The Opinion Pieces are an eclectic bunch on current affairs & history often with a human interest aspect. The Movie/DVDs reviews are mainly on documentaries with a smattering of movie reviews.
Initially Port Elizabeth had only been earmarked as a landing place for the British Settlers and not as their destination. Yet in the thirty years from 1820 to 1850, contrary to expectations, it experienced a tremendous growth spurt, so prodigious in fact was its expansion that it even overtook Cape Town in terms of the volume of exports. This is the story of the people and events that form the basis of this incredible journey.
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Volume 2: Uncharted Territory
After a rambunctious start in which business was the dominating ethos, would the nascent town successfully make the transition from an scruffy unkempt hamlet into a vibrant well managed town. It was an exciting time. Standard Bank was launched, the Prince Alfred’s Guards was formed and the first breakwater was built.
Trump announced today that his trial separation from Reality has turned into an official divorce due to irreconcilable differences. “Reality is a bitch,” he complained on the Supreme Courthouse steps after they had handed down a 6-3 decision in his favour. “She had far too many unrealistic expectations of me,” he added.
In an early morning Truth Narcissist rant he expanded on the theme: “I like to build skyscrapers and things especially the pie-in-sky sort with a side order of chips and a diet coke, but I allowed her to redesign the Rose Garden. When I said there wasn’t enough gold, Reality went off in a huff because I was using the golf cart at the time. She has since given me the hot tongue, cold bum treatment from Mar-a-Laager where she has decamped to. I was not happy about the whole camp thing either and she doesn’t even like the way I dance to YMCA as she says that I dance with gay abandon, but it is not something I am prepared to DEI on a hill for.
“You know that, because I’m clever, like when I tell people that there’s a silent b in debt, they turn around to me and say, ‘Sir, you are clever. How do you know all these things?’ I tell them that I am a stable genius which makes me an SI (Supreme Intelligence) which is better than an AI or even an XI. Actually, I cleverly tell everyone who will listen that XI stands for Unknown Intelligence as no one can solve for him with his slit-eyed Chinese way. In fact, sometimes I don’t know if he is asleep or just being inscrutable. At least with me, you know when I’m asleep. But coming back to silent b’s . . . Hey, I bet you thought I was going off script. That was just my famous weave like when I played tight end in High School. All the cheerleaders thought I was a tight end when I didn’t buy them drinks, and I think I still have the tightest end of any President in History. But about debt – only stupid people like Dumbocrats’ pronounce it deBt. Actually, I love debt so much that I’ve increased it by $2 trillion since I became your favourite president for the second time. Then I started a me me coin called $TRUMP and Reality accused me of profiteering.
“But Reality really upset me when she stopped me from seeing my BFF, Epstein. She actually drove him to commit suicide – that’s how tough she is with other people so you can imagine what it was like to live with her 24/7.
“Reality then complained when our pool went green after I had spent so much on it and that I was always flying off to play golf when we needed to sort out domestic affairs. I tried to seduce her with my new architecturally enhanced ball room and lovingly decorated our house with marble and tasteful kitsch – nada!
“I struggle to understand her accent and she can’t interpret my hand gestures so our communication broke down a long time ago. Reality also then accused me, in her thick East European accent, of sleeping with Putin which is just low IQ because his age and man boobs don’t do it for me and, even if he plays with babushka dolls, he doesn’t have a kitty cat I can grab. I complained to Blanche about it. After involving NI (National Intelligence) and SI, between them and his French surname, they managed to work out that Reality was accusing me of sleeping with a putain, a whore. I just don’t understand women and Reality in particular. Why does she still hold that Stormy in a D-cup against me? The Stormy night only lasted a few hours anyway and cost my company a measly $150,000 – Chump change. Then Reality hit me with 34 felony charges for declaring my 1/12th night stand to be tax deductible – I ask you with crocodile tears in my blue eyes.
“Well, you can’t win them all, but I do win all my golf tournaments and I should have won three presidencies already except the second one was rigged unlike my tournaments. Thank you for your attention in this matter, your favourite precedent, Donald Trump.”
