A Karoo Town with a Poor White Problem
In the 1920s Cradock was a town of intermediate size (14,870 total population), large enough, according to locals, to distinguish itself from 'real dorps' nearby, and to rank itself with Graaff Reinet (14,000) but smaller than Grahamstown (23, 000) and Queenstown (25, 500). Going north there were no larger towns before Kimberley (58,000) and Bloemfontein (79,100).[18] It was, and remained, a farming and minor railway centre.
The developments of the nineteenth century, especially a brief prosperity during the 'cotton famine' of the American civil war, led to the growth of a South African small town and district culture which has since partly disappeared. There was a minority of English farmers, 32 per cent by number, 35 per cent by value of holdings, tending to concentrate in the Fish River valley, some of them wealthy by local standards, experimenting with new crops and irrigation. These farmers often
had urban links, by marriage or involvement in local business, and the town was run by an oligarchy of English family firms and professional men. As most civil servants and railway artisans were still English-speaking in 1920, the town had a decidedly English cast and flavour, when measured by advertising, the proceedings and personnel of local government bodies, and the staffs of the two high schools and one training college. The one daily newspaper, The Midland News (1891), was in English, whereas the Dutch—later Afrikaans—De Middelandsche Afrikaander (1899) was only a weekly, which on the death of its editor in 1933 was taken over by its English competitor.[19]
This English ascendancy was not the result of the English being a majority of the population. According to the Voters' Roll of 1925, 320 out of 703 white male voters in town had English names (45 per cent), and the 1926 census on religious denominations for town and district put 72 per cent of the white population as belonging to the three Dutch Reformed churches.[20] In the nineteenth century, Cradock and its district had had its substantial Afrikaner families, some of them headed by notables who had served in the Cape parliament or played their part in the affairs of the Afrikaner Bond party before Union in 1910.[21] Members of such families frequently had a dorpshuis, a town house, to be used during shopping expeditions, for the education of children, but particularly for the long weekend which accompanied nachtmaal (holy communion) four times a year. These houses had another function: they could be taken over as retirement homes when fathers decided to give their sons their heads on the farm. But more important for the town, they gave these farmers a say in the affairs of town and district, creating a conservative, parsimonious constituency—the so-called 'nachtmaal vote'—when it came to expenditure on urban facilities. And retired farmers were an important source of members of local government bodies.
Not all Afrikaners in town and district were comfortable farmers or former farmers. There was a great deal of white poverty in the district but it is extremely difficult to devise a precise measure of it. In 1916, at the first conference on poor whites sponsored by the Dutch Reformed Church, held in Cradock, the Minister of Agriculture, H.C. van Heerden, Cradock's M.P., had made one of the early estimates of the scale of the problem nationally, arriving at a figure of 106,000 'abjectly poor' and 'less poor'.[22] The Carnegie Commission on the Poor White Problem in South Africa in 1932 regarded this figure as a serious underestimate, calculating that about 21 per cent of Afrikaners in 1931, about 220,000, could be regarded as poor white.[23] If we apply that proportion to the Afrikaans population of Cradock and its district we would have a poor white population of 927, or approximately 244 income earners.[24] Using the 1931 Voters' List, and looking for what the Carnegie Commission called 'lowliest occupations', we find in town and district that 112 Afrikaners registered themselves as labourers (93 of them living in town), 53 as foreman or opsigter (watchman); 5 as transport riders; 3 as gardeners and one each as general help, milkman and bywoner (sharecropper), a total of 176, 57 of them in the countryside.[25] Such a figure is extremely conservative, leaving out of account those who claimed to be farmers and no longer were—479 Afrikaners claimed to be farmers on the 277 farms held by Afrikaners.[26] Cradock appears to have had a poor white population in town and district of about 650, with roughly only 210 living in the countryside. The major rural exodus was already over in the Cradock district by 1931: the first leap to urban status, the shift to the nearest dorp, had already been made.
There were many reasons for poverty in the Cradock district. It is a Karoo area, a thirstland suitable for ranching only, especially if there is no irrigation. It lies between the 10" and 12" annual rainfall contours, one of a group of Midland
districts hard hit by frequent droughts.[27] Furthermore, it suffered after World War I, like the rest of the eastern Cape, from the collapse of ostrich farming, the rapid decline of horse breeding, and then during the depression from the fall in the prices of wool, its long-term staple, and lucerne (alfalfa).[28] It was not, however, in the condition of the very poorest districts along the Cape coast, or in the far northwest, but nevertheless it lost 9 per cent of its white population between 1911 and 1918, a period of severe drought.[29] It is difficult to arrive at the actual process of depopulation and urbanization, but in addition to drought, the Karoo was undergoing a major change in the extension of fencing which limited casual access to land, and reduced the demand for labour, white as well as black. Whites with limited resources had to leave the land; some were expelled. The Carnegie Commission collected information on 13 men in Cradock who had been 'independent stock farming tenants . . . nearly all' of whom had been given notice to quit between 1918 and 1923. Some became bywoners, eight migrated to town and of those 'only two or three succeeded in making a decent living'.[30] Such pressures were in addition to those 'usual' in a Karoo district, according to Macmillan, which generally had a small number of 'really progressive' farmers, a large number in 'reasonable comfort . . . but always also a considerable and even a large proportion very near the margin'.[31]
The population of town and district did not change steadily in one direction and at equal rates. Between 1921 and 1926 the white population of the town increased by 3.88 per cent, and the district by 7.61 per cent.[32] These figures can be compared with a 12.44 per cent increase in urban population and 7.51 per cent in the rural population of the Union. The low rate of urban growth suggests that many were using the town as a way station between country and urban living, staying in Cradock only briefly. Perhaps partly because of the construction of large irrigation works in the district from 1921 to 1926, partly because the bulk of bywoners had already left the land, Cradock was not listed as a heavy contributor to the Afrikaner population of Port Elizabeth, 182 miles to the south, as were the neighbouring districts identified by Grosskopf in 1932.[33]
It seems, therefore, that Cradock acquired most of its poor white population before the 1920s. As we shall see, white poverty had exercised the town's fathers for some time. The poor were dispersed throughout the town, most of them living in an area of mixed occupation and ownership on the borders of the 'location' where Africans and coloureds could rent but not own sites. It was into the mixed area that many poor whites moved, before they began to be rehoused in new subsidized and segregated public housing from 1939 onwards.
Local white poverty had been serious enough for long enough to lead to a distinction between fee-paying schools and poor schools. In 1864, a church school was established under one G.W.D. Wilson. It appears that the school was open to all whites, but soon 'a stigma became attached to [it] because it attracted chiefly the poorer element'.[34] In 1870, a group of farmers and local businessmen opened a secular school for boys, with Wilson as a teacher, and in 1875 a similar one for girls. Both schools were fee-paying and, therefore, excluded indigent children. But Wilson made the education of poor white children his life's work and later left the boys' school and opened one for indigent children.[35] In 1894 it gained a municipal subsidy on the condition that parents had 'both' to be 'entirely European.' In 1898 and 1902, coloured parents, and in 1903 one Asian parent, applied for entry for their children, but all were refused.[36] The school, named 'The Wilson School', continued as a school for poor whites paying no fees until 1938 when it was the scene of a dramatic 'sit in' organized by a faction of local Afrikaner nationalists.[37] In addition, a few Afrikaner notables took up the issue of
education of indigent children in the countryside by establishing two central farm schools and an agricultural school for boys in 1930, a set of policies which were part of the controversy over an attempt to get poor whites 'back to the land'.[38]