My ancestor who escaped from prison in South Africa in 1878

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This describes the colourful life of Jakob Seligmann (1846-1906), who arrived in South Africa from Germany while his cousin, my great-grand-uncle, who migrated to the Cape Colony in 1849, Henry Bergmann (see: https://activeauthor.substack.com/p/a-letter-written-from-cape-town-in ) was still alive. Jakob made a name for himself in the tiny town of Rouxville in what was then the Orange Free State, and then had to flee from southern Africa …

Rouxville was established in 1863 across the Orange River. It is some 23 miles north of Aliwal North, where Henry Bergmann lived, and 25 miles southeast of Smithfield. It was founded to resolve some problems associated with the postal service in Aliwal.

The establishment of Rouxville presented new opportunities for traders. I believe that Henry Bergmann may have had some interests in the new settlement. His cousin Jakob Seligmann and Leopold, a brother of Ludwig Reichenberger, who was working with Henry Bergmann in Aliwal, were both from Ichenhausen in Bavaria and amongst the earliest settlers in Rouxville. In 1873, Leopold married Henry Bergmann’s niece Mathilde Rosenfels who was a first cousin once removed of Jakob Seligmann. Her brothers, Julius, Max, and Jakob Rosenfels, also set up shop in Rouxville. By that time, both Jakob Seligmann and Leopold Reichenberger had both been significantly involved in the foundation of the new town.

The town of Rouxville was established officially in 1863, but it took several years to become the seat of a Magistrate – a ‘Landdrost’. The reason for this delay was opposition by the neighbouring town of Smithfield, north-east of Rouxville and across the Caledon River. One of the reasons given by Rouxville for wanting its own Magistracy was the difficulty of getting criminals to trial when the River Caledon was flooding.

In 1869, the town of Rouxville sent its first petition to obtain its own Magistracy to the Volksraad . Leopold Reichenberg, who was to become the town’s post-master, was among its 108 signatories.  A second petition, containing 60 signatures, followed the first, and was written by Leopold Reichenberg in 1870. His petition included the information that already in 1870 Rouxville could boast of having three shops, a bakery, a slaughterhouse and two hotels with bars, and there were plans for much more growth. After Rouxville had been granted a magistracy, a committee of burghers was constituted to advise the Magistrate. The committee whose role was to ensure the execution of the town’s regulations included Leopold Reichenberg, who had become a ‘Heemraad’ , and Henry Bergmann’s cousin Jakob Seligmann. 

Between the town’s founding date and 1876, the land on which it was built, Zuurbult Farm, was Church land. Until 1876, the town of Rouxville was run by a Committee of Management, which was independent of the Church. Between 1873 and 1876, the Church purchased all rights of management of the town from this Committee.  Jakob Seligmann, vested with Power of Attorney, acted as an agent charged with selling the rights and claims of the Committee on the town to the Church . This is the first evidence that I have of Jakob’s involvement in the town’s legal proceedings.

I learnt from various documents in the National Archives of South Africa that Jakob acted as a ‘General Agent’ in Rouxville. This meant that he undertook legal work such as conveyancing properties, supervising contract writing, drawing up wills, and also defending the accused in court. His name appears frequently in the register of revenue stamps sold in Rouxville. He also appears often in the Register  of criminal cases kept by the Police Station of Rouxville in 1877 and 1878, the latter proved to be a critical year in Jakob’s life.

The police Register contains summaries of cases presided over by the Magistrate of Rouxville. Some of those recorded for 1877 show Jakob acting in his role as an advocate. From the examples that I have seen, it seems that Jakob was good at his job. He defended those in the dock well.

Other cases showed Jakob in a less favourable light.

One of the cases in the police records shows that Jakob’s life did not run smoothly. On 30 March, 1877, he was standing outside his house in Rouxville speaking with a Mr Bachman from Paarl when, out of the blue, he was attacked by Mr Reed. The attacker asked Jakob whether he had made a deal with a Mr Chase, and then began hitting him with a whip. Mr Bachman managed to disarm Reed, but as he testified in court this did not put an end to the attack . Mr Reed, the accused, was found guilty, and both bailed and fined £50. Jakob had been saved by Bachman from serious injury, and maybe also from death. What Jakob had done to annoy Reed is not recorded.

On 2 November 1877, the Police Station Register records that in mid-August 1877 a prisoner, named Leuris, in Rouxville’s jail was accused of stealing the rations of a fellow inmate. That inmate was Jakob Seligmann. This happened during one of several occasions when Jakob was locked up in jail. The stolen rations had been left uneaten by Jakob, who received his food whilst in jail from elsewhere. It was likely that his food was brought to him by his wife. She was Hendrina (né Hendricks), a Christian lady of Dutch descent from Graaff Reinet. Jakob had married her in 1873.

Most Jewish men, including many of my mother’s relatives, who arrived in South Africa during the first six or seven decades 19th century, preferred to marry Jewish women, but they were in ‘short supply’ below the Equator during that time. Often, they married Jewish ladies from Germany who sailed out to Africa specially to be wed . Jakob Seligmann was unusual amongst the South African German Jews of the time; he married someone whom he had met in South Africa and who was not Jewish.

Almost a year after the Reed incident, in September 1878, the Police Register recorded that Chief Constable Henry Röttchers had been accused of being drunken and disorderly whilst on duty. During his trial it emerged that he had left the door of the jail unlocked . Worse than this, Jakob appeared to have had the run of the place: he was able to unlock the door and was not confined to his cell . Röttchers was found guilty and fined 15 Shillings Sterling. Clearly, security arrangements at Rouxville jail were far from satisfactory.

Jakob was incarcerated several times. Once when Leuris stole his rations in August 1877. He must have been released after that because only four days before the Röttcher incident on 31 August 1878, Jakob – at that date a free man – was in court defending someone who had been accused of hitting a ‘white’ farmer. Therefore, Jakob must have been incarcerated again in the last few days of August ‘78.