Day after day you wake up in this country to the same old headlines of corruption, incompetence and laziness. Initially SMAC fought back with satirical opinion pieces illustrated with ridiculing cartoons. After lambasting the same-old, same-old SONA speech year after year, sonorously read off by that master of platitudes, Cyril, SMAC realized it was time to move on before his head turned to putu pap. He even cancelled his Daily Maverick contribution to preserve his positive outlook on life. After a diversion into the delusional world of Putin came the master of all delusion, Trump, who grabbed the world by its collective pussy and got SMAC’s full attention. Every single day Trump does something so stupid, so cringeworthy, so narcissistic that an intelligent person’s brain eventually ends up like the ball in a pinball machine played by an expert player if followed for too long. The only survival strategy was to go cold turkey which has worked for a few weeks.
So, although this Quick SMAC is not about him (who must be obeyed in the current US Administration of bootlickers), SMAC timorously invokes his name as a segue into a similar businessman in South Africa. If Trump has delusions of grandeur and has conned people out of a lot of money and their votes with his overhyped self-promotion, promises, exaggerations and lies, he has a mirror locally in the slimy Iqbal Surve. He is in fact Trump lite, about 50kgs lighter, and doesn’t want to rule the world, but just SA.
A few years ago he wanted to become a media mogul and do his black transformation bit so he decided to buy the Independent News & Media (think Cape Times, Argus etc.) and to trash it with his vision of ‘journalism’, fake stories and self-promotion. One problem though, he was short of funds so he approached the PIC (Public Investment Corporation which is supposed to prudently invest government pension funds). In South Africa there was a popular radio game show that ran from 1955 to 1975 called, Pick a Box, with the catch phrase, “Money or the box!” All Iqbal had to do was to PIC the doos*. This was Dan Matjila, head of PIC, and the doos spewed out billions from his cash register. That went tits up when Iqbal stopped paying the interest on the debt. It got worse when he squeezed even more money out of the doos with a pie-in-the-sky media play that was going to be worth tens of billions. Sounds just like Trump, doesn’t he. This move was too puke inducing for SMAC to pursue at the time when SMAC was quitting commenting on SA. However, since SMAC takes an interest in aeronautical matters, his eye was attracted to a recent article about a helicopter crash published by Independent on Line, a part of Iqbal’s empire of 3rd rate news reporting.
The headline screamed helicopter crash in Zim, the caption of the attached photo repeated the claim and so did the reporting in the article. In their incompetence they used a photo of a private jet crash. To compound this, it looks like the jet was AI generated as the engine assembly is odd, the fuselage seems to be unpainted and there are no plane numbers visible. Perhaps they were a bit cheap and didn’t want to pay for even a stock photo but at least they could have got the helicopter bit right.
*doos is Afrikaans for box and also used as an insult as in, “You’re a c&%t!”
Trump has more early morning brain farts than your average pubescent boy has early morning wet dreams. The comparison is apt. Both have messy and normally embarrassing outcomes. Trump is no stranger to both results with the exception that he’s never embarrassed. That particular piece of his 101-piece jigsaw puzzle is missing – a factory fault. The difference is that wet dreams are the involuntary remit of pre-mature boys whereas the brain farts of the magnitude of Trump’s are the territory of a post-mature arsehole.
His latest wet dream brain fart is the petty one of renaming Lake Ontario to Lake America because he is irked that Canada won’t be cowed by his trade war threats. The fact that was known as Lake Ontario before the USA even became an independent nation is meaningless to Trump because his knowledge of history only extends as far as his last Big Mac.
The last time he did this was early on in his ill-conceived global trade war using unilaterally decided tariffs as a weapon. He had a particular animus towards Mexico probably because of immigrants and drugs entering the States and made a great play of issuing an executive order that changed the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America – as petty as petty can get. If he ever joined the Navy he would immediately rise to the rank of Petty Officer and remain that way until retirement.
