Douglas Blackburn (1857-1929)
This page gathers together information on the journalist and novelist Douglas Blackburn (6 August 1857 – 28 March 1929). I will expand it as time allows, including notes on his publications.
Contents:
Douglas Blackburn bibliography
Prinsloo of Prinsloosdorp: A Tale of Transvaal Officialdom (1899)
‘In Quest of a Treasure-Cave’ (1902)
I Came and Saw (1908)
‘The Bottom Boy’ (c. 1929)
Douglas Blackburn bibliography
This is a work in progress. Much of Douglas Blackburn’s journalistic output was anonymous and was produced on two continents, so it is unlikely a full record will ever be compiled. It is divided into two sections: books, articles and stories by Blackburn; and publications which discuss him and his work. Stephen Gray’s 1984 bibliography divides Blackburn’s output into novels, factual works and selected articles, ordered alphabetically, but I have combined these categories and ordered the works chronologically.
Additions, corrections and clarifications are welcome.
Publications by Blackburn
‘Thought-Reading Extraordinary’, Light, 26 August 1882 (partially reprinted in Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, vol. 1, 1882, p.63).
Thought Reading: or Modern Mysteries Explained, London: Field and Tuer, 1884.
‘The Sentinel Days: An Open Letter to Mr W T Stead’, Sentinel, 1 April 1896, reprinted in English in Africa, Vol. 5, No. 1, March 1978, pp.8-10.
‘The Foolishness of Rider Haggard’, Sentinel, 29 July 1896, reprinted in English in Africa, Vol. 5, No. 1, March 1978, pp. 11-12.
‘The New Press Law’, Sentinel, 30 September 1896, reprinted in English in Africa, Vol. 5, No. 1, March 1978, pp. 12-13.
‘Wanted a Murderer’, Sentinel, 30 September 1896, reprinted in English in Africa, Vol. 5, No. 1, March 1978, pp. 13-14.
‘An Open Letter: To a Prominent Krugersdorp Jingo’, Sentinel, 31 October 1896, reprinted in English in Africa, Vol. 5, No. 1, March 1978, pp. 14-16.
‘Midnight Entertainment’, Transvaal Sentinel, 5 December 1896, reprinted in English in Africa, Vol. 5, No. 1, March 1978, pp. 16-17.
‘A Night in a Pretoria Hotel’, Transvaal Sentinel, 24 December 1896, reprinted in English in Africa, Vol. 5, No. 1, March 1978, pp. 17-18.
The Revolution – and After: Being the Secret History of a Failure, Johannesburg: George Thompson, 1896, 15 pp.
‘The overcrowded Rand’, Transvaal Sentinel, 8 May 1897, reprinted in English in Africa, Vol. 5, No. 1, March 1978, p. 22.
‘If There Should be War’, Transvaal Sentinel, 19 June, 1897, reprinted in English in Africa, Vol. 5, No. 1, March 1978, pp. 22-26.
‘British Plans in the Transvaal’, Transvaal Sentinel, 9 February 1898, reprinted in English in Africa, Vol. 5, No. 1, March 1978, p. 27.
[As ‘Slim Ofanzo’] ‘A Kaffir Mission to England’, Transvaal Sentinel, 23 February 1898, reprinted in English in Africa, Vol. 5, No. 1, March 1978, p. 28.
‘Valedictory’, Transvaal Sentinel, 24 August 1898, reprinted in English in Africa, Vol. 5, No. 1, March 1978, pp. 28-30.
‘An Open Letter: To Mr Moneypenny, Editor of The Star’, Life: A Sub-Tropical Journal, 4 March 1899, reprinted in English in Africa, Vol. 5, No. 1, March 1978, pp. 30-33.
Prinsloo of Prinsloosdorp: A Tale of Transvaal Officialdom [by Sarel Erasmus], London and Johannesburg: Dunbar Bros., 1899; London: Alston Rivers, 1908.
Kruger’s Secret Service, by One Who Was in It, London: John Macqueen, 1900.
‘Preliminary Causes’, Times of Natal War Number (Pietermaritzburg), 1900.
‘The Marvels of Loteni: A Voice from the Dead’, Natal Witness, (Pietermaritzburg), 19 June 1902.
