Losses to the Rare and Antiquarian Book Collections

Most of the Rare and Antiquarian Book Collections shelved in the basement of the Jagger building were not damaged by the fire, and were taken out of the basement as part of the salvage process. Those that suffered water damage have been placed in cold storage or treated by local conservators. There were, however, two collections shelved in the upper gallery of the Reading Room. The first was the Jack Maclean Memorial Collection – 212 volumes. This collection of books was donated to the Libraries in the 1960s by Mrs Maclean in memory of her son Jack, along with funds to purchase additional books for the collection. Included in the collection were travelogues, local and general history books, along with local cookery books. The second collection was the Naval and Aviation Collection donated by Humphrey Charles Willis – 2359 volumes. He was a very enthusiastic collector of books on all aspects of sailing and aeronautics. The collection included volumes on sailing ships through the centuries, including works on the wooden ships of the Elizabethan era and those used in the Napoleonic wars. Personal narratives of South Africans who served in the armed forces of both the First and Second World Wars were also included. These will be almost impossible to replace. Mr Humphrey Willis donated duplicate copies of his collection and on his death bequeathed the entire collection to UCT Libraries. The Naval and Aviation collection was consulted regularly by researchers in all disciplines including those in engineering. Both the collections, while not necessarily ones that would typically be found in an academic library in Southern Africa, added a depth and a variety to the collections in Special Collections.

Losses to government publications

Special Collections was also home to a unique and vast collection of government publications, not only relating to South Africa but also from Southern Africa, and more recently from other parts of the continent. Included in the collection were materials from the colonial period including from the British Colonial Office. In 2019 the Government Publications area in the Chancellor Oppenheimer Library was refurbished and unfortunately the most in-demand materials were moved from the area into the top-most gallery of the Jagger building. This area was just below the roof of the building and everything in there was totally destroyed. A significant amount of South African government publications were lost to the fire, including books relating to the South African government; government gazettes; annual publications of statutes; House of Assembly and National Assembly debates from 1940–2013; material relating to the pre-1994 Homelands; local government materials; provincial materials including Cape Provincial and post-1994 provincial materials; publications from the Native Representative Council, Coloured Persons Representative Council and the South African Indian Council. We lost publications relating to Tanzania, as well as a considerable reference collection. We also lost international publications from the European Union, the Commonwealth, Great Britain, including publications from the Colonial Office, and other international governmental organizations.

Lost while servicing research requests

The Reading Room was a large space with many tables, ideal to accommodate the requisite social distancing during the Covid-19 pandemic to enable staff members to service research requests. One of the greatest singular losses to the archive was the destruction of 90 per cent of the Black and Fagg Architectural Collection, a set of original architectural drawings of well-known Cape-based structures produced by the prominent architectural company Black and Fagg. The collection had been laid out on the tables only a week before the fire to service a research request. Most drawings dated between 1895 and 1907, but there were drawings as recent as the 1930s. Out of ten large oversize portfolios containing an estimated total of 1000 drawings, only the last portfolio, containing about 100 drawings, survived. These contents relate to numerous Standard Bank branches. Black and Fagg were awarded the first of the CPIA/Argus Bronze Medals in 1929 for the Standard Bank building situated between Adderley and St George’s Streets in Cape Town. Another, more recent, architectural collection was also adversely impacted – the Roelof Uytenbogaardt Papers, containing records of certain of the architectural projects of this prolific and influential South African architect and UCT academic. The records of several projects, comprising seven archival boxes, had been used shortly before the fire and were thus destroyed. Another collection lost under similar circumstances was a wooden trunk containing the photographic record of Dr Alex du Toit’s geological research, forming part of the Alex du Toit Papers. As an internationally renowned geologist associated with UCT, du Toit’s work mapping the Karoo region of South Africa through the complete stratigraphy directly contributed to the advancement of continental drift theory and by extension indirectly to plate tectonic theory (Chetty Reference Chetty2021: 151). While his textual collection has been widely used, the trunk of photographs was a later addition by a great-nephew, containing landscape images taken throughout Southern Africa, South America, and other parts of the world. They have been consulted for various purposes including plant ecology and vegetation change over time through time-lapse photography comparison. The loss of this collection had a direct impact on research about Alex du Toit and his work.^{Footnote 4}

