Sources |
- [S62] Lynn MacLeod, MacLeod, Lynn, 28 Jan 2003, email.
JAMES' PARTY No. 35 on the Colonial Department list, led by Samuel James, a carpenter of Westbury, Wiltshire. This was a joint-stock party, recommended and financially aided by the parish authorities and the 'gentlemen of Westbury' . The group amalgamated with the remainder of aparty from Frome in the neighbouring country of Somersetshire. The Frome contingent - Barlett, Hayward, Randall, and Usher...... James travelled to Portsmouth to see his party aboard HM Store Ship Weymouth before returning to Westbury to Fetch his wife who had recently given birth to twin boys. She and one of the infants died on board the Weymouth before the ship left Portsmouth; the second infant died soon after putting to sea. The Weymouth left Portsmouth on 7 Jan 1820 reaching Table Bay on 26 April and Algoa Bay on 15 May. The party was located on an arm of the Lynedoch River, naming its location Bethany. Party Names: Banks, Barter (or Bartlett), Hayward, Hinton, Hobbs, Lanham, Pinnock, Randall, Rogers, Usher and Warren. JAMES: Samuel, 31, Carpenter, w. Elizabeth 33 (died at Portsmouth) child. Edward 8, Elizabeth 5,Stephen 2, Thomas (died at Portsmouth) Samuel William (died at sea)
Extracted from A Settlers Handbook by Nash
- [S108] MacKay, Sue, 7 Feb 2003, Boom files.
See JPGs of Weymouth and Algoa Bay.
The Hobbs Story
My 3 x great grandfather Philip Hobbs was born in Westbury, Wiltshire in 1792 and baptised there on 25 September 1793 at the age of 14 months. He was the son of John Hobbs and Mary Pepler of Westbury, and was baptised in a mass baptism along with four older siblings: Anne (aged 12), Thomas (aged 10), William (aged 4) and Daniel (aged 3). On 7 November 1814 he married Charity Francis in Westbury. They had two children in Westbury, both baptised in Westbury Independent Meeting House; Daniel on 6 July 1817 and Sarah on 9 May 1819. Philip was a gardener and agricultural labourer, but the family had little money to live on and were sometimes in receipt of poor relief from the parish.
Just after Philip and Charity got married the Napoleonic Wars came to an end, and in the political re-organisation which followed Cape Colony was officially handed over to the British by the Dutch. The Cape Province was ruled by a governor under the jurisdiction of the Colonial Office. The Colonial Secretary at this time was Lord Bathurst, who in July 1819 persuaded the British government to put £50,000 into an emigration scheme which would fulfil three main functions. Firstly, it would establish the supremacy of English speaking settlers over the Dutch, and as we know the British treatment of the Dutch in South Africa led some 15 years later to the Great Trek of the Boers northward to Natal and the Orange Free State. Secondly, by concentrating the new settlements in the eastern part of the province, the Colonial Office hoped to establish a strong farming community capable of withstanding the border raids of the native Xhosa, thus increasing the security of the colony. Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly as far as the government of the day was concerned, the emigration scheme was designed to boost popularity at home at a time of rising unemployment, a trade recession following the wars in Europe, and general social unrest. The Colonial Department wanted to make sure that land in the Cape would only be granted to those with enough capital and expertise to develop it, so when the scheme was first announced it was restricted to organised 'parties' of ten or more men, selection being given to men who could afford to engage and maintain a party of at least ten able bodied labourers over the age of 18, with or without families. The head of each party would receive a free passage and food on the journey for himself and his servants, and on arrival would be given 100 acres of land for each man in the party. If they cultivated the land for three years they would be given full title, and the £10 deposit required from each man prior to departure would be refunded, either in cash or in rations to tide them over until the first harvest.
Sixty parties set sail for South Africa on seventeen ships from various parts of the UK between December 1819 and October 1820. In practice less than a third were 'proprietary' parties where a man of capital emigrated with ten or more servants. The vast majority of the so called 1820 Settlers were 'joint stock' parties under a nominal leader where each man paid his own deposit and later farmed his own 100 acres. Often groups of friends and neighbours formed a party, and in some cases a parish would pay the deposits for groups of unemployed labourers to emigrate rather than continue to pay poor relief.
Philip and Charity Hobbs and their two children set sail for South Africa on the ‘Weymouth’, which left Portsmouth on 7 January 1820, arriving at Algoa Bay, near Port Elizabeth on May 15. They travelled with James’ Party, led by Samuel James, a carpenter from Westbury. It was a joint stock party funded by the parish authorities and ‘the gentlemen of Westbury’, the final party consisting of twelve men, eleven wives and thirty nine children. The Westbury Vestry Minutes for October 1819 show that Philip Hobbs had his full £10 deposit paid by the parish. The parish also paid out a sum of £22:10:00 to James Hayward of Chalford to travel in the same party. James and Tabitha Hayward sailed on the ‘Weymouth’ with their children Samuel (17), John (13), Elizabeth (11), Selina (9), William (4) and Eliza (2). The only unmarried man in the party was a 22 year old gardener called William Bartlett from Frome, who later married Selina Hayward. Their daughter Elizabeth Bartlett married my 2xgreat grandfather William Hobbs, thus making James and Tabitha Hayward my 4xgreat grandparents.
