‘Britishness’, Colonial Governance and Education: St Helenian Children in Colonial Natal in the 1870s

ABSTRACT

This article considers understandings of ‘Britishness’ in the Natal colony in the 1870s. Focusing on St Helenian children’s expulsion from ‘government’ schools that were ostensibly open to all racial groups, the article shows how competing definitions of race and ‘Britishness’ shaped the responses of colonial officials, settlers and the St Helenian community to the expulsion. The white settler population in Natal was concerned about St Helenian economic migrants’ inclusion in white, English society. In particular, the ambiguous racial status of St Helenians was seen as potentially harmful to white children. The focus on a group of recent incomers to the colony uncovers a process of racialisation unfolding in the context of migrations within the British Empire. The case highlights how movement and migration within the empire could bring these definitions of race and Britishness into conversation and conflict with each other.

KEYWORDS:

• Natal
• St Helena
• education
• childhood
• Britishness

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. T. W. Brooks to F. N. Broome, 4 Feb.1876, CSO 536 1876/270, Pietermaritzburg Archive Repository (hereafter PAR).

2. Perry, Whose World was British?, 143. As Adele Perry has argued, migration could complicate the British world and led to settler societies attempting to define these groups as either ‘desirable’ or ‘undesirable’, ‘ordered principally along the axis of race’.

3. Buettner, ‘Problematic Spaces, Problematic Races’, 292.

4. For an overview of recent scholarship in the field, see Cleall, Ishiguro, and Manktelow, ‘Imperial Relations’. See also Paisley on race and childhood in the interwar period. Paisley, ‘Childhood and Race’.

5. Ibid., 283.

6. Stoler, Carnal Knowledge, 138.

7. Bradlow, Children and Childhood at the Cape.

8. Duff, ‘Saving the Child’, 230, 237.

9. Errante, ‘White Skin, Many Masks’, 11.

10. Morrell, From Boys to Gentlemen.

11. Many of these settlers arrived under Byrne Emigration and Colonization Company settlement scheme in the 1850s. Ibid., 24.

12. Ballard, John Dunn, 35. Although, as Stoler has argued, the presence of mixed-race relationships were not always synonymous with racial equality. Stoler, ‘Making Empire Respectable’, 638–39.

13. Evans et al., Equal Subjects, Unequal Rights, 100.

14. Bonnett, White Identities, 12; Harris, ‘Whiteness as Property’, 77.

15. Killingray, ‘A Good West Indian’, 364–68.

16. Darian-Smith, Grimshaw and Macintyre, ‘Introduction’, 14. See also Schwarz, ‘“Shivering in the Noonday Sun”’.

17. Gosse, St. Helena, 1502–1938, 373.

18. Schulenburg, ‘Transient Observations’; Yon, ‘Race Making/Race Mixing’, 154.

19. Parker, ‘Multiple Migrations’, 13–14; Schulenburg, Transient observations, 200.

20. Schulenburg, ‘Transient Observations’, 241.

21. Melliss, St Helena, 79.

22. Schulenburg, ‘Transient Observations’, 243. In 1868, the governor of St Helena, Charles Elliot, complained that the St Helena population proved very difficult to classify.

23. Yon, ‘Race-Making/Race-Mixing’, 154.

24. Parker, ‘Multiple Migrations’, 12-14.

25. Saul Dubow highlights the 1870s as a period of rapidly changing ideas about race, in response to the changing social and political landscape in South Africa. Dubow, ‘How British Was the British World?’, 5.

26. Yon and Schulenburg and Schulenburg have different figures here. Yon, ‘Race-Making/Race-Mixing’, 154; Schulenburg and Schulenburg, St Helena, 8.

27. Brain, ‘Natal’s Indians, 1860-1910’, 249–51.

28. Note that in the South African context public and government were, and remain, synonymous terms. Behr and Macmillan, Education in South Africa, 128.