Shortly before lockdown, several museum objects had been retrieved from the Special Collections off-site strong room at the request of a course convenor of the Michaelis School of Fine Arts’ Curating the Archive Object Ecologies course. Students had visited to view the objects to make selections for their student projects. As the strong room was inaccessible over lockdown, the objects remained in a secure area of the Reading Room and were destroyed by fire. This included some unique items, namely a nineteenth-century travelling brass microscope in a wooden box and a 300-centimetre-long roll of an echo-sounding chart from the maiden voyage of Swedish trans-Atlantic line vessel Kanangoora, passing over Aliwal Shoal near Umkomaas, South Africa, 1939. It also included a silver-plated hand mirror engraved from ‘Sweet Workers Union, C.T. 1940’ and a hairbrush from ‘E.C.W.U. Paarl, 7.10.53’ that belonged to renowned South African trade unionist Ray Alexander Simons.

Several objects destroyed related directly to the history of the university. These had been on display in honour of the installation of the new Chancellor in March 2020, until the event was postponed owing to the lockdown. Sadly this included the engraved ceremonial key used for the official opening of the Jagger Library on 1 October 1931 by the widow of J. W. Jagger. It also included a fountain pen used by Queen Elizabeth, consort of George VI, to sign the visitors’ book in the Librarian’s office in the Jagger Library when an honorary Doctorate in Laws was conferred on her in 1947. Two silver trowels were also on display – they commemorated the laying of the foundation stone of the Bolus Herbarium on 26 January 1938 by Vice-Chancellor Sir J. Carruthers Beattie. Another miniature trowel engraved with the university motto, Spes Bona, and the date, 1 May 1925, was believed to have been used by the Prince of Wales, in his capacity as Chancellor, who laid the foundation stone of the Men’s Residence, the first building to be constructed on UCT’s new Groote Schuur Campus (Figure 7).^{Footnote 5}

Figure 7.

The 1947 Royal Visit, with the Jagger Library and the Jameson Hall in the background. All Things UCT Collection, UCT Libraries.

Various documents were laid out in the Reading Room in preparation for digitization; but at the time of the fire they had not yet been digitized. One example included documents found in the papers of Sir Baldwin Wake Walker, considered valuable in unearthing a hidden history of Turkish influence at the Cape Colony. These Turkish papers had more recently garnered excitement by the local Muslim community of Turkish descent, as they provided rare traces of the work and influence of Sheikh Abu Bakr Effendi at the Cape Colony in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Konco 2021). Effendi was an Ottoman qadi sent in 1862 by Sultan Abdulaziz to work with the Cape Malay community. An event in honour of these connections made, marked by the attendance of descendants of both the Walker and Effendi families, would be one of the last held in the Reading Room before lockdown, and the fire (Singer Reference Singer2019).

During the lockdown, the archive team was working on a digital curation project on the Bleek and Lloyd Collection, which is inscribed in UNESCO’s Register of the Memory of the World. It contains the original research and notebooks of linguists Wilhelm Bleek and Lucy Lloyd into indigenous languages and folklore of southern African San, as well as the photographic records of Dorothea Bleek, Wilhelm’s daughter, who traversed the far corners of the country to engage with different communities. Dorothea’s photograph albums had been digitized the week before the fire, and locked in the Archives Office in recognition of their value – as opposed to being placed on the regular reserve shelving to be returned to the storerooms. Of the collection total of eighty-eight archival boxes, four archival boxes were destroyed. Emerging from this, the South African Heritage Resources Agency is currently engaged in a process to declare this collection as a protected national heritage asset. It is some comfort that most, if not all, of the items destroyed were digitized.

