W.M. Macmillan and the Making of History at Wits 1917-1933
By Bruce Murray
University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg
William Macmillan founded the History Departments at two of South Africa’s
English-medium universities—Rhodes, where in 1911 he took up the post of
lecturer in charge of the Department of History and Economics, and Wits, when in
1917 he was appointed Professor of History in the South African School of Mines
and Technology, which became the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg,
in 1922. The History Department at Wits, in short, is older than the University by
some five years. In 1916, amid howls of protest from Johannesburg and the wider
Witwatersrand that their interests were being ignored, the Botha Government’s
university bills had been approved by Parliament, setting up teaching universities at
Cape Town and Stellenbosch, and a federal university of South Africa with its
headquarters in Pretoria. The one concession made to the Witwatersrand was that
the School of Mines, which would become a constituent college of UNISA, was
empowered to extend its work beyond science and technology. The teaching of the
arts, including History, previously reserved by Jan Smuts, as Minister of Education
in the Botha Government of the old Transvaal, for the Transvaal University College
in Pretoria, was now permitted in Johannesburg. Smuts was not alone in regarding
Johannesburg as essentially philistine and unsuited as seat for a university and the
study of the arts. As Sir George Cory at Rhodes wrote to Macmillan when the bill
granting Johannesburg a university charter was passed by Parliament in 1921, ‘Yes,
we noted that you want to become a university on your own. I don’t see why you
shouldn’t—your aims and objects seem to be so different from the rest of us—of
course I don’t know the details, but are you not a really big (very big) Technical
Institute where the hard-up and struggling workingman wants to get some sort of
diploma by attending evening classes? Is it true that compulsory subjects for your
BA are banking, bootlace-making, painting and house-decorating? With Yiddish as
the medium? I should like to think that whitewashing would be a very useful MA
subject in a country such as this.’1
Born in Aberdeen in 1885, the son of a clergyman-schoolmaster, Macmillan had
come South Africa with his parents at the age of six. He was educated at the
Victoria College, Stellenbosch, and Merton College, Oxford, which he attended as
one of the first Rhodes scholars. Thirty two when he assumed the Johannesburg
chair, Macmillan served Wits for 16 years, giving notice of his resignation in
September 1933 while on sabbatical in Britain. They were 16 years of considerable
achievement and sometimes intense controversy, leading ultimately to his
resignation. Unfortunately, the documentary record for Macmillan’s tenure at Wits
is not as full as one would wish. His personal file no longer exists. All that exists in
the Staff Registry is his staff register, recording his appointment, his salary in 1923
(£1100 pa), the award of leave for 1933, and his resignation (dated as 31 March
1934).
There is no correspondence—no letter of appointment, no letter of
resignation, nothing. It was not always so. When I embarked on the Wits history in
the late 1970s, Registry possessed a large blue file on Macmillan, but when I
returned some years later to examine it I was horrified to learn that Registry,
without ever consulting or informing me, had embarked on a space-saving project in
which the files of former members of staff were weeded, and the key surviving
documents preserved on microfiche. All that was preserved for Macmillan was his
staff register—some weeding, that. The main documentary source that survives is
Macmillan’s own, in the possession of his family. This comprises chiefly the
correspondence between Macmillan and Mona Tweedie, who was to become his
second wife, for the years 1930 to 1932, and some of the letters, though not all, from
H.R. Raikes, the Wits Principal, for the crucial years 1932-3, though none of
Macmillan’s letters to Raikes.
Macmillan’s 16 years at Wits were the most productive of his life.
As Raikes
complimented him in the letter accepting his resignation, ‘You have seen the
Department of History grow from a very small beginning to its present considerable
dimensions and at the same time have carried out a great deal of extremely valuable
1
W M Macmillan, My South African Years: An Autobiography (David Philip, Cape Town, 1975),
148.