‘In Quest of a Treasure-Cave’, The Wide World Magazine, June 1902, George Newnes, London, reprinted in Twenty-five True Tales of Adventure, George Newnes, n.d. [1908].
‘Some South African Prejudices’, Chambers’s Journal (London), 22 November 1902, pp. 813-15.
‘Natal and the Native Question’, Star (Johannesburg), 27 December 1902.
‘What Destroys Wild Rabbits?’, Natal Agricultural Journal Vol. 5, 1902, pp 699-700.
‘The Blackburn-Blackwood Letters’ (1902-08), English in Africa, Vol. 5, No. 1, March 1978, pp. 34-47.
A Burgher Quixote, Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood & Sons, 1903.
‘Animal Superstitions Among the Zulus, Basutos, Griquas, and Magatese, and the Kafirs of Natal’, Man (London), December 1904, pp. 181-83.
Richard Hartley, Prospector, Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood & Sons, 1905.
‘Transvaal Treasure-hunts’, Chambers’s Journal (London), September 1906, pp. 661-63.
I Came and Saw, London: Alston Rivers, 1908.
Leaven: A Black and White Story, London, Alston Rivers, 1908.
‘The Safeguard of Kafir Socialism’, New Age (London), 3 October 1908, p. 448.
‘Rand Magnate’s Latest Plot’, New Age (London), 12 November 1908, p. 47.
‘Confessions of a Famous Medium: Story of the Great “Scientific” Hoax’: 1 – ‘How Telepathy was Proved to the Satisfaction of the Psychical Research Society’, John Bull, 5 December 1908 , p590; 2 – ‘The Inadequacy of Scientific Precautions’, John Bull, 12 December 1908 p628; 3 – ‘Flukes and Physiognomy’, John Bull, 19 December 1908, p671; 4 – ‘Private Versus Professional Humbug’, 26 December 1908, pp.706-7; 5 – ‘My Masterpiece’, John Bull, 2 January 1909 , p7; 6 – ‘The Master Key’, John Bull, 9 January 1909, p.39.
and Waithman Caddell. The Detection of Forgery: A Practical Handbook for the Use of Bankers, Solicitors, Magistrates’ Clerks, and All Handling Suspected Documents, London: Charles & Edwin Layton,1909.
and W. Waithman Caddell. Secret Service in South Africa, London: Cassell, 1911.
‘Confessions of a “Telepathist”, Mr. Douglas Blackburn & the Scientists. 30-Year Hoax Exposed. How the Deception was Planned and Worked’ Daily News, 1 September 1911 (reprinted in JSPR, Vol. 15, October 1911, pp.115-19, A Skeptic’s Handbook of Parapsychology, Paul Kurtz (ed.), Buffalo, New York: Prometheus Books, 1985, pp. 235-39).
‘The Church’s Favourite Child’ [poem], New Age (London), 12 October 1912.
‘The Converted Missionary’ [poem], New Age (London), 7 November 1912, p. 9, reprinted in A Century of South African Poetry, 1981.
Love Muti, London: Everett & Co., 1915.
The Martyr Nurse: The Death and Achievement of Edith Cavell, London: Ridd Masson, 1915.
‘The Middle Stump: An East African Story’, illus. Stanley L. Wood, The Boy’s Own Annual, vol. 41, 1918/19.
‘Ghosts and Mediums I Have Met’, Tonbridge Free Press, five parts, 13 February – 5 April 1920.
‘Treasure Tales’, Daily Mail (London), 24 April 1923.
‘The Bottom Boy’, The Triumph Book for Boys, London: Collins, n.d. [c. 1929], n.p.
Blackburn issue. English in Africa (Grahamstown) 5, no. 1, March 1978, pp. 8-47.
Publications which discuss Blackburn and his work
‘Mr Morrey Hollander’, Transvaal Sentinel, 1 May 1897, in English in Africa, Vol. 5, No. 1, March 1978, pp. 18-21.
Johnson, Alice. ‘Mr. Blackburn’s “Confession”’, privately printed for the Society for Psychical research, 1909.
[Appreciation of Douglas Blackburn], Tonbridge Free Press, 5 April 1929.
