The men who drew the lines

Every farm here passes through two officials: a veldkornet who knew the ground, and a surveyor paid by the sheet. Forty-two surveyor signatures over 172 years, a century of ward officers, and a ward boundary changing by hand on a 1934 diagram. The first surveyor, C. Lennox Stretch, was later dismissed for taking the Xhosa side.

District context rather than family history. It is here because these men's signatures are on our own farms' paper.

Two officials, and every farm passes through both

A farm in this district becomes a farm through two men.

The first is the veldkornet, the field cornet: the ward officer, a farmer himself, unpaid in anything but standing. He knows the ground and the people on it. He walks the boundary with the surveyor, he vouches that the beacons were shown to the occupier, and when somebody dies he is the one who takes the inventory of the house.

The second is the surveyor: central government, technical, paid by the sheet. He arrives, measures, plants beacons, draws, and leaves.

Between them they are the only two arms of the state that touch every parcel in this history, and both can now be followed across a century.

The wards, and the fact that they move

The field cornetcies in these papers are Traka, Gouph, Gamka, Winterveld and later Kredouw. The officers named on our documents, in order:

A century of ward officers, from the men who took the Rondabel inventories under the Batavian-era arrangements to the man who pointed out the beacons on Witberg and Venters Kloof Annex in 1913.

Two of them are worth pausing on. Hermanus van der Westhuisen took the inventory when Jan Adriaan Venter died at the place Rondavel in July 1829, the document that fixes the earliest household on that farm. C. Hatting is named as field cornet on the Wilgemond and Klein Valie diagrams and is himself a grantee on 15 April 1841: Klaarstroom No. 184 was surveyed for Christian Hatting Senior. The ward officer and the landholder are the same man, which is how the system worked, and it should be said rather than glossed over.

And the wards themselves move. On the 1934–35 diagrams of the Vrolykheid portions, the printed word Traka is struck through by hand and Kredouw written in. A clerk correcting a form is not usually evidence of anything, but here it is: it is the moment an administrative boundary changed, on our own ground, recorded because somebody could not be bothered to order new stationery.

The register fills the eighty-year gap

That table jumps from 1833 to 1913 because diagrams were the only place it had been drawn from, and a diagram names a field cornet perhaps once a decade. A baptism register names one beside almost every entry. The Beaufort West register carries a veldkornetskap on 208 witness records, and for the seven years it covers most densely the district's roster comes out almost complete:

The spellings are kept as the register wrote them, for the same reason the surveyors' are: the variation is evidence about how these men were known, and collapsing it would throw that away.

Two things in the table are worth stopping on.

The first is a span. C. Hatting is in the table above at 1833 and is still signing as field cornet in 1844: eleven years in the office at least, and the last three of them after he had been granted Klaarstroom No. 184 on 15 April 1841. The paragraph above notes that the ward officer and the landholder were the same man. The register adds the shape of it, taking title did not end the service, and the office ran on for years either side of the grant.

The second is that the wards were porous. A field cornet of the district of George appears in a Beaufort West register in 1841, seventeen years before Meiringspoort made that crossing easy, which is a small piece of evidence that the mountain was less of a wall than the map makes it look.

The Mocke of 1839–41 is a surname and an initial. Frederik Simon Mocke is a direct-line ancestor in this history, and his sons are candidates, but the register does not say which Mocke this is not yet verified, see LEAD-0066.

Forty-two names over a hundred and seventy years

The surveyors' signatures run from J. Tulleken in 1816 to A.W. Reynolds in

1. Forty-two name-variants, and the variants are part of the

problem: the same family signs as Melvill, Melville, J.W. du T., J.W. de T. and J.A. de T. across 1859 to 1940, and whether that is one man, a father and son, or a firm is not settled here.

Two names carry most of the ground once their spellings are grouped, which is the same problem one paragraph up, one level quieter:

• C. Lennox Stretch, twenty-two documents across twenty-one parcels, signing

variously C. Lennox Stretch, C.L. Stretch and C. L. Stretch. Eighteen of them are dated 1833 and two more 1834, so the two-season description holds; but he came back, and two sheets are dated 1839.

• A.J. de Villiers, thirteen documents, 1908–1924, and J.A. Loubser, 1919–21,

who between them did the subdivision work, the generation that cut Vaste Water, Avondrust and the Varsche Fontein portions out of the nineteenth-century farms. Five of those thirteen sheets read A.I. de Villiers rather than A.J. One man in adjacent years and the same district is much the likelier reading of a letter that is barely distinguishable in this period's hands, but it is a reading, so it is marked not yet verified and the two spellings are both kept.

Everything in between is a name on one or two sheets: Thwaits, Marquard, Ballot, Dumbleton, von Oppell, Versfeld, Hartwig, Charles Brown, de Meillon, Seibelhoff, and a Mr Bower who signed a Bloemendaal survey in 1825.

Stretch

The first surveyor is the one to know about.