research work’.2 He had undertaken massive research, and produced four books in
all—The South African Agrarian Problem and its Historical Development (1919),
The Cape Colour Question (1927): Bantu, Boer and Briton, The Making of the
South African Native Problem (1929), and Complex South Africa (1930).3
Macmillan built up the Department from scratch. In 1917 The School of Mines
itself was a small-scale affair with 177 day students, up from 77 the year previously
with the addition of 8 new arts and 2 new science departments. The classroom
accommodation for these new departments was provided mainly by a corrugated
structure, christened the ‘Tin Temple’, the former municipal offices on Plein Square
that had been vacated by the municipality following the completion of the Town
Hall. Macmillan described the building as ‘very moth-eaten’, though as he
commented it ‘housed an abnormally large proportion of men and women who
made their mark in the world’.4 In 1923 the new University began the transfer of its
teaching to the new campus at Milner Park, with History moving in 1925 to the
new, half-completed, Central Block, where it has remained ever since. By 1933
History had grown into a thriving department with over a hundred students and a
staff complement of three, offering a three year major and Honours—during his
tenure the Department was never without an Honours class from 1920 onwards--as
well as supervision for the MA.
In addition to Macmillan, the teaching staff
comprised his former Rhodes student and Rhodes lecturer, Margaret Hodgson, who
first joined the Department as a leave replacement for Macmillan in 1920, was
appointed lecturer in 1921 and senior lecturer in 1928, and Adrian Hope, a lawyer
interested in history who was appointed junior assistant in 1930.
As at Rhodes, Macmillan resisted pressure to ‘overload’ the undergraduate syllabus
with South African history, in part because the literature was still very limited, and
instead designed a syllabus intended to ‘provide something like a liberal education’,
2
Raikes to Macmillan, 27 September 1933, Macmillan Papers.
For Macmillan’s contribution to South African historiography see Christopher Saunders, The
3
Making of the South African Past: Major Historians on Race and Class (David Philip, Cape Town,
1988), 47-75; and Ken Smith, The Changing Past: Trends in South African Historical Writing
(Southern Book Publishers, Johannesburg, 1988), 104-112.
4
Macmillan, Autobiography, 148-9.
with large doses of European history to help broaden the otherwise parochial
horizons of his students and convey to them some sense of ‘the origins of the ideas
and institutions they had inherited’. He was particularly proud of his course on the
European Middle Ages, which he took with him to Johannesburg—he saw it as a
flanking attack ‘on the complacency of white South Africa by introducing students
to the primitive conditions of the Middle Ages in Europe’ and an excellent
mechanism for ‘preparing my students for a new view of their own history’.5 In its
final form at Wits, the Macmillan syllabus offered a course on Europe 1400-1700 to
first years, and four courses to second and third year students, Medieval Europe, a
special period in Modern European history, the development of the British
Constitution, and a general introduction to South African history. Each of these
courses was taught in alternate years, with Macmillan taking responsibility for the
medieval European and the South African, and Margaret Hodgson for Modern
Europe and the British Constitution. Honours comprised four historical papers, a
special period in Modern European history, comparative constitutional history,
general questions in Medieval or Modern history, a special period in South African
history, and a paper in Political Science or Economics. As explained by Margaret
Hodgson in her application to succeed Macmillan, ‘It has been the endeavour of the
Department not only to train students in methods of historical study and in historical
perspective but to assist them in applying their training in the field of South African
History. In the process of this endeavour, it has been the practice of the Department
to introduce third year students to the most accessible sources of that history, while
candidates for the Honours degree in History have been required not only to write
examination papers but to submit a minor thesis on some aspect of South African
history.’6
Nonetheless, Macmillan’s syllabus was regarded as far too ‘Eurocentric’ in certain
quarters, and under his successor, Leo Fouché, the reaction was swift and radical,
with the syllabus focusing very much more on white South African history. The
History I course, represented as an ‘Introduction to South African History’, dealt
largely with Dutch and British colonisation, with special reference to the Cape. For
5
Ibid., 114-15.
