Cold Stone Jug - The Anniversary Edition

Introduction

Safe in the arms of Jesus,

Safe in Pretoria gaol –

Fourteen days’ hard labour

For cutting off a donkey’s tail…

(Song of the old reprobate in

WILLIAM PLOMER’S TURBOTT WOLFE, 1926)

EXACTLY fifty years ago Herman Charles Bosman’s Cold Stone Jug was published by APB Bookstore (that is, the Afrikaanse Persboekhandel) at 3 Plein Street, Johannesburg. To its devoted first readers the early prison background of their humorous columnist and literary man-about-town came as something of a jolt.

But in the Nominal Roll of Convicts, the great Domesday-book kept in the archives at the Little Reserve of Pretoria Central Prison of all the prisoners admitted there, his name is indeed entered in pen as Prisoner No. B3378: Bosman, Herman Charles, Race: E, Sex: M, with his crime, the date of conviction and the sentence. His age is given as 21 years, although he was in fact still twenty, in danger of not living through to his majority. When he referred to his prison years as an unnaturally prolonged adolescence he was not being inaccurate.

Cover of the first edition, 1947

Because he was a capital case due for execution, his double mugshots were pinned to the page, where they remain as a kind of memento mori to this day. Only a dozen or so of the condemned are commemorated in this manner, indicating that hangings in the Transvaal in the mid-1920s occurred rarely (say, one or two a month); they were reserved for murderers only. Of his opposite number in the condemned cells, the immaterial character named ‘Stoffels’ whom Bosman introduces to us in Chapter 1, there remains no trace.

In their ID shots the condemned are dressed in one of two ways: whites wear a striped jacket, a formal white shirt with detachable stiff collar and a neat black bow-tie, so that they go to meet their Maker like waiters at the Palm Court; blacks are posed in the same jacket and shirt, but without the collar and tie. All the doomed sport their original wavy locks or nappy mops; on Death Row a shaved head would mean that the prerogative of mercy had been exercised and the prisoner become a proper convict. Hangings were impressive rituals; after all, Francis Bacon had recommended attendance at them for their edifying effect.

The trial of Bosman for the murder of his step-brother, David Russell, was tried as Case 358 in the Witwatersrand Division of the Supreme Court of South Africa in Johannesburg, on 11 and 15 November, 1926, before Mr Justice Gey van Pittius, without jury but with two magistrates as assessors. The crime itself had been committed on the night of 18 July at the Bosman-Russell family home in Bellevue East. Bosman had been held as an awaiting trial prisoner at the Johannesburg Fort for four months – ever since the first Sunday at Marshall Square which he recounts in the Preamble.

Although the judge was obliged to sentence him to hang by the neck until he be dead – the words are plain enough in black ink on the registrar’s cover-sheet (Verdict: Guilty; Sentence: Death) – he added the respectful but very strong recommendation to the Governor-General that, in this very sad and pathetic case, sentence be commuted; the youth of the offender and the absence of any prior intention to kill could be considered as the mitigating circumstances. With the concurrence of his assessors he continued: If I may be allowed to make a suggestion, I would also respectfully recommend, in case His Excellency the Governor-General should see fit to make a reprieve, that the period of imprisonment be not a lengthy one. Bosman echoed these words in the epigraph to Cold Stone Jug where he describes the work as a record of a somewhat lengthy sojourn in prison.

The Nominal Roll kept in Pretoria indicates that the Governor-General, the Earl of Athlone, had done the right thing by Bosman over that Christmas, informing the registrar of the New Law Courts in Johannesburg on 28 December that Bosman’s sentence had been commuted to imprisonment with hard labour for ten years. In Cape Town on 10 January, 1927, the then Minister of Justice, Tielman Roos of General J. B. M. Hertzog’s long-lasting Pact government, signed the necessary Notice to the Sheriff. This was in due course ceremonially read to Bosman by the prison Governor in his death-cell (as recounted in Chapter 2).

The roll also notes that for commutation warrants and all other proceedings, including his daily behaviour record, one is to refer to the Convict’s Records, a folder unfortunately no longer preserved. But the roll does include several other inscriptions – for example, remission granted to all prisoners on the passage of the Flag Bill (this had dragged on as a divisive national issue since 1926, to be resolved finally by a joint sitting of both Houses in October, 1927): two months off. This detail brought Bosman’s date of discharge down to 14 September, 1936. (The Prince of Wales’s visit led to no reductions.)

