Parallel Broughtons | Broughton Spurtle

Submitted by Editor on Mon, 06/12/2010 - 09:46

Unreliable Geographies by Aeneas McHaar
No. 14: Part 2 — Pilrig, Johannesburg, South Africa
26º 12’ S, 28º 2’ E

Patient readers will remember how last month (Breaking news 1.11.10) the McHaar recounted in heart-stopping detail the engagement of Vivien Sartoris and Archibald ‘Duggy’ Balfour, which foundered upon furnishings. Readers may also recall that, despite a headline promise and heroic efforts thereafter, Pilrig figured hardly at all. That deficit will shortly be made good.

Vivien, you will not be surprised to hear, does not appear to have been broken-hearted by the broken-off engagement. Ever the rubber-ball dynast, two years later she married a cousin of President Theodore Roosevelt. Duggy, however, out of ambition or a desire to escape the Society gossip columnists of his day, left for South Africa in August 1901 (less than a month after the split).

[img_assist|nid=1331|title=|desc=|link=node|align=right|width=173|height=200]He did not go to a warzone to fight for Queen and country – as two of his brothers had done – but to practise as a lawyer in Johannesburg. From August 1901 to July 1902 he worked for Sir Richard Solomon, Attorney-General in the Transvaal (right), and was for two months Acting Commissioner of Patents before taking up as an Advocate of the Supreme Court at the Johannesburg Bar.

His move to the Crown Colony may have been a response to the broken engagement, hastily arranged by influential friends. Certainly the timing is suggestive. However, it may equally have been some time in the offing. Duggy’s sister was married to the diplomat John Lyttleton, who was himself soon to visit South Africa; and his distant cousin Arthur Balfour was also deeply immersed in imperial policy.

In any case, Duggy soon eased himself into the Johannesburg elite, and began enjoying the company of like-minded fellows at a variety of gentlemen’s clubs.*

[img_assist|nid=1332|title=|desc=|link=node|align=right|width=640|height=320]However, Johannesburg during this period was no luxury posting. What is now sometimes described as the largest manmade forest in the world was at that period a hot, dusty, rock-strewn plain dotted with noisy mines and affording little shade. Perhaps the quarrel with Vivien had been not so much about which furnishings as about which continent those furnishings should occupy. With or without her, what Duggie sorely needed now was a comfortable place in which to live.

Comfort, though, would not be enough. Duggie and his elite peers could not abide Johanesburg's expression of new-town vitality, prosperity, optimism and the nouveau riche tastelessness of its ‘Rand lords’. They despised the hearty vulgarity of Edwardian prefabs (ordered from catalogues and imported from England) combining with careless promiscuity elements of French chateaux and Gothic battlements, mock Tudor mansions and Cotswold manors. Lord Milner, the senior diplomat charged with rebuilding South Africa, openly sneered at such edifices, claiming that they exhibited all ‘the taste of a stockbroker’. He considered them, in aesthetic terms, little better than the mud and daub hovels of the Boer. What he (and Duggy and others of their ilk) craved was a ‘better and more permanent order of architecture’.

[img_assist|nid=1325|title=|desc=|link=node|align=right|width=176|height=200]Step forward Herbert Baker (1862–1946, right), an English architect who had arrived in the Cape in 1892 and soon settled. His neo-Classical revivals were already popular choices for the commission of government and institutional buildings (e.g. the Union Buildings in Pretoria, 1910; and the South African Institute for Medical Research in Johannesburg, 1912) but his domestic architecture would also prove successful. Influenced by the Arts and Crafts movement back home, he began teaching Southern Hemisphere craftsmen to build soundly, using indigenous and natural materials. Although his work was late Victorian in fashion, with Saxon, French, Italian Romanesque, and French Norman influences, ‘... [the] rare affinity achieved ... between the buildings, their surroundings and the climate, gave them the organic quality which is one of the criteria of great architecture of any era.’

On a cool (although at that time, treeless) ridge overlooking the veldt and the unsightly rash of pitheads around Johannesburg below stood suburban ‘Parktown’. Here, Baker began building homes in a spacious, modern European style using indigenous materials, and it was one such design which Duggy secured for himself.

