A Brave Community I Had Learned to Respect in Days Gone By
From No Outspan
by Deneys Reitz
We now made for Upington, a village on the north bank of the Orange. A prolongued drought was working havoc on both sides of the river, and I went to investigate. In order to reach Upington we ploughed over two hundred miles of barren country. We went by Rietfontein, the most desolate outpost of Southern Africa, and we went by Haksteen Pan, thirty miles long with a floor so smooth and hard that at sixty miles an hour our cars raised no dust and left no visible tracks.
The effects of the drought were terrible. The Hottentots who inhabit this area exist at the best of times on a mere fringe of life, for this is one of the toughest lands on earth. We found them living on locusts and roots, and digging for ants. I asked one of them how they were faring, and he said in Afrikaans: ‘Sir, we Hottentots can live on wind and sun, but the whites are getting hell.’
The Orange River was a row of stagnant pools. Hundreds of European farmers had moved to the river in search of water and in search of such little grazing as was left on its banks.
We crossed to the south side and hurried along via Goodhouse, Pella-Pella, and other places unmarked on maps, and by a wide sweep we struck the river again at Vioolsdrift. All along our route, dead cattle and sheep and horses met our eyes and our nostrils; it was a sad journey.
At Vioolsdrift a number of families had sought refuge. They had come from their stricken farms, for here, at any rate, was water to drink, and such of their animals as were left to them could gain sustenance of a kind by feeding on the willows and reeds.
When we came among them down a narrow gorge debouching on the river, they were nearing starvation. Wherever a tree was left, a whole family was camped for shelter and, like the Hottentots we had passed, they too were digging for ants and snaring jackals for food. They were a brave, hardy people, among whom I had lived in the days of the guerrilla war, and I knew their fine qualities.
The menfolk had, pathetically, begun to dig a canal to bring what little water there was on to flat ground, where they hoped to sow wheat and maize, but their levels were wrong, and a jutting crag had defeated their labours. Ruin was staring them in the face.
I despatched one of my cars to civilisation, and in less than a fortnight engineers arrived, and within a month three hundred men were at work building a dam across the river and constructing a canal.
Today, where I had found a hopeless, starving community, there are ten thousand acres of fields and gardens under irrigation, and scores of comfortable homesteads, and smiling families. It cost the taxpayer of the Union ninety thousand pounds, but this settlement, conjured from the desert, is a tangible thing I have achieved.
Later I received an artless address. It read:
‘Hon Sir. We the undersigned render our thanks. You promised to help us and we doubted. But the marks of your cars were still in the sand when your workmen arrived to build this dam, and now we are saved.’
There followed the signatures of many people.
I was criticised in Parliament during the next session, but I had helped a brave community whom I had learned to respect in days gone by, and I have no regrets.
A Long and Heartfelt Love Letter
From Lara – The Untold Story That Inspired Doctor Zhivago
by Anna Pasternak
‘Many years will go by. I shall then no longer be alive. There will be no return to the times of our fathers and grandfathers. This would, indeed, be both undesirable and unnecessary. But at last there will appear more things that have long lain dormant: noble, creative and great things. It will be a time of final accounting. Your life will be rich and fruitful as never before.
Think of me then.’
~
When I began Lara, I was secretly concerned that I would discover that Boris had used Olga. As I dug deeper into the story, I was relieved to find that this was far from the case. It was the authorities who used Olga. True, Boris did not save her by publicly ‘claiming’ her. But he loved her. I believe the depth and passion of his ardour differed from anything he felt for either of his wives. Not just out of gratitude that Olga risked her life in loving and standing by him. But because she understood him; she had a deep inner knowing that in order for him to find a resting place of fulfilment within himself, he needed to write Doctor Zhivago.
Although he did not do the one thing Olga desperately wanted – he did not leave his wife for her – from the moment he pledged himself to her, he did his utmost within the constraints of his domestic situation to honour her and her family. He supported them financially, he loved Irina as the daughter he never had, and he trusted Olga with his most precious commodity – his work. He sought her advice, her editing and typing assistance. And what is Doctor Zhivago, if not his long and heartfelt love letter to her?
