and the amazing maintenance staff led by Andries Hendricks, whose care and support Isobel and I have deeply appreciated during the past twelve years.
Cape Town is very different today from when my grandfather arrived or I grew up. But for Capetonians it is always the same place, if only because Table Mountain majestically towers above it and Table Bay stretches out before it. Much of my story is based somewhere between those slopes and the sea. No matter where I have travelled or lived for a while, this is where I belong. My life has not been parochial, however, and as my story unfolds it will soon become evident that, while I am proudly South African, I am also a global citizen. I have travelled across continents, visited cities from Monrovia to Melbourne, from Beijing to Berlin, and traversed the Atlantic more times than I care to remember. I think I inherited my travelling genes from my paternal grandfather, whose story I will soon tell. But he was glad to make Cape Town his home, and it is on these shores that I know I belong, even if I go in search of my ancestors in distant places. In more ways than one, I have come a long way.
Volmoed
Easter 2015
PART ONE
Where I have come from
1939–1972
When we have passed a certain age,
the soul of the child we were
and the souls of the dead from whom we have sprung
come to lavish on us
their riches and their spells.
(Marcel Proust)1
1
From whom I have sprung
The Viking name de Gruchy is already mentioned in a 9th century Norman marriage contract. Two de Gruchys were knights on the First Crusade in 1096, and another was in England in 1100 AD. When the French kings re-conquered Normandy in 1204 the de Gruchys scattered. Jean de Gruchy, the son of Hugh, a royal official, fled to Jersey, a small island off the coast of Normandy. All the de Gruchys who come from Jersey are descendants of Jean who lived at La Chasse in Trinity Parish.
(Walter J. Le Quesne and Guy M. Dixon)2
“Grouchy” is an Old Norse word which means “spear-wolf”. A ninth-century Viking contract confirms that the first Grouchys settled in Normandy (“men from the North”) in what is now France. From there, the crusader knights Nicolas and Guillaume de Grouchy rode off to participate in the Siege of Jerusalem in 1099. My father always wore a gold signet ring with their coat of arms engraved on it. Both my sister and I received such rings on our twenty-first birthdays, as was then the custom in our extended family. I still have the metal stamp used for this purpose.
There is a hamlet in Normandy named Gruchy. It is portrayed in paintings by the impressionist Millet. There is also a De Gruchy chateau nearby, which briefly appeared in the film The Da Vinci Code. But by the end of the thirteenth century, long before either the hamlet or chateau existed, our branch of the family had settled in Trinity Parish on Jersey Island, eleven kilometres off the coast of France. There they dropped the “o” in Grouchy to distinguish themselves from their mainland relations.
In the documents of the Jersey Assizes for 1299, we are told that Jean de Barentin was accused of beating Richard, son of the priest De Gruchy. This is the first mention of a small handful of priests in our family tree, which includes many more soldiers and sailors.
In Trinity churchyard there are dozens of De Gruchy tombstones, many bearing the name Jean or John. I am related to them all, even if only distantly. The original Jean was the son of Hugh, a Norman nobleman, who fled to Jersey at the end of the thirteenth century when the Frankish kings invaded the territory. The control of Jersey fluctuated between the French and the English as fortunes in war waxed and waned during the Middle Ages. But by the end of the fourteenth century, Jersey was finally brought under the reign of the English monarch, and remains so to this day. From then on, it has been governed by its own parliament or states and by the councils of the twelve parishes into which it is divided. At the time of the Reformation, the island’s allegiance switched from Rome to Canterbury.
My branch of the De Gruchy clan starts with Jean’s descendant Robin (c. 1362), who lived at La Chasse on La Profonde Rue in Trinity Parish. The farmhouse still stands, now much enlarged and no longer in the family. It was there, following the custom of their cousins in Normandy, that some of the family dropped the “de”. Our branch kept it, but our most illustrious ancestor on the mainland, Marshall Emmanuel de Grouchy, dropped the “de” after the French Revolution, but kept the “o”.
My father was the first to introduce me to Emmanuel Grouchy and gave me his portrait, which still hangs in our house. Historians blame him for losing the Battle of Waterloo. The truth is more complex, but if he had not arrived too late on the battlefield to save the day for France, the Cape of Good Hope might not have become a British colony, my grandparents would not have settled there, and I would not exist.
Emmanuel’s sister, Sophie, was absent from the family story as told to me. She was a celebrated poet and painter, whose Parisian salon attracted distinguished Enlightenment thinkers. Both siblings miraculously survived the French Revolution and lived long lives.
Emmanuel visited Jersey in 1836, when he acknowledged all the descendants of Jean as his relatives, irrespective of how they spelt their name. My great-grandfather Jean, who was sixteen at the time, must surely have seen the distinguished visitor.
Jean became a farmer and married Caroline de Quetteville in May 1842, and ten years later my grandfather Frederic Abram was born on 27 August 1852. Like all Jersey school children, he spoke French, English and Norman, but his formal education went no further than primary school. At thirteen he bade farewell to his parents and left Jersey to go to sea. There was no future for him in milking Jersey cows, growing Jersey royal potatoes, or building sailing ships at one of the island’s harbours, even though there were several shipbuilders with the name De Gruchy.
Records in the Jersey Maritime Museum document my grandfather’s early years as a sailor. But the story goes blank around the 1870s when he sailed out of Southampton rather than Jersey’s chief port, St. Helier. Sometime during the late 1880s he became the captain of a tea-trading clipper, which regularly sailed around the Cape to China. His days as a seafarer came to a dramatic end in 1883, however, as recounted in our family records:
His clipper Velocity and two other vessels were sunk during a tropical storm … Frédéric and crew took to lifeboats in the turbulent sea. To add to their plight, after the storm abated they were pursued by Chinese pirates for two days and nights. Fortunately during the third night the pirates went ahead of their lifeboat and de Gruchy, by changing direction, was able to elude them. Frédéric, with 14 sailors aboard, spent a total of nine days short of food and drinking water, before being sighted and rescued by a passing ship bound for New Zealand.3
My grandfather continued on the ship when it began its return journey to England, but disembarked in Cape Town. On the Sunday after his arrival, he attended worship at the Metropolitan Methodist Church in Greenmarket Square, where he met Mary Irish, a striking young woman who had recently arrived from England. Within a few weeks they were engaged, and were married in the same church on 18 December 1883.
Mary was born in March 1862 in Climping, Sussex, a hamlet on the Duke of Norfolk’s Arundel estate where her grandfather was bailiff. Her mother died when she was young, and there is no reference to her father in the baptismal register of the parish church in Climping; so she was brought up by her grandparents, kept their name, and her paternity was wrapped in secrecy. When she