Taylor, Ken. Adaptation of The Strange Case of Edmund Gurney, broadcast on BBC2 Theatre 625, Sunday 29 October 1967. (Richard Todd: Edmund Gurney, Anthony Bate: Frederic Myers, Ray Brooks: G. A. Smith, John Barcroft: Douglas Blackburn, Lynda Baron: Alice Smith, Diana Fairfax: Kate Gurney, Norman Shelley: Sir James Crichton-Browne).
Hall, Trevor. The Strange Case of Edmund Gurney, London: Duckworth, 1964.
Hofmeyr, Isabel. ‘The mining Novel in South African Literature: 1870-1920’, English in Africa, Vol. 5, 1978, pp. 1-16.
Gray, Stephen. ‘Douglas Blackburn: Journalist into Novelist (1857-1929). Introduction’, English in Africa, Vol. 5, No. 1, March 1978, pp. 1-7
Gray, Stephen. Douglas Blackburn, Boston, Mass: Twayne, 1984.
Rice, Michael. ‘Douglas Blackburn’s A Burgher Quixote’, Kunapipi, Vol. 8, No. 1, 1986, pp. 70-86.
Shum, Matthew. ‘The Content of the Form: Romance and Realism in Douglas Blackburn’s Leaven’, English in Africa, Vol. 21, No. 1/2, July 1994, pp. 93-102.
Gray, Stephen. Free-Lancers and Literary Biography in South Africa, Amsterdam:EditionsRodopi, 1999.
Lehmann, Elmar. ‘Douglas Blackburn and the Anglo-Boer War’, Alternation, Vol. 8, No. 1, January 2001, pp. 28-40.
Luckhurst, Roger. The Invention of Telepathy 1870-1901. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.
Wiley, Barry. The Thought Reader Craze: Victorian Science at the Enchanted Boundary, Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland, 2012.
Hamilton, Trevor. ‘Smith and Blackburn’, Society for Psychical Research Psi Encyclopedia, https://psi-encyclopedia.spr.ac.uk/articles/smith-and-blackburn, 2015. Retrieved 10 July 2018.
(Last updated 11 December 2020)
Prinsloo of Prinsloosdorp: A Tale of Transvaal Officialdom
Douglas Blackburn was a versatile writer and a colourful character – you might say he was a schelm (a rogue, a rascal) but also slim (cunning, artful, tricky), to employ a couple of the Afrikaans words he uses in this hugely enjoyable tale set in nineteenth-century South Africa. Blackburn himself can write about the dubious transactions of Piet Prinsloo with affection because he also was not averse to sailing close to the wind. Having learned his trade as a journalist in Brighton in the 1880s, he was involved in various scandals, and found himself in trouble for libel. It was during this period that he became briefly associated with the Society for Psychical Research, before he emigrated to South Africa (possibly after a visit to China).
In his new home, where he lived from 1892 until 1908, he again worked as a journalist and editor, while making his name with a series of novels that have become highpoints of South African literature. The earliest of these was Prinsloo of Prinsloosdorp, published in 1899, and it was the first of what Stephen Gray in his monograph Douglas Blackburn (Twayne, 1984) calls Blackburn’s ‘Sarel Erasmus trilogy of satires’, the others being A Burgher Quixote (1903) and I Came and Saw (1908). Together Gray considers these ‘his finest achievement’. Bearing in mind how little time Blackburn had spent in the country when he produced Prinsloo, it is an assured debut.
Prinsloo of Prinsloosdorp is narrated by said Sarel Erasmus, Piet Prinsloo’s son-in-law and occasional associate, after the old man’s death. It is an attempted defence of Piet’s schemes, his life being full of ploys to make money, and ruefully losing it. The result is a humorous and unflattering portrait of the corruption underpinning Boer society. They are typically unsophisticated and ignorant, susceptible to verneukery (cheating, knavery) both between themselves and by the perfidious British, those Outlanders proving themselves unscrupulous in business transactions. One, Scotty, is essentially a bandit, and Blackburn uses him as a metaphor for the ruthlessness of outsiders’ desire for acquisition at the locals’ expense.
