4 - The content of respectability

Summary

A courtship and a marriage

In 1859 John Findlay, the twenty-year-old son of a Scottish tobacconist and merchant in Cape Town, had gone to live in the mountains of the North-East Cape. There he became a trader, working in the store on the farm Oranjefontein which John Austen maintained as an outstation of his own store in Lady Grey. The village of Lady Grey itself had been founded only two years earlier, as a kerkdorp, to allow the farmers of the area to attend church even when the road to Aliwal North was cut by the flooding of the Kraai River and the depredations of Thembu and Sotho in the neighbour-hood. Findlay very quickly gained the respect of those among whom he moved – at least of the whites. Despite his youth, the Dutch Reformed Church Council asked him to become a Justice of the Peace, an honour he refused because he felt himself too young.

While he was still in Cape Town, he had a sweetheart, known only as Mary Ann, but this does not seem to have been very serious. At any event, such a relationship as there may have been did not survive the 900 kilometres and two months' journey that separated them and John Findlay's sister Margaret felt called upon to warn him

Never think of marrying a Dutch girl, and don't be kissing the Boers' daughters too much, or perhaps some Boer will be thinking more than to please…?, and perhaps Miss S. will not be pleased about it either; for I know I would not like a young man who was too fond of kissing. You say there is no respect of persons among the Boers. Now I would like you to be agreeable, pleasant and obliging to all, but only make intimate friends of a few.