg. During the Second Anglo-Boer War (1899-1902) he worked as medical officer for the local British troops and also as information officer, assistant deputy administrator of martial law, and as commandant of the town guard.

Because of his apparent British sympathies his practice diminished considerably, and although he was elected a member and deputy chairman of the school board of Porterville his term of office there was not always without incident. By 1910 he had almost regained his previous practice, but settled at Paarl where he was made medical officer of the Railways in 1911, district surgeon in 1912, and medical officer of the La Motte Forestry Settlement in 1914.

In 1930 he established the Drakenstein section of the Medical Association of South Africa of which he was secretary and chairman for twenty years. In 1935 his devoted service was rewarded when he was made president of the Western Cape Branch, the first country-bred man to be honoured in this manner. From 1935 to 1948 he was a member of the federal council of this body and in 1938 was elected to the South African Medical and Dental Council. The following year he was on a commission of inquiry into medical services for the Railways and at the outbreak of the Second World War (1939) on another into medical supplies for the troops in North Africa. In 1939 he was also asked by Gen. J.C. Smuts to serve on a commission responsible for making recommendations to reorganise the South African Medical Corps. He was subsequently also on the Medical Defence Committee and medical officer for the Italian prisoners of war in the Paarl district.

Frans was a founder member and for many years chairman of the Railway Medical Officers’ Group as well as of the District Surgeons’ Group and in 1946 became a member of the District Surgeons’ Advisory Council. In 1947 he resigned from all his official appointments and in 1948 the bronze medal of the Medical Association of South Africa was awarded him. In 1951 he finally gave up practising.

Although Bester did not accomplish anything unusual in the field of medicine, he made a valuable contribution to the organization of medical services in South Africa.

Well liked, and with a large circle of friends, he also excelled at sport, especially golf. On 28.2.1900 he was married in Cape Town to Gertrude Agnes Moir (†11.5.1942), daughter of a cotton manufacturer of Newport, Fife, in Scotland. They had three sons and one daughter.

A Walk Through Time

Abdol Burns

Abdol Burns was born in Cape Town around 1838 and died in early June 1898, Cape Town and was buried on  the 11 June 1898. He was a Cape Muslim political leader, cab-driver, teacher. His father was probably a private soldier of Scottish origin and his mother of Cape Malay origin.

It is not known whether he had brothers or sisters. Burns’s parents died when he was a child and he was brought up by a Cape Dutch family who had employed his mother.

Although he seems to have been a Muslim from birth, he was educated at St Stephen’s School, a Dutch Reformed Church mission institution. Later he was apprenticed to the saddlery trade. However, it is not clear if or for how long he practised this trade, because at some stage he was also a teacher before becoming a cab-driver – probably in the 1880s.

Unlike many of his co-religionists, Burns was English-speaking and preferred pure Dutch to the ‘taal’ (Cape Dutch or Afrikaans). He placed a high value on his British heritage and on education. He sent his children to church schools, two to the Catholic Marist Brothers’ College, and two to an English church school. The educational values which he espoused were derived from the Victorian social values of cleanliness and class, as he explained in his evidence to the Education Commission of 1891, Burns was also an active member of the Union Cricket Club, negotiating for land on Green Point common for Muslim cricketers, He was a supporter of the Empire League (or Imperial League, an association founded in Cape Town in September 1884 in opposition to the Afrikaner Bond and to show support for British expansionism in Southern Africa).

Burns made his political debut in 1869 at a meeting organized by Prof. Roderick Noble and Saul Solomon to protest against the harsh amendments of the Masters and Servants Act. (This Act carried criminal sanctions for breach of contract or similar offences by a servant – a person employed for wages in agriculture, industry or domestic service.) He remained a supporter of Solomon, and Solomon’s newspaper, The Cape Argus, usually gave Burns a friendly mention, commenting in 1869 on the quality of his English and on his self-possession and intelligence.

In the 1880s Burns apparently became increasingly involved in the affairs of the Cape Muslim community. He abandoned his career as a teacher to become a cab-driver. He began to describe himself as ‘Secretary to the Malay Community’ although he probably represented only a part of the community. This association with Muslim interests brought Burns into conflict with the Cape Town municipality and the colonial government. In 1882, during a major smallpox epidemic, Burns refused to allow his children to be removed to the isolation hospital, arguing before a Town Council meeting on 31 July 1882 that religion was superior to the law.