Piet’s schooling was rudimentary and his illiteracy is a drawback in conducting business, though not an insuperable one, as even when he is appointed a magistrate he is able to rely on others to do the reading for him, and in any case bribes are more significant than case law when adjudicating a dispute. His main complaint about not being able to read is that he has to rely on others, who then know as much as he does. Power is achieved not by merit but by hypocrisy, nepotism, bribery and if necessary blackmail. Even with his educational disadvantages Piet manages to climb to significant positions of power, sometimes by guile, but often because it suits others’ purposes. There is no sense of public service as every position is assessed in terms of its financial rewards.
Added to this unflattering account, Piet is a bully, particularly where his black workers are concerned. Apart from being shown at the bottom of society, only there to be exploited by the whites, the black population is largely invisible. Blackburn drily has Sarel bemoan the fact that Piet’s year of birth (1835) was also the year the British ‘wickedly’ freed the slaves, the result of which (after being cheated by the ‘rascally Englanders’ out of the compensation money) was that the family had to hire ‘kaffirs’ (a term used throughout the novella) ‘and even had sometimes to work themselves’. Sarel sees this as a sorry state of affairs.
Yet it is not a completely negative portrait of Piet – Gray notes that Blackburn balances as much sympathy as censure. Piet is sinned against as much as sinning, and having to survive in such a society forces anyone to be self-serving if they want to prosper. The cynicism he exhibits runs throughout all levels of government. When Piet goes to Pretoria to see Paul Kruger, the President of the South African Republic, Kruger does not criticise his methods but instead upbraids him for being stupid because he is always getting the State into the newspapers.
Justice cannot be expected from the government: a running theme is Piet’s anger that loans he had made were never repaid, though undercutting his indignation is the fact that he had made the loans in lieu of taking up arms on behalf of the Transvaal. Here, as throughout the novel, Blackburn shows how selfish acts are spun to appear patriotic, Piet repeatedly declaring that he has ‘bled’ for the regime. The only checks on greed are provided by other officials who themselves want to use any given situation for their own gain, not a state of affairs conducive to good governance. The book’s frontispiece is a bunch of disembodied hands reaching up for South African Republic coins, suggesting that avarice will be a major theme.
While Piet is a significant figure within his community, Blackburn leaves broader political developments vague, partly because he would have assumed his original readership to be familiar with them, but also because Piet, while intent on personal gain, is never involved in the destiny of the country. In his small way he does well because, despite his illiteracy and proneness to make bad judgements, eventually he founds a town (the Prinsloosdorp of the title), though even here he finds himself cheated out of its full potential when he is outmanoeuvred in purchasing the best plots. Eventually it all gets too much for him, and with an increasingly vigilant press (the only brake on the general roguery it would seem) exposing his dubious practices, he decides to move to Rhodesia, where he dies of dropsy.
In the preface to the 1908 edition, the first to bear his name (and issued the year he returned to England), Blackburn distances himself from the satirical treatment of official institutions by arguing that the incidents portrayed in the book had in the course of the intervening decade already receded into history and would eventually pass to the realm of myth. At the same time he stresses, because he insists there are no contemporary examples, that his depiction of Piet, ‘a Transvaal official of the old regime’, is not a caricature, and somewhat disingenuously that the book contains no invention because all characters and incidents are based on reality.
This, he argues, was demonstrated by the difference between English and local reviewers: the former saw it as political satire, the latter as ‘a matter-of-fact narration of familiar commonplaces’. One suspects that Blackburn must have exaggerated his source material because the satire is often rather blunt, such as the drunken jailer who ‘was punished by being removed to Boshoff, where he was made Chief of Police’. The book is full of similar improbable ironies, so while Blackburn claims that he has merely assembled anecdotes, it is hard to believe that he has not embellished them with his own sardonic view of the political culture in his new home.
The cover illustrated above is from the 1989 edition, a facsimile reprint of the 1908 edition, published by Hans Strydom, Melville, South Africa. The first edition is incorrectly dated to 1898. The back cover shouts: ‘Entire first edition bought up by Paul Kruger’s government to save themselves embarrassment!’ The source for this allegation is Blackburn’s 1908 preface but Gray, while noting that the tale has been repeated frequently and is unverifiable either way, suggests that ‘judging by the quantities of the book still in circulation in South Africa today, any attempts to limit its sales were unsuccessful.’ Blackburn, as he showed in other areas of his life, prized a good yarn, even if not true.
