Introduction to Bacon & the Art of Living

The story of bacon is set in the late 1800s and early 1900s when most of the crucial developments in bacon took place. The plotline occurs in the 2000s, with each character referring to a natural person and actual events. The theme is a kind of “steampunk” where modern mannerisms, speech, clothes, and practices are superimposed on a historical setting. Characters interact with one another with all the historical and cultural bias that goes with this. The period of technology it covers is breathtaking. Beginning in pre-history, it traces the development of curing technology until the present, where bacon curing is possible without adding nitrites.

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Kolbroek

Cape Town, April 1886

The story of bacon is in the first place not the story of curing salts. Bacon is derived from the union of curing salts and pork. Many countries have their unique heritage breeds but the story of the Kolbroek, a cherished pig breed from South Africa is one of the most endearing.

Falling asleep on Stillehoogte, the farm of Oupa Eben and Ouma Susan is one of my most cherished memories. I still smell the sheep in the kraal next to the house as if I were there this morning. Elmar and I slept in one room. It was Oom Uysie’s room before he moved out. My mom and dad slept in the spare bedroom.  Andre slept with my grandparents in their room on a bed at the foot end of my grandparents’ bed.

In the morning we were woken by farm sounds and smells. Maids were cleaning the house, sweeping the carpets with a broom made from long grass, bundled together and bound with a string. Ouma was preparing breakfast on a coal stove. Oupa just came in from the felt to get his morning coffee. Oom Uysie, my mom’s younger brother who managed the farm with his dad and our grandfather, stopped by for coffee.

Below:  Oupa Eben

Whenever he arrived there was no more sleeping. He would make sure that we were out of bed by the time he left by stealing our blankets or spraying us with cold water.  It was good humour which one does not appreciate when you are 7, but when you are a bit older, one misses it. Thinking back, I understand how much his morning visits meant for him and Oupa!

After Oupa Eben passed away it was not the same at Stillehoogte. At church on Sunday, whenever they sang a hymn, my mom would cry. One morning Ouma Susan was very sad at the breakfast table. She told my mom about a dream she had. She was standing in the church foyer, looking at the photos of the elders and deacons. Oupa Eben was a church elder when he passed away. In the photos where Oupa Eben stood was a large black spot. Even in the photos, his life was blotted out! My mom was not a very emotional person, but she was washing the dishes and I could see the tears running down her cheek. We all miss Oupe Eben.

Oupa Eben and Oom Uysie put up four pig pens. They farmed with Large Whites. One day Oupa Eben got home with the most adorable little pigs. He said they do not have to be housed in a pen. These were very special pigs. They are roaming farm pigs who take care of themselves feeding on the scraps from farming activities. They were South African Kolbroek pigs.

Oupa Eben asked if I knew why they were called Kolbroek.  Of course, I did not. Oupa knew that I loved a good story. I would always pester him to tell me a story. After he told me a story, I would re-tell it to myself. Repeatedly! I would take any of the many footpaths on Stillehoogte and, hiking for hours, re-telling the story to an imaginary audience. I am not sure why I loved it so much, but I did! It was the greatest enjoyment imaginable! I knew that he was actually asking if he could tell me the story of the Kolbroek. After work, Oupa Eben called me to come and sit by him. He would tell me the story of the Kolbroek!

Domestication and the Formation of Breeds

“The story of the Kolbroek begins many years ago in the middle of the 1700s in the south of England. Pigs are fed on the mast of the forest, which is the fruit of trees and shrubs such as acorns and nuts. Europeans are fond of fattening the pigs on what was called “hard mast.” The hard acorns and nuts from oak, hickory, and beech trees are the hard mast. The forests were either part of common lands or royal forests. The practice of annually fattening the pigs in the forests for around 60 days was called pannage.”

“Pigs in England were big, long-legged with menacing facial expressions. Animals who are not penned up face predators. When they run, they must run fast. For this reason, they are extremely skittish. The slightest indication of danger and they must move quickly! Their bite must be ferocious as must be their build and facial expression. They are dark in appearance with stripes that resemble their ancestors, the wild boar.”

