Cold Stone Jug - The Anniversary Edition. Herman Charles Bosman
Herman Charles Bosman
COLD STONE JUG
The Anniversary Edition
Edited by Stephen Gray
HUMAN & ROUSSEAU
Introduction
Safe in the arms of Jesus,
Safe in Pretoria gaol –
Fourteen days’ hard labour
For cutting off a donkey’s tail…
(Song of the old reprobate in
WILLIAM PLOMER’S TURBOTT WOLFE, 1926)
EXACTLY fifty years ago Herman Charles Bosman’s Cold Stone Jug was published by APB Bookstore (that is, the Afrikaanse Persboekhandel) at 3 Plein Street, Johannesburg. To its devoted first readers the early prison background of their humorous columnist and literary man-about-town came as something of a jolt.
But in the Nominal Roll of Convicts, the great Domesday-book kept in the archives at the Little Reserve of Pretoria Central Prison of all the prisoners admitted there, his name is indeed entered in pen as Prisoner No. B3378: Bosman, Herman Charles, Race: E, Sex: M, with his crime, the date of conviction and the sentence. His age is given as 21 years, although he was in fact still twenty, in danger of not living through to his majority. When he referred to his prison years as an unnaturally prolonged adolescence he was not being inaccurate.
Cover of the first edition, 1947
Because he was a capital case due for execution, his double mugshots were pinned to the page, where they remain as a kind of memento mori to this day. Only a dozen or so of the condemned are commemorated in this manner, indicating that hangings in the Transvaal in the mid-1920s occurred rarely (say, one or two a month); they were reserved for murderers only. Of his opposite number in the condemned cells, the immaterial character named ‘Stoffels’ whom Bosman introduces to us in Chapter 1, there remains no trace.
In their ID shots the condemned are dressed in one of two ways: whites wear a striped jacket, a formal white shirt with detachable stiff collar and a neat black bow-tie, so that they go to meet their Maker like waiters at the Palm Court; blacks are posed in the same jacket and shirt, but without the collar and tie. All the doomed sport their original wavy locks or nappy mops; on Death Row a shaved head would mean that the prerogative of mercy had been exercised and the prisoner become a proper convict. Hangings were impressive rituals; after all, Francis Bacon had recommended attendance at them for their edifying effect.
The trial of Bosman for the murder of his step-brother, David Russell, was tried as Case 358 in the Witwatersrand Division of the Supreme Court of South Africa in Johannesburg, on 11 and 15 November, 1926, before Mr Justice Gey van Pittius, without jury but with two magistrates as assessors. The crime itself had been committed on the night of 18 July at the Bosman-Russell family home in Bellevue East. Bosman had been held as an awaiting trial prisoner at the Johannesburg Fort for four months – ever since the first Sunday at Marshall Square which he recounts in the Preamble.
Although the judge was obliged to sentence him to hang by the neck until he be dead – the words are plain enough in black ink on the registrar’s cover-sheet (Verdict: Guilty; Sentence: Death) – he added the respectful but very strong recommendation to the Governor-General that, in this “very sad and pathetic case”, sentence be commuted; the youth of the offender and the absence of any prior intention to kill could be considered as the mitigating circumstances. With the concurrence of his assessors he continued: “If I may be allowed to make a suggestion, I would also respectfully recommend, in case His Excellency the Governor-General should see fit to make a reprieve, that the period of imprisonment be not a lengthy one.” Bosman echoed these words in the epigraph to Cold Stone Jug where he describes the work as “a record of a somewhat lengthy sojourn in prison.”
The Nominal Roll kept in Pretoria indicates that the Governor-General, the Earl of Athlone, had done the right thing by Bosman over that Christmas, informing the registrar of the New Law Courts in Johannesburg on 28 December that Bosman’s sentence had been commuted to “imprisonment with hard labour for ten years.” In Cape Town on 10 January, 1927, the then Minister of Justice, Tielman Roos of General J. B. M. Hertzog’s long-lasting Pact government, signed the necessary Notice to the Sheriff. This was in due course ceremonially read to Bosman by the prison Governor in his death-cell (as recounted in Chapter 2).
The roll also notes that for commutation warrants and all other proceedings, including his daily behaviour record, one is to refer to the Convict’s Records, a folder unfortunately no longer preserved. But the roll does include several other inscriptions – for example, remission granted to all prisoners on the passage of the Flag Bill (this had dragged on as a divisive national issue since 1926, to be resolved finally by a joint sitting of both Houses in October, 1927): two months off. This detail brought Bosman’s date of discharge down to 14 September, 1936. (The Prince of Wales’s visit led to no reductions.)
So far the astute reader of Cold Stone Jug may have estimated: the roll merely corroborates and meshes with the evidence of Bosman’s own chronicle. Yet, in writing his record he was not so much intent on providing the reader with a documentary as with a more general narrative about the convict experience. By naming the institution ‘Swartklei Great Prison’ (instead of the ‘Pretoria Central’ where we know he did his time), he alerts us to his partly allegorical intention.
None the less, for the record, and in order to sort out his rather blurred mention in the final chapter that, like all his fellow inmates, he made a career inside of petitioning the powers that be for further remission of sentence, and that one day out of the blue a petition of his succeeded, it should be mentioned here that – according to the information nibbed into that immense record of life and death – he was indeed granted a second reduction. Following Authority No. 2666/W303, as noted on 30 April, 1930, Bosman’s term was then further commuted to “five years with hard labour.” So his date for release had now advanced to 14 September, 1931 (see PD/47/T.321 of 15 August, 1930); thus his last stretch of six years was dramatically reduced at a swoop to thirteen months. Whether this second reduction was thanks to his good behaviour, his fine style of petitioning or a general amnesty in South Africa (of which there is no evidence) is unclear. According to Bosman’s friend Fred Zwarenstein – his fellow school-teacher who became a lawyer, dedicatee of Bosman’s poem “Africa” and a courier of his work from prison – the string-pulling of Bosman’s uncle, Advocate Fred Malan, and the work behind the scenes of other petitioners, may have been influential.
The date of Bosman’s eventual release on probation remains unclear, however. According to the minutes kept in the State Archives of the meeting held in the Prime Minister’s office in Pretoria, by 13 August, 1930, the then Minister of Justice, Oswald Pirow, had already received the favourable report of the chairman of the Board of Visitors recommending Bosman’s release “as soon as possible.” This he endorsed and forwarded to the Governor-General, who the next day in turn approved the report in anticipation of the following meeting of the Executive Council. There it was likewise to be approved – on 12 September, 1930 – and signed by the Minister of Internal Affairs, D. F. Malan.
We know from Chapter 10 that, due to clerical bungling, Bosman’s release was then unduly delayed and he was not to emerge from that monumental door with its huge brass knocker and on to the public Klawer Street of the Pretoria prison reserve until November, 1930. Inside Pretoria Central Prison he had served almost exactly four years. The roll gives his day of release as 14 November, 1931, but that must apply to when he in due course successfully came off parole.
He had missed not only his coming-of-age party, and the notorious 1929 Black Peril election, but the worst of the Great Depression as well. He had been incarcerated as a youth during the jazzy, charlestoning, Art Deco Twenties. He was now an adult in a society of austerity.
What was the nature of his punishment?