En Passant: That’s what we do – write our history

I SUPPOSE I knew it before I joined the Vryheid Herald, but working here really brought it home that newspapers are almost by definition transient. They have a use, a usefulness, a validity for a very short time; they are “news” papers, and once the news has been disseminated and read the edition is redundant. By Sunday evening, pages of that week’s paper are under the dog’s dish in the kitchen, or lining the bottom of a parrot’s cage.

I have gotten used to this fact. I might not like it, but I realised and accept that however much thought and attention, care and creativity I have put into an article or column, by Sunday night it could easily be splattered with specks of “Woof” and dog saliva or splodges of parrot poofies.

Like I said, I accept this, but you know what, each edition of the paper is in fact a weekly record of the History of Vryheid. I’ve said this before, that’s what we do here, and that’s what our sister papers do in Dundee, Newcastle, Ladysmith and Estcourt, and what local or community newspapers do all over the world. We write the histories of our towns.

True, seen by itself, one week’s edition of the newspaper, once read, has few better uses than lining a parrot’s cage floor. But if I tore a single page out of the world’s greatest novel and handed it to you to read, you’d be hard pressed to write a glowing revue. You need the pages on either side.

So it is with the Vryheid Herald. One edition has a limited scope, but if you took a year’s Vryheid Heralds, put them in order and bound them together, you would have a history of Vryheid.

There is no other such history. The high schools might have their year books, the municipality its agendas’ minutes, clubs their chairmen’s annual reports, businesses their financial statements, police stations their crime statistics, but only the community newspapers have their communities’ histories.

It is the only history there is of our towns. I still get calls, e-mails and occasional letters from people all over the country and the world, wanting information about something that happened here or somebody (usually a relative) who lived here. Most often they talk about the old Vryheid Gazette, and the very sad thing is that there are no Vryheid Gazette archives. None.

The Gazette was established in 1924 and folded in (I seem to remember) 1987. That is a huge slice of our town’s history. It includes the Great Depression, World War II, the rise of the National Party, the Border War, the building of Grootgewacht and Bloemveld dams, the establishment and productions of the now defunct Vryheid Players amateur dramatic society. But what Vryheid’s reaction was to these events is now not recorded. There is no record.

In the Lucas Meyer Museum there are a few old Vryheid Gazettes, not many at all, and they give just a tantalising glimpse of what life was like here then. What happened to the Gazette’s archives does not seem to be known by anyone. Every enquiry I have made has petered out, usually with the death of the person who would know. If those archives ever existed they are lost forever.

The Vryheid Herald was established in 1985, and we have here at the office the bound volumes of newspapers for each year. We don’t refer to them very often, but they are here and paging through any of them, but particularly the older ones, you realise you are looking at the broad history of our town.

Maybe I’m a fanciful old fool but I think there is something vital in the preservation of today to turn it into the history of tomorrow. I can’t point to any one thing and say that it is a particular advantage of knowing our history, but we are poorer without that record. Trust me. And if you’ve been in the Vryheid Herald, you are part of the recorded history.

So in my time here at the Vryheid Herald, I have been one of our town’s historians, and it has been a huge privilege which is not given to many.