“On the other hand, pigs in China did not have these pressures. Instead, they had a very comfortable life for thousands of years. They were kept in small and comfortable housing close to the farmer’s house. Being penned up protects them from predators and European pigs went to the forest for two months, weather-dependent, once a year where they had to eat hard acorns and nuts, while Chinese pigs were fed scraps from farming activities all year round. An animal who does not have to run and be on the constant lookout for predators grows smaller, fatter, and shorter legs with less menacing faces. The stripes of their wild European counterparts changed into spots. They pick up weight faster than the European cousins just like people do when they don’t have to walk long distances or do manual labour.” This last bit Oupa added with a grin. He enjoyed comparing pigs with people and used to say that calling some of the people he had to deal with from the Cooperative “pigs” was an insult to perfectly decent animals.

“It was the English East India Company who brought these Chinese pigs to England in the 1700s.” Oupa Eben was a “no-frills and no-fuss” man.  He said stuff in a way that one understood easily. This being the case, one must still remember that Oupa was a very clever man! He knew that any inventions first happen in the mind, not in the physical world. This is called the metaphysical.  The interaction between what we can feel and touch and that which is, initially, only in the mind. 

He explained to me that by the late 1600s and early 1700s, a metaphysical shift took place in the English mind. They started to see “matter” not as the unavoidable experience of nature, but as something that could be manipulated and controlled. Themselves they saw as the masters who, as God’s ultimate creatures were called upon and empowered to control the physical. Just as the pigs responded to the pressure from nature by either becoming smaller and fatter as in China or remaining big, fast and ferocious as in Europe, the English wool industry was pressured to produce clothing for the local market in bigger quantities than could be done by individual villagers, working in isolation. Thus, the organization of labour changed. This shift was due to a change that happened in the minds of people.

The English Empire was taking shape and the demand from the colonies added to the motherland for clothing added up to a demand that completely outpaced the meagre output of any individual person. Imaginative entrepreneurs stepped forward and worked out how to use the forces of nature for their personal ends. They invented better and faster ways to spin wool and make clothing. They realised that work itself can be re-organised, even without machine power. When they combine human power with machine power, output goes through the roof! The results were spectacular! The fertile imagination of the English dreamt up new machines that could do what 100 people could not. The words everybody used and loved were “bigger,” “better,” and “faster.”  They used nature in a way that was never thought possible before. Energy to drive these machines was cleverly being tapped from steam and water.

As people realised that they could manipulate and harness nature, as the sciences were being invented, we became masters of nature. The most important metaphysical realisation was to re-think how we organise labour but also how we manipulate nature.  In the world of farming, this was not a new phenomenon. It has been happening for many thousands of years but a new momentum was added through the industrial revolution.

The earliest discovery was that animals that are penned up, change! The biggest reason was that we were able to manipulate their breeding. Animals became used to us and we found that they were more useful to us. For starters, our food did not run away from us or live in forests where we had to go hunting them. If our animals stayed close, so did our food!  We created animal enclosures where we could separate those with less desirable characters from those with qualities we want. “A good example of this,” said Oupa Eben, “is aggressive animals. We do not like aggressive animals. The menacing bull becomes biltong. The horse that continually breaks out and bites other horses and handlers is served as pastissada.” It takes many generations to change a completely wild animal into an animal that is less threatening to humans; and more useful. One that can work and supply milk or become food. The larger farm animals were domesticated first and as the industrial revolution was taking hold in Europe, it was the turn of the village pig.

Oupa Eben lit his pipe and peered out from the farmhouse over his land. It was late afternoon. The farm work was done and it was the best time to ask him to tell you a story.  I sat on the soft grass outside the back door, between the back porch and the brick cooler where all the perishables were kept. It was a simple invention used around the world. Two layers of bricks filled up with charcoal in the middle and regularly soaked with water. This cooled the inside of the square structure with wooden shelving where the butter, eggs, cheese, and milk were stored. Oupa Eben was sitting on a garden chair he brought from the porch to have a better view of his lands. “I guess you want to hear about the Kolbroek,” he said smiling.

