When Gen Jan Smuts was young
Smuts must have been the youngest man ever to occupy position of State Attorney in an independent state.
PART 37 IN OUR SERIES ON WILLIAM HILLS
Looking back on his time in Pretoria in the late 1800s, William Hills was astonished at how well everyone had got on and what little part prejudice or social distinctions had played in the city’s communal life.
“Today the people of the capital appear to be far too much divided into water-tight compartments – Afrikaans-speaking and English-speaking, government officials and civilians, in society and out of society,” Hills wrote in the 1940s.
ALSO READ: Part 27 in our series on William Hills: Hills helps to start a newspaper
“To tell the truth, the word ‘society’ would have conveyed very little to the public of Pretoria in the 1890s. A man was not measured by the house in which he lived or the clothes he wore, or even the position he occupied.
“The only two high officials apart from the president (Paul Kruger) whose sartorial equipment moved me to admiration were (State Secretary Dr Willem Johannes Leyds) and a young man, as yet almost unknown, whose surname was Smuts.
“Perhaps you may identify him when I state his closest friends called him Jannie.
“Smuts had been appointed to the post of State Attorney and must have been the youngest man ever to occupy such a position in an independent state. But a brainier selection could hardly have been made.”
Hills wrote that Smuts had recently returned from London and with him the most fashionable suit of its kind in Pretoria – a frock coat suit in light grey with a top hat to match.
Smuts’ office was above a shop. The building of the Palace of Justice on Church Square had just started and the officials of justice, however exalted, had to roost wherever they could.
“When I first saw the State Attorney in his celebrated suit at his office, I came to the conclusion that he wore it to enhance his age.
“It gave him added height and dignity and my memory of him at that time registers: long, lean and clean-shaven. He was also much more serious and reserved, one might almost say shy in those days.”
However, Smuts was as courteous then as he was later in his career and did not take offence even when Hills asked pointed questions on what he was doing about the revision of the grondwet (Constitution).
Next time: In pre-war Pretoria, everyone was approachable.
ALSO READ: Part 23 in our series on William Hills: staking claims during the Rand gold rush