Of course, all the tech bros, mindful of their billions and Trump’s retribution, fall in line and using Google Maps in the U.S. will see “Gulf of America,” and people in Mexico will see “Gulf of Mexico.” Everyone else will see both names. Likewise for the rebranded Lake America.
Picking Rodin’s statue, The Thinker, is appropriately snarky because he is the antithesis of a thinker. The depth of his thinking is no deeper than his famously thin skin which matches his shallow character. It is also apt because of the whole Emperor’s clothes thing. Changing that to The Stinker is an obvious next step as all his brain farts stink and he literally does too. Judging by the reactions of people around him at pressers, he sometimes fires off some real whoppers. He is also spotted with suspiciously bulky underwear and it isn’t the latest in bulletproof apparel to protect the family jewels. Normally, this never be something to mock in an 80-year-old, but since he is a malicious and serial insulter and since he is inordinately proud of the AI slop portraying him as a manly heroic figure, it’s game on.
Trump is much more than a GOAT. In fact, he is a GLOAT – Greatest Liar Of All Time – and some of his greatest are the lies that he tells about himself. As a bored again Christian he often portrays himself as, if not the saviour of mankind, at least the saviour of America with his miracles and his love of his people. (Remember too that he had to wander around in the wilderness for 4 years and be charged with a back-breaking 34 counts before he was resurrected.) As a fisher of men though, his arm span is not large enough to describe his self-declared achievements.
He has constantly sought immortality through his executive orders, riding roughshod over convention and law. He has appended his signature tag, that is in desperate need of defibrillation, to so many fatuous orders and boldly signed them with his Sharpies that by now they must be Blunties.
He is so desperate to be the greatest President ever that he has started economic and physical wars with enemies and allies alike but which he is incapable of ending. Starting so many wars also gives him the dubious claim to the Nobel Peace Prize for ending all of them (eventually).
Having failed to gain that recognition, he is using his prestigious talents in the art of interior design (according to himself) to convert Federal buildings into something akin to the interior of a Dubai nightclub. Suffering from ADHD – Attention Deficit Hyper Decoration disorder – he soon ran out of marbled bathrooms and wall space for his gold tat in the Whitehouse.
So, to set his greatness in stone, he has or intends to undertake monumental works. After all, they will remain long after he has shuffled off, whereas no amount of executive orders can protect his tacky décor choices. Without a plan, and after a night of Stormy tossed dreams, he woke up with an idea for an erection – he was going to build an enduring legacy, a grand ballroom. He promptly smashed the old one down before anyone could object. With the courts threatening to stymie him, he pivoted disgracefully and declared it to be an emergency and that he was building a huge secure Fuhrer bunker below his gold and marble grandiose erection. In addition, he has teased plans for a huge Arc de Trump and immortalising himself as the 5th president on Mt Rushmore.
To further promote his legacy, he has moved on from trashing his predecessors, particularly Obama and Biden. Like a delinquent graffiti artist, he now actively tries to get his tag slapped onto everything from airports through to the Kennedy Centre and everything in between. It looks like he’s moved on from the blame game to the name game.
His latest brain fart occurred on 27 August when he posted on Untruth Sociopath his ranking of the greatest presidents, naturally with himself at the top and Obama and Biden stone last. But in line with modern thinking on how to bring up kids and avoid hurting their delicate little egos, he should just get a participation certificate at best.
Having written over 500 blogs on Port Elizabeth, I am presumed by the readers to be the guru on the minutiae of the town. As a consequence, I am inundated with queries from readers most bordering on the trivia or unknowable. A popular query relates to the request of the name of a fellow pupil at Grey in standard 6 in 1965. Alternatively, when was their house in Havelock Street built?
But when I received an email from William Kennedy stating that he was related to William Fleming, my immediate response was that we were related albeit through a long chain, I never expected his response that he could provide the chain. When he agreed to provide the detail, I was more than pleasantly surprised. The challenge was on.