As I wrote Lara, I was surprised to develop a more tolerant affection for Boris. I felt like a close friend or relative who overlooks someone’s annoying idiosyncrasies – in Boris’s case, his self-absorbed soliloquies, his false modesty, his vanity, his addiction to high-drama – due to an intrinsic and burgeoning fondness. As Boris began to write Doctor Zhivago, refusing to be crushed by the pressure of the Soviet state, I grew in admiration for him. I salute his granite defiance, I applaud his rebellious spirit, and I bow down before his monumental courage, especially his publish-and-be-damned attitude to Feltrinelli and the publication of the novel.
As I began to champion him, I mostly forgave his shortcomings, just as Olga and Irina did. I could see the complexity of the man and his situation. The inconsistency of his character. He was both hero and coward, genius and naïve fool, tortured neurotic and clinical strategist. His loyalty to Russia and her people never wavered. His loyalty to Olga was never steadfast. In spite of everything she did for him, including being prepared to die for him, she could not rely on him.
There were times when I felt immeasurably frustrated by his weakness; his letter to Olga from Tbilisi, when he rejected her desire for marriage, citing their mythical connection as more important than anything as mundane and everyday as marriage, infuriated me. Olga was right; he was wrong. If he had married her, the Soviet authorities would not have dared to treat her so cruelly and unnecessarily after his death.
Yet at other times, I ached for him. When I wrote of the savaging he received after the Nobel Prize award, his pain was palpable, his suffering agonising. If it wasn’t for Olga, he might well have committed suicide. She was his strength when his resolution was finally extinguished; she was his guiding light when all around him seemed interminably dark. When they were separated, his letters show the extent of his love, missing and need for her.
But in the end, for all his blistering brilliance, he did not save Olga. I can appreciate that at the conclusion of his life, he did not have the energy to fight any more. Every ounce of his potency was drained in defying the authorities to ensure that Doctor Zhivago was published. In this, at least, he ensured that Olga, his Lara, would never be forgotten. While she was fighting for him in the Lubyanka, he was at least exalting her in the pages of his book. She lost two of his children; the legacy of Doctor Zhivago is their only child. Both Lara and Yury gain immortality through Yury’s poems, the true fruit of their love. Pasternak intended all along to redeem himself by immortalising Olga as Lara. Perhaps on one level he was right; their love would remain everlasting. As he wrote in Doctor Zhivago:
‘It was not out of necessity that they loved each other, “enslaved by passion”, as lovers are described. They loved each other because everything around them willed it, the trees and the clouds and the sky over their heads and the earth under their feet. Perhaps their surrounding world, the strangers they met in the street, the landscapes drawn up for them to see on their walks, the rooms in which they lived or met, were even more pleased with their love than they were themselves.’
Literally Flirting With Death
From Lara – The Untold Story That Inspired Doctor Zhivago
by Anna Pasternak
Boris was certainly working hard on his novel. On 12 December he wrote to Frederick, Josephine and Lydia from Moscow, addressing them as: ‘My dear Fedia and girls!’ In the letter he makes it clear that he is doing everything he can to get the first half of Doctor Zhivago, already in manuscript form, to them. Did they know of a good Russian copy-typist? he asks. And if he is owed any money in England from translation work, could they pay the typist to make three copies and check them? He wanted the manuscript to be sent to Maurice Bowra (the eminent English literary historian), Stefan Schimanski (an English critic and translator of Pasternak’s works in Russian) and their friend, the English historian and philosopher, Isaiah Berlin.
‘Printing it – I mean, publishing it in print – is absolutely out of the question, whether in the original or in translation – you must make this absolutely clear to the literary people whom I should like to show it to,’ he continued, updating them about his work in progress: ‘Firstly, it isn’t completed, this is only half of it, needing a continuation. Secondly, publication abroad would expose me to the most catastrophic, not to say fatal, dangers. Both the spirit of the work itself, and my situation as it has developed here, mean that the novel can’t appear in public; and the only Russian works allowed to circulate abroad are translations of those published here.’
