18th May 1954

The Mann's Enjoy an Important Benefit – Transport

The Mann's and their neighbours enjoy one important benefit which hundreds of smallholders do not – they have good public transport to work and back home.  Almost at the very gate of their smallholding, halfway between Johannesburg and Vereeniging, Mr. James Mann can catch one of two large railway buses round seven in the morning;  his daughter Sylvia, one of two buses half an hour later and both can be sure of getting to Johannesburg in comfort, in plenty of time to stroll along to store or office.

In the evening they have the choice of several railway buses between 4.40 p.m. and 5.35 p.m. and get home in plenty of time for dinner.  They cannot go to a theatre in town and catch a bus home in the evening – there is none. And, although there are buses between 12.40 and 1.40 on Saturday, there is no other Saturday bus back home except the 5.15.  But during the working week – they have regular hours – they are more comfortably off than many works in the city.  It was not so when the Mann's first came to Walkerville 14 years ago.  For their first three or four years there was not bus at all.  Then a Mr. van Straten started running his own bus from Walkerville – just in time for Mr. Mann, whose baby Austin was cracking up.

The bus took Mr. Mann, among about two dozen other workers, to Booysens, from where they got a tram to town.  Then Mr. van Straten went back to Walkerville to take Sylvia, just starting school, and five or six young friends to De Deur.

In the evening Mr. van Straten went back to Booysens to pick up the homecoming workers, who still speak of him with affection.  He would look round and say:  “Must wait for so and so – he’s probably delayed having a drink or a hair cut”.  Another saying of his which his old customers remember was: “Would you like to pay now or at the end of the week?”

Mr. van Straten’s bus used to make a detour about four miles on the Johannesburg side of Walkerville.  It skirted Hartzenbergfontein (where the Mann boys now go to school by school bus) and went round the dirt road through Elandsfontein 34 back to the tarred road, picking up some of the many smallholders in the district.

In winter Mr. van Straten’s passengers could always be picked out from among the people passing through Booysens by the red dust on their collars.  In summer they sometimes had to get out and push the bus through the mud on the Elandsfontein road, and the perfect passengers were the ones who knew something about fixing a bus.  Mr. van Straten was succeeded by other private bus proprietors – Mr. Mann thinks he went faming when he sold his bus – and there are private buses to supplement the railway service on the Vereeniging main road.

But today there is no bus except the school bus on the Elandsfontein route, and some of the smallholders have to get to the main road – a matter of three, four or five miles – as best they can in all weathers.  Some have to walk.  So in some ways they are worse off than they were ten years ago.  They say that the private buses cut their route out because the road, a provincial road, got too bad.

For miles along the Vereeniging road there are smallholders who walk one or more miles to the bus stop each morning, the luck ones have their own cars and the same home in the evening.  The one who work irregular hours must have a car, which the bad roads shake to pieces, and in a short time or their lives become a misery.  In the short time that I have been driving out to see the Mann's I have given lifts to a tram driver, a policeman, a miner and one of two others, more or less stranded.  The car was broken down; the friend with whom they share a car to town and back has failed to turn up.  Those are among the stories I hear.

Their “peaceful” life in the country has become a worry.  Getting oneself to town and back each day, it seems to me, is too much of a strain on the nerves and the pockets of all but the fairly y well to do.  Even the Mann's transport bill is high enough, just on £5 a month each for Sylvia and Mr. Mann, and £2 for Roma Mann, who goes to school in Vereeniging by railway bus.

Apparently the modern bus drivers have the same kindly attitude to their passengers as Mr. van Straten had to his.  When the “lady who walks a mile and a half” is seen hastening over the horizon on the last lap, the bus driver will linger that vital minute.  When the road is dark or wet he will put the homecoming business girl down at her gate.

In the matter of transport, almost the most important thing in the workaday life of the citygoer, these are the lucky smallholders.  The intending smallholder will be well advised not to get too far off a good bus route, if he can find one, unless he has plenty of money to burn in petrol and more important, to spend on car repairs.