6
Margaret Hodgson to the Registrar, 19 December 1933, Ballinger Papers A 410/B2.16.1
second and third year students the courses on Medieval Europe and the development
of the British Constitution, were retained as one year courses, given in alternate
years, and ‘South African History, from the sources’, and a special period in
Modern European History, made two years’ courses. ‘It’s all quite pathetic,’ an
aggrieved Margaret Ballinger (as Margaret Hodgson had become, losing her
appointment in the process) reported back to Macmillan. ‘He spends a year telling
them about the DEICy charter & the foundation of the Cape (no mention of Natives)
& then marks them all in the 70’s and 80’s.’7
Phylllis Lewsen, one of Fouché’s
students, echoed the complaint in her memoirs: ‘In his second and third-year
courses, he concentrated on the few stale outworn themes already so overstressed at
school: the Portuguese explorations; Jan van Riebeeck’s settlement at the Cape; the
evolution of the Trekboer; and the burgher revolt against Willem Adriaan van der
Stel—whose corrupt ways he blamed on his “mixed blood”. And in his honours
course he made us study in the minutest detail the causes, course and consequences
of the Great Trek, but from the strictly white point of view.’ 8
Although his lectures were not carefully structured, Macmillan was an especially
inspiring teacher, greatly loved and admired by his students.
They gave him or
adopted the nickname ‘Pinkie’, no doubt deriving from his facial colour (ginger hair
and pink cheeks) as well as the colour of his political views, which he represented
as social democrat. He and Margaret Hodgson comprised a formidable teaching
pair, the one almost exactly complementing the other. Where Macmillan’s lectures
were very often spontaneous, hers were always very carefully prepared, and were
virtually dictated.
During his tenure at Wits, Macmillan trained some quite remarkable students.
Among the University’s first History majors Wits were the future historians C.W. de
Kiewiet and Lucy Sutherland, both of whom went on to complete their Master’s
under Macmillan, and the economist Herbert Frankel.9 Nor did Macmillan confine
7
Margaret Ballinger to Macmillan, 6 January 1936, Macmillan Papers.
8
Phyllis Lewsen, Reverberations—A Memoir (UCT Press, Cape Town, 1996), 85.
9
For Macmillan and de Kiewiet see Christopher Saunders, ‘A Liberal Descent? W.M. Macmillan,
C.W. de Kiewiet and the History of South Africa’ in Hugh Macmillan and Shula Marks, Africa and
Empire: W.M. Macmillan, Historian and Social Critic (Institute of Commonwealth Studies, London,
his teaching to Wits students. Soon after his arrival in Johannesburg, he established
links with the Witwatersrand’s white trade union movement and later the Workers’
Educational Association, offering them lectures on labour relations. He regarded
the leaders of the 1922 Rand Revolt as ‘in the main high-minded socialists’.10
Macmillan’s tenure at Wits was noted above all for his research and writing and the
production of what he called ‘a revised version of South African history’.
Along
with Eric Walker at UCT, Macmillan was the first of the professional or
academically trained historians of South Africa, and he took particular exception to
the pro-colonist, anti-black, anti-missionary version of Cape history produced by the
amateur pioneers of South African history, notably G.M. Theal and Sir George
Cory, with their sense that South African history was essentially.the tale of the
triumph of white power in conquering a new country and crushing its inferior black
inhabitants, showing no regard in their version for the interests or fate of those
crushed. In countering the approach that ‘treats South African history as the story
of the fortunes only of its European pioneers’, Macmillan stressed that the history
of South Africa was a history of all its peoples, black as well as white, that South
Africa formed a single society. In the estimate of Ken Smith, ‘he was the first
historian working on South African history to see this’.11 Macmillan also rebelled
against the notion that the only real history was political history—while much of
what he wrote was political he provided also for a socio-economic approach to the
past.
Macmillan’s first research project, which he embarked on when at Rhodes, was on
white poverty, culminating in the publication of The South African Agrarian
Problem and its Historical Development. From white poverty he moved to the
study of brown and black poverty. This move was prompted by his realisation that
he had been dealing with ‘only the tip of the iceberg’, and that white poverty was
directly linked to brown and black poverty. The move was also facilitated by his
acquistion in 1920-21 of the papers of Dr John Philip, the famous (or to many at the
1989), 91-102.
10
Macmillan, Autobiography, 155
11
Smith, Changing Past, 108.
time, infamous) head of the London Missionary Society in South Africa in the first
half of the nineteenth century. These voluminous papers, which included a mass of
correspondence from all over the country, were given to him by the family in the
anticipation that Macmillan would produce a biography; instead he proceeded to
produce a ‘revised version of South African history’ with its new focus on the
‘weaker peoples’ Philip had sought to protect. While working on the Philip Papers,
Macmillan kept them at his home in Yeoville and in his office at Wits—only when
he was finished did he place them for safe-keeping in the Wits Library. It was a
fatal move—the Library, including the Philip Papers, went up in flames in the
Central Block fire of 24 December 1931.