New deposits

When the fire destroyed the Jagger Library’s Reading Room, it also destroyed the collective efforts of the archivists over the preceding eighteen months in processing and arranging new deposits. One of the new deposits that was sadly destroyed was the Jacob Jongens Architecture Collection. This historic collection was donated in late 2019 by Sharon and Adrian Jongens. The collection is the residue of Jacob Jongens’ life work as an architect of numerous buildings in South Africa. The collection was arranged by the donor prior to handover, and the number of items was calculated using the data provided. The archival team was excited to receive such a substantive new deposit but were unable to integrate this into our holdings before the March 2020 lockdown halted all on-site operations. Almost the entire collection of 4763 oversized architectural drawings, plans and other miscellaneous data was destroyed, except for a subset of the collection, housed in metal canisters that withstood the fire. Some of the items within the canisters survived, but were partially burnt, requiring restoration.

The survival of the canisters was a rare exception – in most cases, all traces of the collection were destroyed – however, one of our tasks has been to understand what survived and whether other copies may exist. This is evident in the papers of Judge Ian Farlam, who chaired the Marikana Commission of Inquiry investigating the death of thirty-four mineworkers by members of the South African Police Service on 16 August 2012. These were deposited with permission of the Department of Justice and were being physically arranged at the time of the fire. While an external hard drive containing some of the data had been backed up on the UCT server, the collection destroyed in hard copy was extensive, comprising thirty archival boxes. These records constituted Farlam’s personal complete set of the transcripts of proceedings, heads of argument, evidence, and exhibits. They are not unique, as a copy of the record should be lodged with the National Archives, but the loss of these papers, with their annotations by Judge Farlam, less than a decade after the Marikana Massacre took place is a painful reminder of how easily the past can be erased.

Numerous collections of Holocaust survivors who sought refuge in South Africa were handed over to the archive as a means by which to preserve them, ensure their accessibility, and safeguard this record towards ensuring ‘open and democratic societies’ (IHRA 2021). This included some additions to the papers of the South African Holocaust and Genocide Foundation (2014), including documents sourced from the Holocaust and Genocide Centres in both Cape Town and Durban. While the collections had been almost entirely digitized, losing remnants that had survived the Holocaust only to be lost in the Jagger Library fire was deeply painful. This included the carefully curated personal papers of Holocaust survivor, Irene Groll, donated by her grandson on behalf of the Groll family in 2017, outlining her experiences during the Shoah as well as her post-war efforts to claim for reparations. The losses also included a large proportion of the priceless collection of German army field postcards collected by German-Jewish Commander Bernhard Schragenheim during the First World War; they were kept by his son, Julian Schragenheim, and donated in his honour and memory after he had been persecuted in Germany despite his service (SAHGF   2014). Also lost were a range of documents donated by descendants of survivors and victims, including research material collected by late survivor, Stefania Heilbrunn. As 1 September 2019 was the eightieth anniversary of the outbreak of the Second World War, we had compiled these items in the Reading Room display cases, alongside materials related to the involvement of black and Coloured South Africans in the war.

Some of the losses included material deposited by the Faculty of Health Sciences. The papers of Dr Arthur Barclay Bull, who established the UCT Medical School’s Department of Anaesthesiology in 1963, were deposited by Emeritus Professor Dr Peter Gordon in 2017. This was a small collection, comprising two boxes, but important in its reflection of the institutional memory of the department, as well as the history of anesthesiology as a specialized field in medicine. Another loss to the Faculty of Health Sciences was the original registry of the Department of Human Biology’s human remains, which had been fully digitized just before the fire, with detailed metadata encoded – and so the critical data was saved.

