‘Botha Cake’ and ‘Belgian Onion Soup:’ Gendered Patriotism Through Three South African, First World War, Community Cookbooks

ABSTRACT

This article considers three South African community cookbooks – including The Overseas Contingent Fund Recipe Book (Turffontein, 1915) and the Paarl Cookery Book in Aid of War Funds (Paarl, 1918) alongside Wartime Cookery (Cape Town, 1915) – as expressions of gendered patriotism. These community-created cookbooks enabled contributors to participate meaningfully in the First World War by drawing together two established gendered practices: philanthropic fundraising and food and household management. This ‘domesticity in action’ enabled participants to contribute to, and feel connected to, both local and trans-empire causes. These values of philanthropy, economy and patriotism are revealed in the constitutive components of the texts – the titles, aims, prefaces and even the recipes themselves. Apart from supporting specific funds, the call for economy in the cookbooks reflected both experiences and perceptions of wartime material hardship in South Africa. A further consideration of the contributors involved with the books’ compilations highlights the intersection of local and trans-empire networks, and wartime (white) identity politics within urban South Africa. The networks suggest locally-grounded loyalisms, many marked by personal connections to men serving, as well as friend and family networks with overseas reach. Lastly, the article is a reminder of the importance of cookbooks as neglected sources in the writing of history.

KEYWORDS:

• First World War
• women
• South Africa
• cookbook
• food history
• empire
• networks

Introduction

‘There is a cry for help, and a call to economise, echoing throughout the Empire today’, declared the opening lines of the Wartime Cookery Book. Published in Cape Town during the First World War in aid of the Belgian Refugee Fund in 1915, the cookbook was framed as ‘the answer to both’, and established itself as a rallying call for women (‘we, who cannot do our bit in the firing line’) to do their share by tightening the purse strings of the household economy and raising funds for ‘our suffering Belgian Allies and the Empire’.¹ This article considers three South African community cookbooks – including The Overseas Contingent Fund Recipe Book (published in Johannesburg’s suburb of Turffontein, 1915) and the Paarl Cookery Book in Aid of War Funds (published in Paarl, a town in the Cape winelands, 60 kilometres outside of Cape Town, in 1918) alongside Wartime Cookery – as expressions of gendered patriotism, or ‘domesticity in action’. These community-created cookbooks enabled contributors to participate meaningfully in the First World War by drawing together two established gendered practices: philanthropic fundraising and food and household management. These values of philanthropy, economy and patriotism, embedded within a gendered lens, are revealed in the constitutive components of the texts – the titles, aims, prefaces and even the recipes themselves.² Within the contexts of wartime and the recent forging of the Dominion of South Africa (1910), the cookery books attest to the heightened prevalence of empire, and the importance of white South Africanism as seen through the co-operation of Afrikaans and English speakers. This consideration of who and where the contributors were highlights the intersection of locally grounded and imperial loyalisms, many marked by personal connections to men serving, as well as friend and family networks with overseas reach.

Cookbooks as Documenting History

Cape Town's branch of the National Library of South Africa cannot boast of a sizable World War One archive. Amongst the modest ‘Miscellaneous’ collection reside three community cookbooks: Wartime Cookery Book (henceforth Wartime Cookery), the Overseas Contingent Fund Recipe Book (henceforth OCF Recipe Book), and the Paarl Cookery Book in Aid of War Funds (henceforth Paarl Cookery). They represent some of the few surviving artefacts³ from the time, housed at the library, and whilst histories of the First World War and South Africa have encompassed a variety of approaches,⁴ none has used cookbooks. In terms of South African histories more broadly, cookbooks have only made the rare appearance, despite their importance as ‘revealing artifacts of culture in the making’.⁵ This might represent a history of dismissing such objects as ‘serious sources’ of historical study, linking to the past prevalence of a male-centric Academy and a perception of recipe books as belonging to the realm of ‘woman's studies’.⁶ The most prominent exceptions include Gabeba Baderoon’s writing on Muslim South Africans, where she demonstrates how cookbooks have perpetuated problematic discourses of ‘Cape Malay’ culture and cuisine, and Goolam Vahed and Thembisa Waetjen’s Gender, Modernity and Indian Delights: The Women’s Cultural Group of Durban.⁷ Yet an examination of cookbooks more broadly could reap significant insights. Cookbooks can be viewed as a part of the transnational networks of knowledge and material things. They have the potential to suggest literacy levels, the availability of certain produce, cooking practices and technologies, and the adaptation of emigrants to foreign lands.⁸ We can also learn from their use in examining other colonial contexts. Susan Zlotnic, for example, demonstrates that the moral agency of the ‘good’ Victorian (British) woman in India was significant to the domestication ‘of the foreign’ as seen through ‘cookbooks and curry recipes’.⁹ Returning to South Africa, Esther de Beer similarly proposes that cookbooks, apart from aiding the creation of the Cape’s heterogeneous, yet stratified society, propped up the formation of ‘imperial, cultural or national ideologies’.¹⁰

Moreover, cookbooks can document ‘major historical events’¹¹ – as with the OFC Cookbook’s inclusion of recipes for ‘War Pie’, ‘Bombshell’, ‘Kaiser Pudding’ and ‘Allies Cake’. As texts that are embedded with ideologies, cookbooks have thus been used for the study of war.¹² In terms of Britain during the First World War, Michael Buckley examines the National Food Fund’s production of cookbooks as part of its food economy education campaign,¹³ but it is Paul Ward’s consideration of British First World War cookbooks in relation to gendered patriotism which particularly lends itself to an examination of Wartime Cookery, the OCF Recipe Book and Paarl Cookery. Ward uses cookbooks such as the Win the War Cookbook to explain how the war reinforced the ‘traditional’, ‘domestic’ role of women, particularly by calling upon them to show their patriotism through acts of food economy. Women were, accordingly, incorporated imaginatively into national and Imperial citizenship by patriotic gestures enacted through ‘the routine events of their lives’.¹⁴ It is along these lines that these three South African cookbooks are considered products of their social and historical circumstances – reflecting ideological discourses relating the First World War and the way in which some South African women performed a gendered local, and trans-imperial patriotism.

Lastly, because women historically were not in positions of power and often had lower levels of education and literacy, official documents and sources detailing their lives are far fewer than those relating to, or produced by, men. For Janet Theopano, cookbooks, and particularly community cookbooks, are vital for ‘recovering and characterising women’s everyday affairs’.¹⁵ The community aspect of the South African wartime cookbooks – ie the joint effort of a network of women towards a common goal, sharing similar values – is central to thinking through how they understood their actions, and what their participation meant. It suggests how contributors may have positioned themselves in relation to the wider world around them, both local and afar.

