Researching Herman Charles Bosman’s prison memoir, Stephen Gray got into his death cell
Shows how much I knew about South Africa’s most famous inland jail, Pretoria Central Prison. There its most celebrated inmate, Herman Charles Bosman, spent “a somewhat lengthy sojourn”, as he put it in Cold Stone Jug. But that was in the 1920s.
Then South African English nearly lost its Big Fifth (after Olive Schreiner, Pauline Smith, Roy Campbell and William Plomer), who as a grown man was to outsell them all. But as a mere 20-year-old, having shot his step-brother, he was held waiting there. For murder, the sentence was death by the hemp.
Pretoria Central was Lord Milner’s idea, to connect the conquered Transvaal up to the Imperial network of crime control. It opened to its first 600 in 1906. It has enjoyed full occupancy ever since.
Being cleared, and pursuing our duties as the new general editors of Bosman’s works, Craig MacKenzie and I get to see his actual cell on death row. In the new South Africa that kind of industrialised killing has been suspended, the gallows mothballed. But the thickness of the walls has not changed, nor the slope up to that six-inch window with its three black bars, closed with cardboard. Such was the architectural cruelty.
My only thought is: Why did they not let the condemned sit it out in some garden? And those final ritual dinners served on the floor here, last breakfasts of brandy. The dop and drop system of punishment. Today the cell is a store for shelving.
Once Patrick Mynhardt, after one of his recitals from Cold Stone Jug, met the actual warder in charge of Bosman here. He worried that, although the tousled-headed youth was a model prisoner, he often seemed unduly depressed.
Once Barney Simon and I turned our gruesome national classic into a stage production. We enjoyed no co-operation from the Department of Correctional Services. No names were to be mentioned, no costumes to be like the originals (all changed now anyway). I had to invent a Hamletish number for him – 1212B.
As it turns out, the real number on his ticket was three times as high – B3378. And nowadays the department could not be more helpful. We are given the special privilege of being invited into the archives of the Little Reserve. Which would we like to inspect: the Jopie Fourie file?
Well, a glance at Daisy de Melker, whom Bosman as a warped joke once he was out defended till she swung. She too pleaded for the royal prerogative of mercy. There is her childish letter, in pencil on blue Croxley, expecting him to believe all that arsenic was for the cats …
The archivists kindly wheel in for us that Domesday Book of penology, the Nominal Roll of Convicts, in which in black ink every particular was once inscribed. They even hold it open for us to photograph the mugshots of our man, pinned in.
Bosman (and a very few others, say one a month) was dressed to return to his maker like a waiter at the Palm Court. Black people had the same jacket and shirt, but no collar and tie. The curly locks stayed on until, over Christmas 1926, the Earl of Athlone reprieved him: 10 years with hard labour.
Then, for good behaviour, five, with two months off for the passage of the Flag Bill. Finally, after some clerical bungling, he served two days short of five years. During his extended adolescence, Bosman missed the whole of the Great Depression.
We are escorted to the prison library, where a convict with special permission to keep on his embroidered cap admits us. There are copies of Cold Stone Jug available. They are well thumbed.
Over the entrance is a canvas banner: Werk Saam en Wen Saam. Those Union locks, dated 1857, are still functioning perfectly. Touch the stonework of this fortification: Bosman had a hand in dressing it to perpetuate his own immurement.
When he emerged from the castle-door with its huge brass knocker on to Klawer Street, between Wimbledon and Toronto Streets (not on any tourist map), he was disturbed and unrepentant. Not until the post-war boom he helped create set the style of writing hard and true could he come to terms with the book, write it out of himself.
Bosman fans coming into Pretoria may nowadays turn off Ben Schoeman at that giant wild fig. Behind the checkpoint is an extraordinary museum, impeccably kept and full of souvenirs of prisoners who have done well (John Vorster, Nelson Mandela). On display are all the contraband items Bosman mentioned: mellowed dagga-pipes, tinder-boxes, forged keys and currency, tattooing devices. There are artworks made of matchsticks.
>From the era before prison reform are various souvenirs: leg-irons, body-chains, strait-jackets, the dreadful triangle. There is also a head warder’s immaculate photo album, illustrating each and every scene of Cold Stone Jug: the printers and the brush-makers, the stone-yard and the school, even the inmates like overgrown scouts doing precision Swedish drill. It is reassuring to know that, once Bosman got it all off his chest, he told it exactly as it had been.
The new anniversary editions of Cold Stone Jug and Voorkamer Stories: Idle Talk (which replaces Jurie Steyn’s Post Office and includes hitherto unpublished work) are out this week from Human &Rousseau