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.
narrative
Woody’s Bacon
South Africa, August 1890
Upon returning from Johannesburg, I again stopped at Oscar’s farm. The few days I had to think things over, and while offloading in Johannesburg, I was more excited than ever! My plan presented Oscar with an opportunity he has been looking for to diversify his income. Initially, I wanted to embark on the bacon adventure on my own, but two may be better than one.
Oscar’s farm is a well-run business. Every month, he receives newsletters from the Cape and Holland about farming, and he studies them in detail to learn about farming in the modern way. In doing this, he reminds me of my Oupa Eben. He has always been very careful to study farming magazines in great detail to keep up to date with the newest farming trends.
During my second visit to Oscar’s farm, I got to know his wider family. Oscar’s father, Uncle James Klynveld, is a minister in the Dutch Reformed Church. His, like Oom Jan, Oom Giel, and Oom Sybrand, is a more sensible faith compared to many in the Transvaal Republic at this time. He sees all humans as equal before God, irrespective of language and skin colour. This was a view not widely held in the Transvaal. Even in England, some questioned the equality of all races with a debate if black people had souls. Oscar and I shared his view and agreeing on such matters is important when starting a business together.
We also shared the view that England, the two Boer republics, the native tribes, the freed slaves, and their descendants, how these groups treated and mistreated each other over the years and acted shamefully in taking what is not theirs and killing and enslaving one another; that, together with the influx of immigrants into the Transvaal in search of gold and the ambition of men like Rhodes – that all these ingredients cannot spell anything but war. Nation against nation and territory against territory. We see the clouds of war gathering in almost every newspaper we pick up and in conversations we have with other people. War is inevitable, and we want to plot the most sensible road ahead for our young families.
We believe our future is not connected to the land, as many of our fellow Boers believe it to be. Both Oscar and I see our future in free enterprise. In Oscar’s mind, farming is not a God-given right to the Boer nation but a business that must make a profit. Security is not vested inland, but a positive bottom line. The idea of a bacon company appeals to us. The markets we can service are enormous. The two Boer republics, the colonies in the Cape and Natal, passing ships, and the British Navy and army are all markets within our reach. There is also the very tantalising possibility of exporting our finest bacon to the old world of Europe and England.
Oscar and I spent the best three days planning and strategizing. I got an opportunity to meet his two brothers, James and Willem. Will was an industrial psychology student at Potchefstroom University. James did trading for the Netherlands Bank of South Africa. Both men were immediately excited when they heard of our plans, and right there and then it was decided that they would join us at the earliest opportunity. Will would focus on marketing, and James on finances. Before I left a date was set when the company would formally be established.
This is how it came about on one winter morning in August 1890, a formal meeting was convened in Potchefstroom to establish a bacon-curing company. (1) Potchefstroom was the former capital of the Transvaal before the seat of government was moved to Pretoria. Like all Boer towns, it has big gardens surrounding large houses and trees lining the streets. It appears like an oasis on the road from Kimberly, which is a monotonous part of the route travelling from Cape Town through Kimberly to Johannesburg.
We met in Oscar’s dad’s voorkamer (living room). It was a bitterly cold night. A handful of burgers came. Oscar’s wife, Trudie, expecting their 3rd daughter, was there. James, Willem, and Anton, Oscar’s father-in-law. Some of the Boers came out of curiosity, but a few successful farmers were there, looking for an opportunity to invest in the venture. My dad and my brothers, Andre and Elmar, came through for the occasion, taking the train to Bloemfontein and hiring a coach to Potchefstroom.
Oscar’s dad opened the meeting with scripture reading and prayer. His text was Ecclesiastes 9:11. “I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.” (2) He is a man of wisdom and used the words of another wise man, Solomon, to set the course for the adventure ahead. “In the end,” he said, “it will not be our speed, strength, wisdom, understanding, skill or even the riches from investors that will give us success, as important as all these are. Without being in the right place, at the right time, nothing will come to fruition. Commit to the dream and exploit every opportunity with a bounty of enthusiasm and the dream will be turned into a reality.” With these words and in prayer, he commended our venture into the hands of the Almighty God.