He lit his pipe again. “One can imagine that the pigs bought from the English East India Company were sold to wealthy aristocrats and landowners. Villagers used Chinese boars to breed with their sows. It meant that in a particular village, the characteristics of the boar were transferred to the entire village pig population.  This resulted in regional characteristics and in the 1800s it formed the basis of breeds.”  “So,” Oupa Eben told me many times, “on the one hand the old farmers removed animals with less than desirable character traits by either slaughtering them or separating them from others and not allowing them to breed, and, on the other hand, by using males with characteristics which the farmer desired to breed with the sows one gets an animal with the right look and temperament. In the case of the Chinese pigs, imported into England, it produced a smaller animal, rounder and fat that picked up weight fast but much bigger than the original Chinese pigs on account of the larger size of the English pigs they bred with.”

Oom Timo

Oupa Eben stopped with his story when his younger brother walked out of the back door and joined us. He and his wife, Aunt Thelma, were visiting. Her maiden name was Berriman. The Berrimans immigrated from Cornwall. Her father was an immigrant gold miner on the Reef. Her brother was also a miner working mostly at Crown Mines. Tim moved into Thelma’s mother’s (Hilda’s) home just before or just after they were married. Later, they owned their own home in Parkview, Johannesburg.  (1)

“I am telling Eben the story of the Kolbroek pigs,” Oupa said when Oom Timo sat down next to Oupa on a chair that he brought from the porch. I was very small and did not know that as Oupa knew everything about raising cattle, sheep, and pigs, Oom Timo knew about ships. Oom Timo gestured to Oupa to continue, which Oupa did.

Once Upon a Time in Kent

“In Kent, an English East Indian ship preparing to sail to the East via the Cape of Good Hope. The Colebrook was one of these impressive ships. It weighed 739 tons and was 137 feet long, 35 feet wide and had 3 decks. She was built by the most famous shipbuilders of the time, Perryard, and launched in 1770. The captain was Arthur Morris, and the fateful trip to South Africa was her third voyage.”

“On 6 January 1778, she loaded lead bars called lead ingots or lead pigs and provisions at Blackwall in the East India Docks on the Thames. On 3 February, she sailed to Gravesend. Here she loaded shot, copper, stores, gunpowder, wine, guns, corn, military recruits and, very importantly, livestock. The livestock included pigs which were procured from the local pig market. The pigs were a cross between Chinese and English pigs and since they were all the result of mating with the local landowners’ boar, they had similar characteristics.”

“On 8 March 1778, she set sail from the Downs with 212 passengers, crew and soldiers on board in the company of three other vessels, the warship Asia, the other East Indiaman, the Gatton, and the Royal Admiral.  She stopped at Madeira to load 43 pipes of wine. On 26 May, she sailed from Madeira for Bombay and China, passing the Cape of Good Hope.”

Kogel Bay

Oupa was sitting at the edge of his chair, telling the story.  I remember him leaning back when he got to this part and saying to Oom Timo, “You know the story well and you know all the right shipping terms. You take it from here!” Oom Timo put his hand on my head who was still sitting on the grass. “The Colebrook took three months to reach the Cape!”

“She did so on Tuesday, 24 August 1778. It was winter and she was not allowed to enter Table Bay due to frequent and severe winter storms. She had to sail around Cape Point and dock in the much better-protected Simon’s Bay in False Bay. She planned to round Cape Point and turn East for Simon’s Bay. At 11h30, as she was rounding Cape Point, she struck Anvil Rock, lurking just beneath the waves. Anvil rock was not indicated on the Dutch Maps that Arthur Morris used.”

“The Colebrooke almost immediately freed herself from the rock. Water poured into the hull. The crew put on the pumps within minutes but there were already three feet of water in the hold indicating serious damage. After a hurried conference between Captain Arthur Morris and his officers, they realised that they would not be able to nurse the ship to Simon’s Bay. The water pouring into the Colebrook made her unresponsive and difficult to steer.”