Two months later on  9 October 1878, the Gouvernements Courant, a newspaper published in Bloemfontein  reported a jailbreak in Rouxville. Sometime during the night of  5 October and the early morning of the next day Jakob Seligmann escaped from the jail at Rouxville.  A ‘wanted’ notice was published in the same issue of this newspaper, both in Dutch and in English. It reveals why Jakob was being held:

“WHEREAS PRISONER JACOB SELIGMANN, charged with the crime of FORGERY and FRAUD, did, in the night of the 5th and 6th of October, 1878, escape out of the Prison at Rouxville, with the assistance of one or more persons, Notice is hereby given, that a REWARD OF TWENTY-FIVE POUNDS STERLING will be given…”

The authorities were concerned that Jacob Seligmann would try to escape from the Orange Free State. On  10 October, a letter was sent from Bloemfontein to Natal, the neighbouring British colony. It was believed by the authorities that Jakob might head for the coast of Natal, the closest seashore to the landlocked Orange Free State. The letter begins by saying that a copy of the warrant of Seligmann’s arrest was attached, and it continues to say that Jakob was being held in jail awaiting trial at the Circuit Court in late November.

It was the second time that Jakob had been in jail in 1878. The first was three months beginning in May, and the second had begun in late August . The letter included the information that Seligmann had been accused of defrauding several persons of a large amount of money. By mid-October, ten days after Jacob had escaped from prison, the police authorities in Natal had been ordered to look out for the escapee. In November 1879, the authorities in Natal wrote to the Home Secretary of the Orange Free State, reporting that efforts made to apprehend Seligmann were in vain.

At first, I had little idea why Jakob was in trouble, but eventually I ‘unearthed’ an informative document. This revealed that on 28 of June 1877, the High Court of Justice of the Orange Free State ordered the sequestration of Seligmann’s assets , following the issue of a bankruptcy against him by Nathaniel Adler  & Co. of Port Elizabeth. The sequestration order affected all his assets including household possessions.  An inventory of these included two children’s bedsteads and one baby’s cradle. Jakob’s family needed these items because by June 1877, Jakob and Hendrina had two small infants and a five-month-old baby .

After his escape, Jakob disappeared from South Africa. By the time that he disappeared from prison and reappeared across the Atlantic, he and Hendrina had produced four sons, the eldest of which was only 6 years old and the youngest a baby.  They all appear in the yellowing pages of the 1880 Census of the USA: they were living in Springfield in Sangamon County, Illinois .

It puzzled me how Jakob – a wanted man – and his young family managed to reach the USA from South Africa without being captured. Two clues are contained in an unpublished account of a long trip that Jakob’s son Arthur (born 1878) made from the USA to Europe and South Africa in late 1904 and early 1905. Arthur never mentions his father’s colourful past in South Africa anywhere in his detailed, but dryly written, travel diary. He wrote that he arrived at Victoria Station in London, and:

“…was soon located at Kleins Hotel  in Finsbury Square as this Hotel is a very old German house and a great rendezvous for the German Commercial travellers. It is the same hotel that my father stopped at when he visited London during his journey from South Africa to America about 30 years ago.”

In connection with this hotel, Arthur mentions his father but not the rest of the family. Elsewhere, he wrote:

“Upon my arrival in Graaff Reinet, … I made inquiries about the whereabouts of the Bartletts and soon an elderly gentleman introduced himself as Mr Bartlett, and I was then certain that it was Uncle Richard who 26 years ago escorted mother and the four of us boys including myself as far as Mount Stuart  previous to our departure to Port Elizabeth where we embarked on the steamer for America.” 

As the family is not mentioned in connection with Kleins Hotel in London and Jakob is not mentioned in connection with the journey to Port Elizabeth, I speculate that Jakob, a fugitive, might have found it safer to travel to the USA separately, without his young family who would have made their own way there .

In contrast to the mystery about of Jakob’s movements in late 1878 and early 1879, the reason that he chose to go to Illinois is less enigmatic. First, he had at least two brothers already living there: Julius (born 1843) who married in Illinois in 1869; and Daniel (born 1854). Secondly, he would have learnt something about life in Illinois while he was still in South Africa from another of his brothers Sigmund (1856-1939), who had lived with Julius in Illinois (see: https://activeauthor.substack.com/p/sigmund-migrated-from-germany-to ) briefly before coming to Rouxville whilst Jakob was still there.

The lives of both Jakob and his ill-fated cousin Henry Bergmann illustrate that life in a new country had its pitfalls.  Both of them would have enjoyed the less constrained atmosphere of South Africa compared with that which they had left behind in Germany, but they also discovered that life could throw up unexpected difficulties.

Travnik – a small town in Bosnia

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Shortly before setting out on a trip to Yugoslavia in 1975, I had just finished reading “Bosnian Chronicle” by the Yugoslav writer Ivo Andrić (1892-1975). This novel is set in the Bosnian town of Travnik during the early years of the nineteenth century and atmospherically portrays the relationships between the families of the French and Austrian consuls and their Ottoman ‘hosts’. After a short bus ride from Mostar through the forested hills of Bosnia, I disembarked in Travnik – the town in which Andrić was born.

During the journey to Travnik through the hilly Bosnian landscape, I noticed short stretches of disused narrow-gauge railways that wound their way through the countryside. Some years later, when I lived and worked in Gillingham in Kent, I was friendly with an elderly lady, a retired teacher, called Mary Stephenson. We had a common interest in classical music. When I got to know her better, she told me that she had been a keen amateur movie maker and that she and her late husband, both having been interested in railways, had made tours around Europe visiting narrow-gauge lines.  They had visited Bosnia, and she was able to show me the brief movies that she had made whilst travelling on the narrow-gauge lines that I had glimpsed.

After booking into a hotel, I began to wander around the streets of old Travnik that nestle beneath the city’s fortress, which contains a polygonal tower. I explored the town’s old mosques; ‘türbe’ (small, usually decorative, pavilions containing the Islamic tombs of notable people); and other fine architecture dating back to the Ottoman period. At first, I was alone, but not for long. A young man, maybe in his early twenties, approached me and asked in tolerably good English whether he could show me around. As he seemed friendly enough, I agreed.

My new companion led me through Travnik and out into the surrounding countryside. We walked along a lane, and soon arrived at a small single-storied cottage with a steeply pitched roof. It was surrounded by a small patch of land filled with flowers and vegetables. The building consisted of not much more than two rooms. We entered, and were greeted by an old lady dressed in folk costume. My friend introduced me to her, his grandmother, and she showed me the many framed sepia photographs that competed for the limited amount of space on her walls. She told me about them in her language, and her grandson translated for me. Many of the pictures looked as if they had been taken before the First World War.

