Sugar and Natal: the Pioneers - Mack, Platt, Babbs, King

ROBERT GAZLEY MACK

Mack and his brother James arrived in Natal on the Henrietta in July 1850. Robert bought land on the Isipingo Flat and in 1852 he and two other Isipingo farmers sent a wagon to Compensation to buy plant cane from Edmund Morewood. In 1861, Robinson states that Mack 'started with half-a-crown and a family of sturdy sons'; by 1870 there were 300 acres under cane on the Mack estate. Though Robert Mack was dead by that time, succeeding generations of the Mack family continued as sugar planters in the Isipingo area.

SIDNEY & LAWRENCE PLATT

These Yorkshiremen arrived in Natal within a year of each other, possibly attracted by cotton prospects in the Colony. Sidney, however, bought land at Isipingo in 1849 and Lawrence secured 50 acres near his brother's property, naming the farm Prospecton. At first the Platts, like many other early farmers, grew beans as a cash crop, but in 1852 Lawrence joined Mack and Birkett, also of Isipingo, in sending an ox-cart to Morewood at Compensation to buy cane-tops. Lawrence Platt's first mill, like his brother Sidney's, was ox-powered but they each soon acquired a steam mill.

Lawrence Platt died in 1886, and his work was continued by his youngest son Alfred, born in 1853, to whom he had given Prospecton at the end of the Anglo-Zulu War 1879. Alfred Platt died in 1938 - in 1945 the Prospecton Estate was amalgamated with Tongaat Sugar Co Ltd, with Cecil Platt, grandson of Lawrence, as a director. Cecil died in 1950, aged 68.

ROBERT BABBS

Babbs and his wife Sarah were passengers on the Globe in 1850. Like Jeffels, he didn't like the allotment provided in the cotton lands near Umhlali and settled at the Isipingo Flat, becoming a sugar planter and manufacturer at his Umlaas Estate. He started with an ox-power mill but by 1856 was sending into Durban sugar made at a new 8-horse power steam mill. John Robinson wrote in 1861 that Babbs's estate was the largest but one in the Colony, with 360 acres of cane.

Between 1862 and 1864 Babbs sold Umlaas Plantation to John Daniel Koch, a merchant. At the same time Koch bought Smart's sugar estate and the combination of these two farms was named Reunion. This concern was built up by Daniel de Pass, who later formed a syndicate of neighbouring planters to make Reunion one of the leading estates in Natal.


RICHARD ('DICK') KING

The original grant of 6 000 acres made to Dick King included the whole of the Isipingo Flat. Most of his neighbours bought their land from him, and they began planting cane in 1852 though it's uncertain when King himself planted his first cane - possibly about 1854 or earlier.
When the Flat was flooded in 1856, King, by means of a raft, rescued his neighbouring sugar planter, Smart, with his family, from the attic of Smart's house, where they had been forced to stay for two days and three nights due to the rising flood-waters.

He first had an ox-power mill but by the end of 1857 was operating a steam mill. John Robinson noted in 1861 that King had 110 acres under cane.

In 1868 King's estate was sold by auction to WH Acutt for £2 200. Shortly afterwards the Reunion estate, also on the Flat, was reorganized and Robinson wrote that Reunion consisted of three different estates, those owned in 1861 by Babbs, Smart and King. In the 1870s King himself continued to grow cane on the higher ground around his house at Isipingo.

King married Clara Jane Noon, sister of Adolphus Henry and Arthur Noon, who were also sugar planters at Isipingo. See more on Noon at:
http://molegenealogy.blogspot.com/2013/03/the-noon-family-in-natal-mormonism-and.html

Sugar and Natal: the Pioneers - Joyner

WILLIAM JOYNER

The Feildens were not alone in their losses as a result of the 1856 flood. On the Isipingo Flat, William Joyner's sugar mill machinery was washed away forever.

Joyner came to Natal with his wife Ann and family on the Conquering Hero in June 1850 and lived in Durban for about two years working as a painter and decorator before moving to the Isipingo to farm at his sugar estate named Dingwall. During that time, Richard ('Dick') King, the well-known early colonist, was his neighbour. In 1860 Joyner sold his Isipingo property and moved to a new farm in Alexandra County on the Ifafa River, Ellangowan. By 1863 he had a 6-horse power steam mill in operation. In 1870, John Robinson wrote: 'Mr Joyner ... assisted by his intelligent and industrious sons, has year by year laboured on, until now more than 200 acres of sugarcane stretch round his house and a steam mill smokes under his windows'. Joyner produced sugar made from the indigenous cane, imphe.

His daughter, Clara Joyner Anderson, in her Reminiscences and Memories of Early Durban and its Pioneers*, gives a detailed picture of what life was like for pioneering sugar farmers in Natal, working with primitive equipment and their crop threatened by the elements and other hazards. Joyner at one period prospected for gold and during one of his absences from home a run-away fire threatened his Ellangowan mill. Close neighbours, Aiken and Bazley, came to the rescue of Mrs Joyner who was running the mill alone.

