What's in a Name?
My English Traits - Chapter 30
History is an agreed upon fable - Napoleon Bonaparte
No one appears to know who Estcourt was named after. Among the very few people who care, opinion is divided.
Some favour the 19th century British Conservative politician Thomas Henry Sutton Sotheron-Estcourt PC DL IP, FFS, known familiarly as Thomas Bucknall-Estcourt, who had sponsored the passage of a group known as the Byrne Settlers to colonial Natal.
Others, most notably those scions of the local landed gentry who believe themselves deserving of a more romantic provenance, prefer the dashing Captain Estcourt who appears through the fog of history to have been the Harry Flashman of the Boer War, and about as real.
But history, as Napoleon observed, is made of choices, not of facts.
Like most enterprises English, the Byrne pilgrimage was an exploitative commercial venture dressed up as a moral crusade, much in the way charities in England today not only relieve the state of any obligation to take care of the indigent, the inept and the unemployable, but all the while make fat fortunes out of the business of pretending they’re doing it out of, well, charity.
According to Wikipedia there are about 168,850 charities in the UK with a total annual turnover of just under £48bn. Steve Gray, the CEO of Nuffield Health, earns £840,000 a year in a country where a national health service provides free healthcare to every citizen at the point of use. I have no idea what to do with that.
J.C. Byrne & Co. offered prospective emigrants to Natal both the passage itself and, at the end of the rainbow, 20 acres (81,000 m2) of land at the following rates: £10 for a steerage passage (discounted from the usual £15), and £19 for an “intermediate berth''.
Children under fourteen were charged £5 and were entitled to 5 acres (20,000 m2). Cabin passengers could travel for £35 but were not entitled to any land. On the ships’ lists they appeared as ‘passengers’, while the others were labelled ‘emigrants’.
To take advantage of the land allotment an emigrant had to be approved by Her Majesty's Land and Emigration Commissioners - his/her age had to be 45 maximum unless accompanied by adult offspring, and the only acceptable occupations were the practical ones of farmer, blacksmith, wheelwright, wagon-maker, dairymaid and agricultural labourer.
Their other skills would prove more useful than their farming qualifications. The Natal Midlands north of Hilton may look as green and lush as Dorset or Devon, but neither Byrne nor his surveyor John Swales Moreland had done their homework.
As the 1820 Settlers had discovered in the Eastern Cape thirty years earlier, it takes approximately 250 acres of South African veld to rear just fifty sheep to maturity. Twenty acres, the size of the plots designated by Byrne to be bought for five shillings an acre by the twenty ship-loads of optimistic settlers who arrived in Durban in 1849, 1850 and 1851, would raise four or five of them - and that would be only if they were lucky enough to survive a black frost in the spring or snow in the early autumn.
So when it turned out that next to nothing could be farmed on the 20 acre plots in the Natal hinterland they were supposed to buy from the company at five shillings an acre, they abandoned their agricultural ambitions and drifted back to the urban centres of Durban and Pietermaritzburg to spend their money on something to drown both their sorrows and the sound of Zulu war chants.
It hardly needs saying that Byrne himself had never set foot in Natal. When J.C. Byrne & Co. folded in 1850, Byrne moved on to targeting emigrants desperate enough to want to become Kiwis or Aussies.
Shelagh O'Byrne Spencer has written a beautifully unsympathetic account of Joseph Charles Byrne’s life of schemes and scandals here:
https://shelaghspencer.com/josephbyrne/
There is a company called J.C. Byrne, I couldn’t help noticing, that sells boiler stoves, inset stoves, cassette stoves and free standing stoves in the UK to this day. I have no reason to believe their products and services are anything other than excellent.
It wouldn’t have been out of the ordinary in those days, when they had run out of gongs, titles and letters of the alphabet, to reward Members of Parliament such as T.H.S. Sotheron Estcourt for their loyal service to the ruling party by naming a town or two after them in some remote region of the Empire’s dominions, even if their connection with the place itself were as tenuous as this one.
In November 1850 not one but three towns in South Africa were named to honour Earl Grey, Secretary of State for the Colonies, who had recently acquired the title of Lord Howick, the name deriving from his ancestral home of Howick Hall in Northumberland, England. One of the Howicks was, and still is, in New Zealand, another is in Ontario, Canada, and the third is in KwaZulu-Natal.
My mother would die peacefully in a care home there in 2013, the circle of her life circumscribed neatly by having delivered four of her six children in the hospital at Lady Grey in the Eastern Cape, named, like the tea, after Earl Grey’s wife.
One the other hand, if you were born white in a former British colony in the 20th century, your chances of not being born, or getting educated, or living in a town or dying somewhere in a hospital that wasn’t named after Earl Grey, his wife, or one of his estates, is vanishingly small:
Places named after Grey include Greytown in the Wairarapa region of New Zealand's North Island, the Grey River in the South Island's West Coast region (and thus indirectly the town of Greymouth at the river's mouth), and the Auckland suburb of Grey Lynn; Greytown, KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa; the Division of Grey, an Australian Electoral Division in South Australia. Grey Street, Melbourne is also believed to have been named after George Edward Grey. In South Africa, Grey was instrumental in the founding of Grey High School, Port Elizabeth, Grey College, Bloemfontein and Grey's Hospital in Pietermaritzburg.
So much for Bucknall and I.
The more romantic view, espoused by the fabulously wealthy Ralfe family whose descendants we would have dealings with at Estcourt High School in the 1960s, (and again later, oddly, in my time working in London with De Beers, the diamond people) is that the town was named after the fabled Captain Estcourt, apparently a member of the party who established the military outpost in 1847. He would at least have set foot on the ground there, if he existed. And it nicely avoids the unpleasantness of the alternative fact.
A James F, Ralfe and a Robert Ralfe are listed among the Byrne Settlers. So not all the pilgrims were victims of the misadventure.
Latterly, however, if you’re obliged to admit to a South African of my generation that you went to school in Estcourt, those who had heard of it respond with one of three observations: “Lekker bacon” or “Henry Honiball!” or “You know, of course, that Winston Churchill was based there as a war correspondent?”
Which will inevitably say more about them as it does about Estcourt.
A few may mention the chemicals factory that produced and marketed stockings under the brand name of Escort in the days before “nylon+escort” became a popular search phrase on the internet.
Estcourt was fixed firmly on the map of South African history only very recently when Jacob Zuma was arrested nearby and locked up in prison there. People who read about the town’s brand new luxury correctional facility said, “Typical.” People who knew Estcourt said, “Shame, man.”
I’m tempted to call it a one-horse town, but the last time I drove down Harding Street there were more than a few cows sauntering past the Pick n Pay, and even more chickens crossing the road to get out of the way of them.
But, again, what do I do with this? Why should it matter? Why should we care? Why would anyone care?
Because while we are all products of history, we are not therefore obliged to be creatures of it. And since history is a matter of taste, not a matter of fact, the romantic notion of a usable past can just as readily be twisted into the more sinister variant of an exploitable past — today’s weapon of choice in the hands of those most determined to cling onto the privilege and power of their inheritances.
It wasn’t all bad. Like countless other unremarkable provincial towns throughout South Africa and the wider world, Estcourt produced its fair share of wonderfully talented and brilliant people. The most successful among them made their own histories in spite of it.
Provenance matters only if you need it to matter.