Our next port of call was my new companion’s family home, an apartment on the first floor of an unremarkable modern building in a new part of the town. My friend introduced me to his mother and then to his younger brother, who was labouring over some schoolwork. I noticed that amongst the things on the boy’s worktable there was a textbook on the English language. I picked it up and saw that its first chapter was headed ‘The Black Country’. Its first words were,

“Where there’s muck, there’s brass.”

I still wonder how much sense that would have made to a young Bosnian lad, or even his teacher.

Later that day, my new friend fetched me from my hotel. It was evening and in the centre of the town people were enjoying the ‘corso’.  During my visits to Greece, many of which were made long before I began exploring Yugoslavia, I used to watch people enjoying, what I was led to believe was called, the ‘corso’. It occurs in the evening in the centre of a town or along the seashore, and consists of people enjoying the cool evening air and meeting friends whilst wandering to and fro along a more or less well-defined stretch of pavement or street. 

Travnik had its own ‘corso’ or evening promenade. Unlike many that I had witnessed before, this one was highly organised. People walked two-by-two around a definite, but unmarked circle in one of the town’s open spaces. My companion and I joined this human conveyor belt. Every now and then, my new friend would suddenly dart off to meet someone, whom he spotted sitting at a table outside a café or standing away from the ‘corso’. After exchanging a few words with his acquaintance, he would rejoin me in the ‘corso’.

Thus, I ended my pleasant day in Travnik.

I never discovered my companion’s name. I am not sure that I will ever be able to find out whether he survived the Bosnian war of the 1990s, and is leading a good life today.

European influence in paintings by artists in Bengal

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IT IS WIDELY KNOWN that artists are often influenced by aspects of cultures’ other than their own. For example, Paul Gaugin was influenced by the culture and arts of Polynesia, other parts of Asia, and Africa.

Likewise, artists in nineteenth century Bengal were influenced by Western European artistic styles and techniques.

Recently, at a stand in London’s Frieze Masters 2026, I saw a painting by an unknown Bengali artist. Created in the nineteenth century, the painting depicts a Hindu mythological subject: “Annapurna feeding Lord Shiva”. What is interesting about this artwork is that the painter has been influenced by european artistic techniques. This is evident in the modelling of the figures, the use of perspective, and the naturalistic backdrop, which evokes the style of eighteenth century and earlier European artists.

Although artists in Bengal adopted European painting techniques, they began to abandon them in the early twentieth century as aspirations for Indian independence began to grow,

Crackers and Cicero and a clinic near Camberwell

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We are partial to a savoury cracker made in Finland and marketed as Finn Crisp. These thin, rectangular sourdough rye crackers used to be easily available at the Waitrose supermarkets near where we live, but of late, they have disappeared from the shelves. We have rung other branches of this chain of stores, but none of them stock Finn Crisp anymore. After a search on the Internet, we discovered a shop on Walworth Road in Walworth, a district that neighbours south London’s Camberwell. The store keeps Finn Crisp. On a rainy day, we took a bus that went south of Elephant and Castle, and disembarked near the shop. The bus stop is outside a building, which I had never seen before and it intrigued me.

The mainly brick building houses the Walworth Clinic. Its architecture has elements typical of the Art Deco style that was in fashion in the 1920s to 1940s. Above the main entrance on Walworth Road, there is a rectangular inscribed, stone plaque on which the following was carved:

“The Health of The People is the Highest Law.”

Above this, but closer to the top of the building, I spotted a date: 1937. And above this, there is a stone sculpture depicting a buxom woman holding a staff around which a snake was intertwined – a rod of Aesculapius. At her feet, three children are depicted – two seated girls and a standing boy.

The building stands on the corner of Walworth Road and Larcom Street, from which there are two more entrances to the building.

There is much information about this building on the historicengland website ( https://historicengland.org.uk/listing/the-list/list-entry/1393674?section=official-list-entry ), from which I have quoted the following:

“The former Public Health Centre at Southwark was one of a series of pioneering health centres built at the end of the 1930s, in advance of the 1946 National Health Services Act which made their construction a duty of health authorities. Its foundation stone was laid on 11 July 1936 and the building opened on 25 September 1937.

The new building brought all the borough’s health services under one roof and included a solarium for exposing children to artificial sunlight, a TB clinic, X-ray department, maternity and child welfare centre, dentist clinic, … and the Public Analyst, the latter complete with chemical and bacterial laboratory for testing foodstuffs. There was also a special clinic ‘for women from 45 years of age who are subject to illness and disease peculiar to this age group’. With the opening of the health centre, Southwark became, ‘the first borough to have the whole of its health services in one building’, it was claimed by the Borough Medical Officer …”

The building was designed by the Borough Engineer, Percy Smart, about whom there seems to be little available information on the Internet. In contrast, the words on the front of the building are those of a well-known classical author, Marcus Tullius Cicero (106 BC – 43 BC). They are taken from his “De Legibus” (‘On the laws’). The original words which were translated and placed on the clinic were in Latin: “Salus populi suprema est lex.”

Near to this clinic, we bought the Finn Crisp crackers for which we were yearning.

As is often the case when we set out on excursions with a mundane aim, we not only achieve our aim but, as exemplified by the clinic, we discover things we had never come across before.

A dessert from Colombia

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Today, I ate lunch at a Colombian café in south London. The desserts included “chocolate with cheese”, which, out of curiosity, I ordered.

What arrived was a mug of hot chocolate accompanied by three generous slices of a soft, white, tasteless cheese.

The waiter seemed to suggest that dipping the cheese into the chocolate was not necessary, but I might have misunderstood him.

I have heard of chalk and cheese, as in the saying: ‘chalk and cheese’, which refers to two items or people that have nothing in common. But, chocolate with cheese was new to me.

Is there a ‘correct’ way of enjoying chocolate with cheese in Colombia?

A grand portico in London and a meeting which led to a fortunate consequence

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I FIRST SAW THE GRAND PORTICO OF UNIVERSITY COLLEGE LONDON (‘UCL’) when I was 12 years old, and it impressed me greatly.

7 years later, when I was trying to decide what to study at university, I was advised by a family friend, the biologist Professor Lewis Wolpert (1929-2021). He suggested that physiology was the subject that fitted in well with my interests at the time. Back in the late 1960s, UCL was the best place to study physiology in the UK. So, when Lewis Wolpert suggested that I apply there, rather than Cambridge, I remembered the portico and was happy that I would be attending courses at UCL.