A feature of Macmillan’s research in the 1920s is that he did not simply lock
himself up with the Philip Papers. Indeed, he farmed out much of that work to his
‘highly competent students’, as he described them—in his autobiography, he pays
particular thanks to ‘Dr CW de Kiewiet, Dame Lucy Sutherland, Dr Daphne Alon
(née Trevor), lately of the Israeli Civil Service, Heather Hanna (née Moore), late
principal of the Potchefstrrom Girls’ High School, and later Anthony Hamilton,
South African ambassador in a number of capitals’.12 De Kiewiet wrote both his
Honours long essay and his MA thesis on ‘Government, emigrants, missionaries and
natives on the northern frontier and beyond, 1832-1846’, while Sutherland’s long
essay dealt with the Cape Governor, Sir Benjamin D’Urban, and her Masters’ thesis
with Philip himself. So far from confining himself to stuffy archival work over
vacations, Macmillan’s preference was for field work, and during his tenure at Wits
he criss-crossed the country at his own expense gathering information on
contemporary social and economic conditions—research that was vital for his
Complex South Africa: An Economic Footnote to History—and covering the African
areas relevant to his work on the Philip Papers.
Among the academic staff at Wits, Macmillan was something of a loner. He even
managed to range himself against his two main liberal friends of his early years,
John Macmurray, the Professor of Philosophy, and J.P. Dalton, Professor of
Mathematics, over the Stibbe affair, the central issue that rocked Wits in the year of
12
Macmillan, Autobiography, 163.
its foundation as a fully-fledged university. In December 1921 E.P. Stibbe, the
Professor of Anatomy and a married man, was forced by the Principal, J H
Hofmeyr, and Council to resign over what they deemed his immoral liaison with
Miss Frances Roy, the head typist. At an extraordinary meeting of the Senate of the
new University on 27 February 1922 a resolution condemning Council’s action was
passed by 22 votes to 1. Macmurray and Dalton headed the charge by Senate;
Macmillan was the lone dissentient. As he recalled in his autobiography: ‘Rightly
or wrongly I felt I must stand by Hofmeyr, since it seemed to me that the Senate of
sophisticated academics was being unduly harsh towards a young and inexperienced
principal’. With his experience as a ‘rooinek” among the Afrikaners of
Stellenbosch, he also sympathised with Hofmeyr’s plight as a lone Afrikaner among
the largely expatriate ‘rooineks’ of the Wits Senate.13 In the later part of his career,
he also isolated himself from the liberal group that developed round J.D. Rheinallt
Jones, part-time lecturer in Native Law and Administration and the first director of
the Institute of Race Relations, founded in 1929 with its offices at Wits, and the
Hoernlé’s--R.F.A. Hoernlé, who succeeded Macmurray as Professor of Philosophy
in 1923, and his wife Winifred Hoernlé, appointed as the anthropologist in the
Department of Bantu Studies in the following year.
Intellectual and ideological
differences, and a rivalry for resources at Wits, set them apart.
Basically, Macmillan was hostile to the new anthropology, with its emphasis on
‘cultural’ differences and its theories of ‘cultural’ change, requiring the exhaustive
‘scientific’ study of indigenous cultures before changes might be contemplated--it
was an approach that produced ‘paralysed conservatives’, not political activists.14
Rheinallt Jones virtually threw down the gauntlet to Macmillan in his presidential
address of 8 July 1926 to Section E of the South African Association for the
Advancement of Science on ‘The Need of a Scientific Basis for South African
Native Policy’, when he asserted that the ‘scientific’ basis of anthropology and
psychology provided a far more promising approach to South Africa’s race
problems than did a study of the country’s history: ‘Political experience and
13
Ibid., 151.