19th May 1954

How the Mann's Came to Walkerville

FOR SALE: Plot of 5.79 acres, with running stream, on main road halfway between Johannesburg and Vereeniging; £275 - £20 deposit, and £2 10s. a month.  What particularly took James Mann’s fancy when he read the advertisement 16 years ago was the “running stream”.

The Mann’s were two years married, had one baby and a baby Austin.  They lived at Regent’s Park, Johannesburg; had given up a very nice house to go there, because there was enough back garden in Regent’s Park to go in for poultry.  The poultry did well. Then some of the neighbours complained.  The inspector came, said there was nothing to complain about – he was something of a poultry fancier himself – and became one of their customers.  But the back garden in Regent’s Park was getting too small for these would-be poultry farmers.  They began looking round for a little place in the country, not too far away, for James Mann had to come to town every day, and sometimes at night – he was a young policeman.

Land was then much cheaper along the Vereeniging road than it is today.  The Mann's had the choice of half a dozen or more adjoining plots, and chose the one with the running stream.  For a year or so the Mann's went out occasionally the 18 miles to “the land”, picnicked, though there was no shade, planted a tree or two, cleared a small piece of veld for a garden.  Then one day they decided that they would wait no longer for all the things that money should provide on the plot but go and live there before the summer was out.  The baby Austin began to be overloaded with pieces of timber, sacks of cement.  “How we ever got there sometimes I don’t know”, Mrs. Sue Mann says today.  And she recalls the Saturday when the car got them as far as the gate, then sank with a broken differential.

Hundreds of city bred people have begun to be smallholders exactly s the Mann's did.  Many are today doing just as they did.  If they are young, they probably have not much money; perhaps like the Mann's, only a few pounds capital and their salary or wages.    Having acquired the land, the usual thing to do is bore for water, fence the land if the water is fortunately there, and there is enough money to go on with and perhaps plough it and plant a few mealies; at any rate, plant a few trees.  The Mann's built before they bored for water, there was the stream, though it is usually dry today.  One of Mrs. Mann's brothers was a builder, and that was a great help when thy put up their cottage of four rooms, which they paid for mostly out of the new laid eggs they sold in Regent’s Park.

“I had visions then of the day when we would build another house”, says Mrs. Mann – “up there where you get such a nice view.  And I thought the cottage would still be useful as a store room or incubator place . . . but the day has not come yet.  We’ve had to be content with an extra room which was once a stoep, and a bathroom.  And I plan . . . “.  Mrs. Mann sketched out more extensions, then said: “But, of course, it would be nicer to build a new house altogether.  Still, this cottage is comfortable.  And we’re happy, which is the main thing”.

The day arrived 14 years ago when the Mann's packed up in Regent’s Park; the little convoy moving along the Vereeniging road to Walkerville included their poultry and portable poultry houses.  They now had two children, one over two years, and one just over two months.  At Walkerville there was no bus service, no electric lights, no telephone, no post office, no church, no doctor and still not much shade, for the trees were about a foot high. Their nearest neighbour was so far away that they could almost say “No neighbours”.  The nearest store was several miles away.  Today they have a bus service, but although power lines run along their back road they still have not got electricity.  I saw men putting up telephone poles in their neighbourhood today and they have neighbours now.

Mr. Mann recalls the sweat of trying to clear a patch of veld for a garden.  But he also recalls, with natural pride, that the season after they arrived in Walkerville he grew a lovely lot of tomatoes, which he took to town in his baby Austin and sold for £30.  Their windmill is still working.  They have never gone short of water.  They are glad they came.  They feel they have a future.  But, before I speak of the future, let me tell something more of the past 14 years.

 20th May 1954

The Mann's Have Had Hard Times and Fun, Too

Letters to the “Rand Daily Mail” have suggested that I am making the smallholder’s life “sound rather hard”.  Well, it can be hard when you start without much capital.  In their early days the Mann’s had some hard times on their smallholding at Walkerville, but they had fun, too.  They are still there, and they still have fun – and occasionally difficult times.  Plenty of people with money have failed to make a go at farming and even a smallholding.  But to state the obvious, that money alone cannot grow trees or make hens lay eggs, need not blind one to the equally obvious fact that it does help.  And there are many things that you must buy on a smallholding out of capital which you pay for as you go in town.