On my first day at UCL, one of my fellow first-year physiology students was a young lady from India. Several years later, she became my wife.

Maybe I should thank Lewis Wolpert not only for suggesting I study at UCL, but also for making it possible to meet my future spouse.

Created by an artist born in the Philippines

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Pacita Abad (1946-2004) was born in the Philippines, and died in Singapore.

Her interest in the plight refugees is reflected in her works. The 1998 work “Angkor Wat” is a magnificent example of this.

Using the Hindu-Buddhist temple at Siem Riep in Cambodia as the main subject on her creation, she incorporates paintings of Cambodian refugees. The resulting artwork is a spectacular sight.

We were lucky to have seen this work which was being displayed by the Alison Jacques Gallery during the Frieze Masters 2026 art fair held in London’s Regents Park.

He migrated from Germany to the USA, which he did not enjoy, and then moved to South Africa

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This lengthy – you have been warned – essay describes the adventures of some German Jewish migrants to southern Africa during the nineteenth century, and how their activities led to my mother’s father coming to South Africa, where she was born.

A typical pattern of migration from one country to another is that if one member of a family is successful in his or her new home, other members of the family will follow. Such was the case for Jews who moved to South Africa. After Heinrich Bergmann arrived in South Africa from Germany in 1849 (see: https://activeauthor.substack.com/p/a-letter-written-from-cape-town-in), relatives such as his brother and his cousin Jakob Seligmann followed in his footsteps. Sigmund Seligmann (1856-1939), Jakob Seligmann’s younger brother, also arrived in the Cape Colony. As will be described, Sigmund invited his cousin Klothilde Rieser’s son Emanuel Rieser to follow him. Later, Sigmund invited his nephew Iwan Bloch (1886-1931), my grandfather, to take over his department store in Barkly East at the beginning of the twentieth century. I found Sigmund’s story interesting. I hope you will.

Some years ago, I received two fascinating documents which provided much of the information below. One of these, which I call Klothilde’s Diary, consists of a photographic album with handwritten entries of events that were important to my great-great-grandmother Klothilde Rieser (1841-1921). The other document is the unpublished autobiography of Sigmund Seligmann, shown to me by his granddaughter. Both Sigmund and Emanuel figure importantly in the history of my mother’s side of the family. In this essay, the emphasis is on Sigmund’s story.

Sigmund was born in Ichenhausen, Bavaria, in 1856, the twelfth of the 18 children born of Hale (née Springer) and Isak Rafael Seligmann. Of these 18, 15 survived to adulthood.  By 1872, two of his elder brothers, Julius and Daniel, had migrated to Illinois in the USA; and his brother Jakob, as described above, was in South Africa.

On 3 September 1872, a month before his 16th birthday, Sigmund Seligmann left Ichenhausen and began a journey to the USA. He travelled from Hamburg on the steamer Thuringia, which called in at Le Havre on its way to Hoboken in New Jersey, where he disembarked. After a ten-day sea voyage, Sigmund made his way to Springfield in Illinois. From there, he travelled to the tiny settlement of Rienzi, where his brother Julius had a farmstead. He described this place as consisting of:

“… a shop, a blacksmith forge and a doctor’s house and a few other buildings. About a mile or more from there stood a lovely schoolhouse, to which the children of the surrounding countryside went. I was sent there also for a short time. I took my food with me in a tin bucket…”

I have an old cadastral map of the Cotton Hill District of Sangamon County which shows exactly where Julius Seligmann and his family lived during the time when his brother Sigmund stayed with him. Today, Rienzi no longer exists; it lies submerged beneath a man-made lake. Sigmund learned English quickly, and by December 1872 he had a job “… collecting taxes…” by which he probably meant recovering debts. However, he did not enjoy his life in the USA, and began returning homewards on 16 January 1874. Sigmund travelled home by way of Cincinnati and Philadelphia. In both places he had relatives, who had migrated from Germany.

Soon after Sigmund’s return to Bavaria, he decided, for reasons that he did not state in his autobiography, to move to South Africa. It was most probable that he did so because members of his family were already becoming established there. He arrived in Rouxville, where he:

“… obtained employment with a Mr Wiarda, a gentleman of German extraction, who traded in Rouxville in the Orange Free State.” 

He worked six days a week from sunset to sundown, and rested on Sundays. Near the end of his two years stay with Wiarda, an important event in Germany was also celebrated in faraway Rouxville. This was the 80th birthday of Kaiser Wilhelm, which occurred on 22 March 18, 1877.

Sigmund’s detailed description of the celebration of the Kaiser’s 80th birthday reveals much about the Germans living in Rouxville at that time:

“For some time prior to the day, we Germans planned a great celebration and got together to organize the festivities. There was shop owner Mr Meier, his employee Amman Zinn, my own boss Mr Wiarda, two Seligmanns, two Hellmans, two Rosenfells[sic],a Reichenberger and a Bergmann.”

Of the persons that Sigmund listed, he was related (by the Seligmann line) to Jakob Seligmann, Jakob and Julius Rosenfels, and Ludwig Bergmann. Sigmund continued his description of the festivities as follows:

“We were all ‘Germans’ irrespective of the fact that the majority were of the Jewish persuasion! One of our concerns was that we had no German beer. Then we heard of a trader whose several ox spans were en route from the coast laden with goods amongst which there was a crate with 36 bottles of Bavarian beer. These ox wagons arrived in Rouxville just in time, on the eve of our party. They got a rousing welcome! The party was held in the room of my boss Mr Wiarda, and was very successful; we enjoyed it greatly. I heard the new German anthem sung for the first time, ‘Deutschland, Deutschland, über Alles…’. I was much moved and felt very proud…”

Soon after this celebration, Sigmund left Mr Wiarda and Rouxville and took up employment with Mr Oelschig, a German – probably not Jewish, in Lady Grey, which was in the Cape Colony. It was:

“… a place even smaller than Rouxville; but, unlike Rouxville, it had beautiful trees and lovely gardens.”

What Sigmund said about the difference between these places in 1877 was still true when we visited them in 2003.