Fearing criticism from his sisters, he wrote: ‘You won’t like the novel because it lacks cohesion, and was written in such haste. One reason is that I couldn’t drag it out, I’m not young any more, and anyway, anything could happen from one day to the next, and there were a number of things I wanted to get written down. And I was writing it in my own time, unpaid and in a hurry so as not to overstretch my budget, but to try and make time to get down to some paid work.’
In spite of his self-deprecation with his family, praise was mounting from literary friends to whom he had managed to send the first typescript. On 29 November 1948, he received the following letter from his cousin Olga Freidenberg, from St Petersburg, who was a distinguished scholar and later a university professor: ‘Your book is above any judgment. Everything that you say of history as the second universe can be referred to in your book … It is a special variation of Genesis. It makes my skin tingle to read the philosophical discourses in it. I am just afraid that I am on the verge of discovering the final mystery that one hides inside himself and all his life he wishes to express it and waiting for its expression in art or science and is frightened to death of this, because it must remain an eternal mystery.’
Pasternak felt intense pressure to get his work read by those he respected, as he was inordinately proud of his book. It was his answer to a lifelong dream to produce a long prose work about his generation and its historical fate. All writers are prone to frustrations and fears that their work will not get published, let alone stand the test of time. Pasternak, who had already been working on the novel for thirteen years, knew that he was taking monumental risks in privately distributing the politically controversial material. At first, he had been optimistic about the Bolshevik revolution, believing it would liberate the masses, but when he saw the reality of the war it created, he became a fierce opponent of the Soviet regime. He blamed collectivisation for ruining the rural economy and destroying the lives of millions.
Boris Pasternak could not have made his scorn for the political elite any clearer. As Yury Zhivago states: ‘Ordinarily, people are anxious to test their theories in practice, to learn from experience, but those who wield power are so anxious to establish the myth of their own infallibility that they turn their back on truth as squarely as they can. Politics means nothing to me. I don’t like people who are indifferent to the truth.’
As Pasternak had no idea that Stalin had issued orders to protect him, and ordinary citizens were killed or sent to the gulag for expressing anti-Stalinist views in their own homes, to be circulating his trenchant views in his novel was literally flirting with death.
Pasternak recognised the dangers, describing them in what would be his last letter to his family for almost a decade. (Due to the ‘era of suspicion’, he was forced to halt all correspondence with his sisters; he resumed contact with them in the summer of 1956, during the Krushchev ‘thaw’.) ‘Even if you should hear one day that I’ve been hung, drawn and quartered,’ he told them, ‘you must know that I’ve lived a most happy life, better than I could ever have imagined, and my most solid and stable state of happiness is right now, and in all the recent past, because I have finally learned the art of expressing my thoughts – I possess this skill to the degree that I need it, which was never the case before.’
He wrote this letter at the zenith of his affair with Olga. As his son Evgeny explained: ‘The impact of their happy relations during the first three years was revealed in Lara’s image, her appearance and the lyric warmth of the chapters devoted to her. My father always believed that it was the awakening of “an acute and happy personal impression” that gave him the strength to cope with the difficulties of the work on the novel.’
Little did Olga know that due to widespread knowledge of her affair with Boris, and her unflinching support of the book that he was writing, it was not Boris who would be ‘hung, drawn and quartered’ but she herself who would shortly receive unwelcome visitors.
In the Spirit of Your Destiny
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From Lara – The Untold Story That Inspired Doctor Zhivago
by Anna Pasternak
It is almost impossible, by today’s standards of celebrity, to comprehend the level of fame that Boris Pasternak engendered in Russia from the 1920s onwards. Pasternak may be most famous in the West for writing the Nobel Prize-winning love story Doctor Zhivago, yet in Russia he is primarily recognised, and still hugely feted, as a poet. Born in 1890, his reputation escalated during his early thirties; soon he was filling large auditoriums with young students, revolutionaries and artists who gathered to hear recitals of his poems. If he paused for effect or for a momentary memory lapse, the entire crowd continued to roar the next line of his verse in unison back at him, just as they do at pop concerts today.