South Africa at War

The context in which these cookbooks were produced was far from simple. If going on the patriotic push of Wartime Cookery’s opening lines, one might assume that its vigour was representative of attitudes more generally across South Africa after the outbreak of the First World War. Not everyone, however, was keen on helping the ‘empire in her great hour of need’. Of all the white settler Dominions, South Africa was the most diverse and its white minority elite divided in its position towards Britain. South Africa had been forged out of the colonies of the Cape, Natal, Orange Free State and Transvaal into a Dominion by 1910, under the moderate Afrikaans¹⁶ leadership of Louis Botha (Prime Minister thereafter) and his second-in-command, Jan Smuts. Yet this political union was by no means representative of a single ‘national mood’,¹⁷ particularly considering the majority of black South Africans¹⁸ who had been navigating various forms of structural oppression since colonisation began – firstly under the Dutch in the mid-seventeenth century, and then under the British from just after the turn of the nineteenth century. Neither were the views of a small, Anglicised, pro-British black elite necessarily shared by all the people of colour that were encompassed in the large geographical area that made up the Union.¹⁹

Moreover, white or ‘European’ South Africans – roughly broken up into Afrikaans and English speakers – were far from united. Nevertheless, they generally agreed upon the need to maintain white supremacy, even if their philosophical reasonings behind, and practical approaches to, racial oppression diverged.²⁰ Whilst this consensus was enough for the precarious establishment of the Union in 1910, differing opinions on how the Union should be run and, particularly in the context of the First World War, the nature of its relationship with Britain, clashed underneath its fragile facade. The lingering distaste for British imperialism resulting from the South African War, 1899-1902, doomed any chances of a clear-cut, white majority in support of Britain’s First World War effort (even with the Government arguing that protecting the empire was beneficial to the Union and, indeed, Smuts and Botha had tentative hopes of incorporating German South West Africa into South Africa’s own little empire²¹). On the back of this ideologically sticky subject was the material hardship experienced by many rural Afrikaner families, who felt increasingly left behind by the Botha administration. Their discontent fed into a short-lived and vastly under-resourced rebellion against the state in late 1914.²² Afrikaner nationalist sentiments were also beginning to consolidate during this period and the newly established National Party (1914) was particularly vocal in its objection to South Africans sacrificing their lives or risking financial security for the sake of an Imperial war.²³

The outbreak of the First World War, however, was also a beacon of empire, heightening for many feelings of a trans-empire British solidarity with the war cause. This was particularly so in South Africa’s urban areas, where most English speakers were concentrated. The Anglicisation of Cape Town, for example, occurred over roughly a century of British colonial rule. By Dominion in 1910, it possessed a large minority of English speakers, many of whom had powerful positions in business and the city’s administration, and who had long-held generational ties to the ‘Mother Country’. Many old, originally Dutch families in the Cape Colony, moreover, had Anglicised and were part of the Cape's own version of a British world.²⁴ Even Johannesburg, which had been under the Boer Republic of the Transvaal until the end of the South African War, saw substantial British immigration as part of its development after the discovery of gold on the Witwatersrand in the late 1880s. Enclaves of British social and cultural practices were then joined by institutional ones after Sir Alfred Milner took over the administration of the Transvaal in 1901.²⁵

Furthermore, Botha and Smuts saw the war not only as part of their imperial duty, but as a chance to further South Africa’s sovereignty within the overarching umbrella of empire. They also hoped that some sense of a united white South Africanism might be forged through a common cause.²⁶ Many Afrikaners continued to remain loyal to Botha and Smuts as revered Afrikaner leaders of the South African War. As such many their choice to enter the war, even if the idea of fighting alongside Britain may have felt somewhat uncomfortable.²⁷ It was thus among a mass of changeable and varying opinions across the Union regarding Britain and the war that sizeable sections of the Union’s population, led by the Prime Minister, supported South Africa’s war effort. The three community cookbooks, then, form a part of this story.

Gendered War Participation: Domesticity in Action

These three wartime, community cookbooks reflect the gendered nature of wartime patriotism. The growth of opportunities afforded to women because of the war did not, in fact, revolutionise attitudes about gender roles. Indeed, societal shifts in gendered work were more subtle in South Africa – as with Australia²⁸ – than Britain.²⁹ In South Africa there was no major movement of women towards clerical work, nor was munition factory work a major factor at play. Whilst factory work during the war – particularly in the food and clothing industries – did expand (taken up by poorer coloured and white Afrikaner women, with hardier jobs going to African men³⁰), this was not viewed as major challenge to women’s roles as textiles and food were suitably domestic.³¹ Paid wartime work, then, did not particularly challenge wartime gender divisions. Gender roles were, instead, further tightened as women’s contributions were framed within discourses of domesticity and motherhood that linked to patriotism, the nation and empire.³² In South Africa, hegemonic, wartime discourses emphasised the ‘inherent’ division of gender roles: men were soldiers and providers, women were carers and mothers.³³ This was true across class, racial, ethnic and linguistic lines.³⁴ Indeed, patriotic acts were not limited to white women in the context of a loosely segregated South Africa. Fund-raising efforts can be linked, for example, to the African Political Organisation’s Women’s Guild³⁵ and the South African Moslem Patriotic Society. The latter held a bazaar in October 1914 in aid of wartime funds, central to which was the selling home-made cakes and confectionary.³⁶ Food-related funding was thus a tool for philanthropy. The domestic in this sense was not limiting, but empowered women to actively participate in the causes they supported.³⁷

By the early twentieth century, the connection between a woman’s ‘domestic’ realm and food was deeply ingrained across the Anglophone world and cookbooks were an established avenue for fundraising.³⁸ Surviving recipe books from South Africa around the time attest to the popularity of the method, and particularly amongst church organisations. St Andrews Church Tested Recipes (1910) reflected the efforts of ‘those ladies of the church and others who have supplied recipes … to assist funds’, a 1907 Wesleyan and Bazaar: Gems of Thought, Recipes and Rev J. Wesley’s Remedies from Pietermaritzburg, was dedicated to ‘all those kind friends who have contributed’, whilst Wesleyan Methodist Church in Sea Point, Cape Town, produced a community cookbook (‘recipes from many reliable sources’) for the coronation of George V, to raise funds.³⁹ Community cookbooks, like fetes, concerts and street collections, were just one of the tried and tested methods for fund-raising initiatives applied during the war in South Africa. In the words of Wartime Cookery, they provided an avenue for women to ‘do their bit’.