Mrs. Sue Mann put the whole proposition very simply today, when we were discussing the cost of improvements, and came to water.  “First you must have a borehole.  Then, as you cannot afford an engine, because it takes such an expensive pump head, you must have a windmill.  Then a tank on a tank stand high enough to get the water where you want it to go.  Hen pipes . . . one thing calls for another, and it all calls for money”.  And a young policeman cannot easily pay for even that one item out of his pay. So the Mann's were not doing too badly when they managed to bore for water after they had been at Walkerville about four years, and young Jimmy Mann, now nearly eleven, was a year old.  Up to that time they had been carrying water from the stream, as neighbours did after them.  Mr. Erasmus did the job.  He was one of the few plot holders round here – grew beautiful strawberries.  But he’s gone now, like so many of the early smallholders”.

Luckily they got water – some unfortunate people have owned several acres for several months or years before they discover that there is none, or that they would have to go too deeply for it.  They got water at about 80 feet.  That, and the piping and gear down the borehole cost them just over £100.  Then there was the small windmill £60 for a thousand gallon tank and stand and piping to the house – in all the job cost more than a couple of hundred.  There was water in the kitchen tap, instead of at the spring a hundred yards away, but still no hot water, and the bathroom would have to wait.  Mrs. Mann bathed her three children aged four, three and one – in a tin bath, like many a young mother before her and since.

Bathing, feeding and dressing three small children and making their clothes did not leave Mrs. Mann much time for poultry rearing, but they still kept poultry, though the houses they had brought with them from town were getting in bad shape, allowed for no expansion, and would obviously soon have to be replaced.  She and James Mann talked it over and came to the conclusion that there would be no question of James becoming a poultry farmer for years, even after the war.  His role would be that of city goer, and most of the job of looking after the poultry would fall on his wife.

Still, they went quietly ahead.  They had their setbacks.  A strange animal broke into the fowl runs and killed off much of the stock.  They built the fences stronger – the animal disappeared.  They rebuilt their flock.  Then poultry thieves cleaned out most of their best breeding poultry.  They raised a small loan on the property, which they are still paying off at so much a month, began tearing down the old houses and building a new poultry plant – laid out in smallish houses for breeding – and began again.

Then Frankie, the youngest Mann, arrived.

When Mr. Mann came home to Walkerville from the nursing home in Johannesburg one dry August night, he found that the poultry had not been fed or watered.  Labour was always bad, and quite unreliable when not under supervision.  When Mrs. Mann came home from hospital labour had got no better.  To build up a flock of poultry – sometime fetching and carrying water and food herself – and look after a baby and three small children was more than she could manage.  It had been hard enough in the lonely first years – “sometimes so lonely I cried” and now it was somehow harder still.

The Mann's talked it over again.  They would go on building up the poultry plant as best they could – they now also had to make some more improvements to their own house – and they would keep a few poultry for themselves, any small surplus for sale: but large scale poultry was “out” for some years to come.  They planted fruit trees that August / September.  And only last year – years after they began building up their flocks of poultry on a larger scale.

I have made the years seem short, and in some ways they have seemed short to the Mann's, for there has been so much to do.  But have the Mann’s not been a long time getting down to the job which brought them out to Walkerville? 
All things considered, I do not think so.  They have been fighting the cost of living, keeping their children at school, a private school when they deemed it necessary, and generally making ends meet as parents of small means have all been doing since the war. 

Things are easier now.  Walkerville, too, has been growing.  There are neighbours.  But while they were struggling they saw plenty of people come, full of enthusiasm, and some with plenty of money – and go, disheartened and disillusioned.  They had expected a smallholding to grow and pay for itself too soon.  The Mann's – among their immediate neighbours, anyway, are now the oldest inhabitants, though they are not too old to go on building.  And if you ask, “Is it worth it?” Mrs. Mann points to her children.  “They would not live anywhere else”.