This standpoint led Burns to take a leading role in Muslim resistance to the closure of the Cape Town cemeteries in January 1886. (The Public Health Act of 1883 stipulated that burials in any cemetery or burial ground within the limits of any city, town or village should be discontinued; new cemeteries could only be established with consent of the governor of the Cape Colony. Between 1884 and 1885 several Government Notices regarding the closure of the cemeteries within the limits of the municipality of Cape Town were published.) Although other religious groups, particularly the Dutch Reformed Church, opposed the closure, only the Muslims resisted actively. On 17 January 1886, after prolonged unsuccessful negotiations with the colonial government in which Burns played a prominent part, a riot occurred in Cape Town in which the police were attacked. Burns does not appear to have encouraged the riot, although he was probably present, but he was singled out as the chief offender and sentenced to two months’ hard labour and a £10 fine.

Burns’s political influence in the Muslim community waned after the cemetery riots – probably because the riots were unsuccessful and Burns had no permanent standing as religious leader in the Muslim community. He died in poverty in 1898 after he had been forced to sell his cab.

During his lifetime and subsequently interpretations of Burns’s actions have been contradictory, some seeing him as a martyr while others have viewed his actions as wild or unrepresentative of Muslim interests. It is possible that these contradictions arose from his ambiguous position in colonial society in which the Victorian and liberal values which he had imbibed as a young man came into conflict with the fundamental beliefs of the Cape Muslim community in which religious practices clashed with modern sanitary reforms, In addition his position in Muslim society was tenuous since Burns lacked the status of a religious leader. His historical importance lies partly in the way in which his life illustrated these paradoxes under colonialism.

Burns married a Muslim woman in about 1867 in Somerset West. He had four children.

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'n Skets wat die terrein aandui waar die Slag van Boomplaats plaasgevind het.

After Sir Harry Smith had personally on 3rd February  1848 declared the area between the Orange and Vaal Rivers British – the Orange River Sovereignty – the republican-minded Boers, who formed the majority of the White population, appealed to Comdt.-Gen. Andries Pretorius to restore their independence.

In June 1848 a commando of more than a thousand men marched to the Orange River to confront the Cape governor himself. On their way the British Resident was chased from Bloemfontein. All efforts at negotiation failed, and when Smith personally crossed the Orange River with 15oo men, the Boer commando, then only 500 strong, retreated northwards in the direction of the Kromellenboogspruit, a tributary of the Riet River.

In dignant because Adam Kok’s Griquas had been used as allies against them, the burghers decided to stop the British advance at Boomplaats, at the Kromellenboogspruit between present-day Trompsburg and Jagersfontein.

On 29th  August 1848 an attempt to lead Smith into an ambush failed when untimely shots on the side of the Boers betrayed their strategically well-concealed position.
About 300 Boers took part in the skirmish which followed, while Smith had 1,200 men, assisted by 200 Griquas, under his command. In the battle 9 Boers were killed and 5 or 6 wounded, while the British losses were 16 fallen and 40 wounded, Smith himself being grazed by a bullet in the heel. The Boers then retreated in disorder to Winburg, and British authority over the area was proclaimed once again.

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Carl Von Brandis

In 1914 the National Party holds its Inaugural meeting.

Pieter Grobler is appointed as chairman of the commission which had to investigate the basic principles of the party.

Tieleman Roos is elected leader of the party at the first Transvaal congress

Leopold Richard Baur, Moravian Missionary dies in 1889 in Queenstown

John Buchan, statesman, author and publisher, was born in Perth, Scotland in 1875

Cetshwayo appears as a caricature in colour by ‘Spy’ appeared in Vanity Fair on 26.8.1882.

Louis Trichardt becomes president of the Council of Justice in 1812

Carl Von Brandis becomes temporary and provisional mining commissioner in 1886.

Sir Joseph Banks sails with Captain Cook on the Endeavour in 1768.