Class intersected with gendered expressions of loyalism, as it was well-to-do-women who had the luxury of giving their time to charity work in a way that working women largely could not. This did not, however, preclude women from a variety of economic backgrounds from participating. As will be seen, many of Johannesburg’s respectable working-class suburbs were pinpointed in the creation of OFC Recipe Book – suggesting cross class patriotism, with a strong Anglophone or ethnic basis. The wartime philanthropic work of women, particularly concentrated in South Africa’s urban centres, played an integral role in the funding of many wartime activities and relief funds. Tens of thousands of Anzac soldiers, for example, passed through Cape Town and Durban during the war, and women-run organisations were key to hosting and funding troop services, refreshments, and entertainment.⁴⁰ Well-known public figures were frequently involved in charity work as patrons and they used their connections – other influential women, often with overlapping interests – to further their efforts. Viscountess Mildred Anne Buxton (along with her similarly-philanthropic step-daughter, Lady Phyllis Buxton), for example, was involved in several women’s organisations, including the Women’s Hospital Ship Fund, the Women’s Enfranchisement League and the National Council for Women. In October 1914 she joined forces with Mrs Annie Botha, wife of the Prime Minister, imploring the Cape Argus to print their appeal to the women of South Africa to donate to Hospital Ship Fund, ‘as an act of patriotism and of sympathy with our sick and wounded’. Almost £7000 had been raised by January 1915.⁴¹

Cookbooks as Collective Statements: Patriotism and Domestic Economy

Each cookbook can be considered the result of co-operative action towards a common cause, with its components – title, preface and recipes – embedded with values reflecting the historical context.⁴² Broadly speaking, all three demonstrate a locally-grounded patriotism, within the broader context of empire, that is framed within discourses around gender, food and economy during the First World War. These three texts thus represent patriotic domesticity in action. Without prefaces, neither the OCF Recipe Book nor Paarl Cookery provide a detailed elaboration about their war causes. OCF, as with its title, was in aid of the Overseas Contingent Fund, and was sold at a fete held in Turffontein, Johannesburg, in December 1915. Similarly, Paarl Cookery, in aid of the Red Cross, was compiled by the ‘stallholders of the country market’, in the Cape and was most likely sold there as well. Of the three cookbooks, Wartime Cookery, provides the most substantial preface with a rationale. It was a gendered, patriotic call to arms, deliberately linking together fund-raising, food and household economy to aid ‘our suffering Belgian Allies and the Empire’ – and the inclusion of recipes for ‘Belgian Onion Soup’ and ‘Belgian Tart’ reflect this specific context. The book’s compilation, in early 1915, demonstrates the way in which the invasion of Belgium had captured the imagination of people across the empire. Reuters’ reports, reprinted on the pages of South Africa’s most popular English-language newspapers, revealed stories of innocent Belgian women and children fleeing to Britain – their plight was of great concern.⁴³ This worry for mothers and children linked to an increasingly prominent child welfare movement in South Africa and a wartime discourse which emphasised the importance of motherhood as a woman’s ‘primary patriotic role’.⁴⁴

The concern for Belgian refugees was further bolstered by outrage at the idea of Germany violating the right of a small nation. For those who supported Britain's war effort, this violation underlined the importance of halting German expansion and the empire's righteous duty in defence of such freedoms.⁴⁵ It suggested a sense of patriotism not inflected by a bellicose jingoism, as much as a heartfelt, sober responsibility. Wartime Cookery was ultimately just one of many contributions to help the Belgian cause in South Africa, as with other parts of the empire. For example, by May 1916 it was reported that £7700 had been remitted by Cape Town's Mayor's Belgian Fund to the Belgian Minister, whilst another £15,000 was sent to the Mayor of London for the Belgian National Fund. All over Australia local ‘Belgium Days’ blossomed, including ‘a mammoth carnival and torchlight processions’, held in Sydney in March 1915.³³ In Britain itself, there were around 1500 local relief committees established by 1915.³² Wartime Cookery thus represents part of the initial trans-empire rally to support Belgian refugees during the war. As such it was a way for women to meaningfully help and imaginatively connect to this transnational cause. Paarl Cookery offered the same, but in terms of the local Red Cross funds, whilst the OFC Recipe Book served its namesake. South Africans could track the various war funds through the papers and know that they were participating in both local and wider war efforts.⁴⁶

Alongside fundraising, food economy was integral to this ‘domesticity in action’ for all three recipe books, and particularly in Wartime Cookery. ‘Every housekeeper’, states the preface, has the potential to ‘help the empire by running our homes on strictly economical lines’.⁴⁷ Food economy as a gendered, patriotic duty was seen across the Anglophone world during both world wars.⁴⁸ During the First World War, with food imports becoming increasing precarious, and a re-channelling of resources towards fuelling the Imperial armies, food economy was of national concern to Britain. A pre-war food economy movement picked up pace during the first years of the war, under the guidance of the National Food Fund. Extensive education campaigns were launched and around 750,000 recipe books, aimed at different classes of society, were distributed between 1915 and 1918.⁴⁹ These included Home Cookery in Wartime (1915) and Patriotic Food Economy for the Well-to-Do (1917).⁵⁰ Women were specifically targeted as the ‘natural’ managers of a family’s household, including food supply and preparation.⁵¹ In South Africa, it was not only women who were seen as the natural recipients of the rhetoric of patriotism via economy, as with Wartime Cookery. Subsumed into the ‘domestic realm’, children – both boys and girls, as dependents and unable to participate in the war directly – were similarly targeted with a discourse of economy as patriotic duty. Schools like St Cyprian’s for girls in Cape Town used ‘self-denial boxes’ (encouraging children to donate their pocket money) as part of their efforts to raise funds towards the Boys’ and Girls’ League (which augmented the War Relief Fund).⁵² The success of the self-denial scheme was perhaps short-lived, with a somewhat despairing comment in St Cyprian’s May 1917 magazine, saying,

war funds are not supported as they were twelve months ago. Sweets and bioscopes are apparently an indispensable necessity! It is degrading for anyone to spend on mere gluttony that proportion of a girl’s income which is often represented by her bill for sweets.⁵³

