Money Matters by Helen C Noah

Just so. In addition, younger members of the family (my two sons, their wives and children, for example) are unlikely to be very interested in this story at the moment. On the other hand, how often do we hear older people lament, “I wish I had asked about the family when I was younger. Now the people who could have told me are gone, and I’ll never know much about our family forty or fifty years ago.” So, a major motivation to write about my grandparents and their immediate family is to get down in print something about who they were, what they did, and what happened to them. Another, more personal, motivation must have arisen from the fact that I had been absent from South Africa for many years and I wanted to satisfy my own desire to know more closely who my forebears were.

On my father’s side, going back only two generations, my grandfather was an immigrant to South Africa from England. On my mother’s side, two generations back my grandfather was an immigrant from France. Neither ancestor found it easy to establish himself, and their children had a tough time, too. Along with most other immigrants and their children, they were caught up with finding a place in their new society, a central part of which was to establish themselves financially. I have chosen to give this account the title, Money Matters, if only because my ancestors in South Africa devoted such a large part of their attention and energy to the acquisition of what used to be called “a decent competence”. Yet their stories do not unfold as a steady progression from grinding poverty through middling affluence to a glorious wealthy finale. Instead, the journey was an up-and-down one, two steps forward, one step back.

My mother kept letters as did my cousin, Cherie Rijkenberg. My South African family always seemed to regard me as an appropriate repository for their bundles of old letters. These archives were passed on to me. When my two aunts died in 1980, it was to me that my sister, Mary Coram, handed several note books which enabled me to establish how Hilda Pattison and Mildred Chisnall made their fortunes. Indeed, it was because of these rather insignificant notebooks that my aunts’ story unraveled. The story contained in prosaic figures of company shares bought and dividends received was what exploded W.J. Scott’s sedulously cultivated myth that he was the creator of their wealth. All of this seemed to be too dramatic a story to be left untold. Similarly, the documentation of my father’s experiences with the Moral Re-Armament movement possessed a degree of pathos that surely deserved a more permanent record. On my maternal side, there was the fact that relatively few Frenchmen came to settle in South Africa during the last years of the nineteenth century and the opening of the twentieth, as my grandfather did. Even stranger was the determination of this well-educated, city-bred young man (with good qualifications in accounting and the textile industry) to abandon it all to take up farming and petty trading in the back-of-beyond of southern Africa. Here was another life-story too good to pass over quietly without description or commentary.
I hope that you too, dear reader, will be of like mind.

TITLE:	Money Matters: A Family History	more info
ISBN-13:	978-1-920094-60-7
AUTHOR & COPYRIGHT HOLDER:	Helen C Noah, Fishhoek, Cape Town, RSA
SUMMARY:	First edition published April 2008; cover design, layout & typesetting by Barbara Mueller; Printing by New Bind, Cape Town.
SIZE:	Hard Cover; thread sewn; 208 page; 215mm (h) x 155mm (w), weight = 420g
PRICE:	ZAR 180.00	other publications

About the Bookand the Author: All happy families resemble one another; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own fashion. So wrote Tolstoy at the opening of Anna Karenina. That makes a nice epigram, but I am not sure the distinction holds. Rather, my own observation tells me that every family, happy or not, is different from every other family. And every family has a distinctive, interesting story to tell. This is an account of my own family, a generation or two back. Whenever someone writes about people and happenings in her family, the typical objection is, “why rake up all this old stuff?” Why expose to view matters that should remain private? Why not let sleeping dogs lie? It is almost twenty years ago that I received a letter from a cousin telling me in no uncertain terms that “[the Chisnalls] were very private people …. As to writing a history of the family, I am sure that is something they would not want. From my earliest years I was always asking about the family and their history but to use another expression of my Dad’s – mum’s the word….There are many sad things about the family they wanted forgot and never mentioned…”
Just so. In addition, younger members of the family (my two sons, their wives and children, for example) are unlikely to be very interested in this story at the moment. On the other hand, how often do we hear older people lament, “I wish I had asked about the family when I was younger. Now the people who could have told me are gone, and I’ll never know much about our family forty or fifty years ago.” So, a major motivation to write about my grandparents and their immediate family is to get down in print something about who they were, what they did, and what happened to them. Another, more personal, motivation must have arisen from the fact that I had been absent from South Africa for many years and I wanted to satisfy my own desire to know more closely who my forebears were. On my father’s side, going back only two generations, my grandfather was an immigrant to South Africa from England. On my mother’s side, two generations back my grandfather was an immigrant from France. Neither ancestor found it easy to establish himself, and their children had a tough time, too. Along with most other immigrants and their children, they were caught up with finding a place in their new society, a central part of which was to establish themselves financially. I have chosen to give this account the title, Money Matters, if only because my ancestors in South Africa devoted such a large part of their attention and energy to the acquisition of what used to be called “a decent competence”. Yet their stories do not unfold as a steady progression from grinding poverty through middling affluence to a glorious wealthy finale. Instead, the journey was an up-and-down one, two steps forward, one step back.
My mother kept letters as did my cousin, Cherie Rijkenberg. My South African family always seemed to regard me as an appropriate repository for their bundles of old letters. These archives were passed on to me. When my two aunts died in 1980, it was to me that my sister, Mary Coram, handed several note books which enabled me to establish how Hilda Pattison and Mildred Chisnall made their fortunes. Indeed, it was because of these rather insignificant notebooks that my aunts’ story unraveled. The story contained in prosaic figures of company shares bought and dividends received was what exploded W.J. Scott’s sedulously cultivated myth that he was the creator of their wealth. All of this seemed to be too dramatic a story to be left untold. Similarly, the documentation of my father’s experiences with the Moral Re-Armament movement possessed a degree of pathos that surely deserved a more permanent record. On my maternal side, there was the fact that relatively few Frenchmen came to settle in South Africa during the last years of the nineteenth century and the opening of the twentieth, as my grandfather did. Even stranger was the determination of this well-educated, city-bred young man (with good qualifications in accounting and the textile industry) to abandon it all to take up farming and petty trading in the back-of-beyond of southern Africa. Here was another life-story too good to pass over quietly without description or commentary. I hope that you too, dear reader, will be of like mind.