Losses were experienced across all subjects, also impacting on our record of the arts at UCT. This included the small but significant collection named for Helen Rooza, a stage costume designer who worked for many years at UCT’s Little Theatre designing for UCT’s own student theatrical productions. Her scrapbooks had been donated by her son, Patrick Wagner, in 2020, from Australia, and processed during lockdown; they were being kept in the Jagger Reading Room awaiting shelving allocation. Also destroyed by fire were the 294 bound volumes of chronological newspaper clippings collected by the UCT Music Library, dating between the 1920s and the 1990s. These volumes recorded the genesis of UCT’s College of Music training and performances, as well as music performance in Cape Town generally for the whole period 1920s–1990s. This reflects a significant loss of institutional memory as it is an internal UCT collection that was produced over nearly a century by music librarians.

Processing backlogs

Backlogs have become a perennial element of the archive, influencing current approaches to processing (Greene and Meissner Reference Greene and Meissner2005: 209). During the lockdown, when Special Collections could not open, we found a rare opportunity to process collections that had waited several years to be processed – including arrangement and listing, with the possibility of digitization. The team of archivists worked from home, and then returned newly processed collections to be stored in the Reading Room, as all the store rooms were inaccessible. In this way, the team of archivists that worked out of the Jagger Library lost most of the work done during lockdown in the fire.

Some of the collections processed during lockdown were small yet significant, and great care had been taken to create rich inventories to support their discoverability. The Harold Cressy Papers outlined the research resources gathered by Emeritus Professor Mohamed Adikhari for his biography of Cressy, a South African headmaster, activist, and advocate for the right to education for non-white South Africans. The papers of Reverend David Russell, an Anglican priest and later the Bishop of Grahamstown, highlighted his role as an implacable opponent of apartheid who was declared a banned person and restricted in various ways (Goslett Reference Goslett2019). The papers of Reverend Daniel J. Jacobs related to the Zion African Methodist Episcopal Church in Worcester. The William Harold Hutt Papers comprised some miscellaneous items related to the history of Commerce at UCT – in 1930 he was promoted to Chair of Commerce at UCT and he later became Dean of the Faculty of Commerce.^{Footnote 6} The papers of Professor of Social Anthropology and Deputy Vice-Chancellor, Martin West, had been deposited with UCT, including work conducted for his doctoral research on the subject of African Independent Churches of Soweto between 1969 and 1971. The material lost included the large number of print photographs he took as part of his research and related papers.^{Footnote 7}

In some cases, newly processed collections were moved to an extra office in the basement for storage. These were water logged, in many cases, and removed by volunteers during the salvage. However, some boxes survived intact. Piecing together the collections that were only partially processed has been challenging. Stock control during lockdown was challenging which has made reporting difficult as, in some cases, a collection was considered fully destroyed when some items were in fact salvaged. This included additions to the papers of the labour lawyer, Jan Theron, and the extensive papers of Emeritus Professor of Economics and Director of UCT’s Southern African Labour and Development Research Unit (SALDRU), Francis Wilson, as well as the extensive papers of Professor of Law, Denis Cowen. The papers of David de Villiers originating in the SOMCHEM case contained in two archival boxes were also destroyed; these related to a successful community challenge in the High Court against the chemical manufacturer SOMCHEM’s plans for a development in the Southern Cape that threatened the environment and indigenous ecology.

Unprocessed additions to the papers of Professor of Southern African Studies David Welsh, covering South African politics, were also destroyed. The textual records accompanying the donation of Professor of Geography Ron Davies’ map collection, consisting mainly of unpublished field and research notes that were used to either compile or elucidate the maps with which they were associated, were destroyed. Additions to the papers of Professor of Philosophy Martin Versfeld, who has received renewed interest by researchers in recent years, were also destroyed. The material lost in the Hugh Corder Papers related to the work of the Constitutional Assembly that drafted the South Africa’s Constitution between 1994 and 1996. Papers donated by Neil Alperstein were destroyed – these reflected the activities of the United Democratic Front (UDF) which exerted significant pressure for change in South Africa in the 1980s.