So far the astute reader of Cold Stone Jug may have estimated: the roll merely corroborates and meshes with the evidence of Bosman’s own chronicle. Yet, in writing his record he was not so much intent on providing the reader with a documentary as with a more general narrative about the convict experience. By naming the institution ‘Swartklei Great Prison’ (instead of the ‘Pretoria Central’ where we know he did his time), he alerts us to his partly allegorical intention.

None the less, for the record, and in order to sort out his rather blurred mention in the final chapter that, like all his fellow inmates, he made a career inside of petitioning the powers that be for further remission of sentence, and that one day out of the blue a petition of his succeeded, it should be mentioned here that – according to the information nibbed into that immense record of life and death – he was indeed granted a second reduction. Following Authority No. 2666/W303, as noted on 30 April, 1930, Bosman’s term was then further commuted to five years with hard labour. So his date for release had now advanced to 14 September, 1931 (see PD/47/T.321 of 15 August, 1930); thus his last stretch of six years was dramatically reduced at a swoop to thirteen months. Whether this second reduction was thanks to his good behaviour, his fine style of petitioning or a general amnesty in South Africa (of which there is no evidence) is unclear. According to Bosman’s friend Fred Zwarenstein – his fellow school-teacher who became a lawyer, dedicatee of Bosman’s poem Africa and a courier of his work from prison – the string-pulling of Bosman’s uncle, Advocate Fred Malan, and the work behind the scenes of other petitioners, may have been influential.

The date of Bosman’s eventual release on probation remains unclear, however. According to the minutes kept in the State Archives of the meeting held in the Prime Minister’s office in Pretoria, by 13 August, 1930, the then Minister of Justice, Oswald Pirow, had already received the favourable report of the chairman of the Board of Visitors recommending Bosman’s release as soon as possible. This he endorsed and forwarded to the Governor-General, who the next day in turn approved the report in anticipation of the following meeting of the Executive Council. There it was likewise to be approved – on 12 September, 1930 – and signed by the Minister of Internal Affairs, D. F. Malan.

We know from Chapter 10 that, due to clerical bungling, Bosman’s release was then unduly delayed and he was not to emerge from that monumental door with its huge brass knocker and on to the public Klawer Street of the Pretoria prison reserve until November, 1930. Inside Pretoria Central Prison he had served almost exactly four years. The roll gives his day of release as 14 November, 1931, but that must apply to when he in due course successfully came off parole.

He had missed not only his coming-of-age party, and the notorious 1929 Black Peril election, but the worst of the Great Depression as well. He had been incarcerated as a youth during the jazzy, charlestoning, Art Deco Twenties. He was now an adult in a society of austerity.

What was the nature of his punishment?

In the late eighteenth century the English philosopher Jeremy Bentham correctly perceived that, with its flamboyant trials, grisly tortures and tumbrils through the crowded streets, the European system of correction was deeply symbolic. In his writings about the inspection house, published in 1791, he proposed the panopticon building in which inmates, suffering the illusion that they were under constant surveillance, would come to collude in an orderly fashion in their own subjection. The outward show of this routine – the initiation into prison life, its costuming, parades and processions – to this day retains the theatrical element which Bentham saw as essential to the process of acting out guilt and its rectification. The very structure of the Pretoria Central Prison building – four wings in cruciform, each with several storeys of galleries with balconies about the main, well-lit hall like a stage, where as part of the therapy actual plays and the annual Christmas concert are staged – suggests that Bentham’s utilitarian thinking long remained active. The whole of Chapter 7 in Cold Stone Jug, dealing with the food strike, takes place in this Benthamite space like a Piranesi Gothic nightmare, yet as a real-life drama, with all the disruption that occurs from when the audience begins pelting the performers through to authority’s devastating return to order in a brilliant coup de theatre.

In Bentham’s day punishment at the Cape followed Roman-Dutch law and was usually of the body in open display – breaking on the wheel, brandings and amputations – so as to regulate the imported slave and conquered indigenous population by terror. Whites were punished following military procedures. The most celebrated European offender against Company rule was the free burgher and diarist, Adam Tas. For his petition agitating against the Governor’s tariffs, as tourists to the Castle well know, he was incarcerated in its black and airless dungeon for all of thirteen months during 1706-07. Admiring this rebellious, contrary Jew, Bosman made a point on a return visit of his to the Cape in 1947 of inspecting the site of his ordeal and even sketching the Tas mausoleum.