“Instead, they decided to take her all the way across False Bay and find a suitable spot to beach on the eastern side of the bay. This would not require any difficult manoeuvring. Still, the plan was not without risk. The far side of the bay was, as far as they were aware, largely uninhabited. The coast is very rocky with steep mountains coming right down to the water. They did not know if they would find a suitable stretch of beach.”

“The Gatton and Asia dispatched boats with eight people in each to assist the Colebrook’s crew with the pumping of water. These men raced to her aid while her company ensign was flying upside down, a signal of distress. The men dropped a weighted sail off the bows when the hole in the hull became inaccessible due to the flooding. It was hauled under the hull where it was secured over the hole, slowing the ingress of water down. They attempted to push the guns overboard to lighten her load, but these were already submerged, and the plan was abandoned.”

“Her companion ships followed her across the bay. Captain Morris sent the second and third officers up the mast to look for a sandy beach to run the ship onto. In the distance, they identified a small, secluded beach almost directly ahead and would later learn it was called Kogel Bay. The water from False Bay continued to claim the Colebrook. As she was approaching the beach there were already 14 feet of water in her hold. Her bow was so low that she was sipping water through the hawse holes. These were small cylindrical holes cut through the bows of a ship on each side of the stem. It was used to pass cables through to be drawn into or let out of the vessel. The situation was desperate!”

“Water started bubbling through her front hatches, signalling that her sinking was imminent. At 4 pm on the afternoon of 24 August, 200m off the beach at Kogel Bay, she grounded.  Her topsails were let go, which had the effect of swinging her stern around to bring her bow into the wind and swell. The mizzen mast was cut away to stabilise her after which the boats were launched.”

“The first boat was a pinnace. It had sails and several oars. Fifteen men were aboard. The surf at Kogel Bay is treacherous at best of times with a very strong rip current. On that particular day, the wind was strong, making the situation even more precarious. Tragedy struck when the boat capsized in the surf. When the ensuing madness dissipated a smashed boat, and seven bodies were on the beach at Kogel Bay. Survivors were hypothermic from the ice-cold False Bay water, in a desperate state on the beach. All other attempts to get people onto the beach were abandoned. The second boat was swept into the open sea and only recovered the next day. The rest of the crew, soldiers, and passengers were transferred to the other ships.”

  Kogel Bay, 2019.  Minette, Luan, Tristan, Eben.  Photos by Eben

The Pigs of Kogel Bay

Oupa Eben interrupted Oom Timo. “What we told you so far is conventional wisdom, written up in history books from the testimony of the men who were there. What follows is from testimony Oom Timo heard firsthand from the great-grandchildren of people who were on the beach that day.” I blurted out. “But, the beach was desolate. Nobody around!”  “So, we thought,” Oom Timo said and gestured to Oupa to take over the storytelling again.

“There were two additional sets of characters on the beach that day which, for completely different reasons, people were reluctant to talk about. Kogel Bay is located in an area called Cape Hangklip which became, by that time, a refuge for runaway slaves on account of its desolation. Here they lived in caves.  One of the places they made their home was Dappa se Gat, a large cave situated right on Kogel Bay!

Looking out onto Kogel Bay from Dappa se Gat

It is an enormous cave, inaccessible during high tide but deep enough to house a community of people. They would be able to get far into the cave, out of reach of the water. It is quite possible that they witnessed the entire debacle from the safety of their cave home. I wonder if they thought the ships to be a party sent to recapture them in which case the safest thing to do would have been to abandon the cave and hide in the thick bush between the mountain and the beach. “If they did this, as I suspect,” Oupa continued, “they would have seen that something managed to swim from the Colebrook to the beach.”

