the military occupation of Pretoria in the Second Anglo-Boer War, it became clear to the Governor, Lord Milner, that Pretoria too needed to join the worldwide network of formal Imperial prisons stretching, as Boer prisoners of war knew well enough, from Ceylon to St. Helena and Bermuda. The prison reserve was set aside out of town on isolated, higher ground for this purpose. By the peace of 1902 the surrounding wall was completed. In 1903 a contract for building the Central Prison itself was awarded to Johannesburg’s Brown and Cottrill, but on their bankruptcy it was taken over by Maudsley, and then by Prentice and Mackey. By 1906, at a cost of £125 000, that stone fort, the Pretoria Central Prison, was completed and ready to admit its first six hundred. It has enjoyed full occupancy ever since. And as Chapter 5 of Cold Stone Jug records, when extensions became necessary, it was the prisoners themselves who served to immure themselves in still further, each stone of their fortifications hand-dressed from their own quarry, the koppie against which they rest.
But Bosman’s Cold Stone Jug is really a critique of unthinking notions about the value of imprisonment.
The issue of prison reform went public in South Africa particularly in the days leading up to Union in 1910. The African Monthly in Grahamstown, for example, published from September, 1908, a series of articles by G. D. Gray, recommending that the future united South Africa should try and avoid the high rate of European and American criminal recidivism by genuinely affording our “broad-arrowed brethren in clanking leg-irons” the public’s sympathy and care, with the practical opportunity to learn appropriate trades and the mental skills to fit them for a decent life outside as citizens of the rising nation. Of the Transvaal’s 50 000 prisoners (the Cape had 60 000, Natal 30 000 and the Orange River Colony 10 000), Gray wrote:
After mentally and morally starving our State labourers for the required term of years, [we now also shut] every door which could admit good thoughts, keep away all that is likely to heal the diseased mind and soul – in short, empty them of good – we suddenly turn them adrift on the great evil world, and expect them to become paragons of all that is virtuous, and to live peaceful, honest, useful lives in the same society that has recently incarcerated them.
In 1910 John Galsworthy’s famous play, Justice, dramatised those same issues that troubled Gray, and many a Hollywood silent movie went on nobly to expose corruption and violence in modern gaols. In October, 1911, an unsigned article in The State on “Tragedies of the Rope” by a ‘Tolstoy admirer’ continued the bad publicity by describing gruesome executions at Pretoria Central. One was of two Australian officers in the prison yard, marched before the firing squad, blindfolded and offered a last cigarette; another of the notorious Australian, ‘One-armed Mac’ who, after a double murder committed in the Transvaal all of eighteen years before, was extradited from Australia in shackles and under escort on the Waratah, to be duly “flung violently from this world” after his missing limb.
Despite such deterrents, by the 1920s of Bosman’s term South Africa had arrived at the great social watershed that Pretoria Central Prison was built to avert, as the very nature of crime phased from amateur rural banditry to the professional and organised urban kind. Bosman’s castlist of representative characters makes this graphically clear: there is the safecracker of Chapter 2, Alec the Ponce, Snowy Fisher and Pap the full-time burglars, Huysmans the sex offender, Tex Fraser the mugger, Bluecoat Verdamp the habitual, the debonair Jimmy Gair in for financial irregularities and so on. The Nominal Roll confirms that during Bosman’s term stealing, rape and forgery and utterance were the common offences of his fellows, the vast majority of whom had British surnames. Surprisingly, the most prevalent offence was still the old bandiet one, amongst both whites and blacks, of livestock theft – to this Bosman pays no attention, possibly because their sentences were short. Nor does he feel there to be any category of ‘political prisoner’ – after the 1914 General Strike General J. C. Smuts had merely deported its Labour leaders; in 1922 Taffy Long had been hanged, but for murder rather than civil agitation. During Bosman’s term there was only one chronic escapist, and only one prisoner – presumably the original of thwarted ‘Pym’ – consigned to the Criminal Lunatic Asylum.
