AfriPulse
Key topics: Personal anecdotes reveal how memories shape and humanise historical events
Value of preserving small, informal stories, including those found on social media
Memoirs like Gardner’s show everyday details that bring past lives vividly to life
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One day, in my early working years, I was invited to meet an old man who had a story to tell and needed help with the telling of it. My only brief was that the old fellow had been working on a mine near Johannesburg in 1895 and had seen some of the fighting of the Jameson Raid. Such a first-hand account would be, I thought, certainly interesting and perhaps valuable for the anecdotal record of that strange episode of South African history. At the time of our meeting, he was well over 90, and he wanted to write a book about his life; the Raid experience would be only one small part of it.
We met at his home and quickly got down to business, starting with his experience of the raid. This, as I remember it now, is what he told me:
“We were working at the Doornfontein Mine that day and the news was out, everyone knew that Jameson’s men were coming and there might be a big fight. When we heard shooting quite close by my friend and I climbed to the top of the mine headgear to see what we could see. He had a brand-new set of binoculars with him, but he dropped them when we got into position. ‘There goes three quid’s worth’ he said to me as they smashed into the concrete below.”
Try as I might I could not get the old man past the moment of the loss of the binos, so we wrapped it up with a promise to meet again the next day. I went back three or four times, but I could never dig much more out of him. Only one disturbing memory flickered into view on the last day we met. He recalled seeing a hand being raised from behind a rock and seeming to brush something away again and again. He and his friend waited a long time after the shooting had stopped before cautiously going over to look behind the rock. There they found a young man quite dead from a shot in the head, his rifle lying beside him.
But the old storyteller was still stuck on the loss of the binoculars. “Three quid was a lot of money in those days,” he repeated for the last time.
Shortly afterwards, his son telephoned to say the old man had died, so that was the end of my first foray into historical sidelight writing. But the episode has stayed with me, and I know that I was fortunate to have had such a close brush with a fascinating part of the past, a moment or two of real life lived nearly fifty years before I was born. My original notes from the interviews with the old man were lost in subsequent travels so that now I don’t even have his name and I feel very bad about that. Not because such short stories have any great importance but because they have a role in humanising history, and like so much else in these cynical times, provenance can be critical. Without his name and other details, some might think the story a concoction for one of my essays.
Such anecdotes, even when the narrators get them absolutely upside down, do have a hand in humanising history. The question is how to find them and perhaps preserve them for generations to come. Help in this department comes from what some might think an unlikely source – the world wide web and its noisy offspring, social media. In every corner of the world and in every language, people post anything they can think of to keep their ‘friends’ interested and connected. And sometimes these posts throw up real gems, fragments of history no one else has ever bothered to put down before. Historians themselves, or many of them anyway, love this kind of informal recording for the simple reason that it can help in coming to grips with, and fully understanding, life as it was lived at the time they are writing about. The trick now is to find some way of routinely combing the web and securing the jewellery buried among the mass of trash.
An interesting example of personal memories that helps set the background scenery, so to speak, is a collection of tales written about his life at sea by a Royal Navy officer in the nineteenth century, Andrew James Gardner. He put them together, he said, not for publication, but purely for the amusement of his family when he was finally ‘moored fore and aft’. More than fifty years after his death, they came to the notice of a naval historian who recognised their simple honesty and truth and had them published as Above and Under Hatches in Shreds and Snatches. It is out of print now, but copies become available from time to time, and they much more than repay the reader for whatever the outlay. Gardner served on many famous ships of the time, HMS Hector and HMS Victory among them. He was involved in a battle or two, but he deals with them quite abruptly. His focus is rather upon the minutiae of his working life: leaving his ship and going up to Greenwich to write the exam for promotion to lieutenant, for example. When he
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