According to Dirk van Zyl Smit (in his South African Prison Law and Practice of 1992), the British Occupation of the Cape set in place some reforms more in line with the Enlightenment view that the aim of punishment should be the changing of the offender’s mind. Hence the immediate importation of prefabricated treadmills to Cape Town and Natal. These soon went to ruin, but in the second number of The Cape of Good Hope Literary Gazette (on 21 July, 1830) it was reported that, in propitious summer weather back home at Reading Gaol, each prisoner could be made to ascend up to 13 000 feet daily. The South African colonies preferred convict stations which, by reliably supplying heavy labour, contributed more to expansion. Thus were chain gangs used to execute public works, notably constructing spectacular mountain passes into the interior. Over 1848-50 there was the famous Anti-Convict Agitation organised to prevent the British Foreign Secretary declaring the Cape another penal settlement (along with Tasmania, mainland Australia and several islands in the Caribbean), where wrongdoers from the motherland would be dumped at the colony’s expense. This movement was so successful that it had the effect of Britain curtailing its notorious transportation policy. Public executions were also abolished on British territory in 1868. By the 1870s, when the great linguist Dr Bleek needed the Bushman informants whose language and literature he was instructed to preserve, entire tribes were on hand, building that notorious Breakwater into the Atlantic, stone by chiselled stone, before dwindling into extinction.

To the traveller inspecting the old Transvaal Republic of President Kruger’s days, the prison system might have appeared rather ramshackle. The first white sentenced to imprisonment there was one Alexander Anderson in 1865, with one year including hard labour. By a special deal with the landdrost, Anderson was during that period himself to build the very tronk in which he was meant to be held. One of the most chilling stories in Bosman’s Mafeking Road collection is The Widow, featuring the Transvaal Republic’s first judicial execution at Potchefstroom, the place of Bosman’s early schooling. In his version, after a lengthy trial the murderer of the husband of the heroine is put to death by firing squad and buried in the yard of the courthouse. The actual event was somewhat different, being a hanging from a tree in a field outside town, where the trussed burgher made his last stand as the horses attached to the cart which supported him were geed up.

In his biography of his father-in-law Piet Prinsloo, public prosecutor of Prinsloosdorp, Sarel Erasmus records that no landdrost would go to the trouble of sentencing his black offenders, but merely flog them in the back yard himself. White suspects held before a circuit court were often perforce boarded in the local law officer’s own home. As Sarel recounts (in Prinsloo of Prinsloosdorp):

There was no gaol at Krugersdorp, and if there had been there was no money to pay a gaoler. My uncle turned a stable into a gaol, but it was only wattle and daub, and when drunken Kaffirs were inside, they fell against the walls and tumbled outside, so that there was much repairing, and the guard had to keep his rifle and hammer going all the time.

Then, one night during the great storm in this legendary tall tale, of course the entire contraption is blown away.

Sarel Erasmus is later imprisoned himself in a British gaol and, like John Bunyan before him penning his plea for grace, is destined to deliver his immortal A Burgher Quixote as his protest. In reality ‘Sarel Erasmus’ is Bosman’s predecessor, Douglas Blackburn, the journalist and satirist of Transvaal affairs. During the middle years of the 1890s, as part of his duty as the editor of his scabrous weekly newspaper, The Sentinel of Krugersdorp, Blackburn had occasion to attend executions in Pretoria: a typical note of his is Jan, hanged for murdering Paul le Roux, died without a wriggle. But the favourite tale of prisoners in the old Transvaal was often retold, as in this unsigned piece (called The Gaoler of Groenfontein in The State, July, 1911):

Those [prisoners] who were well behaved were allowed out on leave on condition that they were to be back by nightfall. On one occasion certain of them – so the story ran – had been kept too long in the village by kind friends, and when they returned to their prison home they found that the gaoler had wearied of their tarrying and had barred the gates against them: so they had to seek refuge for the night elsewhere. But with the morning light they crept back to the fold, and that day lodged with the Magistrate a formal complaint at the Gaoler’s conduct in shutting them out.