After Uncle James’ words, it was my turn. I presented the outline of the plan, and in the middle of my speech, Oscar jumped in when he saw I was using too many words. He summarized the plan nicely. Looking at the faces in the crowd, I could see that our words found favour among the listeners.
Despite much talk and plenty of enthusiasm, being thoroughly convinced that our plan would find widespread appeal, nobody was prepared to join our venture or invest in the business except a young mining engineer from Kimberly, Dawie Hyman, who made a small investment with me personally on account of our long-standing friendship and Anton, Trudie’s father and Oscar’s father-in-law. Initially, it would be up to Oscar and myself to prove that a quality curing operation is possible in our land.
My dad insisted that the standard we aim for in bacon production is nothing less than the legendary Wiltshire Bacon from C&T Harris in England and the bacon we cured on the farm. His reasoning was that even though he believed his own bacon recipe to be the best in the world, the Europeans and English figured out a way to do it faster at consistently good quality. It was one thing to produce one batch of good bacon per year from one pig, but doing it day in and day out, year in and year out, was a completely different story. It was a widely held belief around the world that the Harris operation in Wiltshire produces the finest bacon on earth.
Everybody agreed with this, but it presented a problem far more daunting than our lack of capital. Nobody knew how to cure Wiltshire-style bacon. It was decided that since my kids were a bit older than Oscar’s, I had to travel to Europe and England to learn the art of curing massive quantities of good bacon! Oscar would stay behind, muster the support, and prepare our factory.
We decided not to go to England immediately, even though the Harris family’s factory was there. On the one hand, there was the fear that war could break out any day, and this would jeopardize our quest. On the other hand, since my ancestors came to the Cape of Good Hope from Denmark and since an old spice trader advised us to visit Copenhagen first, the decision was made to start there.
Oscar and I met up in Johannesburg a few weeks before the founding meeting in Potchefstroom. The city, only two and a half years or three years old by 1890, was already an impressive place. The streets were broad with buildings on either side, built in a style and architecture rivalling those of England’s biggest cities. (3)
The main business street is Commissioner Street. Off it is the new club, the Bank of Africa, the new Exchange buildings, two large hotels, and several two-story buildings, set up to conduct business and span entire blocks with offices for hundreds of brokers and speculators. The city has a hustle and bustle as bricklayers are furiously at work, filling every available space with new buildings. (3) There are several open spaces provided in the city to act as recreation areas and market squares. In the middle of the city is the principal, large market square.
This square is my final destination when I travel to Johannesburg riding transport from the Cape. It is filled each morning with ox wagons loaded with produce from the Transvaal, the Cape Colony, Natal, and the Free State, sold to the highest bidder. In the centre of the square is a large brick building, one hundred feet wide and two hundred feet long, the market house proper. Coffee stalls surround it. (3)
We met in the stately Mounts Bay Hotel on Pritchard Street. (4) At the hotel’s bar, time and chance overtook ability, as Solomon would have it, and completely by accident, we met an old spice trader from Copenhagen. He drank a copious amount of beer, even at midday, while always smoking his pipe. He overheard us talking about bacon production and asked if we would be interested in the finest bacon spices from Denmark.
Two aspects of the meeting were very fortuitous. Firstly, it turned out that he had an intimate knowledge of the spice industry and could tell us exactly where we could get the best curing salt for meat. Secondly, he knew just the man who could teach us how to make good bacon on a large scale. He insisted that if we were serious about learning this art, we should travel to Denmark first where he would introduce us to a young friend of his who did an apprenticeship in meat curing and cutting. (5) In doing this, we realise that he is also helping himself for the future because if we are successful, we will most certainly buy spices from him.
