Not ‘The Diary of Iris Vaughan’: Harry Jacobs Part 2 My post last year on Harris (Harry) Jacobs (1852-1921), the Jewish shoemaker who lived next door to the Vaughans, elicited a lot of response. I am greatly indebted to Cheryl Goldblatt, Beverly Young, Lynn MacLeod and Nolene Lossau Sproat who helped identify him as a Russian Jew who had emigrated to England, where in 1894 he married Dora Gallewski (1874-1936; her maiden name was later written Gillespie). They in fact had four children, not just the son Louis that Iris Vaughan wrote about: Louis, Rebecca, Cissy and Hilda, and they lived in Sunderland, Durham. In 1903, soon after Hilda was born, Harry left his family behind and sought his fortune in the Cape Colony. He landed in Cape Town and in 1907 settled in Adelaide where he lived, and worked as a shoemaker, in a corrugated iron shack on land that belonged to Cecil Vaughan. Last week I went to the Archives to look at his Estate Papers. And here I found another twist in the tail: Louis Jacobs DID COME TO SOUTH AFRICA! I don’t know when he came, but when Harry Jacobs drew up his will in 1920 (the attorneys were D Theron & WH Turpin), he nominated his son Louis Jacobs as the executor. He was at the time living in Volksrust, Transvaal, in the district of Wakkerstroom – today Mpumalanga. Although Louis had completed an apprenticeship as a tailor in England, in Volksrust he was a partner in the firm Van der Westhuizen & Jacobs: Auctioneers & General Commission Agents. His partner was CJ van der Westhuizen. Of course, this raises other questions: was Louis Jacobs married? Are there still descendants in Volksrust or some other South African town where Louis’ restless feet took him? Harry Jacobs left £458 2/ 5d in cash and various bank accounts; that sounds quite a tidy sum for 1921. His wife and daughters were the sole heirs (not Louis – presumably he was doing well enough for himself). However, there seems to have been a bit of a dispute around this. For one thing it could not be established whether Harry and Dora had entered into an ante-nuptial contract. Then, when the heirs had not received their money via the executor (Louis) by June 1922, Dora entered a caveat against the will probate so that Louis could not obtain the money. So she was worried that Louis would not honour his father’s wishes and send the money to her and the girls, who were presumably all still living in England. And that’s all there was. There was no mention of whether she finally received the money or not. I like to believe she did. And the beloved son that Harry Jacobs so longed to see? Presumably Louis made contact with his father when he arrived in South Africa. And so it was probably Louis who organised the gravestone and the Jewish inscription etc (picture 1). That would have been exactly what Harry would have wanted. And he had been right all along when he told Iris all those years ago: “I think my son Louis will come to see me and perhaps work in this land too”.
Posted on: Fri, 23 Jan 2015 21:22:38 +0000