‘There was in Russia a very real contact between the poet and the public, greater than anywhere else in Europe,’ Boris’s sister, Lydia, wrote of this time; ‘certainly far greater than is ever imaginable in England. Books of poetry were published in enormous editions and were sold out within a few days of publication. Posters were stuck up all over the town announcing the poets’ gatherings and everyone interested in poetry – and who in Russia did not belong to this category? – flocked to the lecture room or forum to hear his favourite poet.’
The writer had immense influence in Russian society. In a time of unrest, with an absence of credible politicians, the public looked to its writers. The influence of literary journals was prodigious; they were powerful vehicles for political debate. Boris Pasternak was not only a popular poet hailed for his courage and sincerity. He was revered by a nation for his fearless voice.
~
There is a Russian proverb: ‘You cannot know Russia through your head. You can only understand her through your heart.’
When I visited Russia for the first time, walking around Moscow was like being haunted, as I had the sense of not being a tourist but of coming home. It was not that Moscow was familiar to me but it did not feel foreign either. I marched through the snow one wintry February night, up the wide Tverskaya Street, to dinner at the Café Pushkin restaurant, acutely conscious that Boris and Olga had used the same route many times during their courtship, over sixty years earlier, treading the very same pavements.
Sitting amid the flickering candlelight of the Café Pushkin, which is styled to resemble a Russian aristocrat’s home of the 1820s – with its galleried library, book-lined walls, elaborate cornices, frescoed ceilings and distinct grandeur – I felt the hand of history gently resting on me. The restaurant is close to the old offices of Novy Mir, Olga’s former workplace on Pushkin Square. I imagined Olga and Boris walking past, their heads bowed low and close against the snow, wrapped in heavy coats, their hearts full of desire.
Five years later, on another visit to Moscow, I went to the Pushkin statue, erected in 1898, where Boris and Olga frequently rendezvoused during the early stages of their relationship. It was here that Boris first confessed the depth of his feelings to Olga. The vast statue of Pushkin was moved in 1950 from one side of Pushkin Square to the other, so they would have started their courtship on the west side of the square and moved to the east side in 1950 where I stood, looking up at the giant bronze folds of Pushkin’s majestic cape tumbling down his back. My Moscow guide, Marina, a fan of Putin and the current regime, looked at me standing under Pushkin’s statue, envisaging Boris at that very spot, and said: ‘Boris Pasternak is an inhabitant of heaven. He is an idol for so many of us, even those who are not interested in poetry.’
This reverential view echoed my meeting with Olga’s daughter, Irina Emelianova, in Paris a few months earlier: ‘I thank God for the chance to have met this great poet,’ she told me. ‘We fell in love with the poet before the man. I always loved poetry and my mother loved his poetry, just as generations of Russians have. You cannot imagine how remarkable it was to have Boris Leonidovich – his Russian patronymic name – not just in the pages of our poetry, but in our lives.’
Irina was immortalised by Pasternak as Lara’s daughter, Katenka, in Doctor Zhivago. Growing up, Irina became incredibly close to Boris. He loved her as the daughter he never had, and was more of a father figure to her than any other man in her life. Irina got up from the table we were sitting at and retrieved a book from her well-stocked shelves. It was a translation of Goethe’s Faust which Boris had given her, and on the title page was a dedication in Boris’s bold, looping handwriting in black ink, ‘like cranes soaring over the page’ as Olga once described it. Inside, Boris had written in Russian to the then seventeen-year-old Irina: ‘Irochka, this is your copy. I trust you and I believe in your future. Be bold in your soul and mind, in your dreams and purposes. Put your faith in nature, in the spirit of your destiny, in events of significance – and only in such few people as have been tested a thousand times, and are worthy of your confidence’.
Irina proudly read the final inscription to me. Boris had written: ‘Almost like a father, Your BP. November 3, 1955, Peredelkino.’
As she ran her hand affectionately across the page, she said sadly: ‘It’s a shame that the ink will fade.’
