Wheels of Fortune
Text: Marianne Heron. Pictures: David Morgan. Article from the February 2012 issue of Country Life Magazine.
South Africa might never have come up with world-beating cars but, believe it or not, that’s not true of our wagons.
The carriage is swaying perilously, careering round a bend as the driver keeps the horses galloping flat out. The guard and an armed passenger are firing from the vehicle at pursuing bandits intent on getting at the safe box under the driver’s seat…
Sounds like a scene from a cowboy movie, but it isn’t. The same sort of things happened here in South Africa, except that coach travellers in America never had to deal with attacks by lions or elephants in addition to robbers. Nor did their coaches have to negotiate terrain as tough as ours. Conditions in South Africa were far wilder than in the Wild West, and it led to a phenomenon about which little is known – an epic tale of boom and bust in the Drakenstein Valley, which cradles Paarl and Wellington.
It all began a century and a half ago with the gold and diamond rushes, then continued with the Anglo-Boer War and First World War.
The fortunes of Paarl in particular rocketed as these events relentlessly drove up the demand for wagons and other wheeled vehicles. At its peak, between 1875 and 1895, the boom spawned one of the largest factories in the southern hemisphere right there in the Drakenstein Valley, and provided jobs for thousands of craftsmen. It resulted in the first 24-hour production line and made Paarl the Detroit of Africa (an ironic comparison as the auto industry with which Detroit is synonymous later killed off the wagon trade).
“Someone should make a movie about this,” I’m thinking as I stagger out of De Poort Heritage Village on the outskirts of Paarl, having spent hours reliving the days of jolting, iron-bound wagon wheels, the crack of the whip and the jingle of harness.
De Poort, as its name suggests, is a gateway, a place where the past in the form of a wagon museum, the present through the nurturing of sustainable industry and the future in the shape of a project dealing with an aspect of communications all meet. Opened in 2010, it was inspired by the community-based Sovereign Hill project in Ballarat, Australia, and funded by the Cape Winelands Municipality and National Lottery Trust fund.
Visiting the village’s wagon museum opens your eyes to the significant role wagon making once played in South Africa, plus shows you what the top of the range cars, bakkies, minibuses and lorries of great great-grandpa’s day were like. You can also learn how they were made and even try your hand at some of the skills needed to make them.
Before Bainskloof Pass was completed in 1853, the way to the north from the Drakenstein Valley was barred by the Limiet Mountains. Paarl was a sleepy village boasting a few small wagon-making businesses.The discovery of diamonds near Kimberley in 1867 and then gold on the Witwatersrand in 1886 changed all that. Fortune-seekers poured into the country and flooded north.
But the flood would not have been possible without the wagon-makers of Paarl and Wellington. At the height of the boom there were 87 wagon factories in the area employing more than 4 000 people, many of them home-based subcontractors. They included harness makers, upholsterers, painters, carpenters, blacksmiths, turners, farriers, tanners, canopy makers and decorators. To keep up with the demand, wagon maker Jan Phillips introduced steam-driven machinery from Halifax and Leipzig. Other factory owners soon followed suit, production increased dramatically and wagon exports flourished – with the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, becoming one of the most infamous later customers.
In their day, South African wagons were at the forefront of engineering, points out De Poort’s museologist Johann Burger “Our wagons won international prizes. They were considered the best in the world.
They were superior because they’d been built to handle our exceptionally rugged terrain, not to mention that the big ones and the tented wagons were designed so they could be taken apart in minutes, carried over impassable terrain and reassembled on the other side.
“People think that travelling by coach or wagon was romantic,” continues Johann. “lt wasn’t. You had to make do – shoot for the pot, for example – and endure heat, drought, animals dying, and being attacked by wild animals and robbers.”
There are travellers’ tales aplenty from those days. One involved an unattended coach that was seen to be rocking and rolling mysteriously. The reason? Three curious lions had climbed into it, accidentally become shut inside and were tearing the coach apart in their attempts to escape.
Stage coach travel had its own pecking order. First class passengers paid most and sat in comfort. Second class travellers sat back to back in the middle of the vehicle and had to dismount when the going got tough. Third class passengers sat on top with the baggage and had to get off and push on difficult terrain, hence the expression, ‘put your shoulder to the wheel’. There are plenty of other expressions from the days of wagon travel too, such as ‘hold your horses’, ‘get cracking’ and ‘klopdisselboom‘ (everything’s going great).
By today’s standards the going was painfully slow. It took three and a half months to get from the Cape to the diamond fields by ox-cart, and seven and a half days by horse or mule coach. Routes were broken up into stages, usually about 20 miles apart, so that the horses could have a breather or be exchanged for fresh ones. Two such staging posts on the Diamond Route were the villages of Ceres and Sutherland (the latter then known as Freezing Station).
“The person who controlled the whip controlled the wagon,” says Johann. The whips acted like today’s indicators, accelerators and hooters and were wielded by young boys who worked in concert with the drivers. The boys were trained from an early age in the art of handling the whips and were so good at it that they could kill small birds with them in midair.
There were wagons to suit every pocket. The popular Cape Cart a two-wheeler with a canopy, was the Volkswagen of its day. The uniquely South African Spring Wagon was the answer to today’s minibus. Tented wagons were used in the interior by miners, missionaries and hunters, and more than 100 000 of them were made in Paarl. The landau was a limo-type status symbol. Then there was the Wanderer; a light travelling wagon with a removable hood and strong springs, a travelling wagon with a sleeping compartment, barrels for water and meat, gun racks, and even curtains and chests of drawers. And the Comfort, a wagon specially adapted for doctors. You name it and Paarl made it.
At the height of the boom, leading wagon maker Retief de Ville offered no fewer than 91 designs, all available with customised extras. Prices ranged from £ 100 for a top-of-the-range Brougham to £35 for a basic Cape Cart. Up to 21 types of wood, mainly from the Swellendam and Knysna areas, were used in making the different wagon parts, while the steel for the wheel rims was imported from Sweden.
When repairs had to be made en route they were usually done with sweet thorn (Acacia karoo), the most abundant wood by the wayside. There were carts for every purpose – water carts to deliver fresh spring water to households, wine carts with reed shades for the barrels, ambulance carts, refuse carts, delivery carts, post carts, mail coaches, omnibuses – all of them made in South Africa. The only vehicles to be imported from the United States were secondhand Concord stagecoaches.
In his research into wagon making, Johann discovered forgotten lore, such as that the paint used was mixed with aloe to deter borer beetles, or that the metal parts were protected against rust by rubbing them with cow horn while they were still red hot (when the keratin in the horn could penetrate the iron).
The De Poort Heritage Village wagon museum currently has 19 different types of wagon on display. A donated collection of 41 more might be housed in the complex when phase two of the village comes to fruition. In the meantime, the village already offers craft workshops related to wagon making, displays of other artisan crafts, and an enticing cafe. It’s also part of a pilot project for an interactive cellphone data base that could be the clean, user-friendly way to access information in the future.
Whether through its world-beating wagons or an information superhighway of the future, Paarl is still the business.
De Poort Heritage Project 021 863 2871, www.depoortvillage.org.za
Capewinelands/paarl
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