Several years prior to retiring, I cast about for a hobbie or activity to maintain my mental acuity. My son introduced me to WordPress, a program to record whatever fascinated one. After recording all the interesting activities and events in my life more as a record for my children when I had long since passed on, I decided to record the history of Port Elizabeth but with a difference. Instead of a merely being a recounting facts, I envisaged that it should uncover the world as it existed . By that I mean the human element. Every now and again a reader will draft a missive to unburden themselves of what they experienced in the Port Ellizabeth of yore. My brother Blaine has also availed himself of my blog for similar reasons.
This blog arrived yesterday from a Glen Williams-Jonosky of Bangkok Thailand in which he shares that part of his life spent at Seaview. This is a verbatim copy of that email.
Men, when they are young, tend to wake up with a morning glory. Unfortunately, that joyful event dissipates with age and Trump is well past that age. However, it would seem that he has replaced that with his peculiar mental hard-ons that he wakes up with in the wee-wee hours of the morning.
His recent debacle surrounding the reflecting pool is a case in point, or a pointed case, whatever the case may be. No I am not talking about him using guys he knew who proved to be singularly unqualified, or that the price increased 10 fold over what he originally sold his idea at, or that he blamed all and sundry for their aggressive attacks on his pool liner, or that he forced his Justice Department to arrest and try one man with the most heinous felony of merely touching a part of floating loose liner, or, or . . .
No, the bit that proves that this was just a random ill-formed thought bomb that he woke up with was that he wanted the liner to be coloured patriotic American flag blue. He triumphantly trumpeted that aspect thinking that his opponents would turn green with envy at his decorative skills (they’re lucky he didn’t choose gold) when in fact it was his pool that turned green.
If he was so offended by the green algae then why didn’t he just also paint the oval WW2 War Memorial pool that sits at one end of the reflecting pool blue as well? Obviously, his nocturnal thoughts are like a morning glory that focuses the immature male brain on the problem in hand to the exclusion of wider considerations and future downsides.
Throughout history there have always been people who scandalize society either to make a point or, more commonly, to self-promote. Unfortunately, in this modern social mediaworld of clicks where people aspire to be celebrities or influencers rather than astronauts, doctors or engineers, the trend to get noticed has exploded.
One current trend is for women to expose their baby bumps. To be sure, there is nothing wrong or to be ashamed of being pregnant. Indeed, it is something to be celebrated, but it is becoming tawdry with every A-lister and wannabe feeling the need to do it. Not content to just walk around thus, they even have photoshoots, like Rihanna, to provide material for their fans. The baby bump is actually just the middle act of the three-act play of conception: the act itself, the bump and finally the birth. The first and last are intensely private affairs, but somehow they feel the need to perform the middle act in public. Women who would never walk around with a crop top in public suddenly feel the need to do so in specially tailored outfits.
To put a humorous slant to this phenomenon, SMAC has juxtaposed two current pictures of publicly paraded bumps, Anne Hathaway and Vogue Williams, with one featuring the actor, Jamie Foxx who recently displayed a gorgeous one at the age of 58 which shows that baby bumps are not constrained by age or sex in this transgender age. (No, Foxx is not trans, but the bump could be a phantom pregnancy as his girlfriend is expecting.)
Being a Settler in an undeveloped land with unfriendly neighbours to their east, non-existent infrastructure and a paucity of work opportunities apart from farming their land, would they not only survive but thrive? Ultimately not being unscrupulous opportunists but the opposite, hard working entrepreneurs, the Reed family would rise to the challenge and thrive.
Sailing to a new homeland Aboard the Chapman, the first ship in the 1820 Settler Armada to arrive at Port Elizabeth, was the Reed family. Previously known as the Sybilla, the 558 ton ship would faithfully serve the British Empire for many more years. But now it was transporting settlers from Cork to Algoa Bay as Port Elizabeth did not yet exist. Ultimately approximately 33 years later it would be lost in the North Atlantic during a voyage from Quebec in the early 1850s.