Daniel Stephanus Botha is born in Goudini in 1852

Site for the erection of the Castle is chosen in 1665

Sugar pioneer Friend Addison dies in 1925

Daniel Roelof Fouche is born in Kommissiedrif, Rustenburg 1869

Hebrew Scholar Judah Landau died in Johannesburg in 1942

Alister Mckintosh Miller founded Union Airways Company Limited

Johannes Henoch Neethling is born in Cape Town in 1770

Johann Rissik surveyor-General of the Transvaal Republic dies in Pretoria in 1925

William Robinson member of the Volksraad dies in Middelburg, Transvaal in 1914

Matthys Stadler, farmer, trader and Port Natal pioneer is born in Malmesbury 1794

Christiaan Andries Van Niekerk, Member of Parliament and President of the Senate are born at Vegkop. Heilbron in 1874

David Beukes, minister of the NG Kerk, conducts the funeral of the ex-president, Nico Diederichs.

Jan Botes, Free State Pioneer is born at Baviaansfontein, Koup (Beaufort) in 1800

Robert Bowker

Robert Mitford Bowker was born in Wiltshire England in 1812 and died at Craigie Burn, near Somerset East on 24 August 1892. He was an 1820 Settler and Cape member of parliament, was the sixth son of Miles Bowker and his wife, Anna Maria Mitford. Robert grew up on his father’s farm Tharfield in the Albany district and appears to have lived there until his marriage on 19 December 1838 to Sarah Elizabeth, daughter of Robert Hart of Glen Avon, near Somerset East. They had five daughters and eight sons.

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Bowker and his wife settled on Craigie Burn, a farm high in the mountains above Somerset East, which, owing to its remote situation, was often used by his brothers during the frontier wars as a place of refuge for their families and stock. There he occupied himself with farming and also with gardening, of which he was especially fond. His secluded existence, interrupted though it was by service in the wars and in parliament, may well have contributed to his conservative views.

He served with distinction in the Eighth Frontier War (1850-53). Campbell maintains that he also served in the Sixth (1834-35) and Seventh (1847) Frontier Wars, but I. and R. Mitford-Barberton do not confirm this.

Bowker Coat of Arms

Bowker represented Somerset East in the House of Assembly from 1854 to 1868, and again from 1870 to 1873. Later he sat in the Legislative Council, for the North-Eastern Circle, from 1881 to 1890. In both houses he was one of the better known advocates of a higher franchise qualification.

Bowker is an unobtrusive representative of those British Settlers, and of a family, who contributed so much to the country they had made their home. He is buried in the family graveyard at Craigie Burn. There is a photograph in Morse-Jones (infra) and a portrait, probably from a painting by W. Bevington, in R. Mitford-Barberton, (infra).

Irma Stern

Irma Stern was born at Schweizer-Reneke in the Transvaal on 02 October 1894 and died in Cape Town on 23 August 1966. She was an artist and was the daughter of Samuel and Henny Stern. Her parents, who were of German-Jewish origin, settled in the Western Transvaal, but when the Second Anglo-Boer War broke out in 1899 she was sent overseas and went to a school in Berlin for a time. She returned to South Africa at the age of nine and was already showing an interest in drawing.

In later years she often accompanied her parents on their visits to Europe. On the outbreak of the First World War (1914-18) they were obliged to remain in Europe until hostilities had ceased, and during this period Irma S. seriously applied herself to painting. In 1913 she enrolled at the Weimar Academy where she studied under Gari Melchers (Melcheris) and the following year went to the Levin-Funcke Studio in Berlin, working under the guidance of Martin Brandenburg. She then returned to Weimar and studied for a short time at Das Bauhaus.

On her return to South Africa she held her first exhibition in the Ashbey Gallery in 1920. Her work, which deviated greatly from the art accepted in Cape Town at that time, evoked strong reaction, although a few critics, notably H.S. Caldecott, Leon Levson, and Hilda Purnitzsky, reacted favourably. Brilliant flower studies were a feature of this exhibition, but in course of time Irma S. also used other objects and her still life pictures were more subtle, the colours, although rich, more subdued. The extent of recognition she already enjoyed in Germany in 1927 is proved by the monograph Irma Stern by Max Osborn which appeared in the series Junge Kunst that year. In 1929 her work was presented at the annual exhibition of the Imperial Institute in London and at the International Jewish Exhibition in Zürich.

She enjoyed travelling and after 1934 toured South Africa, the Congo, Zanzibar, Madeira, and South-European countries such as Turkey, Spain, and Italy. Two books which she wrote and illustrated resulted from these travels, namely Congo (1943) and Zanzibar (1948). An earlier book Visionen had already appeared in 1920.