29. Ibid., 382.

30. Ballard, ‘Traders, Trekkers and Colonists’, 129.

31. It is interesting that, in the correspondence regarding the case, the St Helenians are sometimes referred to as ‘coloured’ or Cape children, but never as part of the Indian group. This is probably because of the indentured labour system under which the majority of Indians were labouring, while the St Helenians were ‘free born’ citizens. Behr and MacMillan, Education in South Africa, 383.

32. Vietzen, History of Education for European Girls, 26.

33. Ibid., 26.

34. Minute paper, T. W. Brooks to F. N. Broome, 16 April 1875, CSO 536 1876/270, PAR.

35. R. A. Green, Letter to the Editor, Natal Mercury, 4 May 1875.

36. Minute paper, T. W. Brooks, 14 Feb. 1876, CSO 536 1876/270, PAR; Report, H. E. Bulwer to Lord Carnarvon, 26 Jan. 1876, GH 1219, PAR.

37. Minute paper, T. W. Brooks, 14 Feb. 1876, CSO 536 1876/270, APR; Report, H. E. Bulwer to Lord Carnarvon, 26 Jan. 1876, GH 1219, PAR.

38. Natal Almanac Directory and Yearly Register, 247.

39. Report, H. E. Bulwer to Lord Carnarvon, 26 Jan. 1876, GH 1219, PAR.

40. J. Crowe to T. W. Brooks, 22 March 1875, CSO 536 1876/270, PAR.

41. Ibid.; Minute paper, T. W. Brooks, 14 Feb. 1876, CSO 536 1876/270, PAR.

42. Report, H. E. Bulwer to Lord Carnarvon, 26 Jan. 1876, GH 1219, PAR.

43. After Sir Benjamin Pine had left, Sir Garnet Wolseley acted, from April to September 1875, as the administrator of Natal. On his departure Sir Henry Bulwer assumed the role of lieutenant-governor up to April 1880. Brookes and Webb, A History of Natal, 305.

44. Sixteen St Helenian parents to G. Wolseley, 12 April 1875, CSO 536 1876/270, PAR.

45. Report, H. E. Bulwer to Lord Carnarvon, 26 Jan. 1876, GH 1219, PAR.

46. Sixteen St Helenian parents to G. Wolseley, 12 April 1875, CSO 536 1876/270, PAR.

47. H. C. Crowley, R. A. Green, T. Clarke to F. N. Broome, 21 June 1875, CSO 536 1876/270, PAR.

48. Ibid.

49. Ibid.

50. Duff, ‘Saving the Child’, 232.

51. H. C. Crowley, R. A. Green, T. Clarke to F. N. Broome, 21 June 1875, CSO 536 1876/270, PAR. Yon, ‘Race-Making/Race-Mixing’, 158. Yon recounts a story of a St Helenian woman living in Apartheid South Africa, in a ‘coloured’ suburb in Cape Town. When her children were discriminated against on the basis of their skin colour, Yon reports, she said: ‘After all they [the offenders] should remember that I am British!’

52. R. A Green and H. C. Crowley to F. N. Broome, 28 Aug. 1875, CSO 536 1876/270, PAR.

53. Minute paper, F. N. Broome to H. E. Bulwer, 16 Dec. 1875, CSO 536 1876/270, PAR.

54. F. W. Chesson, letter to The Colonial Intelligencer, Feb. 1876.

55. Willan, ‘The Anti-Slavery and Aborigines’ Protection Society’, 83.

56. Document titled ‘Remarks’, c. 1875, CSO 536 1876/270, PAR.

57. Memo, F. N. Broome, 16 Dec. 1875, CSO 536 1876/270, PAR. The term ‘vicious’ was also used to describe a class of parents, ‘their chief vice being that of drunkenness’, by Patrick Cumin in his 1861 report on ragged schools in Portsmouth and Bristol. ‘Vicious’ here stands for lower class. Cumin, The Popular Education of the Bristol and Plymouth Districts, 11.

