Mary Bland Grew Up On A Farm

This was taken on my grandparents’ Frank and Annie Bland’s farm, Nuwejaarsvlei in the Harrismith district, eighteen miles out on the road to Witsieshoek. The farm is now under Sterkfontein Dam. The solid sandstone stables (‘five loose boxes’) were more stable (!) than the house, which was a long thin prefabricated structure bought from the British army on Kings Hill when they left town in 1913, eleven years after the end of the Boer War. Grandpa Frank bred and raced race horses. For a while . . .

Frank had the prefab carted out to the farm, then cut off a portion of the long house so they only lived in four rooms: A lounge, a kitchen and two bedrooms. They bathed in a zinc bath in the kitchen while Frank showered with cold water in a reed enclosure outside. In all seasons. In the Eastern Freestate. Bath water was heated in paraffin tins on the coal stove. Lighting was by lamplight. The toilet was a long-drop outside under trees along a path of white-washed stones leading from the kitchen door.

Here’s older sis Pat pushing Mother Mary in their dolls pram in the farmyard. See the stable sandstone stables in the background.

Frank started to build a big stone house from sandstone quarried on the farm. Built on a slope, it was level with the ground at the back, but ended in a high drop in front, which never did get the grand steps that were to lead up to the big veranda. The walls went up and the kids would roam around the big house, four bedrooms, big rooms, big kitchen but Mom says, “No bathroom.” Frank believed in an outside bathroom.

The roof never went on. The builder wanted many sheep (Mom thinks 200!) to do the roof and Frank balked at that / couldn’t afford it.

Other buildings on the farm were a workshop, Frank’s office and a garage for his yellow ‘Erskine’ tourer. Mom remembers: “It had open sides; when it rained you put up side flaps.”

Later Frank bought a 1936 Chev Standard – perhaps like this one, but ‘light brown’:

Mom Mary remembers cousin Janet leaving the door open after she and older sister Pat had jumped out just before Frank drove into the garage. The door, she says, was “damaged forever.”

The Nuwejaarspruit runs from Nuwejaarsvlei down to the Wilge river downstream of Harrismith and then into the Vaal Dam. Sterkfontein dam was built on the spruit and drowned the farm under Tugela river water pumped up from KwaZulu Natal. You would now have to scuba dive in the clear water to see the farmhouse. This picture is taken from roughly above the farm looking back towards Harrismith’s long Platberg mountain with Baker’s Kop on the left:

They called the hills on the farm ‘Sugar Loaf’ and ‘Horseshoe’. Mom loved the walks they would undertake with Dad Frank.

I wish we had more pictures of the farm. Here are the only ones I have found so far of areas near the farm before it was flooded:

Annie also always drove. Frank said she always drove too fast. Years later the younger crowd John Taylor and Mike Malcolm-Smith said she should speed up – “to the speed limit”!!

Then the farming ended. The Blands moved into town – the metropolis of Harrismith – ca.1939 to start a petrol station and garage, having lost the farms. In September 1943 Frank had a colosistectomy for gallstones’ performed by his friend and GP Dr Frank Reitz. Mom went to visit him in hospital on her fifteenth birthday, 18 September. He died two months later, aged fifty. The next year, when Annie needed an op, she sent Mary off by train with Granny Bland to Durban to stay with Mrs Jim Caskie – ‘a huge fat lady’ – in the Echoes Hotel.

While in Durban they saw a movie “This Is The Army.”

Luckily Annie came through the ordeal intact. She would live for many a year yet.

~~oo0oo~~

Nearby farm neighbours on Kindrochart were the Shannons, George and Belle, with son Jack, a few years older than Pat and Mary. The Shannons also bred racehorses and achieved forever fame when they won the Gold Cup with their horse Rinmaher.

When Jack had outgrown his Shetland Pony named ____, his parents suggested to him that he give it to the Bland girls on Nuwejaarsvlei. He looked dubious but his parents encouraged him.

“Will you do that?” they prodded him.

“Yes, but not with pleasure” said Jack.

Recently Sheila found a pic of Jack – probably on that very pony!

Peter Bell (or Hastings-Bell) became a pilot in the Rhodesian airforce and tragically went missing in action in WW2.

~~oo0oo~~

~~oo0oo~~

Decades later, here’s Mary in 1990 cruising above Nuwejaarsvlei in a boat the ole man built, with her old family home somewhere underwater below her:

~~oo0oo~~

More decades later and I phoned Mary (now aged 92). She said she’d had a lovely night’s sleep and . . . see here.

The Erskine was an American Automobile built by The Studebaker Corp. in South Bend, Indiana from 1926 to 1930.