War Clouds Gathering
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From No Outspan
by Deneys Reitz
It was August 1939. War clouds were gathering in Europe, but we found that our Prime Minister, General Hertzog, had withdrawn to the seclusion of his farm, and we could get no information from him. Obviously, if war broke out between Germany and Britain, the Government of South Africa would have to state its policy. We would have to say whether or not we intended standing by the rest of the Commonwealth.
I have refrained from stressing our Cabinet difficulties during the six years I served under General Hertzog. He was a man of culture and a gentleman, but he was possessed of an uneasy temperament, and there had been frequent trouble and several acute crises which had led to the resignations of some of our colleagues. General Hertzog never seemed to realise that he and his wing of the United Party were in the minority, and that he was being kept in power by General Smuts and our side of the coalition. He seldom consulted us, and on various occasions unpleasant incidents and unpalatable measures had been forced on us.
General Smuts had throughout shown real statesmanship. He knew that many of his followers thought he was weakly submitting to affronts, but time after time he counselled patience. He said that we were engaged in a vital attempt to persuade the Afrikaans and the English to work together, and if at last there came a time to break, it should be on a question of national importance instead of these minor quarrels.
That time was on hand. From the start, the United Party had been united only in name. The old Nationalist stalwarts who had joined the new party under General Hertzog in 1933 had done so with mental reservations, and we on our side had entered the pact with misgivings.
Nevertheless, both sections had done their best, and we had struggled along and somehow or other we had managed to keep the ship afloat. Now came the crucial test.
Earlier in the year, when all could see that Europe would soon be plunged into conflict, General Hertzog had repeatedly promised that he would summon Parliament before he decided on war. But he never undertook to consult Parliament should he decide not to go to war, and it had never struck anyone to question him on that point.
I have every reason to believe that he and his wing in the Cabinet had agreed to remain neutral, and that they intended doing so without calling Parliament together.
This would have placed General Smuts and his supporters in a terrible predicament, for there would have been no constitutional means of reversing a neutrality decision.
A unique coincidence saved us from this dilemma. Under the South African Constitution, all laws had to be passed by the House of Assembly and the Senate combined. It so happened that towards the middle of August the government Law Advisers discovered that the life of the Senate would expire in a few weeks, and that unless both Houses met to pass a law extending the period, no legislation passed by the Assembly alone would be valid.
General Hertzog reluctantly summoned Parliament for a brief three-day session, in order to cure this technical defect.
The last thing he desired or expected was for war to burst upon him while the House was sitting. But this was precisely what happened. As our special parliamentary train pulled into the station at Cape Town on the morning of Friday 1 September, we were met with the news that Hitler had invaded Poland, and that Britain and France would soon be at war with Germany.
General Hertzog’s luck was out. He was caught in a mesh. With Parliament met together he could now not prevent the House from taking a vote on the question of peace or war, and his plan to remain neutral without Parliamentary consent had been frustrated.
Real Money
by Herman Charles Bosman
‘It explains in the newspaper,’ At Naudé said, ‘how you can tell the difference between a good five-pound note and those forged ones. There are a lot of forged notes in circulation, the paper says, and the police are on the point of making an arrest.’
‘Bad as all that, is it?’ Gysbert van Tonder asked. ‘I’ve noticed that when the papers say that about the police, it means that unless somebody walks into the charge office to confess that he did it, the police are writing that case off as yet another unsolved African mystery. There’s only one thing worse, and that’s when they write in the papers about a dragnet, and that the police are poised and ready to swoop. That means the guilty person left the country a good while before with a lot of luggage that he didn’t have when he came into the country, and with his passport in order.’
Gysbert van Tonder’s lip curled as he spoke. It was sad to think that an occasional misunderstanding with a mounted man on border patrol should have led to his acquiring so jaundiced a view of the activities of the forces charged with the state’s internal government.
‘How you can tell,’ At Naudé continued patiently, ‘that it’s a counterfeit five-pound note is that it’s actually a very good imitation note. The only way you can tell it’s a forgery is that it’s better printed than the genuine note, and that it’s got the word “geoutoriseerde” spelt right.’