Shipboard romance It was the roving eye of the ship’s captain, John Milbank, that was attracted to the young slip of a female, Sara Eliza Reed, the sister to James and Samuel Reed. With the Reed boys being too young at the time, with James being only 7 as he was born in 1813, neither boy would in all likelihood have been aware of the budding romance. Over a voyage of 92 days there was plenty of time for Milbank to woo the 20 year old albeit surreptitiously. The romance must have blossomed during the voyage and so, upon arrival in Cape Town, John Milbank proclaimed that the couple would be married within several days. Sarah never disembarked from the ship. Instead she returned with her husband to England.
[LB15]
Whether dared or on their own volition, two young boys would vie to be the first person ashore. One was a 13 year old boy by the name of James Samuel Reed [SC1] and the other was William Collen [SC2]. Whether they were even aware of the others plot to be first ashore, is unknown but two boys would claim this distinction. In the case of the latter, the family claims that William absconded with the ship’s bell. Passed down from generation to generation this assertion and the bell were ultimately passed down the family until today when Mr. JAS Collen is in possession of the bell. Based upon its inconsequential size, the title of Ship’s Bell is probably too grandiose. Downgrading it to galley bell would probably appease skeptics and naysayers. [SC3] As contestants in the game Chinese Whispers can attest, by the fourth retelling of a fact, the accuracy of the detail no longer bears any resemblance to the original message. All facts are subject to distortion.
An example based upon my family history will emphasise the fact. My maternal great great grandfather was George Dix-Peek. At the apex of his career as an architect, he designed the Standard Bank building in Main Street, Port Elizabeth. The remainder of his drawings were of lessor import, originality and importance. Yet despite that fact, one of my cousins claimed that he designed buildings such as the Union Buildings!
Creating a career as hotelier Nothing is officially known of either of the brothers’ activities for many years except that James’ initial occupation was that of a blacksmith [3]. Next the trail wends its merry way to being hoteliers.
In January 1840 James Samuel Reed opened the Pier Hotel [SC4] in a house located in Jetty Street which later became the Palmerston and ultimately the Campanile Hotel. There was an hotel on this site for 150 years with the original house being considerably extended over the years and becoming known as the “Palmerston”. To cater for the influx of settlers, visitors and businessmen this hotel could no longer be extended. The solution was to demolish the existing hotel and to replace it with a far larger hotel, the “Campanile” which was built in 1934/5.
Above: The Palmerston Hotel which was the successor to the Pier Hotel
On the birth of his eldest son William James Reed, Samuel Reed was the manager of the Pier Hotel. Samuel worked at this trade for 10 years. Combined with the butchering trade, his partners were his brothers George and James William.
Above: This is the earliest extant sketch of the Pier Hotel in 1842
It was originally the home of Alexander William Tennant before James Samuel Reed converted it into a hotel. It was not Tennant who would hit the jackpot, but James Samuel. In January 1840, he placed an advertisement that he had taken over Tennant’s house near the proposed new jetty envisaged by the Port Elizabeth Jetty Company. In anticipation of this jetty’s construction literally on his doorstep, he had christened his inn and boarding house, “The Pier Hotel”. In fact, at that stage, even the foundation stone had not been laid yet. Even though the jetty was only finally completed in 1842, using the wreck of the ship Feejee as a base, the expected goldmine had barely commenced production when misfortune befell the jetty. Within five months after officially coming into operation, on Saturday night, 26th August 1843, Port Elizabeth experienced a violent gale, the worst south-easter since 1835. In a matter of hours, three ships broke their anchors smashing into the jetty and utterly destroying it.
James Reed arrived as an 1820 Settler on the Chapman aged seven. In 1846 Tennant was declared insolvent and at the same time Reed announced that he had returned to his earlier trade as a blacksmith.
Together with chartering vessels taking stock, horses and bullocks to Mauritius in exchange for their products principally being sugar, they did very well financially. Samuel’s brother, George, was the buyer of livestock and William was the bookkeeper. That meant that when the chartered boat was loaded, Samuel had to remove his apron and sail to Mauritius. As part of this job was an extremely difficult portion. This entailed catching wild oxen and loading them on board the ship using slings.
In 1849 James William was listed as cabinet makers in Queens Street.