The call for economy was not just ideological, it was also locally grounded. In its introduction, Wartime Cookery explains how, ‘with the increased price of commodities – and in many cases reduced incomes – to contend against, the task before the women of the Empire is a ceaseless and arduous one’.⁵⁴ South Africa did not suffer from food shortages in the same way that Britain did, but wartime conditions nevertheless saw a hefty increase in the cost of living. In the Cape, where the majority of the book’s patrons resided, both urban and rural areas suffered. In Cape Town it was estimated that by August 1918 the cost of living was 36.38% above pre-war prices, whilst food prices were about 50% above pre-war prices in the Cape’s rural areas by 1915.⁵⁵ Simultaneously, across the Union it was reported that local purchasing power either stagnated or, in the case of Cape Town, dropped below pre-war levels.⁵⁶ Amongst such figures there is some evidence to suggest that the blossoming of wartime industries in cities such as Cape Town led to full(er) employment of working-class family members, buffering the worst effects of wartime inflation, as has been argued in the case of London.⁵⁷ Yet full employment did not benefit seasonal or temporary labour, meaning that the poorest of the poor did suffer from wartime inflation. On the other end of the scale, some of the hardest hit households were also from South Africa’s high society, many of which relied on overseas remittances that were interrupted or diminished as the result of the war – as was the case with Lady Maud Wyndham, a contributor to the OFC Recipe Book, and her husband, Hugh. The war drastically altered the Wyndhams’ lavish lifestyle at their Parktown, residence in Johannesburg. Food management was a necessary response to diminishing household income, and, by mid-1917, Maud was instituting changes including ‘meatless lunches, bread cheese and jam, and no puddings at lunch, only at supper’.⁵⁸ Staffing was also majorly reduced, partially resulting from some servants volunteering for war service, but also by budget cuts. Yet the Wyndhams’ decision to reduce expenses also reflected an awareness of the hardships suffered by relatives back in Britain and a desire to do ‘their bit’.⁵⁹ Domestic economy could be both an ideological patriotism and a local reality.

Whilst it is difficult, then, to declare any kind of uniform, wartime hardship across South Africa, discourses of economic strain were nevertheless prevalent, as seen in Wartime Cookery. Indeed, an awareness of wartime financial difficulty was at the heart of the Governor General’s Fund, set up in through the efforts of Annie Botha and the Buxtons.⁶⁰ This included aiding the sick and wounded and the wives and families of those who ‘may be called out to fight in the defence of our Empire’. The reports of the Child Life Protection Society similarly noted the effects of the war on families (‘what the woman in the street is now only beginning to realise under the staggering shock of war’).⁶¹ The rhetoric of wartime hardship appeared in newspapers more generally (including concerns about profiteering),⁶² at public meetings,⁶³ and even in schools (in St Cyprian’s May 1916 magazine the editor reminded ‘everyone that no efforts to help others should be relaxed. Prices are going up and we are feeling the strain … ’).⁶⁴ Even the advertisements included in Wartime Economy reflect the idea, with the cornflour brand ‘Maizena’ claiming that ‘in times like the present, when economy is of such a great importance, the fact that ‘Maizena’ may be obtained at pre-war prices should indeed be good news to the housewife’.⁶⁵

Neither Paarl Cookery nor the OFC Recipe Book makes the direct call for ‘economy’ as found in Wartime Cookery, yet all three still show traces of the concern in the recipes themselves. Paarl Cookery lists ‘faux meatballs’, ‘Cheap Custard’ and two ‘Cheap Sponges’, whilst Edith Annie Reed and her husband, Arthur, submitted ‘War Pie’ (a ‘cheap and delicious’ layering of mash potatoes and parboiled onions), and ‘Bombshell’ (‘very appetising and economical’) to the OFC Recipe Book. Recipes reflecting the Wartime Cookery’s ‘original intention … ECONOMY’, included ‘Belgian Onion Soup’ (‘for ten persons costing under 1s’), ‘Everyday Pudding’ (a creative combination of rice, tapioca, milk, eggs, marmalade, sugar and bread), ‘Cheap Cake’ (flavoured with raisins and mixed peel) and the economical pièce de resistance, ‘Mock Lamb Cutlets’, submitted by Mrs West from Fickbsburg (patties made using eggs, bread crumbs and cheese, shaped into cutlets, breaded and fried).

Cookbooks as Networks

If the values endorsed in the cookbooks represent a patriotic domesticity in action, a consideration of the contributors involved in their creation highlights the intersection of local and trans-empire networks, and wartime identity politics within urban South Africa. The deliberate detailing of the names, and often the locations, of the recipe contributors in the three cookbooks is suggestive of who these women were. Wartime Cookery was compiled by two friends, Margaret Jones Davies (nee Orford) and Frances E. Newman (nee Loseby). Frances was born in Leicestershire 1879. By 1909 she was living in Rondebosch, Cape Town, where she passed the Cape Medical Board as a midwife.⁶⁶ It appears that she was working at Queen Victoria Hospital in Johannesburg in 1913, when she married one Francis Joseph Edward Harding Newman (born London), but later returned to Cape Town. Margaret was one of the witnesses present at Frances’ marriage and her husband, Henry Jones Davies, who had been the Anglican chaplain to the Imperial Forces in Bloemfontein from 1905–1907, married the couple.⁶⁷ Margaret and Henry themselves were married in Bloemfontein in 1907;⁶⁸ Henry was thereafter Anglican chaplain to the forces at Roberts Heights from 1912-1914⁶⁹ and Senior Chaplain to the Forces in the Cape Peninsula during the war. Henry’s position likely tapped Margaret into social circles involving both the church and the armed forces across Bloemfontein, Johannesburg and Cape Town.⁷⁰ At the very least, one of the contributors to Wartime Cookery was Miss Joan Wycliffe Thompson (born 1889, Dorset), the daughter of Major General Charles Thompson who was stationed at Cape Town during the war as the OC Commanding for Imperial Troops. Joan’s brother, Offley, was killed in action in September 1914.⁷¹ The war was not some abstract, far-off affair for many of the contributors to Wartime Cookery, but was personally and deeply felt.

Margaret and Francis’ social networks, between them spanning at least Cape Town, Bloemfontein, Johannesburg and England, are reflected in Wartime Cookery. Sixty-four per cent of the contributors to Wartime Cookery were from the Cape Province, the majority of which lived in Cape Town’s affluent ‘Southern Suburbs’(including Rondebosch, where Francis had lived). Twenty-seven per cent of contributors came from the Orange Free State with Bloemfontein and the small town of Ficksburg, featuring prominently. It is likely that the Miss Orford of Bloemfontein, Mrs Orford from Fiksburg, and Mrs Loseby from England, were relatives of Margaret and Frances respectively.