The schoolmaster looked interested.
‘Well, they keep on changing Afrikaans spelling so much,’ he said, ‘that I don’t know where I am, half the time, teaching it. Anyway, I’d be glad to know what the right way is to spell that word. But, unfortunately, I haven’t got a five-pound note on me at the moment – I don’t suppose anyone here would care to lend me one.’
His tone was pensive, wistful. But he was quite right. Nobody took the hint.
‘Just until the end of the month,’ young Vermaak said, again, but not very hopefully.
After an interval of silence, At Naudé said that even if somebody were to lend the schoolmaster a fiver – which, in his own opinion, did not seem very likely – it would still not help him with the spelling of that word. Because it was the genuine banknote that had the spelling wrong – spelling it the old way. Only the counterfeit note had the correct, new spelling.
Jurie Steyn said that that was something that had him beat, now: calling it a counterfeit note just because it had better printing and spelling than the genuine note. It was one of those things that made his head reel, Jurie Steyn added. No wonder a person sometimes felt that he didn’t know where he was in the world.
‘Saying that just because it’s better than the real note,’ Jurie Steyn continued, ‘then, for that reason, it’s no good – that’s got me floored all right.’
A situation like that opened up possibilities on which he, personally, would rather not dwell, Jurie Steyn went on.
‘By and by,’ Jurie Steyn said, ‘it will mean that if a respectably dressed stranger comes here to my post office, driving an expensive motor car, and he hands me a banknote that I can see nothing wrong with, except that it looks properly printed, then it means I’ll have to notify the police at Nietverdiend. But if a Mshangaan in a blanket comes round here and he doesn’t buy stamps, even, but he just wants change for a five-pound note, then I’ll know it’s all right, because the banknote has got bad spelling and the lion on the back is rubbed out in places, through the pipe in his mouth having been drawn wrong the first time.’
Oupa Bekker nodded his head, thoughtfully.
‘Yes, there were certain matters relative to currency, as passed from person to person, that did not always admit of facile comprehension,’ he declared somewhat pompously.
‘Take the time the Stellaland Republic issued its own banknotes, now,’ Oupa Bekker said. ‘Well, of course, the Stellaland Republic didn’t last very long. And it might have been different if it had gone on for a while. But I’m just talking about how it was when we first got our own Stellaland Republic banknotes, and about how pleased we all were about it.
‘The trouble in that part of the country was that there were never enough gold coins to go around, properly. Even before the Stellaland Republic was set up, there was that trouble. You could notice it easily, too, by the patches a lot of the men had on the back parts of their trousers.
‘And so, when the Stellaland Republic starting printing its own banknotes, it looked as though everything would come right. But the affairs of the nation did not altogether follow the course that we expected. I remember the boarding-houses landladies. What they wanted at the end of the month, they said, was – I remember very clearly – money. I don’t think I’ve ever, in my life, either before or since, heard quite that same kind of sniff. I mean, the kind of sniff a Stellaland Republic landlady would give at the end of a month when she saw you feeling in an envelope for banknotes.
‘Then there was the Indian storekeeper.
‘I was once with my friend, Giel Haasbroek, in the Indian store, and I’ll never forget the look that came over the Indian’s face when Giel Haasbroek produced a handful of Stellaland Republic banknotes to pay him. Among other things, what the Indian said was that he had a living to make, just like all of us.
‘“But these banknotes are perfectly good,” Giel Haasbroek said to the Indian. “Look, there’s a picture of the Stellaland Republic eagle across the top, here. And here, underneath, you can read for yourself the printed signatures of the President and the Minister of Finance – signed with their own names too.”
‘I’ll never forget how the Indian shopkeeper winced, then, either. The Indian said that he had nothing against the eagle. He was willing to admit that it was the best kind of eagle that there was. He wouldn’t argue about that. Where he came from, they didn’t have eagles. And if you were to show him a whole lot of eagles in a row, he didn’t think he’d be able to tell the one from the other, hardly, the Indian said. We must not misunderstand him on that point, the Indian took pains to make clear to us. He had no intention of hurting our feelings in any way. He would not take exception to the eagle in any shape or form.