Trying their hand at auctioneering The family dissolved the partnership, and Samuel started auctioneering. By 1861 he had sold all what were called the Hospital Lands. These properties lay between Bird and Pearson Streets and in the western portion encompassed the first substantial hospital in the town. These lands had been granted by Sir George Grey in 1858 to the town with the intention of selling them to provide funds for the erection of the hospital on Richmond Hill.
Above: Market Square in 1896
The Reed family operates a pont Prior to the opening of the Mackay Bridge on the Sunday’s River in 1895, passengers and vehicles were taken across the river by means of a pont. J.S. Reed held the lease from 1859 to 1869. James Reed then purchased The Sunday’s River Punt property from Capper for £4750 and Thornhill for £3500. [There are two Thornhills; the farm settled by Christopher near Bathurst in 1820 and the village of Thornhill just beyond the Van Staden’s Pass, named after Christhopher, son of Christopher] After occupying the Punt Property for 10 years, the Uitenhage Council sued Samuel Reed to deliver up the right of way and remove his Punt. He duly refused to relinquish what he had legally acquired from Thomas Capper (b 1811) son of Thomas Capper senior, of George Smith’s party. The case was heard in the Supreme Court. When Reed lost the case, Capper was already dead, and he had no redress which caused him to surrender the property. His son William J Reed then made an offer with the principal creditor W R Metelerkamp through Mr. J S Kirkwood. [James Somers Kirkwood (d.1888) had arrived in Port Elizabeth in 1855 and was a well-known auctioneer and was elected as Town Councillor in 1860 and M.L.A. from 1876 to 1880] had to pay an amount and Reed’s estate was released from Insolvency.
To settle the debt, their property across the Baakens River bridge was sold and realized £600 which was ample to pay the debt. ·
Property magnet Besides being extremely successful in his occupations as farmer, butcher and auctioneer, James Reed also amassed a great deal of property including farms. [SC5] By 1849, J.S. Reed had acquired half of the farm Nooitgedacht on which Frame’s Drift is located. He eventually played a role in the political management of the town by being elected as Councillor onto the first Town Council and later he was also appointed onto the board of the Divisional Council.
Over the years James Reed was involved in numerous successful and unsuccessful business ventures and amassed a great deal of property.
Fox hunting [LB 14] One of the British customs which our stubbornly traditional forefathers attempted to import into Port Elizabeth was fox hunting. They had the horses, the hounds, the “pink” which implies or signifies perfect health and happiness. The Eastern Cape offered splendid hunting country but no foxes! As an alternative they resorted to “running duikers or oribi to earth.”
The Herald [EPH 1] described “the “run” of ·the previous Saturday. The hounds were under the charge of Messrs. Ted and George Reed and they usually met at Harries Kraal at 6 a.m. twice a week. There were 5 couples of hounds and they had a particularly good run that day covering 15 to 20 miles before killing within sight of the Kragga Kamma lands.
Above: Campanile with Palmerston Hotel in the background
Sources [SC1] Social Chronicle to the end of 1945. Harradine Page 275 [SC2] Blog: https://thecasualobserver.co.za/port-elizabeth-yore-settler-ship-chapman/ [SC3] S.C. page 275. [SC4] SC page 27 [SC5] SC Page 21 [LB14] Looking Back Vol VII No. 1, March 1966 Page 14, Fox hunting] [EPH 1] E.P. Herald 24 October 1862 Fox Hunting [LB15] Looking Back Vol XVI No. 3, Sept 1976 Page 84] [LB] Looking Back Settler Memories by William & James Samuel Reed. Volume 20 No. 1 March 1980 Page 18 to 26
Name
DoB & DoD
Comment
George S. Reed
B. 1818
Youngest of W. Reed’s 5 children
William James Reed
1840-c1920
Son of James Samuel Reed, 22 Queen Street
James Samuel Reed
1811-1902
Grandson of James Samuel Reed
William Reed
1774-1827
1820 Settler, John Baillie’s party. Arrived with wife & 5 children aboard Chapman.
