This is the story of my grandfather, written by my mother. It brought back memories of family dinners and the stories that were told about my Oupa and his family. This has been recounted wih much love and many spelling errors! I left the Afrikaans words because it is a story of an Afrikaner family.
My Father's Story, by Bettie Slabbert
My father was born in Pretoria, on the 21 July 1890, in the house they named Klein Constantia, in Sunnyside. He was the 6th child of Pieter Gerhard van der Byl,and Oumoetjie or Hester, nee Groenewald, and was named after his father. The older children were first Aunt Katie, later Ferreira, then aunt Jackie, married name Heyens, then Oom Andries, named after his grandfather, then Aunt Gummie [Hester],married name Hoogenhout, Oom Hennie, who started Iscor, then after my dad came Aunt Lettie, first DeVilliers, then Uekerman,then de Villiers again. Then the youngest was Oom Albie, a dentist and amateur actor and bachelor.
One of the stories I heard from my dad was about how they held the bridge when they expected the English general Roberts, was coming to take Pretoria. This was the Lion Bridge over the Apies river. He and some of the other kids in the street, some of them Cloetes, decided they would keep the enemy out with “Klei-Latte”, willow sticks with a large clod of mud on the end, which would then be thrown at the enemy. When the English didn’t arrive they went off to lunch and left one of the Cloetes to hold the bridge, But later when they returned they found only a pot of rice and no sign of Cloete, who had been taken by his parents to somewhere else to escape the Khakies!
The next day Roberts arrived and later asked my grandfather to supply his troops with food. He had an extensive business as a transport rider, as they were called, he had supplied the Government, with produce for the jails and the hospitals. but he refused to help Roberts and so was given 12 hours to prepare to be deported to the Cape. My Dad can remember the sisters stitching gold coins into the hems of their dresses as they were not allowed to take too much money with them. And I was told that the night before Roberts came my Grandfather had been busy all night with some of the Commando fighters coming to collect guns and ammo that he had hidden in his cellar. The van der Byls had always been rebels, as when van Ass was arrested in the Cape during the trouble there with Somerset[ I think it was? 1700 ?] there was also a van der Byl with him. The day after old vd Byl refused to help Roberts, the family were put on a train to the Cape. Dad told me how awful it was to see the other Afrikaners being put into cattle trucks, destined for the concentration camps. and the kindness of the Khakies who sneaked food and water to them. By then Lord Kitchener had established the concentration camps and these poor people were being sent there, but as the van der Byls were wealthy and had family in the Cape, my Great grandfather lived in Gordonsbay, they were sent there.
Then my father was sent to a school in Franschoek, and made to wear a board around his neck stating that he was a dirty Dutchman! But he survived, and after the war came back to Pretoria, and went to school at the Eendracht Skool.
A little story about a teacher there…There was a Hollander (Dutch) teacher, who was very polite, always raising his hat if anyone greeted him. This teacher used to get the tram that took a lot of the kids to school, it was still in those days pulled by horses, so they never came to a dead stop and the people had to jump on, grabbing the pole on the platform. So there was the teacher running to catch the tram, with his briefcase in the one hand and trying to grab the pole with the other and a kid would shout “More meneer!” And he would let go the pole to lift his hat, and so it went to the great amusement of the kids. Poor guy seemed to have run most of the way to the school!
My Dad and Oom Hennie were very close, cooking up pranks and often being punished for fighting and then being locked in their room together and planning more mischief.Once they were left to look after oom Albie while Oumoetjie went out and as Croquet was very popular then , told not to play as Albie could get hurt.But of course she had hardly left when they put Albie on the lawn and started a game.A ball hit Albie on the forehead and as such things go a huge lump rose on his forehead, and the two boys rushed him to the bathroom thinking the lump might burst. So they decided it should be cut to prevent it from bursting, and fetched a knife from the kitchen. Luckily Oumoetjie had forgotten something and returned in time to hear the screaming Albie and the two brothers arguing about, if they should make a cross or just a slit, on poor Albies head!
Then there was the time when their father wanted to learn to ride a bicycle. They offered to help him but again the one was holding the bike and had to hand over to the other and of course both let go and poor Oupa landed in the hedge! And when Aunt Katie had a boyfriend come to call. Ticky would put on one of her corsets and ride around on his bike in front of the stoep where they were having tea, she would have to bribe him to stop!