As detailed last month, Duggy claimed a blood connection to Arthur Balfour, British Prime Minister from 1902. But he also clung to a tenuous link with the Balfours of Pilrig in Broughton. James Balfour (1681–1737), who originally bought Pilrig House (right) for the family, was ‘Duggy’s’ third great-grandfather. This was apparently sufficient reason for Duggy to name his new, luxury dwelling set amid gardens between Rockridge and Eton Roads after the old, decrepit family pile – still set in a leafy demesne but increasingly encircled by biscuit factories, tanneries, wool warehouses and iron foundries on the outskirts of Edinburgh. (There was an influential Scottish element in early Johannesburg, and consequently several Edinburgh-sounding suburbs including Rosebank and Claremont.)

[img_assist|nid=1326|title=|desc=|link=node|align=right|width=200|height=134]The new Pilrig House – windows small to restrict the influx of beastly African heat and light – boasted a stone and mortar base up to the first storey, with the second storey having a rough mortar finish for an earthen look, but painted white. It had a shingle roof and south-facing balcony overlooking the garden. Here was originally an orchard of cherries, plums and apples, as well as a tennis court and reservoir.

For all its simple proportions, restraint, its use of natural materials such as sand, stone and timber, Pilrig House was a new build in a new estate in a new city in a new country, and in order for it not to appear the home of a colonial parvenu it required further lashings of history. Duggy again turned to his Scottish roots, and, according to Ray Balfour (an American expert on the family's history**), had the original Pilrig House’s sundial shipped out to South Africa for this purpose.

[img_assist|nid=1327|title=|desc=|link=node|align=right|width=428|height=640]Whether the Johannesburg sundial (pictured right) is indeed the Scottish original or a copy of it is not absolutely certain. It is certainly a Northern Hemisphere sundial since, in its present situation, it displays for example 3:00pm at 9:00am. Clarification may come with the reopening of a local museum and archive in Johannesburg in 2012. However, it is certainly more authentic than – and predates – the ‘restored’ sundial on Broughton's Pilrig House today (although the latter sits on the original base of armorial stone and angel supporters). It is also older than the designer’s mock-up which appeared in plans prior to the Broughton building’s restoration and internal redevelopment in 1989 (see photos at foot of page). Exactly when the original Pilrig House sundial disappeared is also a matter of conjecture: it appears to have been missing since at least 1949 when a fire ravaged the building.

The 1640 sundial's inscription – DUM SPECTUS FUGIT – should properly read DUM SPECTAS FUGIT, which roughly translates as 'While you stand there gawping, [Time] flies', a pleasant Presbyterian rebuke to anyone enjoying a moment's rest. Interestingly, the date is only two years after the year in which Pilrig House was built. The inscription on the modern sundial at Broughton's Pilrig House – ADSIT DEUS – means 'God is with me' and was the Balfour family motto. The dates in the black and white mock-up represent the family's years spent in the building.

Parktown, despite its rich undertones of imperial, class and racial privilege remains one of the most desirable areas of Johannesburg in which to live. Partly because they embody so much of a young nation's history, many of the luxurious houses built there by Baker are now on historical/cultural trails and listed as Provincial Heritage Sites. Sadly, much of the South African Pilrig House's garden and reservoir has since been overtaken by an undistinguished new office block, rendering the rear rather more cramped that it used to be.[img_assist|nid=1333|title=|desc=|link=node|align=right|width=200|height=134]

For all its charms, Duggy Balfour himself did not remain in the house very long. He returned home in 1908, and married Hylda Snow Paget in London's St George’s Church, Hanover Square, in December 1909. By 1915 he was practising as a solicitor. His had been a brief sojourn in a sunny clime. He died in Munden Parva, Hertfordshire in 1951. Any further information on his Scottish connections, South African adventure or later life would be gratefully received.

* Although there is nothing to prove Duggy knew him (despite sharing a legal qualification and an interest in South Africa’s ‘heavensent’ but empty trout streams), the author and politician John Buchan also served in the Colony under Milner’s Administration as a young man. A passionate admirer of Robert Louis Stevenson, Buchan would certainly have recognised the Pilrig reference at the time since RLS’s mother was part of the Balfour family. Again coincidentally, Buchan – who had many relations in the Borders – is now remembered there in a small museum at ... Broughton.

** The McHaar is very grateful for the exhaustive scholarship of Ray Balfour, generously shared along with photographs taken on a recent trip to the new Pilrig House. Thanks also to Floranelle Bird – Chair of the Parktown and Westcliff Preservation Trust – for her local knowledge and encouragement.