Irma gradually gained recognition in her own country too. J. Sachs’s monograph Irma Stern and the spirit of Africa was published in Pretoria in 1942, and a film on her art was made in 1947. She received various awards, namely the Prix d’ honneur at the International Exhibition in Bordeaux (1927), the ‘Cape Tercentenary Grant’ (1952), the South African award of the Peggy Guggenheim International Art Prize (1960), the Oppenheimer Trust Award for the best painting at the Art South Africa Today Exhibition (1963), and the medal of honour for South African art from the Suid-Afrikaanse Akademie vir Wetenskap en Kuns (1965).

Vicent van Gogh

She was one of the first modern painters in South Africa to paint in the idiom of contemporary European artistic trends such as German expressionism. Although her work had a strong personal stamp, it was never static and showed traces of cubism and fauvism. At first it was powerfully influenced by Pechstein; later her remarkable use of line was strongly reminiscent of H.E.B. Matisse and M. Chagall. She also learnt a great deal from R. Dufy, while V. van Gogh had an unmistakable attraction for her. From the beginning, however, her art showed a definite individual character and great technical ability. It was mainly her use of colour that at first seemed strange – its brightness and warmth, its vital and shrieking contrasts.

Life itself and the world around her were thrilling and exciting to Irma S., and she observed it acutely and with great admiration. Although the depiction of her subjects was often very dramatic, she was seldom tragic and never sentimental. The exotic was natural to her. People, not ideas, enthralled her – people in all sorts of circumstances and all types of action. She was one of the first artists to approach the Black man as an independent person, a man of feeling. The streets of Zanzibar, the exotic tropics of Central Africa, Swaziland scenes, city views, boats, workers in the fields, Arabic figures, and native women are reproduced with dramatic power, full of rhythm and imagination. Her still life studies of fruit and flowers reveal the same characteristics.

She was an artist of great creativity. She painted some 2 000 pictures in oils, but also worked in other media, such as water-colour, gouache, coloured inks, conté and tempera. In addition she produced lithographs, monotypes, charcoal and pencil drawings, and ceramics. She also sculptured.

By 1965 more than a hundred exhibitions of her work had been held in major European cities like London, Paris, Brussels, Amsterdam, Berlin, Breslau, and Vienna. From 1923 onwards she exhibited more than sixty times in South Africa, and in the period after 1948 took part in various exhibitions of South African art overseas. In 1962 an exhibition of her work, chronologically selected, was held in the Grosvenor Gallery in London, and after her death memorial exhibitions were held in Cape Town, Pretoria, and Johannesburg in 1968. Examples of her art can be seen in all the major art museums in South Africa and in the South African Embassies in Paris, London, Washington, The Hague, and Madrid, as well as in the Museum of Modern Art in Paris. Her house at Rosebank, Cape Town, with the large art collection it contains, became the Irma Stern Museum after her death.

A dynamic painter, Irma was one of the most important artists South Africa has produced, and although her art never gave rise to a specific school of painting or a great number of followers, her influence is certainly discernible, particularly in the early works of Alexis Preller. She was a stimulating influence in the development of art and artistic appreciation in South Africa and the major exponent of expressionism in this country. Photographs of her appear in SESA and the S.A.W.W. (both infra). She was married to Professor Johannes Prinz. The marriage was later dissolved.

Papenboom Homestead

On 22 August 1785  Dirk Gysbert Van Reenen bought the estate De Papenboom or ‘De Brouwerij’ at Newlands for the large sum of 110 000 guilders, mainly because of the brewery there. For a century owners of this farm had had the monopoly to brew beer and to supply the inns and public-houses at the Cape with it. Van Reenen took over the brewery from his father-in-law, J. W. Hurter, and on this estate the architect, L. M. Thibault, built an elegant residence for Van Reenen. According to Lady Anne Barnard the house was the finest gentleman’s residence in the Cape Colony.

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Driekoppen

Another famous Inn was that of “Drie Koppen” where Mowbray is today. In 1723 a burger Johannes Zacharias Beck, lessee of the wine and spirit license at Rondebosch, obtained for the purposes of putting up a tavern, a plot of land.[the] following year, a terrible murder was perpetrated at this tavern when three slaves cruelly did to death at night time two Europeans.