(25 August 2015)
‘In Quest of a Treasure-Cave’
The story appears in Twenty-five True Tales of Adventure (1908), published by George Newnes, Ltd. The preface states: ‘The stories appearing in this volume have all been selected from the pages of the “Wide World Magazine”. They are unique – apart from their thrilling interest – in that they present the actual experiences of individuals who have, in the magazine above-mentioned, supported their remarkable statements with photographs and other documentary evidence which is unimpeachable.’ Unfortunately, the preface continued that lack of space prevented the presentation of proofs.
Blackburn’s story had appeared in the magazine in 1902, and the illustrations in the magazine version were left out of the book. These included a portrait of Blackburn and commissioned drawings illustrating the adventure. The introduction to the story sets the scene: ‘Relating how the Author – who is a well-known South African journalist – and Mr. David Mackay Wilson, first Gold Commissioner of Barberton, set out to discover the whereabouts of a Kaffir chief’s treasure-house, and the adventures they met with.’
In December 1894 an old Kaffir, Umbanda, came to the government offices in Pretoria demanding to see President Kruger as he had a private message. He was handed over to the police. After a fortnight in jail he returned with the same demand. This time a sympathetic ex-official, David Wilson, listened to his story. Aged at least 80, Umbanda said he was the last of his tribe and wanted to impart to Kruger, whom he now regarded as his chief, the secret of a cave containing naturally-occurring gold, the location of which was known only to him. He sought no reward and said it was a king’s secret, so could be told only to Kruger.
Wilson had been a mining commissioner in the gold fields and was inclined to believe the old man. He asked Kruger to consider seeing Umbanda, but there was plenty of gold flowing in and Kruger chafed Wilson on his credulity. The old man left, refusing to tell anyone else. About four months later he returned, asking Wilson to persuade Kruger (‘the obstinate old autocrat’ as Blackburn calls him) to grant an interview. Kruger authorised his son-in-law and a general to accompany Umbanda, but this compromise was refused. Umbanda left again, warning he would be dead in two months. Wilson conveyed this account to Blackburn and they discussed schemes to find the gold for themselves.
Three years later Blackburn was living in Krugersdorp, editing the Transvaal Sentinel. He received a letter from Wilson saying he had traced Umbanda (apparently still alive) to the Krugersdorp district and inviting Blackburn to help locate him. Sending a Kaffir agent to look for him only produced a slew of aged Kaffirs, none Umbanda. The agent then produced ‘an old Swazi’ who could tell more, whom Blackburn took to Wilson at Johannesburg. He claimed to know about Umbanda and to have been to the cave himself. Based on the information he gave, Blackburn and Wilson decided to mount an expedition, though Blackburn later concluded Wilson had used leading questions and been told what he wanted to hear.
The expedition is the heart of the story. Blackburn, Wilson and the Swazi went to the cave system, which they heard had been only partially explored and was in the care of two men who had leased it, charging admission to visitors. Blackburn knew one of them, so he arranged for a night in town to inveigle them away. He, Wilson and the Swazi were equipped to explore the limestone caves, through which they made slow progress, involving Blackburn having to swim across water to an alluvial beach. The Swazi refused to make the crossing and in the resulting fracas with Wilson two of their three lamps fell into the water, followed by the Kaffir, of whom no trace was found.
It appeared they had indeed been fed a yarn as there was no trace of gold. Disheartened, they abandoned the quest (and the Swazi) and retreated towards the surface, but found the wire they had used to link them to the entrance had been cut. However, they reached the open air after 11 hours underground. Having located their horses they were heading home when they saw the Kaffir they thought drowned, with a bundle. He ran off and was lost to view. They were left with three questions: how did he get out; was it he who had cut the wire; and had he ever met Umbanda? (To which might be added: what was in the bundle?)
As usual, Blackburn is critical of Boers, the Transvaal authorities, and their callous attitude towards the black population, though it must be said Blackburn does not rate them highly himself. As to whether he was able to present ‘unimpeachable’ evidence of his adventure, the strapline of The Wide World Magazine may have been ‘Truth is stranger than fiction,’ but it is doubtful this was the truth, and even if there was a kernel, it is highly likely it was heavily embellished.