Additions to collections were regularly handed over to Special Collections by organizations or individuals. This collection development was not always anticipated by or arranged with the archivists. They were set aside at the time and stored until they could be added to the existing collections. The challenge of backlogs is universal, with a 2015 study highlighting that ‘on average, repositories are taking in more material per year than they can process’ (Greene 2005: 211). The backlog of unprocessed collections destroyed by the Jagger Library fire highlights the danger of retaining unprocessed backlogs without speedily processing them. Regrettably, there were a large number of unprocessed collections destroyed in the fire, including of individuals and organizations that played important roles in South African education, politics and social transformation. This included twenty boxes of unprocessed additions to the Community Arts Project Archive, as well as eleven boxes of textual material relating to the South African Committee on Higher Education (SACHED). The additional papers of wartime cabinet minister and founder member of the Progressive Party, H. G. Lawrence, included albums of newspaper reports covering his whole career and photographs. The papers of Gloria Sandak-Lewin reflected her research and material related to her published works. The papers of Anne Finsen, also associated with the Black Sash, reflected her own creative work, as well as personal and family records such as photographs of her father, Owen Clough, First Speaker of the Parliament of the Union of South Africa, whose additions to his own collection were also destroyed in the fire. The additions to the Dora Taylor Papers were small but of special importance – including the letters she wrote to her daughter, Sheila Belshaw, who has described them as not merely letters but in fact a detailed ongoing diary of Dora Taylor’s life and work as a writer and activist. Sheila Belshaw had retained the letters as she was hoping to have them published once she herself reached her nineties. The contents of Classicist Dr Margaret Hewett’s papers were also destroyed, including her research for her translation from Latin into English of a classical Latin legal text for publication. The Cape Tercentenary Foundation emerged in the 1950s to preserve, promote and encourage literature, the visual and performing arts, and the natural and cultural environment in the Western, Eastern and Northern Cape Provinces. These lost additions to an existing archive provided a record of endeavours in diverse cultural spheres and significant contributions in the field.

Sadly, the papers of Emeritus Professor Sandra Burman, former director of the Centre for Socio-Legal Research in the Faculty of Law at UCT, were destroyed after being transferred from off-site storage to the Reading Room for processing in early 2020. Burman’s work involved bridging the divide between rights on paper and the systems charged with ensuring their implementation. She had investigated how legal decisions on children are made in South Africa, and how children’s rights fare in a variety of settings across the country. The archival collection contained in eighty archival boxes constituted the records of her research and her life’s work that were deposited after her early death in 2015.

Special Collections holds the extensive archive of the Black Sash in the Western Cape and the archive of the Black Sash Advice Office. In 2015 Black Sash volunteers in the Eastern Cape who had served the organization for many years decided to deposit their archive with UCT. Sadly the entire archive comprising eighteen archival boxes was lost in the fire. Other Black Sash-related material lost was a combination of donations by various Black Sash leaders and occupied twenty-six archival boxes. Laurine Platzky’s papers were also destroyed – reflecting her social involvement and political work, including the Surplus People’s Project, working against forced removals, and contributing to the Reconstruction and Redevelopment Programme in Presidency in 1996. Her papers, contained in ninety-six archival boxes that were considered a rich research source, were all lost in the fire.

Additions to the papers of the National Union of South African Students were burnt, but this is minor compared to the main body of the collection which was salvaged. Sadly, all holdings related to the Harold Wolpe Memorial Trust, which was set up after his death in 1996, were also destroyed. This included sixty-three archival boxes that constituted the formal archive of the activities of the Trust. There were also some lost additions to the papers of the Owl Club, a longstanding Cape Town society of persons eminent in their fields who become members by invitation. Three trays of cassette tapes containing the audio recordings of interviews of individuals affected by forced removals in terms of the Group Areas Act conducted by Michele Paulse for her Doctoral thesis were destroyed.