The Transvaal had erected its central penal institution at what was known as the Convent Redoubt. (Originally a military camp adjacent to the Loreto Sisters, the site later became the Royal Mint and is now the African Window museum.) As a stream ran through the property, prisoners were obliged to undertake their own laundry arrangements. Here in the garden hangings were held on Saturday mornings, open to the public as one of the capital’s few spectacles. Here old Chief Lebogo (Malaboch), the last in the line of defeated black leaders of rural resistance against the commandos, was held after the Bagananwa War and widely photographed. Over New Year, 1896, he was joined by the defeated Dr Jameson and his hundred Raiders.

But the Benthamite concept of the prison as a total institution, in which every facet of the inmate’s daily existence may be controlled until such time as he has changed his attitudes to authority, to work and to the society outside, and where the benefit of literacy training and religious instruction may be inculcated, arrives in the Transvaal only with the building of the Fort in Johannesburg (where Bosman was held while awaiting trial), and then with Pretoria Central Prison as the prime example. Described by penologists as the Pennsylvania system of prison management, it was introduced in Britain notably at Pentonville before being exported to the colonies. The blueprint allowed for single-occupancy cellular accommodation for longtimers (to prevent amorous alliances and to break up gangs), with the exercise of labour in specially designed workshops.

During the military occupation of Pretoria in the Second Anglo-Boer War, it became clear to the Governor, Lord Milner, that Pretoria too needed to join the worldwide network of formal Imperial prisons stretching, as Boer prisoners of war knew well enough, from Ceylon to St. Helena and Bermuda. The prison reserve was set aside out of town on isolated, higher ground for this purpose. By the peace of 1902 the surrounding wall was completed. In 1903 a contract for building the Central Prison itself was awarded to Johannesburg’s Brown and Cottrill, but on their bankruptcy it was taken over by Maudsley, and then by Prentice and Mackey. By 1906, at a cost of £125 000, that stone fort, the Pretoria Central Prison, was completed and ready to admit its first six hundred. It has enjoyed full occupancy ever since. And as Chapter 5 of Cold Stone Jug records, when extensions became necessary, it was the prisoners themselves who served to immure themselves in still further, each stone of their fortifications hand-dressed from their own quarry, the koppie against which they rest.

But Bosman’s Cold Stone Jug is really a critique of unthinking notions about the value of imprisonment.

The issue of prison reform went public in South Africa particularly in the days leading up to Union in 1910. The African Monthly in Grahamstown, for example, published from September, 1908, a series of articles by G. D. Gray, recommending that the future united South Africa should try and avoid the high rate of European and American criminal recidivism by genuinely affording our broad-arrowed brethren in clanking leg-irons the public’s sympathy and care, with the practical opportunity to learn appropriate trades and the mental skills to fit them for a decent life outside as citizens of the rising nation. Of the Transvaal’s 50 000 prisoners (the Cape had 60 000, Natal 30 000 and the Orange River Colony 10 000), Gray wrote:

After mentally and morally starving our State labourers for the required term of years, [we now also shut] every door which could admit good thoughts, keep away all that is likely to heal the diseased mind and soul – in short, empty them of good – we suddenly turn them adrift on the great evil world, and expect them to become paragons of all that is virtuous, and to live peaceful, honest, useful lives in the same society that has recently incarcerated them.

In 1910 John Galsworthy’s famous play, Justice, dramatised those same issues that troubled Gray, and many a Hollywood silent movie went on nobly to expose corruption and violence in modern gaols. In October, 1911, an unsigned article in The State on Tragedies of the Rope by a ‘Tolstoy admirer’ continued the bad publicity by describing gruesome executions at Pretoria Central. One was of two Australian officers in the prison yard, marched before the firing squad, blindfolded and offered a last cigarette; another of the notorious Australian, ‘One-armed Mac’ who, after a double murder committed in the Transvaal all of eighteen years before, was extradited from Australia in shackles and under escort on the Waratah, to be duly flung violently from this world after his missing limb.

