Introduction to Bacon & the Art of Living
The story of bacon is set in the late 1800s and early 1900s when most of the important developments in bacon took place. The plotline takes place in the 2000s with each character referring to a real person and actual events. The theme is a kind of “steampunk” where modern mannerisms, speech, clothes and practices are superimposed on a historical setting. Modern people interact with old historical figures with all the historical and cultural bias that goes with this.
The Greatest Adventure
Johannesburg, May 1890
Soon after I started my transport business, I married the daughter of a German immigrant who set up a blacksmith business, making wagon wheels in Port Elisabeth, Colin Beckmann. I met Julie at church. We fell in love and decided to build a life together. She was 20 and I was 26.
Her grandfather on her mother’s side was the British High Commissioner to Zambia and very English. My parents were delighted with our relationship. Not on account of the position of her grandfather but because they thought I would never find a wife!
My friend, David (Dawie) de Villiers-Graaff had a different focus. He told me many times whenever I brought the subject of marriage up that he will marry as soon as he made his millions. I thought about those words often over the years and wonder who was a millionaire at 25. Him with millions in the bank or me with my family with two kids. Then again, he created a wealth that will last many generations and engineered advantages for his children and successive generations. Looking back on my life, having children early is still a choice I would make 100 times over.
Very soon after our marriage, I was back on the road, hauling mainly food and building materials between the Cape and Johannesburg. Even when Julie was pregnant with our two children, Tristan and Lauren, I did not stay home very long, always being driven by a strange mix of a somewhat misplaced quest for adventure and a drive to care for my young family. When I was home we were happy together but being away from home had its toll on our relationship.
On one of my trips in 1890, I was crossing Vijoensdrift. It is a few hours ride outside Potchefstroom and one of the best places to cross the Vaal River on your way to Johannesburg.
I was contracted by a certain Mr. Vincent Reeves to transport chickens to the Johannesburg market. Mr. Reeves, originally from Minnesota in the USA, purchased land in the Parys district and set up a chicken farm. He studied chicken farming intensely and was successful in Minnesota. Upon learning about the discovery of gold on the Rand, he conceived a plan to buy land in the Transvaal Republic, not far from Johannesburg to farm chickens for sale in the lucrative Reef market where gold mining was exploding. (1)
Mr. Reeves was, by all accounts, a very good chicken farmer but not well versed in geography. An unscrupulous fellow back in Minneapolis convinced him that Parys was closer to Johannesburg than it actually turned out to be. The reality is that Parys is in the Orange Free State and Johannesburg in the Transvaal – two different Boer republics. Nevertheless, he thought it was close enough, which it is, and forged ahead, setting up the farm. On this day I was trying to cross the Vaal river at Viljoensdrift with Mr. Reeves’ chickens on my ox wagon, taking them to the Johannesburg market.
It was after a particularly wet spell and the river was high. I was tired after a long journey, eager to get to Johannesburg and my exhaustion caused an error in judgment. I should have taken better notice of the speed and level of the river. We should not have crossed at that time.
Hans Viljoen had set up the ferry and by 1857 was taking travelers, their horses, and wagons across the Vaal River. Over the years, the crossing became known as Viljoensdrift. (2) This was where I was making the crossing.
Everything went according to plan. Just before we reached the Transvaal side of the river, one of the ferry anchors came loose. It tilted slightly to one side and dipped into the rushing current. As the ferry got pushed down, my wagons started rolling forward. Desperately I tried stopping it from the front but it was too heavy. On it was Mr. Reeves chickens, salt, maize, and building materials. I had little chance.
On the Transvaal side of the river, a Boer from the Potchefstroom district was waiting to cross himself. His name, Oscar Klynveld. He was sitting on the bank, on his horse, when the anchor rope came loose. With no hesitation, he spurred his horse on and raced towards the ferry while yelling to others on the bank to come and help.
His horse plunged into the water. He kept feeling the depth of the water with the handle of his whip (5) with water swirling around his horse’s chin as it tried to keep its head above the water. The surging river caused the ferry to tilt dangerously and bags of grain dislodged from the wagon. Oscar jumped into the water and swam the last few meters next to his horse.
He pushed himself up onto the ferry. His trusted steed turned to make it back to the land. Oscar scrambled onto the ferry and grabbed hold of the one front wheel, shouldering back against the forward motion of the wagon. Together we held it. Tentatively.
He continued to scream at others to swim faster to get to us. Within the blink of an eye, there were five Boers on the ferry and we held the wagons back till the wagon was steadied. I saw Hans Viljoen running down to the landing site of the ferry, cursing and swearing at his workers who, by this time, re-fasten the anchor that came loose.
The ferry, my wagons and seven, very wet and cold, Boers made it safely to the Transvaal side of the Vaal River. That was how a friendship started that would last a lifetime.
Oscar invited me to his farm, not far from Vijoensdrift. I left one of my men in charge of the wagons and set off on my horse, Lady. Oscar was farming in the old Boer republic of Transvaal, in the Potchefstroom district. When I told him about Mr. Reeves and his chickens, he was eager to learn more since he heard similar stories about farmers in Europe and America who set up successful pig farms close to large cities. He was always looking for ways to expand his farming operation. What interested him about pork farming was how one sow produced many piglets compared to cows and sheep and you can take the pigs to the market sooner. There was already large chicken farms around Potchefstroom and he had no interest in competing with them.
