Something of a Novelty
Postcards of South Africa
by Archie Atkinson
Note from the Editor, Vivien Allen
The postcards with which Archie deals throw a fascinating sidelight on the history of South Africa from the last decade of the old Zuidafrikaansche Republiek over a hundred years ago, when Paul Kruger ruled it, through to the outbreak of World War I.
Many of them provide the only record of how the towns and countryside looked then but perhaps more important are the messages written on many of them.
These were colonial times and many of the cards were sent home to family and friends in Britain by men (and a few women) who were working in South Africa or serving in the British Army. They record contemporary White attitudes and provide useful footnotes to the social history of the era.
Archie says that he first became interested in postcards in the late 1940s or early 1950s. “My then father-in-law was a magistrate and he had a very fine collection of military postcards. Over the years my interest grew strongly. I also realised that, if the cards did not have a monetary value they would disappear – simply being thrown away by the children of collectors. So I encouraged the sale and trade of cards through conversation and articles in the paper I worked for but I never became a dealer myself - I just made my own collection.”
Right: Archie Atkinson in the late 1970s
Below: The first postcard sent in South Africa.
Archie was born in South Africa and became a journalist with the Argus Group newspapers. He retired to the UK with his second wife, Vivien Allen. Whilst living in the Isle of Man, he founded the Southern Africa Postcard Research Group (SAPRG) with Vivien as Secretary. He produced their first newsletters on an electronic typewriter and an ancient copier that is now a museum piece, later they moved on to computers.
This book started as a series of articles in that newsletter and he negotiated with a Cape Town publisher but these fell through and he put it aside for many years. Now 90 years old and with failing sight it was difficult for him to do the revision himself but he has been consulted throughout.
Many of his notes and items in the text stem from his own memories of such things as travelling by ox wagon. His father was a schoolmaster in Uitenhage in Cape Province. Every year in the summer holidays they packed everything into an ox wagon hired from a local farmer, harnessed the full span of sixteen oxen and set off for the two-day trek to their holiday house at Sea View, on the coast west of Port Elizabeth – a journey of about 22 miles. Where the going was over hills or through the sand dunes the full span was needed, but eight oxen were sufficient on the easier parts. His mother was a large lady and heavy. When the wagon began to tilt over, she had to be persuaded to sit on the other side!
Archie died on 2 March, 2008, aged 90.
For a copy of this book please contact Vivien Allen