Admittedly there is a photograph said to be of Mr Wilson in the magazine, but that is no guarantee of veracity – another claims to represent ‘The Swazi “boy” who professed to have visited the treasure-cave’, and it is improbable Blackburn and Wilson would have gone to the trouble of taking his picture before they set off. Anyway, according to Blackburn’s account the business left him considerably out of pocket. It does not seem in character to have sported out so much in advance, including sums handed repeatedly to an unreliable native agent, and for a night in town for the two cave guardians, on so slim a prospect. Without corroboration from Wilson, this should be filed in the ‘highly dubious’ category.
(11 December 2020)
I Came and Saw
I Came and Saw (1908) is the last of Blackburn’s ‘Sarel Erasmus trilogy’, following Prinsloo of Prinsloosdorp and A Burgher Quixote, and it confirms him as a fine comic writer and satirist. In this instalment Sarel visits England and finds the resulting culture clash the source of unpleasant experiences, generating a great deal of humour in Sarel’s discomfiture but also barbs by the expat Blackburn against his mother country. Stephen Gray notes that Blackburn had left England during the Victorian era, and on his return in 1906 for, by Blackburn’s account, medical treatment, had found Edwardian society rather different to the staider one he left.
Sarel, having been defeated in an election for the Transvaal’s legislative assembly, during which he had run up considerable campaign debts he cannot repay, and wanting to put some distance between him and his wife, decides to leave the country. The opportunity arises when he finds that an acquaintance, Bob Magus, an Englishman who has made a fortune in the Rand (often by dubious means), plans to return to the old country to float a diamond mining company which is essentially a sham. Sarel, knowing about Bob’s dodgy deals, is able to blackmail the millionaire into allowing him to join the trip as a quasi-secretary/general hanger-on.
The third member of the party is Sixpence, a black youngster just out of jail. Sarel, on the basis of reading YMCA literature, believes including him will create a good impression of the group in England, distinguishing them as humanitarians. Unfortunately for the plan, once there Sixpence proves he has a sense of independence, and when Sarel tries to treat him as he would at home he finds English standards of behaviour are somewhat different. Attempts at discipline with his trusty sjambok backfire, gaining him a reputation for brutality. In England Bob seeks a secretary and hires Elsie, by whom Sarel is smitten (dismissing his wife at home from his mind).
In order to raise his profile and obtain the desired capital for the mine, Bob poses as a philanthropist, allowing Blackburn to depict a wide array of chancers keen to take advantage of his largesse for a variety of ‘humanitarian’ enterprises, but transparently acting out of self-interest. During this enterprise Bob becomes entangled with a society lady who palms off her useless son as an employee of Bob’s organisation, his sole activity being to draw his salary. Fortunately for Bob, the liaison comes to nothing and romance blossoms in a more suitable direction.
Despite believing himself to be sophisticated, in England Sarel is an innocent abroad, forever getting into scrapes. It is clear he is constantly being made fun of, but he fails to realise it. He considers himself a clear-eyed sceptic but, viewing English society based on the way things are back home, he exhibits a tendency to misunderstand situations. Bob is frequently exasperated by his outlandish behaviour but also bears him some affection, and curiously finds that Sarel’s actions, while frequently uncomfortable for Sarel, tend to work out to his own advantage.
Sarel makes much of having been a public prosecutor in the Transvaal but Blackburn in his prefatory author’s note refers to ‘the almost childish simplicity’ shown by Sarel, noting how low the qualifications for legal office had been under the Kruger regime. The result is that Pooterish Sarel has an overinflated yet undeserved sense of his own importance, with his pomposity constantly being deflated by the realities of the rather more down-to-earth English who regularly see opportunities to fleece the unsuspecting Boer
Chronicling the fish-out-of-water misadventures of Sarel, and thereby satirising the culture from which he comes, is not Blackburn’s only aim. In the same way he had examined life in South Africa as a journalist, he is able to show England to its inhabitants in a fresh light through Sarel’s eyes. It is a kind of reverse anthropology, and not always to the mother country’s advantage. Sarel may be naive, but the English are frequently shown to be unscrupulous and grasping, making Sarel often a sympathetic character and marking the behaviour of some of those he meets, both men and women, as less than admirable.