At the time, I could not understand why we would learn the art of Wiltshire bacon curing, from a man in Denmark. Was it even the same process? How did the Danes do it? That night in the Mount Bay Hotel on Prichard Street, I had too many good local witblits with Oscar and the trader from Denmark to be overly concerned with this question. This is how it happened that Oscar and I planned to invite friends and family to a meeting at his dad’s house, where we would establish our bacon-curing company. We resolved to give practical manifestation to our vision without any delay.
(c) eben van tonder
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Notes:
(1) Eben created the Woodys bacon brand in August 2007. Oscar, who had a distribution business in Potchefstroom, Transwest Distributors, joined forces with Eben in December of that year and in January 2008 they created Woody’s Consumer Brands (Pty) Ltd. together with Anton. They initially outsourced their manufacturing.
They started to prepare for their own factory in 2011. It was the culmination of a process that started on a flight between Johannesburg and Cape Town in January 2011 where Oscar and Eben decided to re-think the entire Woodys strategy and gear themselves for a much bigger company. Oscar and Eben has been joined by Willem on the Woodys Executive by this time. The first step of the plan was a transition from contract packers to an own factory.
(2) Quote from the KJV, would have been from the Dutch Statevertaling, the standard bible text used in 1890 among the Boers. In actuality, the text and its interpretation were suggested many years earlier to Eben by his friend Dawie Hyman who, apart from a qualified engineer, is also a graduate from the Masters Seminary and who was a pastor in Johannesburg before returning to the USA. It became one of Eben’s favourite Bible texts.
(3) Description of Johannesburg and the journey from Kimberley from The Burlington Free Press (Burlington, Vermont), 14 Feb 1890, page 7, Scenes in South Africa
(4) The Mounts Bay Hotel was built in 1889 in Pritchard Street and survived until 1909.
After Woody’s Consumer Brands was created, the first meeting was held at the Palazzo Hotel, at Montecasino, Johannesburg at the end of Jan 2011. It was attended by Eben and Oscar as well as Dawie Hyman who initially was part of the company and an investor who supported Eben while establishing the brand and a lifelong friend of Eben’s, Elmar, Eben’s brother who was initially involved in a scheme to procure pigs from small farmers in the Southern Cape and Sophia Krone, an old school friend if Eben, turned top-notch corporate consultant and executive coached who lead the inaugural meeting and who was very involved early on in direction and goal setting of the company. She did not like the outsourced manufacturing model, predicting that the company would struggle until it had its own manufacturing plant.
(5) In 2011, Oscar and Eben met with the Danish owner of a spice company in Johannesburg. This paved the way for a visit to Denmark where they would start learning the art of bacon and be introduced to the spice industry by a skilled young man from Denmark who is both an expert in spices and a who did a deboning apprenticeship.
(6) In the 1890s, David visited Europe and the United States to investigate the use of refrigeration in meatpacking plants. In Chicago, he visited the Armour Meat Packing plant. In January 1890, back in South Africa, he exchanged letters with Pulsometer Engineering Company about the latest refrigeration technology. Soon afterward, refrigeration chambers were installed at Combrinck & Co. (Dommisse, page 31 – 33)
(7) J. Woodheads & Sons, a leather tannery business, was established by John Woodhead in 1867. The company exists to this day, still located in Cape Town, making it one of the oldest companies in South Africa.
n, on 15 October 2018, Old Mutual reduced its shareholding in Nedbank Group to 19,9%.” (Didi Basson, https://www.facebook.com/groups/TodayinSouthAfricanHistory/)
References:
Dommisse, E. Sir David de Villiers Graaff, First Baronet of De Grendel. 2011. Tafelberg.
Heinrich, Adam R. 2010. A zooarchaeological investigation into the meat industry established at the Cape of Good Hope by the Dutch East Indian Company in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, The State University of New Jersey.
Linder, Adolphe. 1997. The Swiss at the Cape of Good Hope. Creda Press (Pty) Ltd
The Sheffield Daily Telegraph, Wednesday, 20 April 1898, Obituary
Simons, Phillida Brooke. 2000. Ice Cold In Africa. Fernwood Press
Photo Credits:
New York Tribune, Sunday, 18 March 1900, Page 23, The War in South Africa