The 'Weymouth' carried 11 separate parties comprising nearly 500 people out to South Africa. The first parties started boarding on December 10 1819 in bitterly cold, snowy weather, and before the ship had even sailed there were two deaths, those of Elizabeth James and her infant son Thomas. Most of the settlers had arrived in Portsmouth in carts and wagons carrying a few cherished possessions. Bedding for the voyage had been provided by the authorities as well as basic rations, but most took pigs and chickens in crates on board. The women also took a few trusted home remedies, pieces of china and linen and some seeds of English flowers. Wendy Beal Preston in her book ‘Story of a Frontier Family’ describes how one mother gave each of her daughters a rose bush from her garden to take with her when she married, and in this way the English ‘moss rose’ came to the Eastern Cape.
The settlers spent Christmas day of 1819 afloat, enjoying good English fare - in the preceding days 188 lbs of fresh beef, 60 lbs of vegetables, and beer had come aboard. This must have made a welcome change from the rather strict ship routine to which they were learning to adjust; they were only allowed three quarts of water per day each for everything. The ship’s log for Christmas day recorded ‘fresh breezes with frost and snow’. The children were doubtless very excited to be on board ship and enjoying good food and a white Christmas, but the joy was to be short-lived. Once the ship set sail the happy laughter turned to crying as rough weather brought sea sickness and boredom set in.
An illness far worse than sea sickness also struck the settlers - measles. Sixteen infants and young children died during the voyage, as well as three adults. The log for Thursday 3 February records the death of Sarah Hobbs, daughter of Philip and Charity, who was buried at sea just off the Canary Islands. The burial was obviously fairly routine for the crew, as the entry reads:
Set studding sail. Grand Canary 3 or 4 leagues. Killed a bullock weighing 625 lbs. Committed body of the deceased to the deep.
As the previous day’s entry had recorded the death of Sarah Hobbs we can only presume that it was her body and not that of the bullock that was committed to the deep!
The settlers got their first view of South Africa when the ship called first of all at Capetown, and they doubtless crowded round the rail to get a closer look at Table Mountain. A few settlers left the ship here, but the vast majority continued on to Algoa Bay, after taking on fresh water and rations. They must have felt their spirits rise somewhat after the long journey, although I am sure they remained apprehensive as to what kind of life lay ahead of them. They left Table Bay at 6am on 9 May, and within six days had reached Algoa Bay, which did not seem to match the beauties of Capetown. The Rev.William Shaw, one of the 1820 settlers, wrote the following in his diary:
h in these hills afforded a peep into the country immediately behind this fringe of sand, the ground seemed sterile, the bushes stunted. Immediately above the landing-place the land rose abruptly into hills of considerable elevation. Two or three white-washed cottages, and Fort Frederick, a small fortification crowning the height, and by its few cannon commanding the anchorage, were all that arrested the eye in the first view of Algoa Bay.â€
As there was no suitable jetty the settlers disembarked by transferring into the ship’s boats and being rowed to the outskirts of the surf, where they were again transferred to flat bottomed surf boats. Any gloomy thoughts about the landscape were put to one side as they concentrated on getting ashore in one piece with all their belongings. Sir Rufane Donkin, acting Governor while Lord Charles Somerset was on leave in the UK, had travelled to Algoa Bay to see the settlers arrive, and named the landing place Port Elizabeth after his wife who had recently died.
Scale Model of the Weymouth
“The Landing at Algoa Bay†by Thomas Baines
1820 Settlers Museum, Grahamstown
Wagon trains came to the shore to meet the settlers and carry them to their onward locations. The wagons were pulled by oxen and could only manage about 25 miles a day, so the journey was long and arduous. The parties from the ‘Weymouth’ had been given land in the Albany region near the Great Fish River: James’ party was located near Bathurst on the Lynedoch River. Shaw’s diary describes the feelings of the settlers on arrival:
“Our Dutch wagon driver intimating that we had at length reached our proper location, we took our boxes out of the wagon and placed them on the ground; he bade us ‘goeden dag’ or farewell, cracked his long whip and drove away, leaving us to our reflections... My wife sat down on one box and I on another. The beautiful blue sky was above us, and the green grass beneath our feet. We looked at each other for a few moments, indulged in some reflections, and perhaps exchanged a few sentences; but it was no time for sentiment, and hence we were soon engaged in pitching our tent; and when that was accomplished we removed into it our trunks, bedding etc. All the other settlers who had arrived with us were similarly occupied, and in a comparatively short time the site of our future village presented a lively and picturesque appearance....