Language is yet another clue. The book is published in English and most of the surnames suggest that the women were English-speaking (and mostly married) with a few Dutch/Afrikaner names scattered throughout. Overall, Wartime Cookery paints a picture of a largely urban, English-speaking and middle-class network of women, including friends and family, both local and abroad, joining together in support the Belgian Fund and the imperial war effort more generally.

The OCF Recipe Book was compiled by Edith Annie Reed (nee Pilkington). Edith was the daughter of a ‘engineer fitter’ from Sussex. She married Arthur Shaw Reed in 1906,⁷² who served in the volunteer-based South African Overseas Contingent during the First World War.

It is likely that many of the contributors – most of whom were married and sported English surnames (as with Wartime Cookery) – had similar personal connections to the war. As such their efforts were intimately motivated and felt. They were also locally grounded even if, of the one hundred and twelve contributors towards the OCF Recipe Book, approximately 60 per cent did not detail their location. Similarly to Wartime Cookery, family members from London (Mrs and Miss Pilkington) contributed to the OCF Recipe Book. Yet whilst England and the Western Cape featured in a sprinkling of recipes, the majority of those who did provide residential details came from Johannesburg (twenty-seven per cent), where the book was produced. Listed locales included the affluent and Anglophone-dominated northern suburb of Parktown, and the cosmopolitan, middle-class Bellevue.⁷³ Even more of the Johannesburg contributors belonged to the respectable, largely white working – and middle-class southern suburbs of Turffontein, Rosettenville, La Rochelle and Belgravia (which were historically English speaking⁷⁴). The fact that the book was sold at a fete at the Turffontein Racecourse further emphasises the particularly local nature of this network, whilst Turffontein itself was markedly pro-war in opinion.⁷⁵ The OCF Recipe Book may have not had the stirring preface of Wartime Cookery, but there is no mistaking the personal connections involved in this effort, particularly considering the eight OCF members – including Arthur Shaw Reed – who also contributed to its pages.

Of the three books, the Paarl Cookery Book is the most overtly linked to a pre-existing network: the ‘stall holders of the country market’ – presumably of Paarl itself, a historically Cape Dutch and French Huguenot farming town. Of the 81 contributors to the Paarl Cookery Book, over 80 per cent were from the Cape’s Paarl region. A few originated in the Transvaal, the Free State and Cape Town, with one, Mrs Moore, hailing from Scotland. As with the other two cookbooks, it is likely that family networks were also involved in the contribution of recipes to Paarl Cookery: Mrs Johanna Frederika de Villiers (nee Albertyn), was the sister-in-law of Mrs Helena Anna de Villiers, and was potentially related to the ‘Mrs Albertyn’ noted in the book.

A consideration of the network of contributors further reflects identity politics in the region, with the Cape winelands representing a complex mix of positions relating to local identity and empire. Many respectable families in the region were bilingual, as a command of English was viewed as being both worldly and necessary for movement within the Cape’s elite social circles.⁷⁶ Broadly speaking, an older Cape Dutch population – many of whom viewed themselves within the networks of empire – was being challenged by a younger generation pushing for the recognition of Cape Dutch, or Afrikaans, as an official language.⁷⁷ The discussions around Afrikaans reflected broader debates about an ‘ethno-cultural’ Afrikaner identity (which fed into what would later become a more defined Afrikaner nationalism) and how to relate to Anglophone or ‘British’ South Africans.⁷⁸ As with much of the Cape region, Paarl also had a British component, which had been involved in ‘the life of the community’ from the nineteenth century onwards.⁷⁹ The war brought these tensions around local identity and empire to the fore, and whilst some Paarl residents might have viewed the empire’s war as their war, the war also helped push others towards a more stringent anti-British stance. At the very least this was not a simple story of (white) English versus (white) Afrikaans speakers.⁸⁰ Paarl Cookery Book attests to this as well: the book was published in English, and the surnames suggest both British and Cape Dutch origin. Moreover, whilst the majority of recipes in all three cookery books reflect the deep intertwining of the British world in urban South Africa (with instructions for a number of Victoria Sponges and Yorkshire Puddings and such the like), Paarl Cookery contains noticeably more Afrikaner recipes, including Mrs Helena Anna de Villiers’s ‘Zoet Koek’ (sweet cake), Mrs Baartman’s ‘Moskonfijt Poeding’ (grape syrup pudding), and Mrs IJ de Villiers ‘Bobotee’ (a spiced meatloaf topped with an egg custard, which has Malay slave origins and was incorporated into Cape Dutch cuisine⁸¹).

The networks represented in the creation of these three cookbooks also involved the endorsement from people of high social standing, which likely aided in their promotion and appeal. For the Paarl Cookery Book, the contribution of the aforementioned Mrs Helena Anna de Villiers would have added weight to the fund-raising effort. Helena, listed as Mrs Septimus de Villiers, was prominent in the life of the town. Her husband, ‘Oom Seppie’, had been one of the members of the early Cape Parliament, and was Mayor of Paarl for a remarkable 17 years.⁸² Wartime Cookery was similarly supported by a premium selection of Cape Town’s ‘who’s who’. Its preface was written by Viscountess Mildred Anne Buxton. Her fellow patrons in the endeavour included Mrs Charles Thompson (wife of the Major General who commanded the Imperial troops stationed at Cape Town), Lady King-Hall (nee Lady Mabel Emily Murray, wife of the Imperial Naval Commander-in-chief) and the Lady Mayoress of Cape Town, Mrs Susan Parker (who ‘took an active part in all committees in connection with the Great War’).⁸³ Indeed, many of these elite women were involved in similar philanthropic activities and supporting Wartime Cookery would have been a ‘natural’ extension of these.