Reformers in the Transvaal had established with the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1909 the system of the indeterminate sentence for habitual criminals, together with the statutory body of the Board of Visitors, empowered to recommend releases to the prison Governor, as Bosman describes in Chapter 1. The change for the worse, as announced so astoundingly by the Governor to the assembled bluecoats at the end of Chapter 6, whereby indeterminate sentences were arbitrarily increased, was a setback for the reform mission and, as Bosman shows, seems to have had no meaning for the prison population.
By the mid-1940s prison reform was again an issue in the South African press: the Reverend H. P. Junod, who had served for many years as the chaplain to the segregated-off black prisoners of Pretoria Central, formed his Penal Reform League, and in 1945 the Lansdown Commission on Penal and Prison Reform was appointed. Although there is no evidence to suggest that these influenced Bosman to write Cold Stone Jug, its appearance in 1949 was nevertheless pertinent. No other writer offered the shocking testimony that all the prison system taught its inmates was stoically to endure.
And yet in Bosman’s day Pretoria Central Prison was a model institution of its kind, conscientiously managed by its Governor, Deputy Governor, Medical Officer, Head Warder, Overseer and other ranks. The Solly Flatt album, compiled in 1957 and kept at the Museum of the Department of Correctional Services in Pretoria, shows this clearly, in picture after picture. Flatt was first the prison’s Reception Clerk, then its Mess Caterer and eventually Head Warder. Between 1910 and the early 1940s he was also the official photographer, so that the mugshots of Bosman are probably his, or at least taken under his supervision. In one photo Flatt stands in his uniform and in full view behind the tripod, while his assistants – in exactly the convict garb Bosman describes – correctly keep their faces out of the lens. The tailor-shop, the printers, the brushmakers, signwriters, stonecutters and school are exactly as Bosman depicted. Even the stone quarry is captured on film, as is the Swedish drill conducted with military precision in the exercise yard.
Yet the crusade to reform Pretoria Central Prison was in full swing while Bosman was inside, thanks to Stephen Black. South Africa’s own working-class lad, Black had struggled his way up from boxing to being the country’s leading actor-manager. Diverted from showbiz to satirical journalism, he founded in Johannesburg his scarifying sheet, The Sjambok, Vol. 1, No. 1 being dated 19 April, 1929. Until March, 1931, The Sjambok would continue to appear weekly, despite mounting libel suits and other legal threats, as an alternative to the establishment’s big-sheet press and with the novelty of R. R. R. Dhlomo as a leading contributor. Only six weeks into its run – on 31 May, 1929 – Black carried a sketch called “In the Beginning” by one ‘Ben Africa’, which he must have known was a pseudonym of the young Herman Charles Bosman, forbidden to publish as he was behind bars. A feverish African liberation fantasy about Adam and Eve in an unenclosed landscape, the sketch was written in the same coyly erotic, dagga-dreamy vein as the prison poems in The Blue Princess sequence.
Then on 14 June, 1929, Black’s Sjambok began the remarkable instalments of the prison confessions of its greatest celebrity, the nation’s ‘Uncle Joe’ – the originally British actor, Lago Clifford, who from 1 July, 1924, on Radio JB had been the country’s first full-time announcer. A year before he had been consigned to Pretoria Central, an institution he fully conceded was run “on modern lines of Prison Reform.” Clifford’s series clarifies many details that are taken for granted in Cold Stone Jug: that there were three grades of prisoner (first offenders, second offenders and bluecoats – with starmen being first offenders having served more than half their sentence); the dop and drop hanging procedure; the wages earned in the workshops, rising to 3d. a day, with 30s. held in reserve to cover the cost of a coffin; and the routine by which prisoners could receive books and newspapers from outside and regular visits.
Here is Clifford’s portrait of Bosman:
The most interesting and intellectual man I met at the Central
