In 1908, my 16-year-old grandmother sailed with her parents on the Saxon mail ship from Southampton to South Africa. They were part of a late wave of unemployed miner families seeking work in the new gold mines. My St Ives grandfather emigrated one year later. I have often wondered what they were expecting of their adoptive country, and what values they brought.

This post is not intended to be an academic treatise on race and class but to provide insights into the period around my ancestors’ emigration. I am aware that the visual material is offensive, but I think important to remind people of the prevailing attitudes of the many, which still linger today.

Turbulent times

I seriously hope that my ancestors did not share the attitudes expressed on this 1906 postcard (below).

Postcard, 1906, Zulu mothers. “Are these not horrid looking creatures?”

Public opinion about indigenous South Africans, at home and abroad, was likely to have been influenced by the highly publicised 1906 rebellion led by a minor Zulu chief. Chief Bambatha had assembled an army of sorts to fight the imposition of a new poll tax that was designed to drive his people into labour on the mines. After months of fighting, the uprising was crushed—over 3,000 Zulus were killed and double that number imprisoned.  To publicise Bambatha’s defeat, the Natal colonial authorities placed his head in a glass box and paraded it around the rural areas.

In the early 1980’s, I was in a Johannesburg archive, researching an audio-visual programme on the history of resistance to apartheid, and came across a sepia postcard that stopped me in my tracks. The reverse side bore the formal ink script of the era, with a personal message to a friend. The front showed a photograph of Bambatha’s shrivelled head.

Who thought to make it into a postcard? Was there some notion of this card being passed from homestead to homestead across the province? Or was the intention that it would be sent “home” to convince would-be immigrants that the colony was safe for human habitation?

When I unearthed this image, it never occurred to me that it might have relevance to my ancestors, or to me. But this was the world they would encounter and whose values they would absorb. My grandfather Samuel Roach had left England to become a skilled worker in those very mines that Bambatha aimed to avoid.

Having rejected my white suburban upbringing, I certainly never thought of myself as a miner’s granddaughter. Which is strange really, when you consider my then interest in the history of gold and workers, and the making of the South African state. I was also living in Crown Mines, a former mining village on the Witwatersrand, with its relics and reminders of the hard lives of working people. But I was at pains to dodge my true place in the history of our land.

Labour in vain

In 2012, when I visited St Ives, I found another metaphorical postcard from the past. Near to Grandfather Samuel’s family home in Downalong, was a bed and breakfast called “Labour in Vain”, thus named for the thankless task of attempting to scrub a little black boy white and clean, which is memorialised in an illustrative plaque. This image was a recurrent one in Victorian England, speaking directly of an association of black skin with dirt and inferiority.

 “Labour in Vain’is situated in St Ives, 100 yards from Porthmeor Beach and 350 yards from Tate St Ives in an area where fishing can be enjoyed...Guests at Labour in Vain can enjoy golfing and cycling nearby or make the most of the garden.” Online brochure, St Ives 2012.

In 1884 the idea was popularised by Pears Soap in a two-frame advertisement—the first showing said black boy in a hip bath with the words “Matchless for the complexion” written on the side. He is looking down at the water with an expression of horror on his face. A small white boy stands over him brandishing a bar of soap. In the second frame he is sitting next to the bath—lily white from the neck down—staring with pleasure into the mirror held up by the little white boy.

Pears' soap: matchless for the complexion / Pears.Wellcome Collection. Source: Wellcome Trust.

This bastardisation of Psalm 127 (“Except the Lord build the house, they labour in vain that build it”) has been commonly used in this way ever since. A Google search in 2012 showed that several pubs and restaurants of that name were still in existence across England.

The “Labour in Vain” pub in Yarnfield, Staffordshire was much in the news. The original sign, which featured a white couple scrubbing a black boy, was removed in 1994, after a complaint by two ten-year-old schoolgirls. In 2000 it was then rehung in the rear garden of the pub. A survey was duly conducted and showed that most villagers wanted the sign to remain. The proprietor was quoted as saying: “Too many English traditions are dying, and we wanted to do our bit to save this one. There is nothing malicious about it and it shows a part of English heritage. We want to show we care about the pub.”

But I digress…

The white man’s burden

In 1899 another Pears advertisement spelled out colonial attitudes of the time. It showed how a cargo of Pears soap would cross the ocean to bring civilisation to the hapless locals. “The first step towards lightening the white man’s burden is through teaching the virtues of cleanliness.”

“The White Man’s Burden” was a Rudyard Kipling poem written in response to the American-Philippine war. It implies that it is the moral duty of imperialist countries to civilise the indigenous “sullen peoples, half devil, half child”.

Perhaps the Pears campaign was intended as a humorous take on the prevailing wisdom. It is hard to know.

I will also never know if my Cornish ancestors shared these views, and to what extent they upheld them. My mother used to defend her dad to my angry 1980s self, saying that Grandfather Samuel believed that all human beings were equal before God, and the black man had a raw deal in South Africa. As a shift boss, working with poorly paid black labourers, that was something he would have known.