The Court of Justice sentenced them as follows: Their limbs were to be broken without the coup de grace after which they were exposed on the wheel until death ensued, the one with and axe, the other with a knife and the third with a bludgeon above their heads. These were the instruments they had used in their dastardly act. They were then decapitated and the heads placed upon stakes near the spot where the crime had been committed. The in was later named “The Three Cups”

The discovery of diamonds at Kimberley gave a great impetus to the erection of hotels in South Africa, and after 1875 the nature of hotel-ownership began to change: they began to be built by companies with a large capital. The discovery of gold in the Transvaal gave a further stimulus to the erection of hotels, first at Pilgrim’s Rest, Lydenburg, Barberton and thereafter on the Witwatersrand. The economic development which followed stimulated the erection of hotels in the coastal towns as well as in the interior. In the mean time additional hotels were erected in Cape Town and the Cape Peninsula.

William Duckitt

William Duckitt was born at Esher, Surrey, England and baptised on the 20^th October 1768. He died at Klavervlei, Groenekloof (Darling) on the 13^th April 1825. William was an  agricultural pioneer and was the son of William and Elizabeth Duckitt, of Waylands farm, Esher. His father was much visited by King George III and others interested in agricultural improvement and was the inventor of several farming implements.

His early life

Four years after the first British occupation of the Cape Colony, Duckitt was selected to introduce modern farming techniques. An assistant in the office of the treasurer-general in London, he was formally engaged on 29.7.1799 as ‘upper gardner’ (later called ‘agriculturist’) by the secretary of state, Henry Dundas, in the presence of Sir George Yonge (who had just been appointed governor at the Cape), his assignment being to improve the state of agriculture at the Cape by the introduction of a system of British husbandry.

For this purpose he was provided with plants, seed, implements which he selected before his departure, and workmen, including a wheelwright and a blacksmith, who accompanied him when he sailed in 1800 on the Wellesley. He landed at Simonstown (12.9.1800) with his wife and children and an imposing array consisting of nine agriculturists, three Devon cattle and a quantity of seeds, plants, fruit-trees and farm equipment which included the iron drill-plough invented by his father.

At first he lived at the Garden House estate at Simonstown and began experimental plantings there. After inspecting many properties in the Cape hinterland, he selected Klapmuts as the best site for a government farm and his buildings are still to be seen there. As may be gauged from his journal (December 1799 to November 1800), which has survived, he found much that might be improved. The heavy wooden plough used hitherto did not dig to a sufficient depth, nor did it break up the dry soil sufficiently after the first of the winter rains. Wheat land and garden land lacked manure. Many of the cattle and horses were of poor quality and the sheep, he found, were ‘half of the goat kind’. He urged the use of iron ploughs, recommended that dry soils be harrowed before they were ploughed, encouraged the provision of humus for the ground, and stressed the need for careful breeding of stock.

As superintendent of the agricultural department he quickly made friends with the Afrikander farmers, in time ‘growing into a Boer’, according to a contemporary reference. When an agricultural society had been formed by 1801, he was a very early member and, for some time, almost the only English one. But, though his neighbours might like him, they were, like most farmers of their day, suspicious of new ideas. They considered his methods and machinery too expensive: in a good year plentiful crops could be grown without them and in a poor one not even elaborate equipment could make up for lack of rain. Duckitt started unluckily with severe droughts in his first seasons and the crops on government land seemed hardly better than the others. But progressive men like the Van Reenens saw the value of his ideas and they gradually spread. In 1812 he was appointed secretary of the newly constituted agricultural board and remained as such until it was dissolved in 1815.

Until then he had had to import his farm implements from Britain, but, while he was in charge at the board’s experimental station at Groote Post (near the present village of Darling), he was able to forge his own iron plough-shares.

