A year in the life of Grahamstown, 1876

Ever wondered what Grahamstown was like in the late 1800s? Records from this long ago tend to be sketchy, but a complete year’s worth of The Journal, a popular local paper back then, offers some fascinating insights into what life was about for Grahamstonians in 1876. Grocott’s Mailreporter Ian Macleod thumbed through these old reports to find out.

Ever wondered what Grahamstown was like in the late 1800s? Records from this long ago tend to be sketchy, but a complete year’s worth of The Journal, a popular local paper back then, offers some fascinating insights into what life was about for Grahamstonians in 1876. Grocott’s Mailreporter Ian Macleod thumbed through these old reports to find out.

In 1876 Alexander Graham Bell made the first ever telephone call, Custer and the 7th Cavalry were wiped out by Sioux and Cheyenne at Little Big Horn River in America, and The Wanderers won the FA Cup. Far away from all of this, the bustlings of tiny Grahamstown in colonial South Africa may not have been as auspicious, but were nonetheless rich with characters and tales. A rare surviving record of this quaint time and place reveals a town with all the peculiarities one expects from a bygone era.

One striking feature of the stories in the dusty and flaking collection of 1876 editions of then-popular newspaper, The Grahamstown Journal, is just how brutal life was in those slow and mechanical days. For example, one pithy report from a September issue simply reads: “John Cooper, the famous ploughman, has been accidentally burnt out of his place at Kuils River, and is penniless.” Just like that. One June issue reports an “unfortunate hunting incident” where one Mr. Pretorius, while out shooting giraffe, got a thorn in his thigh and was left “lying dangerously ill”.

It seems Pretorius hadn’t heard of the miraculous cures that abounded at the time, and surely wasn’t aware of the regular newspaper adverts for Holloway’s Ointment. Makers of this “cure for all” proclaimed if would remedy “bad legs, bad breasts, ulcers, abscesses, wounds and sores of all kinds,” so one imagines a simple thorn fell comfortably within its abilities. Failing that, “Clarke’s world-famous blood mixture,” would surely have done the trick. “Cleansing and clearing the blood from all impurities,” this must have been a real bargain at 2s. 6d. a bottle.

But amidst the hardships of the time, sport and games were the delight of village life. Billiards and rifle matches were popular, and tales of rich horse races in Cape Town were favourites on the sports pages. One particularly physical nearby football match between the Grasshoppers and Olympic received especially excited reviews, and in regional cricketing circles, teams such as True Blue and Livingstone wowed fans with their gentlemanly tussles in multiple-innings matches. One of the few titbits from overseas lauds the exploits of one W.G. Grace who had recently scored 177 for Gloucestershire against Nottingham, and directly afterwards “played for his county against Yorkshire and made 318 not out”.
One also shouldn’t ignore those quirks that may have sounded sensible enough at the time, but can only amuse decades later. A fine case in point is a September story explaining the workings of a fire-proof dress. The Swedish-made outfit was said to feature an “india-rubber [sic]” inner and “moleskin lined with stout cotton cloth or some other non-conductor of heat”. Coupled with an incomprehensible system of tubes and pumps, it was claimed that the colourful inventor could survive half an hour in the suit in a blazing inferno.

Other narratives display a timeless lunacy. One traveller recounted a scene from early October where he spotted “three wild ducks flying down wind at a rapid rate” when one “suddenly fell to the ground”. His examination of the floored bird revealed its throat had been cut “as clean as if it was made by a sharp knife,” and he concluded he had witnessed that uncommon phenomenon of “duck-icide”.