Robin Castell

Robin Castell has produced a veritable library of books on the South Atlantic island St Helena: it is a place I have always wanted to visit, a remote English anomaly in the middle of nowhere, but one of particular significance to South Africans.

Although the island’s most famous prisoner was Napoleon, it was also home from to chief Dinizulu, son of Cetewayo, and his entourage from 1870 to 1897. as well as large numbers of Boer Prisoners of War, taken captive between 1900 and 1902.

The book comprised hundreds of photographs and is a tastefully designed volume – an authentic treat consisting of nearly 400 sepia toned pages, with a carefully chosen font and rubrics. As a reference work however it leaves everything to be desired.

The pictures are all briefly and tantalizingly captioned – ‘Geranium Valley; Path to the Tenantless Tomb’, “Speery Island or ‘After the Disastrous Flood” – they all beg answers to the questions who, what, when, why, and to enjoy the book you need to be a St Helena native, and a well-informed one at that.

An all too brief preface does little to set the contents in any sort of context, but it does touch on the Anglo-Boer war prison camps of Deadwood and Broadbottom, and the factoid that the prisoners actually had their own photographic studios on the island.

The Colonial influence is everywhere – the houses, fortifications, social life and parades – but also in the ethnicity of the people. During the mid 19th Century the Royal Navy was intercepting slave ships and depositing the liberated cargoes at St Helena for onward shipment to the cape or the Caribbean.

There is a substantial black population at St Helena’s today, so it is safe to assume many freedmen remained on the island: family portraits also reveal a fair degree of interracial marriage where a typically whiskered and pompous pater familias poses with his fashionably dressed black wife and ‘coloured’ children.

How can a written review do justice to a picture book? Quite simply, it can’t but South Africans will find the architecture tantalizingly familiar: whether in the Cape of Good Hope, or St Helena, the Victorian abroad was nothing if not consistent, and the island is awash with villas, mansions, cricket grounds and cathedrals.

Despite being swelteringly hot in the summer the photographs show fertile farms, shady lanes, tennis parties and country mansions peopled by ladies and gentlemen in fashionable layers of tight heavy clothes. Even Chief Dinizulu is pictured in a three piece suit and top hat while his sullen-looking wives are corseted with high collars, leg o’ mutton sleeves and voluminous petticoats in the European manner.

Photographs of the Boer POWs show life in the prison camps may not have been quite as dire as romantic accounts recall: the prisoners had their own bakery, many of the senior men has their wives, servants and assistants with them, and several of them lived in comfortable bungalows.

The number of non-South Africans among the Boer prisoners is surprising and we see French internees visiting Napoleon Bonaparte’s empty tomb, and Irish, Russian, German, Scandinavian and even Australian sympathizers with the Boer cause.

The bulk of pictures were taken before 1910 but the pages covering the years from then until 1947 are worth a mention: interracial marriage, peace despite the world war, royal visits, and cultural harmony – a grand time to be alive and living in St Helena.

The book ends with the 1947 tour of the British Royal family: dedicated King George, with his always game and determinedly smiling wife and his daughters - dutiful Princess Elizabeth and bored Princess Margaret – a fine set of pictures with which to close.… (more)