14
For a fuller analysis see Hugh Macmillan, ‘”Paralysed Conservatives: W.M. Macmillan, the Social
Scientists and the “Common Society”, 1923-48’ in Macmillan and Marks, Africa and Empire, 72-90.
historical knowledge have not given us a panacea for our racial difficulties, but have
led us instead into a wilderness where the road is lost in the thick undergrowth of
racial pride, passion and prejudice’. He looked instead to the ‘scientific study’ of
‘the Native’ by anthropologists and psychologists to provide a more constructive
understanding of the country’s race problems.15
While Macmillan conceded that
this approach might produce some interesting research, he had intellectual
reservations about studying ’the Native’ in an a-historical context and in isolation
from the rest of society—he was fundamentally opposed to the notion of ‘two
civilizations’ in South Africa—and it was an approach that promoted too little by
way of political action, whereas what history taught was the need for immediate and
direct political action. As he explained in his autobiography, ‘History, as I saw it,
taught me that South Africa was suffering from bad government and bad
administration such as had occurred elsewhere in the world’s history, and not least
in some areas of so-called Western civilization. I was firmly convinced that the
remedy was political, to substitute good laws for bad: only, political action to force
reform of vicious legislation was to be urged rather than palliatives and
amielioration’.
In retrospective judgment he claimed that the Institute of Race
Relations that Rheinallt-Jones came to direct ‘had no effect on politics’.16
There
was
another
RheinalltJones/Hoernlé
ingredient
in
Macmillan’s
isolation
from
the
nexus—the struggle for resources at Wits, a struggle
heightened by the onset of economic depression at the beginning of the 1930s. As
he wrote in his autobiography, ‘The new trend in research, away from history or
politics and towards anthropology, had its direct effects on my position at the
University of the Witwatersrand’—it left him short of resources.
In 1931, in an
effort to save the post of his junior assistant, Adrian Hope, he proposed to the
Board of the Faculty of Arts that the course in Native Law and Administration be
transferred from the Department of Bantu Studies to History ‘as better teaching
results might be obtained by this arrangement, which would also make possible the
retrenchment of the present part-time lecturer in Native Law and Administration and
15
J.D. Rheinallt Jones, ‘The Need of a Scientific Basis for South African Native Policy’, South
African Journal of Science, 23 (1926), 79-91.
16
Macmillan, Autobiography, 214-6.
would justify the retention of the part-time lecturer in the Department of History’.
In Macmillan’s contention the existing course in Native Law and Administration
was unsatisfactory, not only because it failed to attract many students, but more
importantly because it was quite lacking in historical content. He also made it clear
that he did not consider Rheinallt Jones competent to teach a university course. In
response to Macmillan’s criticisms and proposals, a committee on the Teaching of
Native Law and Administration was set up, and it defended the status quo against
him. “I have just been driven off the field’, he wrote privately, ‘routed in the
Committee by four to one on every point.’17
Although rather shy and reserved as a person, Macmillan possessed a strong
combative streak in him.
This was sometimes revealed in Senate, most
constructively in 1927 and again in 1932 when he urged that the Medical School
take positive steps towards providing a medical education for blacks.
‘Senate
unexpectedly lively;’ he wrote to Mona Tweedie in June 1932, ‘the medical people
having recommended refusing admission to a Native, on the grounds of making
“suitable” (unnecessary) provision for him. I led a fight, had a good “scrap” and got
them to agree fairly readily at least to press on the Government the need to make the
“necessary” arrangements; this was more support than might have been for setting
the University against the Government—nothing much may come of it, nothing will
perhaps,--but at least the Senate reaffirmed what I got out of them four or five years
ago, their “willingness” to take and train blacks.’18
But he was at his most combative when taking on government. In the 1920s he
wrote a series of aggressive articles on worsening conditions in the reserves, which
the Prime Minister, J.M.B. Hertzog, denounced as ‘political’ in Parliament. Jan
Smuts, a friend, intervened to defend Macmillan, but privately warned him against
the ‘pessimism’ that was creeping into his writings.19 After Macmillan returned
from a trip to Britain in 1931, he sought to rally the Johannesburg Joint Council of
Europeans and Natives, of which he was chairman, in opposite ion to Hertzog’s
17
Macmillan to Mona Tweedie, 23 October 1931, Macmillan Papers.
