Merriman and Smuts: Street’s two South African Premiers

John Xavier Merriman, the son of a Wiltshire cleric, was born in Street in 1841 and ended up as Premier of Cape Colony, and almost became the first Prime Minister of South Africa.

His father, Nathaniel James Merriman, moved to Street in 1841, and on 15 March, John was born in the rector’s house in the High Street.

John had an interesting view of the county of his birth. He was once quoted thus: “Every day in my orisons I thank the powers that rule our destinies that I was born in Somersetshire, that nest of spicery, that cradle of English freedom, from whose soil surely one derives a modicum of that divine stupidity which has somehow carried us, muddleheaded and blundering, round the world.”

His father accepted the archdeaconry of Grahamstown, in Cape Colony, in 1848, and John was educated at Diocesan College, Cape Town. In 1856 he returned to Britain to study at Radley College, near Oxford, after which he worked as a clerk in London before returning to the Cape in 1862.

Thereafter, John split his time largely between various careers and politics. He started as a public surveyor in the Cape border districts. He was a diamond buyer during the early 1870s Kimberley diamond rush, where he first met Cecil Rhodes. Then he joined a Cape Town wine firm, and opened a crayfish canning factory. In the mid-1880s, after trying to merge the various diamond mines, he joined the Transvaal gold rush, becoming a mine manager in 1889. He settled down in 1892, after buying a derelict farm, and became an innovative wine producer, fruit grower and exporter.

His political career was, if anything, even more tortuous. Late Victorian South African colonial politics were dominated by a toxic cocktail of imperialism and racism, which was to stain South African politics for decades. Although relatively progressive for his time, Merriman was essentially a white supremacist.

He was first elected to the Cape Assembly in 1869, and, other than 2 months after the Boer War, sat in Parliament continuously till 1924, for various constituencies. From 1875 to 1878 he was a cabinet minister, as Commissioner for Crown Lands and Public Works. After a period in opposition, he returned as Commissioner of Public Works, 1881-84; then it was back to leading the opposition until 1890, when he was appointed Treasurer in a Rhodes ministry until 1893.

As the constitutional crisis grew, especially with the abortive pro-British ‘Jameson Raid’ in 1895-6, Merriman became ever more involved. He sat on the Cape parliamentary inquiry into the Raid, which led to Rhodes’ downfall, and was in government when the first phase of the Boer War ended in apparent victory, when he supported relative leniency to the Boers.

That war ended in 1902, and in early 1908 he became Cape Prime Minister. His party won a big election victory, which put him at the forefront of the unification national convention, and the negotiations with the British government (on one voyage to London he sailed with Mahatma Gandhi, then an activist in South Africa), which settled the terms of the Union of South Africa.

It was widely expected that he would become the first Prime Minister of the new South Africa. However, it was not to be, and he withdrew from frontline politics, though he retained his parliamentary seat until 1924. He died at his farm in 1926.

A plaque to Merriman was erected on the Old Rectory, off the High Street, to mark his birthplace. The Merriman family is commemorated in Street by Merriman Park and adjacent Merriman Road and Merriman Gardens.

Curiously, Merriman is not the only South Africa-Street connection in that era. Jan Christiaan Smuts, controversial Boer soldier and politician, later South African Prime Minister 1919-24 and 1939-48, also had close ties with Street, through the Clarks shoe family. Like Merriman, Smuts would now be regarded as a politically unacceptable white supremacist, but, at a time before formal apartheid, he was thought to be relatively liberal and enlightened on race politics.

Smuts first came into contact with the Clarks indirectly, via Emily Hobhouse, a British political and social activist, who had campaigned against the horrors of the Boer War, especially the notorious British concentrations camps. They had first met in the aftermath of the War in South Africa in July 1903, and began an active correspondence.

In November 1904, she wrote to him of her plan to return to South Africa, bringing with her a secretary/assistant, one Margaret Clark. Knowing of Smuts’ admiration for the famous Victorian politician and social reformer, John Bright, she wrote: “I feel sure that it will add to your interest in our scheme when I tell you that the lady who is going to help me to carry it out is a granddaughter of John Bright and like yourself studied at Cambridge and says that she had often heard of you there.” Smuts met his first Clark when they arrived in South Africa in January 1905.