In about 1880, Sigmund was offered a partnership in a failing trading business owned by a Mr Dunker, a German in Lady Grey. He discussed this offer with Mr Oelschig, who said:

“It is six years since you were home and saw your family. Take a trip home. Visit your mother… You can be back in October for the wool season, and I intend to give you a share of the profits in addition to your regular wage.”

During Sigmund’s brief stay in Germany, he used part of his time to buy merchandise for Mr Oelschig. These would become the first goods that Oelschig had ever imported from Germany. Sigmund also invited his cousin’s son Emanuel Rieser to accompany him back to South Africa. Emanuel’s mother Klothilde, who was then living in Augsburg, wrote in her Diary:

“My dear son Emanuel left on Saturday 25 April 1881 (eve of Rosh Hashanah) for Africa.  May God hear my prayers … for good fortune, blessings and a long life for him.”

This entry was typical of many that she made each time a member of her family set off for South Africa or visited her from there.

When Sigmund arrived in Cape Town, he left Emanuel there because, being an employee, he was not able to offer him employment. Emanuel moved to Paarl, where he got a job, which Sigmund describes as follows:

“He was given a two-horse wagon, which was loaded up with household goods. He had to drive this to the farms in the vicinity and exchanged the goods for ostrich feathers.”

Many years later, Emanuel’s son, the artist Dolf Rieser, wrote the following in his unfinished autobiography:

“Many other original stories told by my father come to mind. When he was very young he took all sorts of jobs. At the age of about seventeen he was employed on an Ostrich farm. In those days the wing and tail feathers were very much sought after and fetched high prices. He knew nothing about these grotesque birds at the time. When walking one day from the farmhouse veranda to his lodgings, he suddenly received an enormous punch between the shoulder blades that threw him over and tore his shirt and jacket. The bird that had attacked him then sat on top of him trying to hit him. Now an enraged Ostrich can quite easily kill a man with his four enormous toe claws, but luckily for my father these birds can only hit upwards or straight ahead and not downwards. The farmers shouted to my father from the veranda not to get up and they pulled the bird off him. In order to pluck the feathers from these birds a stocking was put over their head to stop them seeing what was happening, as otherwise they would attack.”

All went well until, as Sigmund Seligmann pointed out:

“Suddenly, out of the blue, the demand for ostrich feathers ceased. The birds were not worth feeding and one often read in the newspapers how the farmers let the ostriches go free into the bush…”

A great slump in the demand for ostrich feathers occurred in the mid-1880s. Emanuel became unemployed. 

A few months after Emanuel lost his job, Mr Oelschig required extra help and, following Sigmund’s recommendation, he employed Emanuel Rieser. Later, after Sigmund had left Oelschig, Emanuel became one of the three persons who ran Mr Oelschig’s firm after he retired from it.

In 1883, Sigmund was offered an equal-share partnership in Oelschig’s firm which was doing very well at the time. For various reasons that included worries about anti-Semitism and also Oelschig’s extravagant lifestyle, Sigmund declined it. At the end of the year, in December, Sigmund felt that it was time to move on, and left Oelschig on friendly terms.

Before continuing with the description of Sigmund’s life after leaving Lady Grey, we will return to Klothilde’s Diary because it describes how, one after another, each of her remaining three children left her, and then later Germany. All were bound for South Africa. First:

“My daughter Paula left on Old Year’s Eve for Africa… Augsburg, 1 January 1885.”

Only six weeks later:

“My dearly beloved daughter Paula became engaged to Mr Michaelis Arnholz on 15 February 1885 in Rouxville.  Augsburg, 18 March 1885.”

Was this a case of love at first sight, or something a little less random? I feel that it was the latter. Mr Arnholz was from Pomerania, far away from southern Germany where the Riesers lived. Paula and Michaelis were married in Rouxville on the 1st of April 1885. Two years later another unmarried Rieser girl, Hedwig, headed southwards. She went to Rouxville to join her sister Paula, and then a few months later she became engaged to another Jew from Germany, who was living in South Africa. In 1888, Klothilde’s youngest child Jakob set sail for the Cape Colony. Thus, one by one Emanuel Rieser’s siblings followed him out to South Africa.

Returning to Sigmund Seligmann’s story, we meet Moses (‘Moss’) Vallentine, a British-born Jew, who was working in Lady Grey at the same time as Sigmund Seligmann. They were friends, and became collaborators in a new business when Sigmund left Mr Oelschig in December 1883. As Moss had little capital, Sigmund took him on as an employee, offering him a share in any profits that they might generate. Sigmund planned to open a trading business based on his experiences in the USA:

“During my two year stay in the United States, mainly on farms, I gained insight and knowledge of the needs of the American farmers and knew that those of the Boers farmer would be very similar. But I preferred to sell German goods.”

Sigmund knew that he could have bought goods more cheaply from the USA than from Germany, but he favoured the latter for reasons that he did not state. Sigmund wrote:

“German export to South Africa was not yet well-established and I believe I substantially contributed to its growth.”

After Sigmund and Moss had completed a buying trip in Germany and England, where they purchased building materials for a new shop, during early 1884, they returned to the Eastern Cape. In September 1884, the new shop – a small affair – was opened in Dordrecht, which is about 70 miles directly south of Lady Grey. It was so great a success that Moss felt that he could afford to send for his fiancée Amelia Victoria Green, who was in London, to come out to join him in Africa. They married soon after her arrival.

According to the novelist Olive Schreiner (1855-1920), who lived in Dordrecht in 1871, the place was:

“… a miserable village on the side of a hill without trees and with no water. A poor little hotel and everything speaks of poverty and want of enterprise…”

Despite Sigmund’s injection of enterprise 14 years later, Dordrecht had not changed much by the time that we visited it in 2003.

During Sigmund’s stay in Lady Grey, many of Oelschig’s customers -farmers – relocated to the new town of Barkly East. It was 6000 feet above sea-level, and had been established on the lands of Rocky Farm in 1874. In the knowledge that he would have a good number of friends in Barkly East, Sigmund decided to open his own new shop in that newish town, which is about 50 mountainous miles southeast of Lady Grey. He began setting up shop in November 1885. His first accommodation for it was a corrugated iron shed that he bought at an auction in the Indian Ocean port of East London. He had it erected on a plot of land that he had bought. The store was a success even before it opened properly:

“The only goods from the Dordrecht shop I carried with me in my wagon were several dozen Christmas Cards, very artistic ones, printed on velveteen. Barkly East had seen nothing like it! While the carpenter was putting up shelves in one part of the building, I displayed the Christmas Cards on a packing crate and was inundated with customers. They were still milling about as several ox-carts brought all my other merchandise.”