Blackburn was not enamoured of the way England was developing, and there are side glances at greed and duplicity, financial transactions bearing no relationship to anything tangible, rural poverty, and a fondness for drink and free meals. At times it seems everybody is out to con everybody else, for varying amounts. England may believe itself to be a civilised country, but in its way it is as morally backward as it considers Africa to be, its values shallow and self-serving.
The expedition ends happily for Elsie and Bob. Despite being married, Sarel too had sought romance, but proved himself to be spectacularly inept. The women run rings round the men, but as Bob ends up with the right woman, he can contemplate her machinations in winning him with good humour. Sixpence is set up in England, leaving Sarel the unfortunate prospect of having to go back to his wife. Sarel, Bob and Elsie return to South Africa, the venture having proved a success for Bob, but leaving Sarel in philosophical mood. Sarel comes and sees, and while he definitely does not conquer, he leaves behind, as recounted by Blackburn, a comic gem.
(31 July 2019)
‘The Bottom Boy’
Douglas Blackburn’s short story ‘The Bottom Boy’ would probably be called something else now.* Actually, it wouldn’t be published today as it is very much a product of colonial South Africa. It is contained in a chunky collection, The Triumph Book for Boys, published by Collins. It is undated (and for some reason unpaginated), but it probably appeared in the late 1920s, around the time of Blackburn’s death in March 1929. Apparently the story was repackaged by Collins in The Best Book for Schoolboys, also undated, but I have not been able to examine a copy to compare to the Triumph Book for Boys.
Fourteen-year old Charlie Barton is the bottom boy – actually the bottom of his class, kept back with younger children, to his parents’ dismay. He lives on the family’s sugar plantation on the Zululand coast and one day stumbles on the owner of the next-door plantation, Paton, on the beach with a stranger bringing ashore a cargo which turns out to be illegal rifles. These it transpires are for a native uprising against the whites. Charlie is captured by Andrade, Paton’s business partner, but escapes by using purple ink to mimic the symptoms of smallpox, fooling the credulous natives.
Unfortunately he injures his foot and is mistaken for a water sprite (referred to as a togolosh but known nowadays as tokoloshe) by some locals because the purple ink has run, and he is taken to their kraal. Andrade turns up and tells Charlie he has to help in the sale of the guns – which are actually useless – or be killed. The local witch doctor claims that Charlie is indeed a togolosh, come as a sign that the tribe will prevail over the white men, and tries to take credit for his presence.
Resourceful Charlie though, belying his place at the bottom of the class, demonstrates to the chief that the bullets are fake, thereby disgracing the witch doctor and causing Andrade, who has murdered Paton, to take an early bath in the crocodile pool. The chief gives the diamonds intended for Andrade to Charlie, and back home Charlie’s father, unfazed by his abduction, is pleased with his achievement. In fact Charlie’s indifferent scholastic achievement is now a cause for levity (unfortunately Mr Barton is referred to as Mr Paton in the penultimate line, spoiling the effect). Upon being questioned, Charlie explains that he knew the bullets would not fire because ‘a rascally German’ had once sold him and his friends some, which were made of wax and silver paper, and filled with weak powder.
Blackburn had an interest in Zulu beliefs. He supplied notes on ‘Animal Superstitions Among the Zulus, Basutos, Griquas, and Magatese, and the Kafirs of Natal’ to the journal Man in 1904, in which he discusses the mischievous ‘Togolosh’. In his 1908 novel Leaven he refers to ‘the Togolosh that carried off maidens’. The shrewd Charlie is able to turn this superstition to his advantage, telling the chief that he did so to establish his superiority to the witch doctor. Charlie prevents a conflict that would have seen many tribesmen killed, preserving the peace now minus its disruptive elements. To do so, the bullets are shown to be useless empirically, by having tribesmen shoot at a goat which remains uninjured. At a stroke Charlie proves the Europeans’ superior wisdom compared to the indigenous population’s reliance on magic and inability to recognise ersatz ammunition.
*Having said which, in 1918/19 Blackburn published a story called ‘The Middle Stump: An East African Story’ in The Boy’s Own Annual, so it is possible he mischievously assigned risqué titles to his children’s fiction.
(28 July 2017)
The Joy of Mere Words 