The acquaintance was renewed at the end of 1905 when both Smuts and Clark were on the same ship, the Hertzog, to Britain, where Smuts was going on a political mission to meet the new Liberal Government to discuss self-government for the defeated Boer republics. They got on famously, even going up the mountains together at a stopover in Las Palmas. When the Hertzog docked at Dover on 6 January 1906, they were met by Margaret’s sister, Alice, and their mother, Helen, Bright’s daughter. As Smuts wrote in a letter to his wife, “I at once made friends and hope to spend Saturday and Sunday with them in Somerset.”

Smuts visited the Clarks in Street twice during that British trip. During the first, over the weekend of 12-15 January, he and the Clarks joyfully heard the first news of the Liberal general election landslide. He returned in early February for another weekend visit, a welcome break just prior to his crucial talks in London with the Liberal PM, Campbell-Bannerman. These talks led to new elections in Transvaal, where Smuts’ party swept to power, with him becoming a senior minister. His Clark friends saw him off when he boarded the boat train at Waterloo on 10 February on his return to South Africa, giving him a bundle of books to help him pass the time aboard.

Smuts and various members of the Clark family (which included the Gilletts, when Margaret married Arthur Gillett in 1909, and moved to Oxford) – which Smuts frequently referred to as the ‘Street Circle’ – wrote to each other regularly thereafter. Smuts also maintained a correspondence with Merriman, the Street-born Cape politician, over the complex politics which led to the creation of the Union of South Africa in 1910.

Another opportunity to renew personal acquaintance with the Clarks and Somerset arose during the First World War. Despite his Boer background and previous anti-British activities, Smuts supported Britain, and he became a very influential military and political figure in the War, and its aftermath, especially the fateful Versailles peace conference.

He was based in London from 1917-1919, and saw his Clark friends both in London and on visits to Oxford and Street. He was with the Clarks in Street after Christmas 1917, but, as he described in a letter to his wife: “I was to spend New Year’s Day with the Clarks at Street and went there the Saturday before and had a delightful time both on Saturday and Sunday .. but unfortunately I had to return to London on New Year’s eve and the Cabinet sat both on New Year’s eve and New Year’s Day. So no rest for the wicked. I am very busy and work continuously and am very glad when one or other of the Clarks or Gilletts comes to see me.”

A letter to Alice Clark in May 1918 showed clearly how he is torn between his war work and the prospects of a further break in Somerset: “I feel much tempted by your invitation to come to Street for a holiday on my birthday. But indeed it is impossible. I have been away two days at Glasgow and two at Oxford … and now it is not possible to get away so far or so long as Street would take me. But you do paint an enchanting picture of the West Country.”

Even after he became Prime Minister of South Africa in August 1919, he found time to visit Somerset when in Britain, as he noted in a letter of July 1921: “Last Saturday and Sunday I was at Street with the senior Clarks. Salt and gold of the earth.” This continued after he went into opposition in 1924.

The most notable instance came in 1928, when he was guest of honour at the prizegiving at Elmhurst School, Street, and also unveiled a plaque to the Clarks who founded the School. In his speech, he recalled that the first time he had heard of Street was at home just after the Boer War, when his two young daughters were wearing sandals, and his wife said they came from a place called Street. He added, to laughter and applause, he “had heard a great deal about Street since.”

The Street connection was formally cemented in late 1928 when William Bancroft Clark – later to become a long-serving chairman of the shoe business – married Smuts’ daughter, Catherina Petronella (‘Cato’) in Pretoria. They lived at Hindhayes, a Clark’s property in Street.

Even during the Second World War, when Smuts was again PM and active in the war effort, he still thought of his Street Circle. In a June 1940 letter to Margaret Clark Gillett, he was concerned about the safety of the younger Clark children: “I don’t think small children should remain in England at this time, if they have a chance of going to healthier countries. Of course, Street is a not a particularly dangerous place and may escape bombing.”

Smuts lost office in 1948, and died on 11 September 1950, with the West Country media noting his Somerset connections in their obituaries. The superb Alfred Gillett Trust Clarks Archive at Street holds much about the Smuts connection with the town.