Editing the Chronicle of Jeremiah Goldswain: 1820 Settler has brought me close to Jeremiah. It is almost as though he were alive: he is indeed in one sense – in the vividness of his recollections.
Editing the Chronicle of Jeremiah Goldswain: 1820 Settler has brought me close to Jeremiah. It is almost as though he were alive: he is indeed in one sense – in the vividness of his recollections.
I was always aware that I was descended from Jeremiah Goldswain, and my father boasted about it as though Jeremiah was someone very special. When I grew up and went out into the world I realised that he was not special: Jeremiah Goldswain was just another settler. The fact that I was of ‘settler stock’ made me slightly special during my five years as a student at Rhodes, but there were hundreds of other students also with the claim to being of settler stock, who were also slightly special in Albany because of that.
‘Goldswain’ was in some ways a name that stood out from the catalogue of settler names because of Una Long, who edited Jeremiah's Chronicle for the van Riebeeck Society. If it hadn’t been for Ms Long’s lucky encounter with the manuscript via the daughter of Jeremiah Goldswain Junior, the patriarch’s youngest son, and her enthusiastic scholarship, even the existence of the chronicle would barely be known.
The name of the street in Grahamstown that was named for him would be as obscure and enigmatic as the other street names – the names of people whom no one remembers or knows anything about.
My father grew up in East London so somewhere along the line the family had moved away from their farm life in Albany to the country that was opening up beyond the Great Fish River. My grandfather, Albert, the son of Jeremiah’s third son, James, got a job in the thriving port of East London as a railway policeman. James’s other children carried on farming and settled around Peddie, Kidd’s Beach and Kayser’s Beach. Very often on a Sunday we would drive out and visit my father’s cousins – Uncle Alfred, the dairy farmer on the West Bank of the Buffalo River; Uncle Roland and Uncle Rudi at Kayser’s Beach; Uncle Claude near Peddie; and two sisters, my father’s aunts, Lydia and Lil, also near Peddie.
Those two aunts seemed very old but were still farming actively.
I wish I could go back to the 1950s, visit them all and interview them. I would love to hear the two aunts’ memories of their grandfather, Jeremiah. I would love to know how it was that the family had moved away from Albany. My two great aunts had a dark house filled with old furniture – including a piano – ornaments, and ancient carpets and rugs. What happened to them when they died? Where are those things now? Some of them would once have been in the home of Jeremiah and Eliza – things that they had owned and cherished.
I saw those items as a child but unfortunately I didn’t get to touch them: every time I came near any of them my mother would warn me not to touch. I longed to open the tall, carved mahogany piano and strike the keys. There was a little brass bell that I yearned to lift and toll. If I could go back now, knowing what I know, I would ignore my mother’s instructions and enjoy it all – strike the piano keys and toll the bell. I like to think that that was the piano that Eliza Goldswain played as the family gathered around and sang on Saturday nights.
I clearly remember the day my father came home with the first volume of Una Long’s Chronicle. I was only four years old but I remember him sitting at the kitchen table, writing his name in the book. I remember my mother settling down with my two sisters and me under a blanket on some winter evenings reading it to us. I eventually inherited the two volumes, which I keep proudly on my bookshelf.
By the time I got to Rhodes I had virtually forgotten about Jeremiah and he didn’t feature at all in my life there during my first four years. Whenever I spoke my name, though, I was reminded of him: the name was so familiar in that part of the world that there was always a comment like, "ah, a Goldswain!" or "1820 settler", or "fine pedigree". And then, in my last year, Guy Butler invited me to play the part of Jeremiah in his Take Root or Die, which I did, and I left Grahamstown with the words of the play ringing in my ears.
Although Una Long’s Chronicle has become a classic of its kind – a very famous settler memoir and one of the most popular because of the quality of the writing and its value as a primary historical source – it has been out of print for more than half a century. Last year, while visiting my brother in Johannesburg, during a nostalgic evening we decided that I would do a new edition of the Chronicle and make it available to the whole world, available in bookshops and libraries. Which I have done with its publication this month. And while working on it I got close to my great great grandfather. I feel that in bringing his memoirs back to life I have, in a way, resurrected Jeremiah Goldswain himself.