58. It appears that the mother referred to here is Mrs Sherrard.

59. Minute paper, H. E. Bulwer to F. N. Broome, 5 Feb. 1876, CSO 536 1876/270, PAR.

60. Minute paper, T. W. Brooke, 26 Jan. 1876, CSO 536 1876/270, PAR.

61. Notes, H. E. Bulwer, 25 Jan. 1876, CSO 536 1876/270, PAR.

62. Minute paper, T. W. Brooke, 26 Jan. 1876, CSO 536 1876/270, PAR.

63. Minute paper, H. E. Bulwer to F. N. Broome, 25 Jan. 1876, CSO 536 1876/270, PAR.

64. Minute paper, K. Dillon to F. N. Broome, 3 Feb.1875, CSO 536 1876/270, PAR.

65. Report, H. E. Bulwer to Lord Carnarvon, 17 Feb. 1876, GH 1219, PAR.

66. Minute paper, T. W. Brookes, 14 Feb. 1876, CSO 536 1876/270, PAR.

67. Superintendent of Education T. W. Brookes virtually managed the Natal colonial education system single-handedly with no clerical support or a budget to speak of. His work conditions, and the fact that Bulwer viewed his actions during the St Helenian school saga with suspicion, drove him over the edge and he committed suicide in April 1976. Obituary for T. W. Brooks, Natal Witness, 13 April 1876.

68. Report, H. E. Bulwer to Lord Carnarvon, 17 Feb. 1876, GH 1219, PAR. The following documents were, among others, attached as supporting evidence: sixteen St Helenian parents to G. Wolseley, 12 April 1875, CSO 536 1876/270, PAR; J. Crowe to T. W Brooks, 26 April 1875, CSO 536 1876/270, PAR; W. J. Hepworth to T. W. Brookes, 14 Jan. 1876, CSO 536 1876/270, PAR; Minute paper, H. E. Bulwer, 21 Jan. 1876, CSO 536 1876/270, PAR; Minute paper, H. E. Bulwer, 28 Jan. 1876, CSO 536 1876/270, PAR.

69. Report, H. E. Bulwer to Lord Carnarvon, 17 Feb. 1876, GH 1219, PAR.

70. Despatch, Natal 2575, 30 March 1876, CO 179-120, The National Archives, Kew (TNA). Our thanks to Jeff Guy for alerting us to these sources.

71. Cunningham, Children of the Poor, 191.

72. Morrell, From Boys to Gentlemen, 49.

73. Ibid., 48–49.

74. Buettner, ‘Problematic Spaces, Problematic Races’, 278; see also Buettner, Empire Families, ch. 2.

75. J. Crowe to T. W. Brooks, 22 March1875, CSO 536 1876/270, PAR.

76. Swaisland, Servants and Gentlewomen, 98.

77. Martens, ‘Polygamy, Sexual Danger’, 24.

78. Ibid., 42, 33n.

79. Minute paper, T. W. Brooks, 14 Feb. 1876, CSO 536 1876/270, PAR; Report, H. E. Bulwer to Lord Carnarvon, 26 Jan.1876, GH 1219, PAR.

80. Minute paper, T. W. Brookes, 14 Feb. 1876, CSO 536 1876/270, PAR.

81. Ibid.

82. Buettner writes that accent was seen as an ‘important marker of class, cultural, and regional background in Britain, [while] in colonial India “chi chi” English was widely viewed as a sign of social and racial “contamination”’. Buettner, ‘Problematic Spaces, Problematic Races’, 284. It is interesting that the concerns over white children and language degeneration were occurring at the same time as the discussions over whether African children should be taught in English or in their mother-tongue languages. The civilising power of the English language was promoted by many people in colonial Natal, both missionary teachers and government officials.

83. Ross, Status and Respectability.

84. Bickford-Smith, ‘African Nationalist’, 90. The authors are aware of the differences between the concepts of ‘Englishness’ and of ‘Britishness’ but do not have the space to address the specificities of this distinction here.

85. J. Crowe to T. W Brooks, 26 April 1875, CSO 536 1876/270, PAR.

86. Ibid., 135.

87. Lester, ‘British Settler Discourse’, 26.

88. Ibid., 31.

89. Perry, Whose World Was British?, 140

90. Schwarz, ‘“Shivering in the Noonday Sun”’, 23.

91. Banerjee, Becoming Imperial Citizens, 5.