I do not know why I suddenly thought about them when waking this morning, but several mnemonics came to mind. All of them I learned at school. Here are a few:
BODMAS : Brackets Of Division Multiplication Addition Substraction
Referring to the order in which arithmetic operations are carried out.
The Serpentine Galleries – both North and South – rarely put on exhibitions that are anything but adventurous. Such is the case for the latest at Serpentine South, which can be viewed until 10 January 2027. The exhibition showcases creations by Justin Caguiat, who was born in Tokyo in 1989. He is known for his inter-disciplinary works which explore the connections between architecture, spirituality, and everyday rituals.
The exhibition is called “Change Ringing”. The name refers to the commonly employed English method of ringing church bells, which, as is explained in a Wikipedia article, is:
“… the art of ringing a set of tuned bells in a tightly controlled manner to produce precise variations in their successive striking sequences, known as ‘changes’ … This creates a form of bell music which cannot be discerned as a conventional melody, but is a series of mathematical sequences.”
Caguiat’s exhibition incorporates painting, sculpture, printmaking, sound and film. The sounds are produced by a collection of bells and loudspeakers positioned throughout the gallery. The bells are struck by electrically operated mechanisms. They do not ring randomly, but are programmed to sound according to a score composed by Lily Pickett. As one views the show, you can hear a sequence of sounds produced by the bells.
Apart from the bells and the sounds theyb produce, there are some attractive, abstract, colored canvases to be enjoyed. Some of them have been mounted on wooden frameworks behind which the brickwork of the gallery has been exposed by removing its plaster covering. There are also some sculptures. Some of these incorporate bells, which form part of the sound creating ensemble.
“ … a new series of thermochromic paintings that continuously change in response to heat and light. As temperatures fluctuate, layers of heat-sensitive pigment reveal and conceal different forms, creating works that remain in a constant state of transformation.”
During the brief time we saw them, we did not notice any transformations, as described.
I enjoyed viewing “Change Ringing” because it was not only aurally and visually satisfying, but also innovative in an engaging way.
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.
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 whichAndrić 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.
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,
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.
“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.
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?
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.
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.
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 Rouxvillejust 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.