Soon after the shop opened in 1886, Sigmund needed an assistant. He engaged Moss Vallentine’s brother Jacob (‘Jack’), who was then unemployed in Lady Grey. By 1889, the corrugated iron building was replaced by a larger and sturdier single-storied brick building. Soon after this, Sigmund opened a branch store in Moshesh’s Ford, which:

“… lay further into the mountains, approximately a 3-hour ride away, across the Kraai River.”

On the last day of 1889, Sigmund married Ernestine Perlmutter , who was born in Radziejew in Poland and had travelled out from Ichenhausen to South Africa that year. She was a daughter of Heimann Perlmutter – a Cantor in the synagogue of Ichenhausen. Soon after Sigmund married, his assistant Jack married Ernestine’s sister Helene, who was later to perish in the Holocaust.

Sigmund and Ernestine’s first child, Reinhold, was born in Barkly East in November 1892. A second child, Mathilde (‘Sissy’), was born in 1894. By this time, Sigmund’s business was doing so well that he had sufficient work to need more helpers. This, and Jack’s unexpected death in 1897, resulted in Sigmund inviting three of his nephews from Germany to help him in South Africa. They were Jakob Krämer, Moritz Rosenberger, and Julius Cornelius. The first two were grandchildren of Sigmund’s father Isak Rafael Seligmann. Julius was Sigmund’s nephew by marriage. He was the brother of Frieda Cornelius, who married Jakob Krämer.

After the death of Jack and the arrival of his nephews in 1897, Sigmund decided that his children ought to be educated in Germany rather than South Africa, and that it was a good time to return to Germany. He decided that his nephews should take over the running of his business ‘S Seligmann & Co.’

Sigmund and his family travelled to Germany in May 1898, and settled in Munich, from where he maintained an interest in the running of his firm by helping to buy German goods for the shops in South Africa. A patriotic German, but a naturalized British citizen, Sigmund volunteered as a helper in a military hospital in Munch during WW1. His son, Reinhold, like so many Jews in Germany volunteered for military service as soon as the Great War began. He was awarded the Iron Cross, 2nd Class for his services to Germany. As part of his duties whilst in France, Reinhold became one of the first people involved in aerial reconnaissance.

Sigmund died in Munich in 1939, by which time the rest of his family had reached Palestine, where they lived throughout WW2 and after that. The business that he left behind in South Africa continued to flourish in the hands of his three nephews. After a while, they were joined by some of his other nephews. Amongst these was Iwan Bloch, my grandfather, about whom I will tell you another day. Because he moved to South Africa, my mother and her siblings were born in that country.

This is an abbreviated extract without annotations from my book “Exodus to Africa”, which is available from Amazon.

A boy from Germany: from photographer to factory owner

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In a previous posting ( https://activeauthor.substack.com/p/why-did-my-great-grandfather-leave ), I discussed the reasons that my great-grandfather Franz Ginsberg (1862-1936) left Germany in 1880 to settle in King Williams Town (‘King’) in the eastern part of the Cape Colony in what is now South Africa. This article describes how Franz became a successful industrialist within a few years of arriving in southern Africa. Eventually, he manufactured three items that were in daily use in nineteenth century southern Africa: matches, candles, and soap. His achievements in industry were eventually accompanied by his ever-increasing involvement in politics.  But first, let me introduce the man, Jakob Rindl(1853-1937), with whom Franz worked at first in southern Africa.

By 1882, Jakob Rindl was an established professional photographer in King. Jakob, who was born in Engelsberg (now ‘Mosnov’ in the Czech Republic) ran a photographic studio some of whose pictures bore the words ‘J Rindl, Photographer, King Williams Town, South-Afrika’, Africa being spelled the German way with a ‘k’. Young Franz worked with Jakob, who was nine years older than him. How and where they met has been forgotten. All that I know is that my late uncle Felix Bloch, Franz’s grandson, once told me that Jakob was already established in South Africa when Franz arrived. Felix also told me that Franz was at first apprenticed to a draper in Germany. The draper did not treat him well, and he soon left, and then became apprenticed to a court photographer in Berlin.  Both Franz and Jakob were German speakers, and this may have appealed to the numerous German settlers in the area, who wanted photographic portraits, maybe to send back to their relatives in Europe. A report[i] on the Kaffrarian Agricultural Show held in King early April 1884 shows that portraits were Jakob’s forte:

“Photographs were in the competition only for colonial scenery, and hence Mr Rhindl [sic] was not a competitor, but his frame of portraits was worthy of attention, a better collection of portrait photographs being rarely seen.”

While working with Jakob, Franz experimented with colour photography. When I first learnt of this, I was surprised, but then I discovered that by the 1880s many people were looking into ways of producing true colour photographs rather than hand-tinted black and white images. No one, including Franz, managed to perfect a technique that worked until about 1892, when a Jew from Luxembourg Gabriel Lippmann (1845-1941), who won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1908, hit upon a method that worked.

Photography is both an art and a science. The scientific side of it involves both physics and chemistry. Franz, who is unlikely to have attended university before setting sail for Africa but had a father who was well-versed in science, was able to ‘dabble’ in colour photography.  This shows that he had an innate flair for chemistry. This was a skill which would prove useful in many of his manufacturing endeavours. Almost everything that he produced, usually on an industrial scale, involved processes that required a knowledge of, or at least a masterly ‘feel’ for, chemistry.

In May 1885, an advertisement announced Jakob’s move from Cathcart Street to new premises in Downing Street[ii]. Franz’s name does not appear in this announcement. This suggests that the relationship between Jakob and Franz was that of employer and employee.  This situation, if it existed as such, was not destined to last much longer. For, in July 1885 the town of King was about to become the home of a new factory, and Franz would soon be the leading light in this enterprise.