“That “something” was a sounder of swine. This was not something unusual. The English Navy and the English East India Company both had a standard procedure that the pigs must be let out of their pens if it seemed imminent that a ship would sink so that they could swim ashore to provide food for the shipwreck survivors. This is presumably what happened to the pigs from Kent.”

“When they got to the beach, the slaves took them. The slaves had a long history with pigs. Pig-keeping was not very popular at the Cape. The Dutch farmers who farmed pigs let them roam free in the valleys and gorges and when they wanted to slaughter one, they had to capture it. The job of looking after them was mostly reserved for slaves. At the Slaves Lodge in Cape Town, where the Dutch East India Company’s slaves were kept, they were allowed to keep pigs to provide extra income for the lodge.”

“Not only did the slaves have a long history with pigs and pig husbandry, but they knew that they had to keep domesticated animals to survive. There are accounts of this time when they kept cattle in Dappa se Gat.  There are in the Cape Hanglip area several such caves where the slaves kept livestock. It is not known if the pigs were kept at Dadda se Gat or somewhere else. What is known is that a local magistrate complained to the Governor about the slaves and local farmers who looted the remains of the Colebrook.”

“A farmer would not have dared to take the pigs in due to heavy penalties that were exacted for anyone found with looted goods in his or her possession. The fact that the pigs were kept by the slaves is the reason why they survived as a more or less uniform type of pig which continued to exist as a breed.”

Oupa Eben smoked a pipe. He showed me a tobacco card which in those days was sold with cigarettes. The United Tabacco Co (South Africa) printed these cards from 1850 (till approximately 1959). A series that was issued in South Africa was titled Farmyards of South Africa consisting of 120 images. One such card featured the Kolbroek pigs. They refer to the pigs swimming ashore close to Hermanus which is a very good description of the exact place where they swam ashore namely Kogel Bay which is very close to Hermanus.

Years later I tried to find the exact date when the cards were published, but I was unsuccessful. The exact date of the images given seems to be closer to the early 1900s than the close of the 1800s due to the other pork breeds that were featured in the series of cards. I later discovered another reference with a more certain date. It comes to us from Arnoldus Pannevis (ca. 1880) as given in Vroeë Afrikaanse woordelyste, (1971)–H. J. J. M. van der Merwe. Pannevcis wrote, “Kolbroek, of Snees vark, kortpootig Sineesch varken, aldus genoemd naar Colebrook, die het alhier invoerde. De Slamschen noemen het vark en het langpootige varken swyn.” It translates loosely that Kolbroek is a Chinese pig breed, named after the Colebrook which imported it. One author takes this as literal, that a ship, Colebrook, imported the pigs from China. In interpreting any historical document, context determines meaning and the overwhelming context is the well-known account of the sinking of the Colebrook from where the pigs swam ashore.

A few comments are in order. It is in my experience not at all uncommon that early authors would cast descriptions of events and processes in very “formal language” especially if the work were of an academic nature. Stripping the account from its more “romantic” elements is not surprising to me. The fact that the pigs were Chinese referred to the fact that even though from England, the animals had strong Chinese characteristics (see The English Pig with links to the Kolbroek and Kunekune). It was in keeping with the strong contrast that existed between the Chinese and the British pigs. “Imported”, in this context, without a doubt refers to the animals being carried to South Africa by this ill-fated ship without the reference to them swimming ashore. I suspect that the tobacco cards were issued just after the 1900s began and Pannevis wrote around 1880. The tradition must have been more than 100 years old by the time of his writing and reflects the widespread nature of the account.