21st May 1954

There are smallholders who say that it is cheaper to buy your milk in town than to keep a couple of cows, but for most months of the year the Mann's find that keeping a cow saves them approximately £4 a month on milk and £3 10s. on butter – and the sale of surplus skim milk, though not much pays for the cow’s meal.

Yesterday evening the youngest Mann, Frankie, gave me the history of their cow keeping at Walkerville.  He did so, quite unwittingly, when I suggested that Frankie, who will be nine next August, could hardly remember their first cow.  “Yes I do”, Frankie asserted, “we had Lucky, the Jersey with the calf that died.  And after Lucky we had the Friesland – daddy called her Aandbloem.  She was a kicker and hardly anybody could milk her.  Now we’ve got Brownie and Buttercup the heifer calf, and the heifer is Daisy, she’ll be getting a calf soon”.

Lucky and Aandbloem were well bred cows, and when they were both in milk the Mann's sold quite a lot of milk to their neighbours.  The cows were sold at one of those times, which occur in most families, when ready cash was needed quickly.

For quite a long time the Mann's themselves were milk buyers and Mrs. Mann says, “Never again if I can help it”.  Brownie, bought as a very young calf, is about fifty-fifty Jersey and Friesland.  She was called Brownie before she turned out to be black – so Frankie explains.  She is not exactly the kind of cow you would put on the Rand Show, though I am told that the Apple Orchards Show (in which the people of Walkerville and De Deur take part) has a class for just such breeds – a nice idea.

As a cow that has paid her way handsomely Brownie takes some beating.  No gallon of whole milk a day for here for her first five or six weeks and no skim milk for weeks thereafter – the kind of rations that Buttercup the calf has since enjoyed – and no milk substitute followed by calf meal, either.

On such rations any calf can be expected to thrive, given reasonable luck, but it comes rather expensive.  I estimate (on the advice of another smallholder out the Mann's way) that on milk substitute and meal a calf would cost £8 to feed in its first six months, well worth it for a good pedigree calf.

Feeding it on the smallholding’s own milk for the first four months or so would be much less costly.  But either way the smallholder has a long time to wait for milk if he is waiting for the calf to grow up and become a cow – something over three years for a Jersey and nearly a year more for a Friesland.

A calf you can buy for two of three pounds, but the cowless smallholder usually buys a cow in calf, not a very fancy one for £30 to £35.  That way he gets milk in perhaps a few months and saves money on fancy rations.  But Brownie had no fancy rations.  Yellow mealies for her – I understand that many a useful cow has been reared on a mealie pap – and sweet grass, in a wonderful season for sweet grass, which she ate by the bucketful.  But she thrived on everything she was given, whereas the Mann’s first calf, the well bred Jersey, died – Mrs. Mann thinks because, in their inexperience they fed her too much calf meal.

Brownie has had several calves, Daisy, is one of them is now 21 or 22 months, and Mr. Mann is going to make inquiries about the possibilities of artificial insemination.  Few smallholders can afford to keep a bull – the Mann's sold a bull calf the week before they bought Buttercup the Jersey – and consequently the services of a bull are not always easy to come by when required.

When Daisy is giving milk, the Mann's, once without milk for the years during which Daisy’s mother was growing up, will have much more milk than they need, even making allowance for the skim milk they feed to the poultry, for most of the year.  And with reasonable luck – for they will keep Daisy – they will never be without milk and cream and butter, even during those months when a cow is expected to calve and “dries off”.

Of course, their own six acres cannot be expected to graze two cows and a calf, especially now that the orchard, which once gave such nice sweet grass when the trees were small, has grown up.

And they can grow so little winter feed that it is hardly worth mentioning, at any rate to a dairy farmer.  That is the position of many smallholders, though some keep an extra plot for their couple of cows, some hire grazing, and some live on a group of smallholdings on which a commonage has been specially set aside for them.  Otherwise the cows are grazed as the Mann's cow and heifer graze at the moment – mostly on vacant plots.