Despite such deterrents, by the 1920s of Bosman’s term South Africa had arrived at the great social watershed that Pretoria Central Prison was built to avert, as the very nature of crime phased from amateur rural banditry to the professional and organised urban kind. Bosman’s castlist of representative characters makes this graphically clear: there is the safecracker of Chapter 2, Alec the Ponce, Snowy Fisher and Pap the full-time burglars, Huysmans the sex offender, Tex Fraser the mugger, Bluecoat Verdamp the habitual, the debonair Jimmy Gair in for financial irregularities and so on. The Nominal Roll confirms that during Bosman’s term stealing, rape and forgery and utterance were the common offences of his fellows, the vast majority of whom had British surnames. Surprisingly, the most prevalent offence was still the old bandiet one, amongst both whites and blacks, of livestock theft – to this Bosman pays no attention, possibly because their sentences were short. Nor does he feel there to be any category of ‘political prisoner’ – after the 1914 General Strike General J. C. Smuts had merely deported its Labour leaders; in 1922 Taffy Long had been hanged, but for murder rather than civil agitation. During Bosman’s term there was only one chronic escapist, and only one prisoner – presumably the original of thwarted ‘Pym’ – consigned to the Criminal Lunatic Asylum.

Reformers in the Transvaal had established with the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1909 the system of the indeterminate sentence for habitual criminals, together with the statutory body of the Board of Visitors, empowered to recommend releases to the prison Governor, as Bosman describes in Chapter 1. The change for the worse, as announced so astoundingly by the Governor to the assembled bluecoats at the end of Chapter 6, whereby indeterminate sentences were arbitrarily increased, was a setback for the reform mission and, as Bosman shows, seems to have had no meaning for the prison population.

By the mid-1940s prison reform was again an issue in the South African press: the Reverend H. P. Junod, who had served for many years as the chaplain to the segregated-off black prisoners of Pretoria Central, formed his Penal Reform League, and in 1945 the Lansdown Commission on Penal and Prison Reform was appointed. Although there is no evidence to suggest that these influenced Bosman to write Cold Stone Jug, its appearance in 1949 was nevertheless pertinent. No other writer offered the shocking testimony that all the prison system taught its inmates was stoically to endure.

And yet in Bosman’s day Pretoria Central Prison was a model institution of its kind, conscientiously managed by its Governor, Deputy Governor, Medical Officer, Head Warder, Overseer and other ranks. The Solly Flatt album, compiled in 1957 and kept at the Museum of the Department of Correctional Services in Pretoria, shows this clearly, in picture after picture. Flatt was first the prison’s Reception Clerk, then its Mess Caterer and eventually Head Warder. Between 1910 and the early 1940s he was also the official photographer, so that the mugshots of Bosman are probably his, or at least taken under his supervision. In one photo Flatt stands in his uniform and in full view behind the tripod, while his assistants – in exactly the convict garb Bosman describes – correctly keep their faces out of the lens. The tailor-shop, the printers, the brushmakers, signwriters, stonecutters and school are exactly as Bosman depicted. Even the stone quarry is captured on film, as is the Swedish drill conducted with military precision in the exercise yard.

Yet the crusade to reform Pretoria Central Prison was in full swing while Bosman was inside, thanks to Stephen Black. South Africa’s own working-class lad, Black had struggled his way up from boxing to being the country’s leading actor-manager. Diverted from showbiz to satirical journalism, he founded in Johannesburg his scarifying sheet, The Sjambok, Vol. 1, No. 1 being dated 19 April, 1929. Until March, 1931, The Sjambok would continue to appear weekly, despite mounting libel suits and other legal threats, as an alternative to the establishment’s big-sheet press and with the novelty of R. R. R. Dhlomo as a leading contributor. Only six weeks into its run – on 31 May, 1929 – Black carried a sketch called In the Beginning by one ‘Ben Africa’, which he must have known was a pseudonym of the young Herman Charles Bosman, forbidden to publish as he was behind bars. A feverish African liberation fantasy about Adam and Eve in an unenclosed landscape, the sketch was written in the same coyly erotic, dagga-dreamy vein as the prison poems in The Blue Princess sequence.

Then on 14 June, 1929, Black’s Sjambok began the remarkable instalments of the prison confessions of its greatest celebrity, the nation’s ‘Uncle Joe’ – the originally British actor, Lago Clifford, who from 1 July, 1924, on Radio JB had been the country’s first full-time announcer. A year before he had been consigned to Pretoria