18
See B.K. Murray, Wits: The Early Years (Wits University Press, Johannesburg, 1982), 302-11.
19
Macmillan, Autobiography, 188-89.
segregation policy. Critics accused him of ‘politicising’ the Joint Council, founded
in 1921 with a view to promoting co-operation between white liberals and the
African elite. This brought him into direct conflict with Oswald Pirow, the Minister
of Justice, and E.G. Jansen, the Minister of Native Affairs. In his autobiography,
Macmillan gives the impression that his altercation was with Pirow alone, but
after a major brush with the Minister of Justice in September 1932 he then
confronted the Minister of Native Affairs over the Government’s failure to
consult African opinion in the preparation of the 'Native Bills'. Their exchange
reached its climax on 10 November 1932 when, in defiance of
the minister,
Macmillan published their correspondence in the Rand Daily Mail. The same
day an agitated Principal Raikes wrote to Macmillan to rebuke him for his
public attack on the minister, that might prejudice the University's future relations
with the Government: ‘I feel very strongly that the University should not muzzle
members of its staff. But this naturally implies that members of the staff will
not take such action as may jeopardise the relation between the University and
the Government without being authorised so to do by the Council. I am not
prepared to say that the action you have taken in this instance has jeopardised
our
relations with
government, but
I feel that
it may
well have serious
repercussions in that direction. Under the circumstances I feel bound to say, both
as a private citizen who is keenly interested in the development of the Native,
and as Principal, that the publication of the letter can do no good and may
do very great harm, both to the development of the Native and the position of
the University.’
To this point Raikes had all along treated Macmillan ‘at least with tolerance, if
without active encouragement’, and Macmillan was convinced that Raikes had now
buckled to Government pressure to rein him in.
Because of the economic
depression, and Wits’ dependence on government funding, the University was
particularly vulnerable to such pressure. Before the next meeting of the University
Council on 11 November, Macmillan was summoned 'urgently' by
Raikes.
According to Macmillan's own account, he offered to resign, but Raikes was
determined to avoid that as he did not 'want to make the University notorious
by
victimising me'.
Macmillan did not then resign, but took the overseas
leave that had already been granted him for 1933. It was agreed that Macmillan
‘would think things over during my leave’. 20 He was never to return to Wits as
a member of staff . On 13 September 1933, he cabled his resignation to Raikes.
The question is: why did Macmillan choose to resign?
It is evident from his
autobiography that he was getting restless at Wits—he was politically isolated, he
was tiring of much of the ‘donkey work’ associated with teaching, the Philip Papers
had gone up in smoke, and with that any plans he might have had for producing a
biography of Philip, and his interests were shifting to Africa beyond South Africa.
His research tour of East Africa in 1930, and the encouragement he got from
members of the British Colonial Office, ‘made me conclude that, rightly or wrongly,
I would be in a more hopeful field in the colonial Empire than struggling to make
any impression at all on those in control in South Africa’. But it is quite clear from
his autobiography that his decision not to return was rooted in the University’s
attempt to silence him and thereby end his pioneer role in South Africa as a public
intellectual.
In 1981, Macmillan’s son, Hugh, wrote to me that he had heard that Phyllis Lewsen,
then Associate Professor of History at Wits, ‘had been spreading doubt as to the
authenticity of my father’s views on his leaving Wits as expressed in My South
African Years’. In her own memoir, Reverberations, published in 1996, Lewsen
gave her account: ‘Macmillan had felt obliged to resign at the end of 1931, after an
unpleasant, prolonged and unmerited scandal. He was accused of being too friendly
with his secretary, which was considered both infra dig and immoral—especially for
a married man. In addition, he had enraged the university authorities and the Prime
Minister by his far too liberal—and scandalously outspoken—political views’.21
This was clearly the recollection of a confused old lady. She got the dates wrong,
academic departments in those days never enjoyed the luxury of a secretary, and
she mixed up Macmillan’s departure with that of Professor Stibbe in the previous
decade. Nonetheless she sensed that there was a sniff of scandal about Macmillan’s
departure, that ‘the university authorities’ had reservations about his private life as
well as his political views. Arthur Keppel-Jones, who served as Macmillan’s leave
20
Ibid., 223-30.