Sir George Yonge supported him warmly, but, after this governor’s recall in 1801 he never received the same help from Yonge’s successors and he turned more to private enterprise, petitioning the government in 1801 for land of his own. For a time he held the government meat contract in partnership with two brothers, Jacob van Reenen and Sebastian Valentyn van Reenen, having the monopoly of supplying at fixed rates (which were lower than those tendered by the previous contractors) the meat required for army and navy personnel at the Cape: Though his management of government land had not always shown a profit, he became, with greater experience, a prosperous private farmer. He had been given a farm, Paradise, at Newlands, for his own use and this he soon exchanged, in 1806, for Witteboomen in Constantia. That, in 1815, he exchanged for Klavervlei (Klaver Valley), Sebastiaan van Reenen’s well-known farm in the Groenekloof (near Mamre). There he spent the remainder of his life, keeping, as was his custom, a careful diary of his farming. He used only about a tenth of his 2,800 acres for cereal farming and the rest of it for cattle pasture. Here, too, he established a stud, mating his mares mainly with sires belonging to his Van Reenen friends. He was a patron of the Green Point racecourse, where horses he had bred won a number of races.

In the stormy days of Sir George Yonge (1799 – 1801), who was dismissed from office for his scandalous administration, accusations were freely bandied to and fro and D. did not escape his share. It was declared that he had run the government farms with undue extravagance, that he had used government property, slaves and livestock for his own gain, that he had made doubtful deals with the Van Reenens, and the like. The charges were never proved or disproved and in time they were forgotten. Sir George Yonge, at any rate, found him ‘honest and firm to his duty’ and (only two months after D.’s arrival at the Cape) claimed that ‘his zeal, his skill, his activity, joined to his probity, has (sic) already gained him a general good character’. He was, by any reckoning, one of the chief farming men at the Cape for some twenty-five years.

Samuel Whitbread

A miniature still preserved by his descendants, painted no doubt in Britain, perhaps shortly before he sailed, shows him as a young man, with a rather long head, brown eyes and black hair. At Barnett, in April 1794, he married Mary Ann Whitbread who was born 16^th October 1775 died 21^st August 1843, born at Dugdale Hill, near London. She was the daughter of the celebrated English banker and brewer, Samuel Whitbread, and sister of another Samuel Whitbread, brewer and member of parliament.

Acknowledgement Paul Duckitt

She outlived her husband by over eighteen years and was buried beside him in the vault at Klavervlei, over which their descendants erected a new tombstone in 1909. They had three sons: William Duckitt (1795-1864), who succeeded his father as a farmer at Klavervlei; Frederick Duckitt (1799-1873), who farmed at Groote Post, in the Darling district; and Charles Duckitt (25.4.1808), the youngest son. Frederick became a member of the Cape legislative assembly for Malmesbury (1854-63), and two of his children became members of the Cape parliament; Jacob Duckitt (†1891), of Groote Post, was the member for Malmesbury in the legislative assembly (1869-73); and William Ferdinand Duckitt (†1885), of Karnemelksfontein, was a member of the legislative council for the North-Western Province (1884-85).

Hildagonda Johanna Duckitt was a daughter of Frederick’s. Numerous descendants of Duckitt, mostly farmers like their ancestor, still live in the Darling district.

Grave of Napoleon

On page 394 of the December 1918 issue of South African Gardening & Country Life there is a picture of gates with the caption “From Napoleon’s tomb”. Upon enquiry, the City Engineer’s Department in Cape Town replied as follows: “In September 1844, James Maynard, a wealthy businessman at the Cape acquired `pasture land between Wynberg Village and Wynberg Hill’, which included much of what is today Kenilworth and Plumstead, stretching across the Cape Flats to the German church at Philippi.

What remains of this vast estate is the Maynardville of today. James Maynard was an admirer of Napoleon and his estate had a memento of the Emperor. When Napoleon died on St. Helena, he was buried on the island, but in 1841 his remains were exhumed and placed in the tomb of the Dome des Invalides in Paris. Many objects associated with Napoleon’s years on St. Helena came up for sale, including the gates that guarded the entrance to his grave. James Maynard bought these gates and had them erected in the ground of his estate surrounded by willows, grown from cuttings of trees around Napoleon’s grave on St. Helena.

James Maynard

When the last owner of Maynardville died in 1941, the gates were sent to the Governor of St. Helena to be restored to their original site and are thus no longer at Maynardville park. In 1954 Maynardville was sold to the Cape Town City Council. It is a well known park in the southern suburbs housing the famous Maynardville Open Air Theatre. This information is extracted from the book Wagon Road to Wynberg by C. Pama.

If you are related to the Maynard family we would love to hear from you and would like to know what other artefacts are still held by the family.