‘But when it came to the signatures of the President and the Minister of Finance, it was quite a different matter, the Indian said. For he had both their signatures in black and white – for old debts that he knew he’d never be able to collect, the Indian said. And of the two, the President was worse than the Minister of Finance, even. The President had got so, the Indian said, that for months now, on his way to work in the morning, he would walk three blocks out of his way, round the other side of the plein, just so that he didn’t have to pass the Indian’s store.’
Oupa Bekker interrupted his story to get a match from the school-teacher. That gave us a chance to ponder over what he had said. For they had fallen strangely on our ears, some of his words. There appeared to have been a certain starkness about the texture of life, in the old days, that our present-day imaginings could not too readily embrace.
‘But they never caught on, really, those Stellaland Republic banknotes,’ Oupa Bekker continued. ‘Afterwards the Government withdrew the old banknotes and brought out a new issue. But even that didn’t help very much, I don’t think. Although, I must say, the new series of banknotes looked much nicer. The new banknotes were bigger, for one thing. And they were printed in more colours than the old ones. And they had a new kind of eagle on top. The eagle seemed more imposing, somehow. And he also had a threatening kind of look, that you couldn’t miss. It was like the Stellaland Republic threatening you, if you got tendered one of those notes for board and lodging, and you were hesitating about taking it.
‘But, all the same, those banknotes never really seemed to circulate very much. Maybe the Indian storekeeper was right in what he said. Perhaps, after all, it wasn’t the eagle, so much, that they should have changed, as those two signatures on the lower portion of the banknote. Perhaps they should have been signed so that you couldn’t read them.
‘And, as I have said, the queer thing is that there was nothing wrong with those Stellaland Republic banknotes. They weren’t counterfeit notes in any way, I mean. They were absolutely legal. The eagle and the printing were both all right – they were the smartest-looking eagle and the smartest printing you could get in those days. And yet … there you are.’
We agreed with Oupa Bekker that the problem of money was pretty mixed up, and always had been. Shortly afterwards the Government lorry arrived from Bekkersdal, and the lorry-driver’s assistant went up to the counter.
‘Change this fiver for me, please, Jurie,’ he said.
Now it was Jurie Steyn’s turn to be funny. He took full advantage of it. He turned the note over several times.
‘The printing looks all right,’ Jurie Steyn said. ‘And for all I know, the spelling is also all right. And the lion hasn’t got a pipe in his mouth.
‘What kind of fool do you think I am, handing me a note like this? About the only thing it hasn’t got on it is an eagle.’
The lorry-driver’s assistant looked at Jurie Steyn, mystified.
The Irish Bar Library
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From Edward Carson QC
by Edward Marjoribanks
The Irish Bar was one of the best clubs to which a young Irish gentleman might belong: in those days it was very much a continuation of Trinity College life, and, with a few exceptions, a close preserve of its Protestant alumni, for most of its members were then Protestants and Unionists. It was a smaller and homelier corporation than the English Bar, and, although its prizes were less and its fees were lower, it made up in good-fellowship what it lacked in guineas.
Barristers had no separate chambers at or near the Four Courts, one of the most beautiful and noble buildings in the Empire, unhappily and wantonly destroyed by Rory O’Connor in 1922. In the main building was the famous ‘Bar Library’, the place ‘where barristers most did congregate’. The main room was rectangular, with narrow galleries round the sides, under which were the bookshelves, a small octagonal room at each corner, and another room, the ‘Long Room’, running at right angles and opening off one side. The entrance used was through one of the small rooms, which became an anteroom in which solicitors and their clerks could speak to counsel.
The barristers sat on forms at long desks, or at ‘the Round Table’, a large table in the centre of the main room and opposite the chief fireplace (where twelve men sat), or at small round tables or separate desks in the corner rooms, or occupied any other available space. The accommodation was quite insufficient for the number requiring it, and the Bar were packed like children in a poor school of the bad old days, but with far more discomfort than would now be tolerated in such a place.
