By my reckoning it is just under 226 years ago, early in the First British Occupation of the Cape, that the 34-year old customs clerk, Samuel Eusebius Hudson, rode through what became Claremont – it was then a wagon road across the Sans Souci estate – on his way to Simonstown, ‘to put the Customs House seal upon the Hatches of the Christianus Septimus, a Danish ship bound from Batavia to Copenhagen with a cargo of sugar and coffee and detained here by the late Admiral and the Vice Admiralty Court on suspicion of the whole or great part being Dutch Property… (Diary entry for Saturday 8th December 1798).
Which means that Samuel Eusebius Hudson rode past the very spot on today’s Main Road – in his day a waggon road – where we are sitting tonight. It is thus most appropriate that Edward Hudson, his 5th generation descendant, is launching this volume of selections from his great, great, great, great, great-uncle’s diaries here tonight, to boot in the presence of the 6th generation, his son, Thomas, to whom welcome too.
Edward has worked for 20+ years on this project, putting into it his indefatigable labour as a researcher, palaeographer, transcriber and editor, all driven by a characteristically Hudsonian determination to complete the task he had set himself. The results of this he will share with us shortly.
As he will tell you, the diaries reflect the changing social lenses through which Samuel Hudson viewed the Cape during the First and Second British Occupations, those of a manservant who became a customs clerk, a hotel-keeper, a slave owner, a farmer, a shopkeeper, an unrehabilitated bankrupt and a painter-cum-art teacher, in that order. Despite these diverse social positions, some features remained constant in his life however, shaping his outlook as they did – his misogynism, his Evangelical Christianity and morality, his Anglophilia, his sense of English racial superiority, his hostility towards aristocratic, military and bureaucratic placemen, and his love of a good yarn, of gossip and of rumour. All of these aspects are to be seen in his frank, daily (sometimes twice or thrice-daily) diary entries, which aimed to record for his own later perusal whatever he found interesting or remarkable. Unabashed, he admitted shortly before his death in 1828, ‘I write too much but the fever is on and ‘tis scarcely possible to allay the itch of scribbling.’
For making accessible this selection of his ‘scribblings’ (the right word to describe Samuel Hudson’s handwriting) as HiPSA’s 106th volume, HiPSA has to thank the late Rob Shell and Achmat Davids (who re-discovered the diaries in the 1980s), Rob Shell’s widow, Sandy Shell, who generously shared Rob’s work with the editor, Susie Newton-King and Elizabeth van Heyningen who made helpful comments on the entire text, Claudine Willatt-Bate who designed and set the book so stylishly, and an anonymous donor who provided a subsidy towards publication. Most of all, of course, HiPSA must express its gratitude to Edward Hudson for his diligence, meticulous scholarship and commitment, for his readiness to take suggestions on board and for his willingness to share the intellectual excitement generated by this project. The history of the early British Cape will not look the same again thanks to the return of Samuel Eusebius Hudson and his descendants to the Cape.
Accordingly, I ask one of the latter to tell us about the former and his diary.
Howard Phillips.
22 October 2024.