“...After a while a great variety of fragile and grotesque looking huts and cottages began to arise. These were generally built in the style called by the settlers ‘wattle and daub’.. The best generally were designed for two rooms of about ten or twelve feet each, forming a building of about ten by twenty-four feet. At first there was no plank for doors, or glass for windows; hence a mat or rug was usually hung up in a void to do duty for one; and a piece of white calico, nailed to a small frame of wood, was used to let light into these dwellings. The floors were usually made of clay or antheap, kept hard by being smeared with a mixture of cow dung and water, a mode of securing clean and comfortable earthen floors which, however strange to English ideas, all natives and colonists of Africa know to be indispensable!â€
Philip and Charity presumably settled well into their new wattle and daub cottage, as nine months later, on 13 March 1821, my 2 x great grandfather William Hobbs was born. Next came Charity, born on 7 December 1823, and Mary Ann, born on 5 December 1825. All three of these children were baptised together on 4 December 1826 in Grahamstown, as at the time there was no chapel in Bathurst. It must have taken them virtually all day to get there, no joke with three young children, and was doubtless a journey that was planned and talked about a great deal in advance. Life was hard during the early years for the settlers, as after the first two years the government stopped issuing rations. By 1823 only 438 out of about 2,000 adult male settlers were left on the land assigned to them, the rest having sold up and gone to find work in the rapidly growing Grahamstown. Also in 1823 a drought was followed by torrential rain and floods, and the crops were ruined. Philip and Charity must have known the meaning of the word hunger, but they survived. The farmers who remained were granted more land, and could look forward to some sort of future. Things were still not easy; the crops were destroyed by locusts in 1825 and their lands were constantly being raided by native Xhosa, but the situation was never quite as bad again as it was in 1823.
- [S449] Collett, Joan, "A Time to Plant", 24 Feb 2003, p7.
In (Hyman's party) there was a large family called Trollip described as labourers who cam from the countryside round Frome in Somersetshire and seem to have been tenat farmers and wevaers near Tytherington, a village near the Wiltshire border. It was into this family that James Collett later married and became part of a close family circle which took the place of the one he had left in England.
- [S449] Collett, Joan, "A Time to Plant".
- [S6] M D Nash, "The Settler Handbook", (Chameleon Press ISBN 0 620 10940 8).
- [S539] Biggs, Alice and Vorster, Christine, BUTLER Family Tree produced by Alice Biggs and Christine Vorster, of her son, John.
- [S80] Guy Butler, "Karoo Morning", (David Philip 1983 ISBN 0 949968 76 5), of her son, John.
- [S632] Death Notice, MOOC 6/9/100 ref 9797, (filed on 29/8/1862), of her son, John.
- [S466] Vernon, Carl - KING GEDCOM - East London Museum, KING GEDCOM - East London Museum.
- [S377] Brummer, Hansie, BRUMMER GEDCOM, (http://www.sun.ac.za/gisa/home.asp).
- [S407] Memorial Inscription on Tombstone.
- [S562] Smits, Peter - Various Family Trees, supplied by Mrs Barbara Grossi, (from Becky Horne).
- [S12] Ivan Mitford-Barberton & Violet White, "Some Frontier Families", (1968, Human & Rousseau Publishers, Cape Town, South Africa).
- [S2181] Family Search website, (www.familysearch.org), https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:3Q9M-CSQF-X91V-W? (Reliability: 3).
- [S486] Monumental Inscriptions - Cemeteries in and around 1820 Settler Country, Eastern Cape, Monumental Inscriptions - Cemeteries in and around 1820 Settler Country, Eastern Cape, (compiled by Liz Eshmade, Mary Runciman, John Drury, Lorraine Drury), Published Port Elizabeth, August 1997.
- [S2921] FreeReg, (www.freereg.org.uk).
County Somerset
Place Frome
Church name St John the Baptist
Register type Parish Register
Register entry number 969
Marriage date 25 Sep 1794
Groom forename Joseph
Groom surname TROLLOP
Groom parish of this parish
Bride forename Susannah
Bride surname CROUCH
Bride parish of this parish
Witness1 forename T
Witness1 surname JONES
Witness2 forename John
Witness2 surname DEACON
Notes Licence
- [S449] Collett, Joan, "A Time to Plant", 24 Feb 2003, p17.
Joseph Trollip remarried on April 6, 1824. His second wife was Ann, widow of Thomas Simpson, of Grahamstown, and it is likely that Joseph did not return to Standerwyck.
- [S483] Lower Albany Chronicle, Lower Albany Chronicle, (p 82), Part 1 1805 - 1826.
- [S1134] Morse Jones, E, Lower Albany Chronicles, (p 82), Part 1 1805 - 1826.
- [S497] Fort Beaufort Methodist Parish Records, Marriages 1838 - 1903, (LDS Microfilm# 1560854), (Entry# 17), transcribed by Nolene Lossau.
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