On my account, I did not know much about farming, but I did know a great deal about Dawie, Uncle Jacobus and Combrinck & Co. who bought and slaughtered many pigs. They even farmed for themselves. They supplied the public in Cape Town, the passing ships at the Cape of Good Hope and had contracts with the Cape government to supply the navy and the army. (3) Oscar saw the opportunity to not only supply Johannesburg but as soon as the railway line is linked all the way from Johannesburg to Cape Town, why not sell the pigs to Combrinck & Co.!
Oscar and I talked till late in the night. His wife, Trudie kept making us fresh coffee. We wondered about selling pigs. I, of course, knew how to dry cure bacon. It was, so to speak, in my blood from childhood. We could cure our own bacon! Of course, Uncle Jacobus already made and sold bacon using my dad’s recipe, but making it was a long and slow process that could only be done during the winter. As a result of this, Combrinck & Co. imported much bacon. The best imported bacon was produced by the Harris family in Calene, in Wiltshire, England. Oscar and I reasoned that if they can produce large volumes of bacon and sell it here in South Africa, why can’t we cure the bacon in Potchefstroom and sell it across the country? We could possibly even export it to other countries!
One thought led to another and as we spoke, a clear plan started to emerge that involved producing and selling bacon. Later that evening after supper Oscar and I transitioned from coffee to witblits (4). I told him about my misgivings about the future of the country and that I did not see riding transport as a long term occupation. Not only was I skeptical about the safety of such an occupation in a land which I saw becoming more divided by the day and racial prejudice and distrust increasing, I also expected the railway line between the Cape and Johannesburg to be completed very soon and there would be no more need for the transport rider. On his side he was eager to diversify away from cattle farming and the prospect of processing the meat further appealed to him.
That night I was not just a young man who cured bacon once a year on his grandparents farm. I was a master butcher who could do anything. Together, we saw ourselves as invincible and everything seemed easy. We knew the right people and had the right skills to farm, make the bacon and sell it. How difficult could it be?
Over the years we have many times thought back to the many similar discussions we had in the beginning. Little did we know what skill, knowledge, and capital it took to set up and run a bacon curing company. Especially to make good quality bacon like the Harris family with their Wiltshire cured bacon.
That night in Potchefstroom we had all the answers to life’s questions and it is right that young people should think like this. Otherwise, if tainted by the skepticism of experience, nothing new will ever be started. There are very few times when ignorance is a good thing but in this case, it really was. If we knew how difficult the voyage would be that we embarked on, we would never have done it! As it is, it turned out to be the start to the greatest adventures ever!
(c) eben van tonder
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Notes:
(1) Vincent H. Reeves from the Twin Cities, Minnesota was a chicken farmer and an entrepreneur in the 1890’s who owned a 10-acre farm in the Golden Valley. He made a careful study of the chicken industry and devised to use steam to do away with the hens altogether for incubation. (Saint Paul Globe, page 5)
Eben and Oscar met when Eben was the Johannesburg Depot manager for Goosebumps Frozen Foods and Oscar was the owner of Transwest Distributors, located in Potchefstroom. Oscar was a sub-distributor, used by Goosebumps to service farts of Gauteng and the North West province. One of the commodities that Eben and Oscar worked on together during this time was the distribution of frozen chickens. Oscar had Eben’s name saved on his phone for a long time as “Eben Chicken.”
(2) “It started with the drift, that is a river crossing over the Vaal. Hans Viljoen advertised in 1857 that he has a pond and is able to ferry people, wagons and live stock over the Vaal on his father’s farm Witkop…. Until a few years ago one could still see the steel post to anchor the rope. The crossing must have been active until 1927 when the road bridge (single lane) was constructed.” (ruralexploration)
(3) It is this tradition of supplying the general public, state departments and the navy of Combrinck & Ross (Domisse, page 26) that, I believe, laid the foundation of the future success of David de Villiers-Graaff with Combrinck & Co and later Imperial Cold Storage & Supply Ltd. They continued to supply the British army and won the contract to supply meat to the British forces during the Second Anglo-Boer war which contributed substantially to the wealth generated through the company.
Woody’s Brands was created in the first place to supply retail. This is a notoriously difficult market to enter but both Eben and Oscar had mainly retail experience and for them was a natural starting point. It was buyers at Shoprite and Pick ‘n Pay who motivated Eben to create the Woody’s Brands and who gave the company its first break. Retail remained the almost exclusive focus of the company during its first 5 years, until around 2015 when its own factory made it possible for them to enter catering and food services markets.
(4) Witblits or “white lightning,” similar to Moonshine is a brandy made from grapes.
(5) The image of measuring the depth of the water with a whip I got from a series of articles I did on the life of Petrus Pooe. “Petrus remembers that the Vaal River was in flood, and describes the difficulty experienced in crossing it above Lindequesdrift. “I had never seen such drama in my life,” he says. He remembers his father feeling the depth of the water with the handle of his oxen whip, his brother Samuel leading the oxen into the water until it was swirling around his chin, the surging river dislodging bags of grain from the wagons.”
The photo is Crossing the Vaal (at Vereeniging) published on the web by The Heritage Portal. The life and story of Perus Pooe is from, Facing the Storm: Portraits of Black Lives in Rural South Africa by Tim Keegan, 1988, published by David Philip, Cape Town.
References:
Dommisse, E. Sir David de Villiers Graaff, First Baronet of De Grendel. 2011. Tafelberg.
Saint Paul Globe (Saint Paul, Minnesota), 3 March 1890, Page 5, Chickens by Steam.
Photo Credits:
Crossing the Vaal – https://www.moltenofamily.net/picture-gallery/transport/
The Viljoensdrift Ferry, courtesy of the Vereeniging Museum.