For sure, when O. F. Mentzel wrote “A Geographical and Topographical Description of the Cape of Good Hope,” ten years after the sinking of the Colebrooke, in 1887, there was no established breed called the Kolbroek at the Cape. He describes the state of pig farming in its infancy and says that only two species were found in this region namely “the ordinary European type and a Chinese type which have claws like dogs, the latter are not actually bred here.” This is in contrast to the mention by Pannevis. It is interesting that Mentzel was aware of Chinese pigs swimming ashore and he mentions that “some of them are brought to the Cape or, as has often happened, swim ashore “from a shipwrecked vessel (for they can swim very well, even through the strongest surf).” (Mentzel, 1787) His mention of the two breeds as the only two species found at the Cape precludes the possibility that the Kolboek emerged from one of the very early pig-raising farmers in the Cape since Mentzel would most certainly have known about it and described it in his section about animal husbandry from which the quotes I give are extracts. The account from Oupa Eben of the Kolbroek pigs swimming ashore at what later would be known as Kogel Bay on 24 August 1778, close to Hermanus, would not have been known to Mentzel if the area of incubation of the herd was the remote regions of Cape Hangklip and Hermanus. Especially not if the incubation of the herd was done courtesy of runaway slaves.

His mention of the well-known fact of pigs swimming ashore is substantiated by other accounts from this and earlier times. (For a detailed treatment of the subject, see In Search of the Origins of the Kolbroek)

An interesting account from World War II which reminds me of the story of the Kolbroek. It comes from the memoirs of a Latvian woman, Agate Nesaule. When she was a child, she was an inmate of a British-run refugee camp in occupied Germany. As was often the case in these camps, inmates had to get by on meagre rations. A local German farmer gave the inmates some piglets. This was illegally done, and the piglets were kept in various spaces in the barracks. They were fed on food that was spoiled or whatever else could be scavenged. Agate commented that they “also enjoyed watching the little pigs, a hopeful sign of the future, thriving for their own sake.” (Nesaule, 1995) As was the case with Agate, I suspect that this kind of human-animal interaction between the slaves and the animals they kept served a greater need than simply for the slaves to look forward to a pork roast or beef steak. There must have been a tremendous psychological benefit for the slaves to keep the animals in such close proximity, under desperate circumstances!

“The sinking of the Colebrooke captured people’s imagination. For a short while, Kogel Bay was even called Colebrook Bay. This was later changed back to Kogel Bay. The pigs were called Kolbroek pigs, a perversion of the ship’s name. This colloquial name for the pigs stuck.”  “And that,” Oupa Eben concluded, “is how an English pig, crossed with a Chinese, ended up at the Cape of Good Hope!”

Oupa Eben and Oom Timo started talking about politics. I lost interest and left to join my brothers and cousins who started walking to the stables to help milk the cows.

I miss Oupa Eben. I wish I asked Oom Timo to tell me some of his stories. It is why I write my recollections of the story of bacon and how I discovered it. It is also why I want it to be known that bacon taught me about the art of living. I want you to know my story. 

Oupa bought a few Kolbroek pigs from a trader in Cape Town and since that day, we slaughtered and cured a Kolbroek every year. It is not a bacon pig like the Large White and the Berkshire. These pigs have straight backs and long loins for bacon. The Kolbroek is a lard pig, ideal for making hams, lard and, as you will see, not bad at all for bacon. Apart from this, they have the most delicious meat.  One can taste the difference. 

So it happened that bacon and farming with pigs had been in my blood from a very early age. I first heard the story from Oupa and Uncle Timo in the month in which I turned 17 and still, I could not comprehend how these matters would consume the rest of my life.  It started with my dad’s secret bacon recipe and the Kolbork pigs that Oupa Eben brought home one autumn afternoon in April!

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(c) eben van tonder

Stay in touch

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References

The account of the Colebrook is mainly from the account by John Gribble and Gabriel Athiros from Tales of Shipwrecks at the Cape of Storms.  (Tales-of-Shipwrecks-at-the-Cape-of-Storms-Colebrook)

The theory about the slaves taking the pigs in is my own.  Read In Search of the Origins of the Kolbroek and Kolbroek – Chinese, New Zealand, and English Connections

George Arents Collection, The New York Public Library. “Kolbroek boar.” The New York Public Library Digital Collections. https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47e2-d1e8-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99

Mentzel, O. F.. Glogau: Günther, F. C.. (1785 – 1787) A complete and authentic geographical and topographical description of the famous and (all things considered) remarkable African Cape of Good Hope.