Joyner sold Ellangowan estate in 1868. Eventually it became part of Reynolds Bros Ltd. William Joyner died in East Griqualand in 1886 at the residence of his son, Archibald Scott Keith Joyner. The latter was born 3 Jan 1877; he married Florence Rose Beale and they had two sons and three daughters. Archibald Joyner served in the Natal Royal Rifles 1896-99, transferred to B Squadron, Natal Carbineers 1899; he was a marksman. After the Anglo-Boer War he farmed in the Matatiele district at 'Bon Accord'. In 1916 he was Lieut in 1st Cambridgeshire Regiment serving 16 months in the trenches in France, and was wounded 22 August 1919. He then returned to farming in East Griqualand.

For more on Joyner descendants see:
http://home.global.co.za/~mercon/mercer/James%20Keith%20Joyner.htm

* copies available at Killie Campbell Library, Durban

Sugar and Natal: the Pioneers - Morewood

For decades prior to white settlement in Natal, there was an indigenous variety of sugar cane which grew wild and was known to the Zulus as imphe. It was chewable and sweet, but its sugar content wasn't found by settlers to be high enough to make its cultivation commercially viable. There was also umoba, an imported strain of true sugarcane: in 1837 the traveller Nathaniel Isaacs mentions both these plants. In 1858, Michael Jeffels, a planter and miller at Isipingo, stated that to his certain knowledge sugarcane was growing in the area of the Isipingo River at the time of Shaka's war with Faku in 1828.

EDMUND MOREWOOD

Morewood, regarded as the founding father of the sugar industry in Natal, made a very early visit to this area in 1833, before spending time in Australia, New Zealand and Mauritius. He returned to Natal in 1838, after the Battle of Blood River, when British military forces had been temporarily withdrawn and the flag of the Voortrekker Republic of Natalia had been hoisted at the port. Morewood was on good terms with the Voortrekkers and was one of the men chosen to visit the Zulu King, Mpande, in the hopes of making a peace treaty. In 1840 Morewood was appointed Harbour Master and Commissioner of Customs under the Republican government, and it was in this capacity that he became involved in the events of 1842 when the vessels Conch and Southampton brought reinforcements to assist in raising the siege of a British force at what is now the Old Fort, Durban. William Bell, Captain of the Conch, remarked that Morewood, on being rowed out to the schooner, accompanied by the Voortrekkers' Military Secretary, was astonished to find the Conch's lower deck bristling with grenadiers 'as thick as bees'. According to Bell's Narrative, Morewood 'had sufficient power of speech left to say he was a friend of the English, but at the same time I could see that he was much embarrassed by the position he had placed himself in ...' and it truly was a difficult situation for an Englishman in the employ of the Trekkers.

Morewood's farm, Compensation, in 1852

However, Morewood remained in Natal and though the British authorities retained some understandable suspicions as to his allegiance, he quickly adjusted to the new British regime and began to pursue his interest in sugar cultivation.

In November 1847 the first plant cane was brought to Natal from Mauritius on the Sarah Bell, by the Milner brothers. It's thought that this cane, or a portion of it, was imported for Morewood. He began planting towards the end of 1847 or early in 1848. At that time he was employed as manager of the Natal Cotton Company on the Umhloti River, but he resigned his position in July 1849 to focus on growing sugar on his property, Compensation.

According to John Robinson's Notes on Natal written in 1870:

... before 1850 agriculture in this colony was confined to the growth of a little wheat by the Boers, and of a fair quantity of maize by the natives. Cotton culture ... had been attempted at New Germany (by the Bergtheil Settlers) ... a few coffee bushes were bearing berries in the garden of a private householder of Durban, and a small patch of sugarcane was being planted by Mr Morewood at Compensation.' Arrowroot (to a value of £31) was the first agricultural product to be exported from Natal, in 1853, but the following year the export record showed a new export - Sugar, £2. 

It was a small beginning, but of great significance. After that date, sugar was exported every year in increasing quantities, and, as Morewood had predicted, it became the 'staple article of Natal'. 

A young man named George Lamond who arrived in Durban in June 1850 on the Byrne ship Unicorn, joined Morewood at Compensation and later wrote that he found the estate under the management of 'a surveyor named George Jackson, with some half-a-dozen ploughmen (plus native labour). We had six acres under cane ... When I left in 1854 we had more than 100 acres of cane ready for crushing. In 1851 I helped to make and eat the first sugar manufactured in Natal ... The ploughmen were Randal, South, Coward, Dykes and an apprentice named Moore, son of a Gloucester parson, and a grand old Dutch gardener named van Versfeld'. Late in 1850, Morewood constructed a simple mill, which would be used to crush his first cane crop.