21
Lewsen, Reverberations, 79.
replacement in 1932-3, cryptically remarks in his autobiography that the reasons for
Macmillan’s resignation ‘were complicated and the evidence conflicting’.22
If there was any sense of scandal at the time, it was in regard to Macmillan’s
relationship with Mona Tweedie, the daughter of the British Vice-Admiral at
Simonstown, a woman half his age who was later to become his second wife. They
had met on board the Durham Castle in February 1931 when Macmillan was
returning from a brief sojourn in England. Beyond mentioning this, and making use
of his letters to her as a source, Macmillan has nothing to say about their
relationship in his autobiography. That gap has now been filled by Mona herself, in
her posthumous memoir Mona’s Story, edited by their son, Hugh Macmillan, and
published in 2008.
It is a quite remarkable book, and provides a frank account of
their courtship, and some of the ruffles it caused. At the end of the voyage out to
South Africa Macmillan, according to Mona, proclaimed his love for her. About six
weeks later she went to went to stay with the Macmillans in their Yeoville home,
evidently at Jean Macmillan’s invitation.
Her visit to Johannesburg caused
something of a stir, her being invited to tea by the mayor among other things, and
she sometimes sat in Macmillan’s office while he gave his lectures: ‘We enjoyed
each other’s company, and we were beginning to depend a lot on each other, but
during this visit we behaved impeccably, there was no kissing or lovemaking’.
Later in the year Mona twice stopped off in Johannesburg when touring southern
Africa by rail with her parents. On the second visit they had tea at the Macmillan’s
home: ‘William and I were allowed to go for a walk on the koppie during which we
got closer to each other than ever before’. Thereafter Macmillan corresponded
regularly with Mona, but his letters were intercepted by the Vice-Admiral, and she
also suspected her phone was tapped. Over the Christmas/New Year break the
Macmillans came down to Fish Hoek, two stations away from Simonstown, on
holiday, when Macmillan was summoned by the Vice-Admiral for an interview
‘during which he was persuaded that he had been acting improperly’ and agreed not
to see Mona again. The next day Mona escaped from home to meet Macmillan on
Fish Hoek station. With his encouragement, she determined to return to England.
For his part, he intimated that ‘at the end of that year, 1932, he would be coming to
22
Arthur Keppel-Jones, A Patriot in Search of a Country (private publication, 2003), 162.
England for a year’s sabbatical leave and he had hopes of finding a new direction,
probably at a British university, and at least of getting some major writing done. He
promised that we would meet again there’. That was a promise he kept. When he
arrived in England at the beginning of 1933, they shared a Chelsea house for a
month as lovers.23
This developing saga did not go unnoticed at Wits, which was still a relatively small
institution led by men who believed academic staff were not simply teachers but
should offer a moral example to their students.
In particular, the Principal,
Humphrey Raikes, had become perturbed not only by Macmillan’s political clashes
with Government ministers, but also by his relationship with Mona Tweedie. A
straight-laced High Church Anglican, he disapproved of Macmillan, a married man,
befriending a young woman half his age, and feared that given Mona’s high status
as the daughter of the British Vice-Admiral, it might embroil the University in a
public scandal—evidently the Vice-Admiral had communicated his displeasure
about the relationship to Raikes. Allegedly, at their meeting on 10 November 1932,
Raikes requested Macmillan to resolve the issues in his private life while on
sabbatical.24
Altogether Raikes found the History Department quite unsettling,
given that he also strongly disapproved of Margaret Hodgson living out of wedlock
with the radical trade unionist, William Ballinger. In her case, retribution came
when she finally married Ballinger at the end of 1934; without even consulting
Council, Raikes immediately gave her notice that as a married woman she could no
longer remain in the employ of Wits, this despite the fact that Mrs Hoernlé
continued to teach in the Department of Bantu Studies.25
It seems, in short, that when Macmillan agreed that during his sabbatical he would
‘think things over’ in regard to his future at Wits, one of the things that required
thought was his relationship with Mona. A return to Wits might well require an end
to that relationship. This was brought home to him in the spring of 1933 when, after
a research visit to West Africa, he went up to All Souls in Oxford as a visiting
23
Mona Macmillan (edited by Hugh Macmillan), Mona’s Story: An Admiral’s Daughter in England,
Scotland and Africa, 1908-51 (Oxford Publishing Services, Oxford, 2008), chaps. 4 & 6.