But it will easily be seen that at such close quarters the members of the Bar were a much closer association than their brethren in London, that jealousy and backbiting were so uncomfortable as to become really impossible, and that friendship and good-fellowship were not only general but necessary in such conditions.
Every barrister then lived in the city, and came to Court regularly every morning. Having robed and bewigged himself, whether expecting to be in Court or not, he went to the library and began his work or prepared to go to Court. As in the House of Commons, though not strictly entitled under the regulations to any special seat, each man could acquire by custom his own.
In Ireland, owing to the limited amount of legal business, there was not the same possibility of specialising as in England, and a junior barrister had to be prepared to take a case or advise proceedings in any of the Courts. This general knowledge, perforce acquired, was very useful to Carson when he came to the English Bar, and on many occasions he surprised the English Judges and his own colleagues, such as A H Bremner, with his acquaintance with the most abstruse legal doctrines which are as a closed book to the ordinary English Common lawyer.
Nevertheless, the library had its rough divisions. For instance, the ‘Long Room’ was the abode chiefly of Chancery men and conveyancers. So far as not engaged in Court, everyone spent the day in the library, and the pampered English practitioner, with his private chambers and his senior and junior clerk, may well wonder how these Irishmen managed to transact their business.
At the entrance to the main room stood a ‘crier’ – this formidable official was in Carson’s time an ex-trooper named Bramley, with a clear, powerful voice. Solicitors or their clerks – barristers had none – requiring to see a barrister, or to summon him to Court, came to the library door and mentioned the name of their counsel. Bramley then shouted the name – his voice would have reached far beyond the uttermost corner of the library – and the barrister immediately stopped his drafting or reading and went to the door.
Bramley’s voice retained its power from early morning until the shadows fell, and, in justice be it recorded, the ex-trooper’s throat needed very little lubrication. He kept by him a printed sheet with the names of the barristers, and a man leaving the library would say where he was going – such as ‘Rolls’, ‘Common Pleas’, or ‘Exchequer’. Bramley then entered a note of this address after the man’s name, and if, when subsequently wanted, he did not respond when his name was called, Bramley would tell the enquirer where to look for him.
The shouting of the names and the tramping of the men between their seats and the door made a great noise. In addition to this, the ‘library boys’ (some of these attendants were very old men) were obliged to go trotting or tottering about at their quickest speed in their search of the books called for by the members of the Bar. Further, there was much talk and laughter – quite unrestrained – chiefly at the fire and the Round Table, the centre of legal gossip and scandal of the Kingdom of Ireland.
To the newcomer, like Carson in 1877, the place seemed more like pandemonium than a place to work. He wondered how he would, if a solicitor ever paid a call on him, even hear his name called above the hubbub, let alone do any study in such a place. Soon, however, like everybody else, he became used to it, and grew able to shut his ears to every sound but Bramley’s stentorian ‘E H Carson’, a cry at first rarely heard, but one which grew almost monotonous in its frequence as the years passed. Moreover, Carson learned in the library that a general noise, no matter how loud, is not so distressing to the worker as two persons in close proximity holding a whispered conversation.
The library system had very great advantages: gentlemen of the Bar from the ‘six quarters of Ireland’ – in 1877 there were six circuits – were thrown together, and, as the Catholics and Nationalists began to come to the Bar, the library became a fine centre of friendship and comradeship between men who were politically and religiously opposed. Indeed, the Bar Library was the best social club in Dublin. Moreover, it was a great advantage for a young man to be thrown amongst men older and more experienced than himself: a junior could always ask for assistance from a senior, and such help was freely given.
Counsel engaged together in a case could discuss their business together, and the most useful consultations were those informal ones held in the library. More formal consultations were held in counsel’s houses in the evening, or in consultation rooms at the Courts immediately before or after the Courts rose. The ‘formal’ consultations, however, frequently degenerated into informality, being held at home among Irishmen, and libations in claret and champagne were freely poured out to the legal Muse, who is never thus honoured by her English devotees in their dignified professional chambers.