Morewood, a man of apparently boundless energy, was also involved in immigration as agent in Natal for the Justina, which arrived in November 1850 under a private scheme arranged by George Murdoch and Capt Richard Pelly. Among the passengers were Thomas and Lewis Reynolds who would become leading figures in the sugar industry. The ship also brought £5 000 worth of merchandise for sale in South Africa: this venture had been arranged by Morewood's brother, J.J. Morewood, then residing in London.

The Noon Family in Natal: Mormonism and Sugar

In the Natal Mercury of March 20 1863 there appeared the following paragraph:

Adolphus Henry NOON (the Mormon Elder mentioned in the above extract) and his brother Arthur N. NOON were sugar planters on the Isipingo River from about 1860 to 1863. Their sisters were Clara Jane and Susan Noon. Clara is better known as the wife of Richard ('Dick') King, also of Isipingo, the Natal colonist who undertook the famous ride to Grahamstown in 1842, taking news of the besieged British Garrison at the Port and enabling reinforcements to be sent by HMS Southampton and William BELL's schooner Conch, which ended the siege. The younger Noon sister, Susan, married another famous Natalian, Robert Bristow TATHAM. A brother to the Noon siblings, Charles, died in England in infancy; Kent was their home county, and all were born and baptized there.

In April 1863, a month after the above Natal Mercury reference, Messrs A H and A N NOON offered for sale their 300 acre sugar estate on the Isipingo plus various items of related equipment including 1 by 12 h.p. (i.e. horse power) steam engine, 1 by 6 h.p. steam engine, 1 new boiler 25 ft by 5 ft, 1 Bour Wetzel, 5-pan battery and 4 clarifiers. (See 'Valiant Harvest' p 284)

A sketch entitled 'A.H. and A.N. Noons' Sugar Mill, Isipingo South Africa 1863' shows the mill building as it looked when the brothers sold their Isipingo Estate. It gives a delightful glimpse into the Natal sugar industry at the time, with small turbaned figures of the indentured Indian workers in the foreground, some returning from the fields with hoes on their shoulders, others loading bags of sugar into a wagon. (The first indentured labourers had arrived in Natal in 1860.) Could the figure on horseback in the central foreground be one of the Noon brothers - or perhaps merely their overseer? To the right of the picture is a separate figure in a turban, carrying a stick, probably an Indian sirdar in charge of the labour. A dog runs at his heels. The words 'Isipingo Estate' can be seen written faintly on the main gable of the mill.*

In January, 1863, Elder Henry Aldus Dixon in company with Brother Aldophous (sic) H. Noon, commenced Latter Day Saints missionary work in Natal. They held meetings at Isipingo (Brother Noon's residence), inviting surrounding sugar planters and others to attend. After a few meetings, the congregation grew into a mob which disturbed and tried to break up the meetings. The magistrate and policemen were on the side of the rowdies, protecting them and screening them while trampling the law under their feet. (Source: A History of the South African Mission, Period I, 1852-1903, by Evan P. Wright).

The Noon brothers departed for the United States with a company of emigrants from Port Elizabeth in April of 1865 aboard the Mexicana, settling in Utah and later in Arizona. It was in 1865 that the South African Mission of the Church of Latter Day Saints was closed, possibly why the Noons left Natal in that year.

'No official reasons were given by Church Authorities in Salt Lake City or in England (headquarters of European Mission) for closing the South African Mission in 1865. Perhaps the chief reasons were because of the indifference of the local people, difficulties encountered by the missionaries, and because most of the faithful members had immigrated to Zion. No doubt Satan and his followers rejoiced when the mission was closed, but their victory was only temporary. LDS missionaries were to return to South Africa in 1903 and thereby fulfil the prophesy made by Jesse Haven on May 23, 1853'. (Evan P Wright Part II 1903-1904)

According to Noon descendants, Adolphus was not involved with the Latter Day Saints prior to his arrival in SA. He was quite young when he joined the British army in England (a South African unit which he knew would send him there - he wanted to join Clara in Natal) but just where and under what circumstances he was first associated with Mormonism is unknown. He was a devout journal keeper and produced three, A, B and C. Journal A was the oldest and was heavy with his experiences in South Africa - mainly his Mormon connections. Unfortunately, after he became disillusioned with the movement (in Utah), journal A disappeared; he probably destroyed it. Journals B and C have survived.

Clara Jane Noon remained in Natal and after the death of her husband Dick King, she married a Durban merchant, Joseph Henry RUSSELL.

*The original drawing of the mill, featured on this page, is in the Old Court House Museum collection, Durban, presented by Mr and Mrs A H Noon. 

Acknowledgements to Tom Montgomery, husband of Adolphus Noon's great great granddaughter, for information on the Noon family.
Also to Jenny Harries of LDS Family History Library for extracts from the works of Evan P Wright.