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 - Jeffels

MICHAEL JEFFELS

Jeffels arrived in Natal on the Sovereign in March 1850 with his wife Mary and children. His allotment of about 112 acres on the cotton lands, assigned to him under Byrne's scheme, was relinquished in favour of a property on Dick King's farm on the Isipingo Flat, near the confluence of the Umbogintwini. Jeffels purchased plant cane from Morewood in 1852 and by 1853 the Feildens rode out to visit the Jeffels family, reporting that 'the sugarcane of three or four months growth was very fine'. In 1853 and 1854 Jeffels imported two sets of sugar mill machinery from England, the first recorded importation into Natal of such machinery.

As early as 1854, Jeffels saw the need for central milling if sugar was to be produced economically in Natal, and he was instrumental in organizing a meeting at Messrs Evans and Churchill's store, to find ways of building and maintaining a central mill at Isipingo to meet the needs of the growing number of small planters.

In 1856, The Natal Mercury remarked that 'Mr Jeffels is the type of a class that form the pioneers and harbingers of all successful colonization ...'

In a letter to the same newspaper in October 1858, Jeffels claimed that he had imported the first sugar-mill and plant into Natal, had brought the first sugar of quantity into Durban, and introduced the first steam sugar-mill into the Colony.

A parcel of Jeffels's sugar won a prize at an exhibition in Cape Town and was purchased by the French consul, who sent it on to the Paris Exhibition. Jeffels was at that time well ahead of other Natal sugar planters. He was also a public-spirited citizen, nominated as a Durban Councillor and as Justice of the Peace. He died in 1862; his will is held at Pietermaritzburg Archives Repository. By the 1870s his estate was managed by WF Jeffels, possibly Michael's brother.

Jeffels's Albion Estate was sold in 1899, eventually becoming part of Prospecton Sugar Estate.

For more on the Isipingo sugar planters see article in Natalia by Duncan Du Bois:
http://natalia.org.za/Files/42/Natalia%2042%20Article%20Article%20Du%20Bois%20pp%2019-32.pdf