Mildred Buxton was also a contributor to the OFC Recipe Book, joined by notables Mrs Annie Botha (wife of the Prime Minister), Mrs Anstey (the Mayoress of Johannesburg) and the Mayoresses of the nearby towns of Springs and Boksburg (Mrs Goodman and Mrs Cooker, respectively). Miss Jeanette van Duyn, who was spearheading ‘domestic science’ in South Africa, also made an appearance, as did High Society’s Lady Woolls-Sampson, Lady Kathleen Villiers, and Lady Maud Wyndham. Notably, Maud held ‘ladies meetings’ in the Turffontein area where her husband, Hugh, held a seat as a member of the Unionist Party.⁸⁴ The book’s endorsement by Annie Botha is significant, representing, in social terms, the alliance between moderate Afrikaners (many linked to the Prime Minister’s South African Party) and the pro-British Unionists. Both parties supported the idea of a single (white) South African nation within the umbrella of empire (although to varying degrees), with the war posing an opportunity to further cement a white South African national identity.⁸⁵ In the wartime context, the idea of South Africans – both Afrikaner and British – fighting, and dying, side by side, was seen by those in support of the war as a ‘fellowship’ which would ‘replace the former unhappy divisions between the races’.⁸⁶ Yet the alignment between the SAP and the Unionists was also strategic, as a growing Afrikaner nationalist opposition – strengthened by the war – forced Louis Botha to rely on Unionist support in the October 1915 elections.⁸⁷

The networks in aid of the war effort represented in the OFC Recipe Book, published just two months after the elections, thus not only represent connections between local and international friends and families, between working – and middle-class neighbours and social elites, but also cross-party politics. The other two recipe books arguably reflect this burgeoning white South Africanism, both through the co-operation of Afrikaans and English speakers and in the inclusion of recipes, such as Paarl Cookery’s ‘Union Tart’ and Wartime Cookery’s ‘Botha Cake’. The latter potentially points to a pride in the recent achievements of the Prime Minister. Whilst the rebellion of 1914–1915 had caused some concern about the fragility of South Africa’s white Union (with one commentator noting that the rebellion was proof that ‘unification was a premature scheme’⁸⁸), Botha’s swift and sensitive action against it affirmed faith in his leadership for English speakers and the positioning of other ‘loyal Afrikanders’.⁸⁹

Conclusion

Taken together, Wartime Cookery, Paarl Cookery and the OCF Recipe Book speak to the gendered nature of wartime patriotism in South Africa, and further across the empire. This patriotism, endorsed by recipe contributors and patrons, linked food, economy and philanthropy and represented a ‘domesticity in action’ that enabled participants to contribute to, and feel connected to, both local and trans-empire causes. Apart from supporting specific funds, the call for economy in the cookbooks, seen in the preface of Wartime Cookery, but also in some of the recipes across all three, reflected both experiences and perceptions of wartime material hardship in South Africa (as well as abroad). If the values endorsed in the cookbooks represent a patriotic domesticity in action, a consideration of the contributors involved in their creation highlights the intersection of local and trans-empire networks, and wartime (white) identity politics within urban South Africa. A close analysis of the contributors and patrons displays the multiple, often overlapping, social webs involved in the creation of the three cookbooks. This emphasises the locally grounded loyalisms involved, many marked by personal connections to men serving, as well as friend and family networks with overseas reach. The involvement of ladies of high society also suggests cross-class co-operation, whilst the OFC Recipe Book, in particular, displays the wartime alignment of the SAP and Unionists. Whilst all three illustrate the significant presence of pro-British, Anglophones in South Africa’s urban centres, Paarl Cookery is a reminder that wartime allegiances did not reflect a simple ‘Afrikaner’/‘British’ divide with regards to war opinion in white South Africa. It is more difficult to ascertain what reach and impact these cookery books had, with no existing records of their sales. It is likely that some did find their way into kitchens across South Africa, with buyers perhaps being part of the same extended social networks. Whilst the focus here as been on the intention and creation of these cookery books, the act of purchasing was also supporting the war cause in question. Even the act of preparing recipes from these books – be it ‘Botha Cake’ or ‘Belgian Onion Soup’ – might have allowed women to feel connected across households of empire, and that they, too, were contributing in their small way. Ultimately, these books represent one of the ways in which many South African women sought to meaningfully participate in the First World War and to ‘do their share’ for their families, their friends, their neighbourhoods, their empire and their war.

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their helpful feedback and suggestions. She particularly expresses her gratitude for the support of the International Studies Group of the University of the Free State in their support of her research. Her thanks also go out to Melanie Geustyn of the National Library of South Africa, Cape Town branch, for their assistance with navigating the archival holdings of Special Collections.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 ‘Preface’, Wartime Cookery.

2 As such community cookbooks can be considered ‘collective statements’. Black, "Community Cookbooks," 157. In relation to the Spanish Civil War, Maria Paz Moreno unpacks the ‘ideological discourses’ that cookbooks – their recipes, prefaces, titles – are grounded in, as well the challenging circumstances that necessitated creative cooking solutions to feeding families when food was scarce. Moreno, "Food Fight," 276–85.

3 The collection otherwise includes a few postcards, a pamphlet from the city's Peace and Arbitration Committee, and the committee notes from the Women's Hospital Ship Fund (Cape Town was an important port in the empire's network).

4 See, Nasson, World War One; Nasson, "South Africa’s Memory, " 156–60; Vahed, "‘Give Till it Hurts,'” 41–61; van der Waag, A Military History; Grundlingh, "Pleading Patriots," 29–47; Grundlingh, Fighting Their Own War; Sampson, East African Campaign; Sampson "South Africa," 113–36; Thompson, "The Natal Homefront," 101–37; Garson, "South Africa," 68–85; Digby, Pyramids and Poppies; Lambert, "Munition Factories," 67–86.

5 Appadurai, "Cookbooks in Contemporary India," 22; DiMeo and Pennell, eds. Reading and Writing Recipe Books.

6 The use of recipe books in historical inquiry have become increasingly important to 'Food History,' a relatively recent phenomenon, which grew out of cross-disciplinary interest in all things food, from anthropology, to history, gender studies and sociology. For the development of Food History, see, Kirby and Luckins, eds. Dining on Turtles, 3–9; Pilcher (ed.), The Oxford Handbook, 1–16; Avakian and Haber, "Feminist food studies," 2–7.

7 ‘Cape Malay’ as a South African creole food arose out of the Dutch, and later, British settler colonial contexts. It reflected the legacy of slavery and indentured labour, and drew upon locally-available ingredients, the spice trade of the Dutch East India Company and later the British empire, and the influences of indigenous, Asian and European peoples. Baderoon, "Catch with the eye," 115. Baderoon shows that the framing of this creole food as ‘exotic’, yet ‘benign’, ‘has the effect of domesticating images of slavery in South Africa … while denying the brutality of slavery’. Baderoon, Regarding Muslims, 52. Vahed and Waetjen, Indian Delights. Other exceptions include Oppelt, "C. Louis Leipoldt," 51–68 and De Beer, "Spicing South Africa." For the ‘cauldron’ of the early Cape see, Ward, Networks of Empire.