Oom Andries had gone off to war and was captured and sent to Ceylon, where he contacted some nasty tropical disease and was never very healthy after that .His father gave him a farm in the Free State , next to the one Aunt Jackie and Oom Jan Heyns lived on. One night my father had visited Andries and walking home in the dark he nearly went over a cliff or krans as it is called there, if it wasn't for the little fox terrier that kept pushing him in another direction, and all my dad could see was the white spots on his little black head.
A little story about Oom Jan,,,, He bought a car, a very novel thing in those days, and decided that it was too dangerous to drive in reverse, so put a wooden block in the way of the gearlever, so that he couldn’t put the car in reverse by accident! Aunt Jacky read up all about the car's engine and as my one uncle told me could most probably have serviced it herself. She was very intelligent, and had worked out the amounts of
wood, bricks, stone , cement and even the no. of nails needed to build their house on the farm.
My Dad went off to Canada to get a degree in Agriculture at the University in Gheulph.I have some pictures of him playing in the snow, but he was called home as his father was dying, and then the war [1914--18] war broke out and he wasn’t able to return to Canada. He eventually got a diploma from Cedara in Natal. He farmed on the Springbok flats, his nearest station was MacGreggor, and the nearest big[?] town was Warmbaths. Neighbors were the Pentz's and the Gillfillens, and the Morkels.
He built his own house on the farm, I think before he married my Mom. He had a servant OuBooi [I think his name was] who helped him. They first built a bedroom and a shower, and one morning as Dad was busy shaving he heard a swishing noise and looking down saw a big Ringhals[snake] trying to get out from under the washbasin , but the floor was very slippery , so my Dad ran out to fetch Oubooi to help get the snake out, but on returning with a sack, the snake suddenly got a grip on the cement floor and Dad and Oubooi took out the doorframe as they fled!
He invited some of his pals over and they must have had quite a party, because they ended up riding the horses, one guy with a full cowboy outfit my Dad had brought from Canada, and my Dad naked and without a saddle on the other, and he still won!
How he met my Mom...................apparently when he returned home from Canada, my mother was nursing my Grandfather, and my Dad saw her through the kitchen window making tea, so when she had the teapot in the one hand and the kettle in the other, he kissed her!! But at the time she was engaged to Dr.Barry so it was only some years later that they got married.
They farmed there until the Depression, when he sold the farm for a pittance. The prices for crops was so low that he had to pay the railway for the transport to the Co-op for his mealies. And he also grew peanuts, but they were so big [like our Party Peanuts now] that the Co-op sent them back saying they could not use them, so he had to pay the rail fare again .I was born in 1929, during the depression, so was about 4 when we moved to Pretoria. My Mother went nursing and my Dad walked the streets looking for a job. Then the Government took a census and he found work with the Census Board, but it didn’t last long and he was out of a job again. Then somehow he got a job at Iscor [When Oom Hennie heard about it he was cross with Dad that he hadn’t been to see him to get a job, but my Dad was much too proud to go begging for a job from the Boss of Iscor ]He worked on the schedule of the shunting of trains loading ore and depositing slag. These days they use a computer, and my cousin Klasie Hoogenhout told me that my Dad was brilliant at his job. He retired in 1955[?] and they sold the house in Muckleneuk Street and eventually stayed on a plot , where he built his own house; first an 'ovavel ' (an oval shaped house) and then the house .Years later they sold there and moved to Amanzimtoti. Dad had found that he had an aortic aneurism and was to take things slowly. but in Jan.1967 the aneurism burst and he was taken to Durban for an op .Those days they didn’t have the means to fix that sort of lesion and he died after coming out of the theatre. My Mother had been a theatre nurse and she had always told him that it was a very bad thing if a patient died on the table, so when he came out of the theatre she came to see him and he said" I’m going now, I didn’t die on the table though!" The Doctors were very shocked and thought he was going to pull through. He was cremated and we brought his ashes to Pretoria and put them in the Van Der Byl grave in the old Cemetery in Pretoria West.
He was a wonderful wise and loving man and an enlightened one too and I learnt many wise things from him.