Mrs. Mann has begun feeding her cow two bags of meal a month, costing just over £3 and that will be the winter ration.  (The calf, like the heifer, went off meal at six months).  At the moment she gets only two gallons of milk a day, giving her enough cream for butter on the family’s bread but not quite enough for cake making and such luxuries, she uses margarine for that.  In summer her meal bill was less than half the £3 a month, and she received four gallons of milk a day, not as much as the dairyman along the road would naturally expect, but far more than the Mann's ever need.

On that basis, even if the sale of surplus skim milk did not pay the meal bill (an average of say £24 a year) she is saving £78 or £80 a year on milk and butter – and, more important, with her eggs she has the basic foods in abundance for most months of the year.  Cheese the Mann's might also have, but for some reason which I cannot understand they do not like home made cheese.

Even paying £35 for your first cow, it seems that it pays to keep one.

 

22nd May 1954

Nearly every smallholder, like nearly every householder in town, has at some time or other toyed with the idea of selling.  The Mann’s, once in their 14 years at Walkerville, had the idea.  Things were zooming along the Vereeniging road.   They had a good offer for their property.  Perhaps if they sold they could start all over again – on another smallholding, of course – with a nice bit of capital behind them.  But when it came to the point they decided they would rather stay.

There was one practical reason for not selling.  Only the really clever person, who is not particularly interested in making a home, can be certain of selling one piece of suitable property on a rising market and buying another suitable piece on a falling market.  And what would they do in between?

Sit cooped up in town waiting for the very plot they wanted at the price they could pay?  They might wait a long time.  And then when they began estimating what this and that would cost at the current prices, they were surprised to find how much it might cost, how much they had already invested.

But that was not what decided them against selling.  The deciding factor was that they liked being where they were too much to leave. 

Roma Mann proved that very conclusively.  Now that I know the Mann's better I sometimes tease Roma with being the glamour girl of the smallholding.  When Roma heard what was being considered she burst into tears, and the three other young Mann's were not far behind.  Poor James Mann pointed out that the idea was originally his.  Nobody could think who first thought of it, now it seemed preposterous.

So the Mann's stayed (though they have “seen them come and seen them go”) And that, I think, is as good an answer as any to the very interesting letter which the “Rand Daily Mail” publishes today from a smallholder who lives near the Mann's.

This letter suggests that so far I may have given towns people the idea that smallholder’s life is “all trial and tribulation”.  I hope not, for the intention of this series is to report how one finds the life of one smallholder family, and let the reader draw his own conclusions: and the Mann's are one of the happiest families I know.

Later I hope to meet and talk with some of the Mann's neighbours.  (I hope they will not set the dogs on me).  I have so far only been introduced to a few of them.  Meanwhile let me recapitulate some of the benefits which the Mann's and their neighbours enjoy and, in parenthesis, refer to conditions on smallholdings elsewhere.

The Mann's can produce much of their basic food at little or no cost, though the capital outlay comes heavy on the family of modest means without much capital.  They have excellent transport to work in town and to school.  (Some smallholders have not.  I was not surprised to learn this week that a meeting had been called of the people in adjacent neighbourhood’s off the main road to press for a railway bus service).

They have a tarred road at their gate (but some smallholders have to drive over several miles of extremely rough roads to reach the tarmacadam, and that makes motoring expensive, especially when there is no bus).  They have water (while some smallholdings have gone dry or nearly dry) and good schools which some townspeople and some smallholders have not got.

The Government has promised an inquiry into the disabilities of the smallholder’s life.  Meanwhile the would be smallholder should be put on his guard against some of the disabilities which he may be able to avoid.  In advance, the agricultural experts have shaken their heads at the idea that a smallholding can be made to “pay”.  I am not arguing that question now, but let me quote from another smallholder’s letter.  The writer, Mrs. Gwen Rosenbroek, who lives on ten morgan, at Honeydew.

“Through all our trials and tribulations . . . nothing has dimmed our affection of our little farm . . .   We would certainly like to find out if it pays to live as we do, but should it be proved that city life is really far cheaper it would make no difference because this is the only life for us”.

Mr. James Mann (quoted in my first article) said: “We are quite solvent and quite happy”.

An under statement?

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