Nesaule, A.. 1995.  A Woman in Amber: Healing the Trauma of War and Exile.  Soho Press, Inc.

Van der merwe, H. J. J. (1971) Vroeë Afrikaanse woordelyste, (1971), quoting Arnoldus Pannevis (ca. 1880) as given in

Note 1

Information about Oom Timo was given to me by Leon Kok.  His mail to me reads:

“There is quite a bit about Tim, not least his SAAF war years in Somaliland, Abyssinia and the Western Desert generally. For example, he was among several young Air Force chaps from the Union that destroyed 101 enemy planes, countless lorries and other transport within three months in the most trying conditions. He also accompanied Prime Minister (General) Jan Smuts on a reconnaissance flight in the Desert on one occasion.  He escaped being taken prisoner by Rommel and was involved in what came to be known as ‘The Graveyard of Italian Hopes’.  His maverick return from the Desert to SA in late 1945 almost constitutes a book in itself.

Tim and I spent tens of hours over about 30 years chatting about his memories of the war. Yes, he was an air mechanic and indeed a lot more. He would like to have been a pilot but was deemed too short.

Tim didn’t serve in Korea. He became an auto-electrician in Johannesburg shortly after disembarking from the UDF and had his own auto-electrical business in Bethlehem OFS for several years. He then sold out and moved to Durban and joined an auto-electrical business there. He rode a motorbike until well into his seventies, which included a fairly serious accident. He survived it and carried on with business as usual.

Thelma’s maiden name was BERRIMAN and her folk, I suspect, immigrated from either Cornwall or England. Her father was an immigrant gold miner on the Reef. Her brother was also a miner, mainly at Crown Mines. Tim moved into Thelma’s mother’s (Hilda’s ) home there just before or just after they were married in the late 1940s. Later, they owned their own home in Parkview, Johannesburg. Hilda, when widowed, moved in with them until her death in Durban in approximately the 1980s. Tim and Thelma never had children.

Not sure whether you ever saw the TV Series ‘The Villagers’, produced in the 1970s by Gray Hofmeyr (he and I were at school together). That typified the Berriman home.”

“Oupa en Ouma het 4 kinders gehad,

1. Johan (Leon se pa) gebore 02 Mei 1908. Hy was die enigste een van die kinders wat op Universiteit was – Wits, as ek reg onthou
2. Gustaf. Gebore 12 Mei 1910 en oorlede 10 Julie 1910
3. Oupa Eben. Gebore 18 Junie 1911
4. Miempie (Bosman. Ma van Mariet en Ronnie en Jantjie) Gebore 23 November 1913

Timo is soos al die ander kinders op heilbron gebore waar my oupa Jan ‘n sendeling was. Sy vrou was Engels en het NOOIT geleer om Afrikaans te praat nie. Sy het beweer Timo het eendag vir haar gelag toe sy probeer Afrikaans praat het en het toe nooit weer probeer nie

So ver my kennis strek was Timo ‘n vlug-ingeneur in die oorlog en het eers in Noor-Afrika  en Later in Italië geveg.

Ek dink nie hy was ooit in Korea nie. Ek dink Leon sal vir jou meer inligting kan gee. Die foto wat ek aanheg kom uit een van jou ma se albums.

Mag die feestyd vir julle wonderlik wees. Vir die eerste keer sedert Joretha-hulle in Engeland is, gaan ons op Kersdag ALMAL om een Kersmaal aansit. Marinus bring vir Cathy saam en ons het opdrag gekry dat ons op Kersdag GEEN Afrikaans mag praat nie, want ons moet Cathy laat tuis voel.

Ek wens so ek kan julle klomp neefs en Niggies met al julle aanhangsels bymekaar kry om een tafel.”

Photo Credits:

Four small pigs are Kunekune, courtesy of the Empire Kunekune Pig Association of New York (https://www.ekpa.org/)  They are a close family of the Kolbroek.

Anvil Rock and Kogel Bay Map: John Gribble & Gabriel Atheros.