Charles Lennox Stretch (1797–1882) was born in Bristol and came out in 1818 as a captain in the 38th Regiment. He was at the defence of Grahamstown in 1819. From 1823 he was engineer and Government Land Surveyor for Graaff-Reinet, and with Andrew Geddes Bain he built the Oudeberg Pass in 1829 and Van Ryneveld's Pass in 1832. [SRC-165]

Then, in August and September 1833, he came into the Koup and the Gouph and measured our farms, Middelwater, Vrolykheid, Klaarstroom, Rondabel, Klein Valie, Reim Hoogte, Venters Kloof, Wilgemond, Vlakfontein, and in 1834 Varsche Fontein. Eight years later the whole bundle was converted to quitrent on a single day, which is its own story.

How he was regarded, seventy-nine years later

In July 1912 K.M. von Oppell was sent to subdivide Klein Valie No. 182, one of the farms Stretch measured in August 1833. He could not find the western corner beacon.

His report says beacons B to M were pointed out to him and all had an old appearance, but that beacon A was shown only approximately: "the position in which the owners of Klein Valley think it should be", and that he found no trace of it. He fixed it by making the distance agree with the diagram of Lot B.5.17, the farm granted to C. Hattingh on 15 April 1841. The owners also claimed a beacon he had not expected, saying they could prove its existence for over forty years and swearing they had used the land inside it; he adopted that one too. Then he wrote:

"As Surveyor Stretch was one of the most unreliable men of olden days, I had no alternative but to go on local evidence."

— K.M. von Oppell, Government Land Surveyor, Oudtshoorn, 30 July 1912

That is how Stretch stood in his own profession seventy-nine years after he walked this ground. The sentence is not venting; it is the justification for what von Oppell did next. He set the 1833 diagram aside, drew every departure from it in red, and took the district's word instead, so the boundary Klein Valie's portions are registered on today was fixed from what the families said the beacons had been, and from a grant of 1841.

What happened to him afterwards is not a footnote. In 1836 he was appointed diplomatic agent to the Gaika, Imidange and Amabele. He was influential in exposing the killing of the Xhosa king Hintsa by Harry Smith's men. He supported Andries Stockenström's policy of holding settlers back from Xhosa land, and during the Seventh Frontier War of 1846–47 he fought with a Fengu division, clashed with the British authorities, and was dismissed. He went back to surveying on his own farm.

He was known as Xolilizwe, peacemaker.

He then sat in the Cape Parliament for close to thirty years: the lower house for Fort Beaufort from 1854, for Port Elizabeth from 1859, and the Legislative Council for the Eastern Circle from 1868. He died at Somerset East in October 1882.

The boundaries every farm in this history is still registered on were walked by a man who was later sacked by his own government for taking the other side.

The roads close the circle

Stretch's road-building partner, Andrew Geddes Bain, later built Meiringspoort, opened 3 March 1858. The northern mouth of that poort is Klaarstroom, and the poort is the reason there is a village there at all, the erven were surveyed and sold within two years of the road opening, on ground that is De Claar Stroom. [SRC-167]

Bain's son Thomas built the Swartberg Pass from the Prince Albert side, repaired Meiringspoort after the 1885 flood, and reported on the Prince Albert gold in 1891, which is the gold rush story.

So the same two-man partnership that cut passes through the Sneeuberg in 1829 turns up, one generation later, cutting the road that creates this history's anchor town. That is not a hidden connection, it is what a small colonial technical service looked like. There were not many of them, and they did everything.

What this story is about

• about Charles Lennox Stretch

Sources

Everything this story rests on, with a link to the original wherever one exists. Where a citation is incomplete it says so, an incomplete citation is a research gap, not a formatting problem. If your work is here and the credit is wrong or thin, please tell us and it will be fixed.

1. Rose Willis and Doreen Atkinson, with Judy Maguire and Bruce Rubidge, "Klaarstroom: Ancient place of clear waters" (Karoo Cameos, 2021) Karoo Development Foundation, Karoo CameosKaroo Cameos, 2021view it online →
2. 'n Tak van die Swanepoel-familie in Suid-Afrika, 1699 tot 1999: 'n genealogiese en kultuurhistoriese studie Universiteit van Stellenbosch (SUNScholar)MA thesis, Departement Geskiedenis; studieleier Dr M Burden; April 2003; handle 10019.1/53526view it online →
3. Charles Lennox Stretch (1797-1882) Wikipediaview it online →
4. Andrew Geddes Bain and Thomas Charles John Bain - Meiringspoort and the Swartberg Pass web (Swartberg Circle Route; SA Country Life; Wikipedia: Swartberg Pass)view it online →
5. survey_report, 2114-2118/1912 (report p2), 30 July 1912 Surveyor-General, Cape Town (SGCTN)2114-2118/1912 (report p2)
6. survey_report, 2114-2118/1912 (report p1), 30 July 1912 Surveyor-General, Cape Town (SGCTN)2114-2118/1912 (report p1)
7. survey_report, 2114-2118/1912 (sketch), 30 July 1912 Surveyor-General, Cape Town (SGCTN)2114-2118/1912 (sketch)

Research notes

The research behind this page, kept separate from it: dated working notes, open questions, and what is not yet settled.