Just after Jakob shifted to Downing Street, readers of the Cape Mercury (‘Mercury’), a local newspaper in King, would have read:

“A MATCH factory will shortly be established in this town, the necessary machinery being now on its way.  Mr. Stray of Stray and Toenesson, is starting it, and hopes to be able to find employment for a good number of hands. The kind made will be the Locomotive brand of Tandstickors. … The factory will be on the outskirts of the town.[iii]” 

Tändsticka (plural Tändstickor) is the Swedish word for a match, or type of match. Safety matches were patented by Johan Edvard Lundstrom of Sweden in1855. H Rider-Haggard (1856-1925), author of King Solomon’s Mines who lived and worked in South Africa in the late 1870s, uses the Swedish word in his story Long Odds:

“It was so dark that I could not see anything, though I could smell a great deal, so I lit a match. It was a ‘tandstickor’ match, and burnt slowly and dimly, and as the light gradually increased I made out …” 

In 1886 when this was published – a year after the advertisement was published, the Swedish word was in common use. On the 21st of July 1885, newspaper readers in King learnt that the promoters of the local Match Manufactory were going to be “Messrs Toenessen and Ginsberg”. Their offices were situated near to Jakob’s photographic studio in Downing Street.

By mid-December 1885 the factory was operating at full speed, as was reported in a local newspaper:

“The match factory is now in operation, and cannot get through with the orders, consequently further labour saving machinery is being imported. Twenty lads are employed, and the manufacturers wish to double the number at wages, which are gauged according to ability. The other day a visitor saw 375,000 matches tipped in one hour.

By the way, why do Colonial manufacturers not adopt a Colonial insignia for their wares? Kaffraria has a coat of arms, now disused since its absorption in the Colony; why not revive the emblem of independence, even if it is on a bottle of local made sweets or a box of Kaffrarian matches.”

Three points come to mind. The first is that the potentially hazardous business of making matches requires competence in applied chemistry. Franz appeared to have had this. Second, maintaining the complex machinery, which was imported from Europe to make matches on an industrial scale, required someone with mechanical skills. Toenessen had this. He had been awarded prizes in King for manufacturing goods that required this skill – for example: lock-making, door plates, and later weaponry. In 1894, Messrs Stray and Toenessen advertised their skills as practical engineers:

“Stray & Toenessen … are prepared to undertake all kinds of work connected with machinery, locks, lamps…”

The third, is ‘Colonial Manufacture’. That is to say, the manufacturing of goods within the colony. One thing that encouraged this was that the duty applied to imported manufactured goods did not apply to goods manufactured in the Colony. The promotion and protection of colonial industry was to become an important concern of Franz during his lifetime. Franz and Toenessen began manufacturing matches during 1885. They were able to exhibit matches at the Port Elizabeth Exhibition held at the end of that year.

By January 1886, Franz had not only begun making matches but also another product, ink. Its manufacture needed chemical knowledge. His Kaffrarian Ink Factory also had its offices in Downing Street.

Average life expectancy for someone born in 1862 was much shorter than that of someone born now. Therefore, there was a need to achieve success earlier in life than now. Even taking this into account, Franz had made a significant leap in his career ‘trajectory’ by 1886, remarkably early in his life (when he was only about twenty-three years old).

The capital costs involved in setting up a match factory and a separate ink-making plant must have been considerable. I feel that it is unlikely that Franz would have arrived in South Africa with much money – his father with twelve children to support probably had little spare cash. Also, however successful Rindl’s photography business might have been, there would have probably been little that Franz would have been able to invest. It is possible that he had saved some money, and/or maybe, Toenessen had sufficient capital to start the match factory with Franz. Franz might well have had to approach a financial house like a bank for finance. If this was the case, whoever lent Franz the money must have felt, quite correctly as it turned out, that he was a good bet.

The match factory soon began doing well. In April 1886, Franz and Toenessen carried off prizes at the annual Kaffrarian Agricultural Show. In addition to winning “…the prize for the best collection of Colonial Matches, £2-2s.”, they also hosted a stand showing the full process of manufacturing matches. As if this was not enough, Franz and a Mr Klinkhardt won a prize for the manufacture of plant pots using local clay. These pots, which were very much below the prices of imported ones, were, in the opinion of the show’s judges likely to sell well. Elsewhere in the same show, in its ‘Art Department’, Franz was awarded yet another prize. This one was for photography. According to the newspaper reporter writing in the Cape Mercury:

“Messrs. Rindl & Ginsberg took the prize of £1 – 10s. for portraits, which were certainly as fine as can be produced in the Colony, both in taste and photographic excellence.”

The prize for portraits shows that Franz was still associated with Jakob Rindl, and that his name had been added to Jakob’s in connection with the photographic studio. Franz’s triumphs at the 1886 show demonstrate that he had his fingers in many pies, but none of them suffered because of his ‘multi-tasking’. In addition, this twenty-four-year-old man was creating much new employment in the town.

Four months after his successes at the Agricultural Show, Franz attended a meeting held at the town’s Council Chamber to consider the advisability of forming a Gold Prospecting Company, to be called the ‘Pioneering Gold Prospecting Company’. Its proposed aim was to prospect for gold and other minerals in the district around King. Franz was a member of the ‘Provisional Committee’, which included other members of the town’s business community.  Two weeks after this, he was elected to Board of Directors of The King Williams Town Pioneer Prospecting Company. Impressive as this assimilation into the town’s business hierarchy may seem, it was not enough for him to get an invitation as a guest to an important ball, organised by the town’s Freemasons, held a few days after the meeting[iv].

Even a successful venture can hit snags. This was the case with Franz. At the beginning of 1887, Franz and Mr Toenessen published the following announcement[v]:

“DAMAGED MATCHES. SOME of the Matches damaged in the course of manufacture which we advertised for some time ago, are still being sold. We shall be happy, not only to exchange perfect goods, but will pay the carriage on such matches. GINSBERG & TOENESSEN”

This problem appears to have been resolved, but others loomed. For example, the street lighting near the factory was defective and the ill-lit streets made a perfect place for ‘Natives ’ to drink away their woes. In connection with the lighting problem, Franz and Toenessen requested the Town Council of King to:

“…to have the bottom of Wood Street repaired, and lamps erected in Buffalo Road or Victoria Street, which was a thoroughfare used by drunken Natives.” To which the Mayor commented that the drunken ‘Natives’ could be arrested. At the following Council Meeting, Franz and his partner’s request was partially turned down. The Council resolved not to “…enlighten the darkness…” of the locality, but instead they allocated a sum not exceeding £20 for mending the main roads and bye-ways[vi].