8 See also Albala, "Cookbooks as Historical Documents," 227–40.

9 Zlotnick argues that Victorian women could tame the ‘colonial “other”’ by ‘naturalising the products of foreign lands’. Zlotnick, "Domesticating Imperialism," 52–53. In a similar light, Nupur Chaudhuri has written of ‘memsahibs’ as ‘agents of cultural exchange between coloniser and colonised’. Chaudhuri, "Memsahibs and Motherhood," 517–35. Such work also builds on the argument that European women were integral to implementing and re-enforcing racial stratification and the colonial system more broadly. See, for example, Stoler, “Making Empire Respectable,” 355. Other authors looking at colonial food histories include: Bickham, "Eating the Empire," 71–109; Collingham, Curry; Laudan, Cuisine and Empire; Leong-Sabir, A Taste of Empire; Procida, "Feeding the Imperial Appetite," 123–49; McCann, Stirring the Pot; Mintz, Tasting Food, Tasting Freedom.

10 de Beer, "Spicing South Africa," 30–31.

11 This point is made by Mitchell, '"A Scottish Case Study," 13.

12 Moreno, "Food Fight," 276–85.

13 Buckley, "Recipe for Reform."

14 Ward, "Empire and the Everyday," 267–84.

15 Theophano, Eat My Words, 2. For more on community cookbooks, gender and society, see, Leonardi, "Recipes for Reading," 340–7; Anne Bower, Community Cookbooks, Stories, Histories; Driver, Culinary landmarks; Pilcher, Que vivan los tamales!; Black, "Community Cookbooks," 154–70. It must be noted that the social and structural racism within the South African colonial context meant that white women were more likely to be educated, literate and in positions of power than most persons of colour. If the lives and thoughts of white women, and particularly those of the working classes in South Africa, are difficult to trace in written historical sources, those relating to women of colour are almost entirely absent.

16 Whilst Afrikaans (a semi-creole of Dutch) was widely spoken (and, importantly, not only by white South Africans – Afrikaans was written in Arabic script by Malay Capetonians – see, for example, Davids, “Arabic Afrikaans”) Dutch was still used in formal, and particularly older, gentile circles. The Second Language Movement, however, linked Afrikaans as a language to a white Afrikaner nationalism. The nationalist paper De Burger, established in Cape Town during the war, was first published in Dutch, but by the end of the war had transitioned to Afrikaans. The terms ‘Afrikaner’ and ‘South African’ were not fixed, and often shifted according to who was using them. This reflected greater debates within Afrikaans/Dutch circles regarding Afrikaner unity and how this was imagined in relation to Britain, and, accordingly white English speakers. See, for example, Koorts, D.F. Malan; Dubow, A Commonwealth of Knowledge; Lambert, ‘British South Africanness’; Giliomee, Afrikaners.

17 Nasson, "War Opinion in South Africa," 248–49.

18 Including, by the early twentieth century, various indigenous peoples, as well as the descendants of trafficked slaves and indentured labourers.

19 Saunders, "Britishness in South Africa," 66.

20 Dubow, Racial Segregation, 1–45; 123–4.

21 Nasson, “War Opinion,” 4.

22 The rebellion, whereby almost 11,000 men followed a handful of revered old Boer leaders, was further fuelled by the decision of the Botha Government to invade German South West Africa on behalf of Britain in late 1914 (where many German and Afrikaner kin resided) and by big, blustery talk of re-establishing the independent Afrikaner Republics of the Orange Free State and the Transvaal. The rebellion was, partially, a result of the Anglo-Boer War and subsequent years or drought and hardship, but more generally related to South Africa’s uneven, but increasing, capitalisation of agriculture. Swart, "'Desperate Men,'" 161–175.

23 For an elaboration of wartime responses see: Nasson, World War One; Nasson, "War Opinion in South Africa."

24 Dubow, A Commonwealth of Knowledge, 22, 47; Bickford-Smith, Ethnic Pride and Racial Prejudice, 61, Saunders, "Britishness in South Africa," 65.

25 Bickford-Smith, Emergence of the South African Metropolis, 43, 67–69.

26 Nasson, “War Opinion,” 8.

27 As Kent Federowich shows, loyalty to Botha and Smuts often involved revere for their actions, but could also reflect kinship, family and friendship networks, as well as opportunism. Fedorowich, “Sleeping with the Lion?,” 90–95.

28 Beaumont, “Whatever happened to Patriotic Women,” 275.

29 In Britain, white-collar positions (far more than munition factories) became the key area representing a shift in women’s work, with roughly two million taking up office jobs by 1918. The complicated nature of loyalisms in South Africa, and the fact that there was no conscription, meant that, in national terms at least, there was not the same movement of men out of work as in Britain. Reid, “World War I,” 18.

30 Walton, “Motherhood, Morality and Materiality”, 14; Department of Mines and Industries, Industrial Development, 1; Union of South Africa, 1921 Census, 342–4; Berger, Threads of Solidarity, 34–35; Nicol, “Garment and Tailoring Workers,” 54, 36–59.

31 The objections that did emerge centred around the consequences of factory work on mothering and childcare, or concerns that inadequate wages might lead women towards prostitution. Walton, “Motherhood, Morality and Materiality”, 14–16; Berger, Threads of Solidarity, 34.

32 Susan Grayzel has demonstrated, in the context of Britain, ‘the powerful set of ways in which appropriate feminine behaviour was defined along … the most traditional of lines’. Grayzel, Women’s Identity at War, 2.

33 Even South Africa’s white suffragettes, largely conservative and divided racially and linguistically, prioritised the war effort over their enfranchisement work. Wartime charity and work, it was suggested, might demonstrate their administrative and organisational prowess, and their worthiness of voting rights. Campaigning for the enfranchisement did continue in part, and women were granted the ability to be town councillors in the Cape Province, in 1918. The discourses surrounding this, however, again were about the perceived insights women could bring to matters of child welfare, education and health. This was not a break from ‘traditional’ gender roles. White women eventually received the vote in 1930, as part of a strategic move to increase the white electorate (at the same time people of colour lost the vote to right in the Cape Province). Women’s Outlook, April 1915, 3; Walker, “The Women’s Suffrage Movement,” 331; Gaitskell, “The Imperial Tie,” 5, 13.

34 In the context of white minority rule in South Africa, and popular understandings of eugenics in the early twentieth century, motherhood was viewed as particularly vital in the creation and maintenance of white power. Walton, “Motherhood, Morality, Materiality,” 12–16.

