From Miriam Erasmus, our Lewes Lass in South Africa
As promised, I carried out further research regarding the events of 1820 and found inextricable links between South Africa, Kent and Sussex.
What possessed people to contemplate a 7,000 mile voyage to a faraway land where survival was not guaranteed?
Life in Britain in 1819
We call it the “Regency” period. We are told about the decadence and eventual madness of the Royals of that period. We wonder at Brighton Pavilion and all the Regency terraced houses that were built in the Spa towns.
The fashions – Empire Line dress for the women and Regency / Ditto Suits for the gents – for the wealthy were made of silks, satins, brocades, finest linen muslin and wools.
For the working classes, linen and rough wools and cottons were the order of the day. You were lucky if you had a change of clothing for during the week and a ‘Sunday best’ outfit for Church.
The nouveau riche from the Industrial Revolution were living in newly built mansions on grand estates, whilst the workers were living in terraced houses with no sanitation and smoggy conditions near the factories which were powered by steam created by coal burning, causing killer smogs over most new cities. Conditions were so bad that we recoil in horror at the Peterloo massacre in Manchester 1819.
In the countryside at that time, life was marginally better, with farming still mostly unmechanised and the shepherds, farm workers and and milkmaids etc. living in the simple way they had for centuries.
The slow mechanisation led to the Swing Riots in Kent in 1830.
On top of this, in the early 1800s the population in Britain was just under 12,000,000.
About 25% of the eligible male population was in the army or the navy. Folk songs abound about press gangs and conditions in the forces at that time. After Waterloo in 1815 there was a glut of soldiers ‘home from war’ who could not find jobs to feed their families.
Click on the title to hear the song:
by Miriam
The poet Percy Bysshe Shelley was moved to write:
England in 1819
An old, mad, blind, despised, and dying King;
Princes, the dregs of their dull race, who flow
Through public scorn,—mud from a muddy spring;
Rulers who neither see nor feel nor know,
But leechlike to their fainting country cling
Till they drop, blind in blood, without a blow.
A people starved and stabbed in th’ untilled field;
An army, whom liberticide and prey
Makes as a two-edged sword to all who wield;
Golden and sanguine laws which tempt and slay;
Religion Christless, Godless—a book sealed;
A senate, Time’s worst statute, unrepealed—
Are graves from which a glorious Phantom may
Burst, to illumine our tempestuous day.
Small wonder then, when the 1819 search for volunteers to go to South Africa had between 50,000 and 90,000 applicants.
Only just under 5,000 were chosen….. Here is the list from Paul Tanner-Tremaine on his amazing website British 1820 Settlers to South Africa.
His list is far more detailed from all the research he has done from books and records of that time. He includes their genealogies, ships they were on, and their Settler numbers, but I have simplified it to the names of the brave souls who were definitely born in Kent and Sussex. Maybe one of your ancestors is on this list.
1820 Settlers from Kent
Rebecca Amos
Jane Barton
Catherine Clark
Frances Clark
George Clark
Mary Ann Clark
Major Crause
Thomas Dry
Bayly Dyason
George Dyason
Isaac Dyason
Jane Dyason
Tassell Dyason
Cecilia Eastland
James Eastland
Thomas Eastland
Mary Ann Eley
James Thomas Erith
John Filmer
Hannah Green
William Green
George Hayward
Jeremiah Honey
Sarah Honey
Abel Worth Hoole
Hougham Hudson
George James
Maria Johnson
Henry Keogh/Kew
John Penny Mandy
Cornelius Maytham
John Norton
Joshua Norton
Richard Peacock
Sarah Prime
Mary Skineer
John Bath Staples
Martha Strutt
James Sweetman
George Webster
George Webster
Thurston Whittle
1820 Settlers from Sussex:
Jane Barton
Frederick Gowar
Sarah Ann Hillman
Wakeman Sutton
Thomas Sweetman
Most of the ships set sail in January 1820, and the first one, the Chapman, arrived in Algoa Bay on April 10th 1820.
Imagine gathering a few precious belongings and going to a chosen port to board a wooden sailing ship and enduring a 10 week sea voyage to who knows where.
After your ship arrives smaller boats come to carry you and your belongings and rations to the shore. You are now sitting on your suitcase, on a beach, 7,000 miles from ‘home’.
The Government have arranged for the local Soldiers and Boer farmers to bring their wagons to transport you to your designated plot of land.
Will you survive? Will you build a new life here?
This is now where the adventures and hardships of life in this strange land begin.