By 1890, Franz had diversified his product range. This is illustrated by the following announcement that he published in the local press:

“Notice OUR MR. GINSBERG having returned after a lengthy visit to England, Germany and Sweden, we beg to notify to the public that the work in our factories will be carried on WITH ALL LATE IMPROVEMENTS, and in a most efficient manner, so that we can guarantee the quality of our matches and candles as SECOND TO NONE.”

This shows that Franz had added candles to the household essentials that he was producing on an industrial scale. Like matches and ink, candle-making requires some appreciation of applied chemistry, which Franz certainly possessed. The advertisement also shows that Franz travelled abroad. He was to do this a great deal, as I shall describe later.

A description of the candle factory exists in a scrapbook[vii] which belonged to Franz and is now stored in the archives of King’s Amathole Museum:

“In the candle factory I saw the various greases and tallows being boiled, after which, by means of powerful hydraulic presses, the oils are extracted from them. After crystallising, the fats are put into tins and placed in hot chambers, heated by steam, where further oil is extracted from them. They then go to the candle moulding machines, of which I saw a great number at work. Another room was occupied by girls who were deftly making boxes, each one to hold a dozen candles, and in the next room wood boxes were being made for packing the candles in. The work in the candle factory is carried on night and day, and to shew its capacity, I was informed that it could produce 35,000 to 40,000 candles a week. A great deal of water is required in this factory, which is supplied from an artesian well on the premises, and a steam pump, which I saw at work, was raising 1,800 gallons per hour. Mr Ginsberg however desires a more ample supply, and with that object in view has purchased a drill with which he is now boring to a greater depth, and in a short time hopes to have a pump which will raise 4,000 gallons per hour.”

The same writer then continues to comment on another of Franz’s factories:

“In the match factory, which is nearby, I saw the various operations of this industry being carried on, and was rather surprised to be informed by Mr Ginsberg that the labour alone in this industry represents 75 percent of the total cost, and the proof of this was not far to seek, for I found about 130 people employed here, which is a very large number in comparison to the work turned out, the production of the factory being about 1,800 to 2,000 gross of boxes per week.”

The writer ends his piece by discussing yet another of Franz’s enterprises, his soap-making business:

“The soap works belonging to the same firm, have the capacity of about 18 tons of soap per week, so that altogether Messrs. Ginsberg and Co. may be said to be very largely interested in Colonial industries, and have done their share towards developing them. I was given to understand they are prepared to go in for further extension, but are holding back at present until they see what is going to be the result of the approaching Customs Convention.”

The Convention, held in 1898 and mentioned above, was concerned with eventually harmonising customs regulations between the four separate parts of South Africa: the two British colonies and the two then independent Boer republics.

The references to artesian wells as a means of gaining an adequate supply of water for his factories, is an early indication of Franz’s concerns about water resources. Later, I will describe his involvement in a major water supply improvement scheme for King. His use of artesian wells was publicly praised[viii]:

“Messrs Ginsberg & Co. are to be congratulated on the success of their boring operations. Not a few persons were sceptical over the matter, or at least that the borer would have to be sent to an extreme depth, but the firm has tapped a good supply at a depth of little over 180 feet. This enterprise will doubtless lead to other artesian wells in the town, and make householders independent of the present service for irrigation purposes. Government is encouraging well-boring, more especially among the country people, by supplying machines at half cost. It will be a pleasure to report that the Natives are giving attention to this simple method of irrigating land, or obtaining a healthy supply of water in their communes.”

Franz’s factories were consuming water at a high rate. Had this come from the municipality, his firm would have had to pay for it. After paying the initial outlay to bore the wells and obtain the pumps, the water itself cost the firm nothing.

Franz added yet another product to the range of household goods that he manufactured. This was another item whose manufacture made good use of Franz’s practical skills in applied chemistry. By March 1893, he had begun making soap.  This was only seven years after the future Lord Leverhulme (founder of what is now the Unilever company) opened his first soap-making factory in the UK.

At the 1899 King ‘Agricultural and Industrial Society Show’, Franz’s company was awarded £5 prizes for each of the following categories of exhibits: soap, candles and matches. Year after year, his company’s products won prizes at similar shows. In 1907, the local newspaper, reporting an annual show, wrote:

“GINSBERG & Co. have two stalls. On one, is displayed samples of their “XXX Pale Soap”, an article made out of colonial products. This soap is growing rapidly in popularity and in many quarters is completing successfully with blue mottled. The second stall in the form of a kiosk, on which are several new lines that Messrs. Ginsberg and Co. are pushing. One of these is “Electra Soap”, made up in attractive cartons containing three bars. Another new line is the “Mining Candle”, which is daily growing in popularity. The feature of this candle is that it is very hard, and calculated to resist a very hot atmosphere, therefore highly suitable in mines. Messrs. Ginsberg’s other lines in candles and soaps are also nicely displayed...”

Conspicuous by their absence are matches. By 1907, Franz was no longer producing them.

I have described how my great-grandfather, Franz Ginsberg, became a successful industrialist. Within about 10 years after having left Germany as a young man, he had become one of the leading businessmen in King Williams Town. In a future essay, I will outline how he combined his commercial activities with a profound involvement with politics, both at local and national levels.

This is an abbreviated excerpt from my detailed biography of Franz Ginsberg, “SOAP TO SENATE: A GERMAN JEW AT THE DAWN OF APARTHEID”. The book/kindle is availabl from Amazon.

[i] CM: Cape Mercury, publ. King Williams Town: 5th April 1884

[ii] CM: 30th May 1885.

[iii] CM: 18th July 1885.

[iv] CM: 21st August 1886

[v] CM: 4th Jan 1887

[vi] CM: 4th & 11th May 1889

[vii] A newspaper cutting dated 22nd November 1895, copied me by Stephanie Victor , a curator at the Amathole Museum

[viii] Undated and unidentified newspaper clipping from Franz Ginsberg’s scrapbooks in the Amathole Museum

Two artists from Japan in London

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‘Kensho‘ is a Zen Buddhist term meaning ‘seeing one’s essence’. It is the name used by the London art gallery Tristan Hoare (in Fitzroy Square) for an exhibition being held until 31 October 2026.

The exhibition features ceramics by Taizo Kuroda (1946-2021) and works in ink by Sousai Inada (born 1949). Both are Japanese.

The exhibition is small but very satisfying and the gallery provides a wonderful setting for the artwork.