24
Interview with Professor Stanley Jackson, 1981.
25
Murray, Wits: The Early Years, 329-333.
fellow to prepare his chapters for the Cambridge History of the British Empire. An
aggrieved Jean Macmillan had written to the warden complaining about her
husband’s conduct, prompting the warden to take Macmillan aside for a ‘fatherly
and non-judgmental’ talk.
That persuaded Macmillan to tell Mona ‘that he could
see no future in our relationship and that, perhaps, we ought not to go on seeing
each other’. Two weeks later he relented and went down to London to resume their
relationship. At the end of the summer term he moved to London, living apart from
Mona but meeting her daily at Chatham House (the Royal Institute of International
Affairs), where he began writing up his African researches.26
By then, he had received two letters from Raikes wanting to know what his plans
were. Anxious to make a major progress on the book that was to become Africa
Emergent, and wishing to focus more on his research and writing, Macmillan
requested an extension of his leave and his appointment as a research professor.
While Raikes rejected the latter as financially quite out of the question, he did offer
to extend Macmillan’s leave until July 1934 on condition that he committed himself
to return then. In September, after an urgent cable from Raikes, Macmillan finally
submitted his resignation. In his autobiography he advanced two major reasons for
this decision. The first was that he was not prepared to risk abandoning his book,
and the second that he was not prepared to be silenced politically; ‘I wondered after
the storms of the previous year whether I could fit again into South African
university life. Perhaps I would not last there long, especially once the book was
published—if it ever was’.
The third, unmentioned major reason, was personal.
He was not prepared to abandon Mona.
About a year later Mona discovered she was pregnant, and Macmillan immediately
wrote to Jean requesting a divorce, which went through in the next year. Jean
herself moved to England in 1935, where she gained employment as a social
worker. ‘There is nothing in the struggle of the last years to be proud of’, she wrote
back to Margaret Ballinger, ‘there is much to be forgotten, and thankfulness that
peace has come to us both, I think, at last’. She declared Macmillan had not
intended to hurt her, and that ‘he still treats me like a mother, and for this I must be
26
Mona Macmillan, Mona’s Story, chap. 4.
in part to blame’.27
The news that Macmillan received from Wits on the fate of Margaret Hodgson and
the History Department, and on developments in the wider society, convinced him
that he had made the right decision in resigning. On hearing from Hodgson that his
‘brightest stars’, C.W. de Kiewiet and Hodgson herself, had been overlooked in the
appointment of his successor, he wrote ‘They of course passed her over, and with
much political scheming…have appointed Fouché of Pretoria. Peg adds that he is
anti-native and “regrets” my work for Philip and Co.! The Bantu Studies social
workers are wrecking everything, and affairs are shaping (as they may until they
provoke the blacks into kicking) for an Afrikaner Nazidom. To all of which my
reaction is only gratitude to be out of it all; out of a place where my style would be
badly cramped, and clearly placed for a new and more useful start’. In fact, as he
conceded in his autobiography, his ‘future was not so easy’.28 He was not again to
obtain an academic post until after the war.
Three universities, Oxford, Natal, and Edinburgh, awarded Macmillan honorary
doctorates in recognition of his pioneer contribution to the historiography of South
Africa, but Rhodes and Wits never so honoured him. Wits declined to offer him an
honorary degree as its hierarchy, while prepared to forget the political controversy
he aroused, remained unwilling to forgive his liaison as a married man with the
daughter of the Vice-Admiral.29
27
Jean Macmillan to Margaret Ballinger, 14 November 1935, Ballinger Papers A 410/B 2.16.1.
28
Macmillan, Autobiography, 246-47.
29
As told by I. Glyn Thomas, Vice Principal, and A. de V. Herholdt, Registrar, to Noel Garson, then
a lecturer in the History Department, after Macmillan had delivered a lecture at Wits when out in
South Africa to receive his honoray doctorate from Natal University.