Long Silence - Dundee, South Africa

The only message on this mysterious card is Long silence???
The view is of Victoria Street in Dundee, South Africa, a town named by Scottish settler, Peter Smith, after his home town. Peter found coal close to the surface on his farm and started selling it while continuing to farm. Dundee later became a major coal-mining area. The first battle of the Boer War was also fought nearby.

The building on the right appears to be the Jan Johnson Masonic Hotel. In the foreground, we see a man pulling a rickshaw, a common form of transportation in South Africa at the turn of the century. Another man appears to be carrying a bicycle on his back.

But for the initials, J.E.G, we don't know who the sender was. We can see that he sent the card from the Piggs Peak Development Co. Ltd in Swaziland on the 29th of September in 1905 though. The company and the town were named after William Pigg who discovered a gold reef in the area. At the time this card was sent there many thousands of miners had emigrated from Cornwall, England to South Africa bringing their mining techniques with them. You can see a great photo of Cornish miners at Piggs Peak here.

The card's recipient was Eric F. Smith, Esquire of Barbourne College in Worcester, England. Whether the recipient is related to Peter Smith, founder of Dundee, is a mystery to me.

Drumhead Cabbage & Friends

Most of us don't have a local seedsman these days where we can buy our seeds. We're more likely to buy them at nurseries or hardware stores. These cards were all produced by Richmond & Co/Clay & Richmond of Buffalo, New York in the 1880s/90s.

Dr. Bine Returns Home

There are a lot more Vienna postcards from Dr. René Bine that I haven't posted, but I think it's probably time to move on to his other adventures. Since he was in Vienna in 1904 and 1905, I had wondered where he was in 1906. I don't have any postcards from 1906, but I have a number from 1907 and 1908. Was he back in San Francisco for the 1906 earthquake? It turns out he was.

 

San Francisco's Nob Hill in Ruins (Source)

 
A later passport application shows that he had been in Vienna from September 1904 until February 1905. He went back to Heidelberg, Germany and Paris, France for a little over a year, but not until December of 1906. Here's his photo, circa 1923 from the passport application.

Then, of course I wondered what Dr. Bine's experience had been in the San Francisco earthquake. It wasn't hard to find out. In his book, The Good Years: From 1900 to the First World War, Walter Lord writes that when the earthquake struck at 5:12 A.M. on April 18, 1906, "young Dr. Rene Bine at first thought he was dreaming and waited to wake up." In describing how ordinary people did remarkable things in the aftermath of the earthquake, Lord writes that "gentle Dr. Rene Bine coolly commandeered an auto at pistol point to get to the hospital and lend his help." It didn't stop there.

Dr. Bine, age 24,  volunteered his services to the Army and was put in charge of the largest refugee camp, pictured below.

Refugee Camp #6 at Harbor View in San Francisco's Marina District (Source)

He was the surgeon in the camp of 600, but he was also responsible for health and sanitation and managing a sometimes unruly group of refugees. According to a special study by Gaines Foster of the Center of Military History,  Dr. Bine, assisted by a nurse, saw an average of 36 patients per day.

If you have read the previous posts of Dr. Bine in Vienna, it will come as no surprise that he documented everything he saw and did during the aftermath of the earthquake. Years later, his daughter Marie Louise donated two boxes of his papers from 1906, including correspondence, photos, payroll sheets, directives, and newspaper clippings. These papers are now stored at the California Historical Society in San Francisco.

Andrea Rees Davies, historian and former San Francisco firefighter, spent ten years researching the relief efforts after the San Francisco earthquake and just published her book Saving San Francisco: Relief and Recovery after the 1906 Disaster. Davies was able to use the Bine papers as a source in exploring the social order at refugee camps. The book provides a very interesting perspective on how the earthquake affected different neighborhoods and social groups and the role the relief efforts played in creating the San Francisco of today.

One thing I noticed from Dr. Bine's postcards home is that the address changed after 1906, suggesting that their own house at 1554 Post Street was probably damaged during the earthquake.