35 The APO saw itself as representing all coloured people in the Union but more accurately reflected the aspirations of a Coloured elite. Adhikari, “Protest and Accommodation,” 94.

36 “Patriotic Moslems.” Cape Times, October 6, 1914.

37 Rommelspracher, “White South African Housewives,” 25.

38 According to Janet Theopano, the idea of a community cookbook as a means of women’s fundraising dates to ‘at least the 1600s’. The deeply ingrained connection between a woman’s ‘domestic’ realm and food made cookbooks for fundraising an obvious choice for women, who would often call upon pre-existing social connections. Theopano, Reading Women’s Lives, 12. In contrast, Cobley and Black date community cookbooks to the American Civil War. Colbey, "Recipes, Armistice and Remembrance," 23; Black, ‘Community Cookbooks’, 151. For Australia, see, Cobley, "Recipes, Armistice and Remembrance."

39 Hughes, St Andrews Church Tested Recipes; Wesleyan and Bazaar: Gems of Thought; Wesleyan Methodist Church, Coronation Recipes.

40 Walton, “Motherhood, Morality and Materiality,” 9.

41 Women’s Hospital Ship Fund, “Interim Report,” 19 January 1915.

42 Mitchell, '"A Scottish Case Study," 13.

43 “The Brave Belgians.” Cape Times, November 16, 1914.

44 Grayzel, Women's Identities at War, 2; Pickles, Female Imperialism and National Identity, 9–10, 39–42; Walton, "Motherhood, Morality and Materiality," 54–70. For South Africa’s child welfare movement see, Duff, "Babies of Empire," 59–73.

45 Black, "Community Cookbooks," 157.

46 Paul Ward has similarly argued, in the case of the British Empire, that ‘everyday’ acts of patriotism, (such as practising food economy, fund-raising and knitting) incorporated women ‘into the nation’ and empire during the war. This sense of participating in a trans-empire effort enhanced an ‘Imperial Britishness’ even in the Dominions where local nationalisms were developing. Ward, “Empire and the Everyday,” 269–70.

47 Wartime Cookery, preface.

48 See, for example, Gordon, "Onward Kitchen Soldiers," 61–88; Mosby, Food Will Win the War; Bentley, Eating for Victory; Monger “Tangible Patriotism.”

49 Buckley, "Recipe for Reform,"65.

50 Ibid, 67–75.

51 Monger, "Tangible Patriotism," 249.

52 St Cyprian’s School Magazine no. 64, April 1915, 8.

53 St Cyprian’s School Magazine, no 68, May 1917, 3.

54 Newman and Davis, ‘Introduction’, The Wartime Cookbook.

55 Cost of Living Commission, 33; Nasson, “‘Messing with Coloured People,’” 307.

56 "Statistics of Wages and Industrial Matters," 6. The Union Government eventually fixed the price of some commodities including sugar, matches, paraffin and petrol and warned merchants and grocers against war profiteering. Cost of Living Commission, 8.

57 White, Zeppelin Nights, 226; Winter, The Great War and the British People, 105. For Cape Town also see: Nasson, World War One, 174–5. The diverging infant mortality rates for Cape Town’s municipal wards during the war suggest that the benefits of full employment were not uniform across the city. "Reports of the Medical Officer of Health," 1914–1919.

58 Van der Waag, Wyndhams, “Wyndhams, Parktown,” 275–6.

59 Ibid.

60 Cape Town’s Mayor’s Minutes for 1914, records the Governor General’s Fund as ‘an all-South African fund, thanks to Mrs Botha’. Its objectives were ‘to relieve distress more directly caused by the war, to relieve the sick and wounded, and to help wives and families of those who have been or may be called out to fight in the defence of our Empire’. Mayor’s Minutes. Cape Town, 1914.

61 As reported in the Cape Times, September 01, 1917.

62 In a letter to the editor, for example, A. Wilmot wrote of ‘rental and cost of living’ being ‘above means’. Cape Times, July 27, 1916; J.H. Hartley, as late president of the Cape Peninsula Grocers’ Association, responded to allegations of profiteering in the face of wartime inflation. Cape Times, May 25, 1916.

63 Such as the public meeting called in August 1914 by the Mayor of Cape Town. Mayor’s Minutes, 1914.

64 St Cyprian’s School Magazine no. 66, May 1916, 5.

65 As found in the Wartime Cookery Book, npn.

66 The Welcome Trust, The Midwives Roll, 1904-1959.

67 South Africa, Marriage Index, 1807-2007.

68 Ibid.

69 van Niekerk, “South African Military Chaplaincy,” 5, 318.

70 Ibid, 69.

71 “Offley Charles Wycliffe Thompson.” Ancestry.com. https://www.ancestry.com/genealogy/records/offley-charles-wycliffe-thompson-24-1s4vj7q.

72 West Sussex Record Office; Sussex Parish Registers; Census Returns of England and Wales, 1891.

73 Bickford-Smith, Emergence of the South African Metropolis, 31–32.

74 Harrison and Zack, “The Wrong Side of the Mining Belt?”

75 van der Waag, “Hugh Archibald Wyndham,” 261–2.

76 Koorts, D.F. Malan, 9.

77 Korf, “D.F. Malan,” 89–96.

78 Tamarkin, “Nationalism or ‘Tribalism,” 230.

79 Langham-Carter, “The Early British Families of Paarl.”

80 Korf, “D.F. Malan,” 175.

81 Baderoon, Regarding Muslims, 52.

82 Green, Beyond the City Lights, 34–40.

83 South African Women’s ‘Who’s Who’, 325.

84 van der Waag, “Hugh Archibald Wyndham,” 260.

85 Dubow, A Commonwealth of Knowledge, vi, 27–64. For the compatibility of Britishness, as a civic identity, within the South African context, see Bickford-Smith, Emergence of the South African Metropolis, 18–19.

86 Cape Town Citizens’ Meeting Booklet, January, 7, 1917, 3. Similarly, Rondebosch Boys’ School in Cape Town boasted of the number of both English and Afrikaans names present on its register of ex-pupils who volunteered for war service. Rondebosch Boys High School 1897–1947, 46–47. Fedorowich, “Sleeping with the Lion?”, 90–95.

87 Cruise, Louis Botha’s War, 186–7.

88 Molteno Family Papers, Alice Green to Eppy, November 20, 1914.

89 Botha only used Dutch/Afrikaans troops to face the rebels in order to minimise anti-British sentiments. van der Waag, 'Military History,' 99–100.