Chairman’s annual report, 2009

If Thomas Edison was right and genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration, the VRS is fortunate that its Council and secretariat consist of genii.

I say this because the Society’s considerable achievements over the last 12 months have been very much the product of bright ideas executed with immense zeal, diligence and determination by its office-bearers and several enthusiastic members. For these sterling qualities I readily pay tribute to my fellow Council members and our indefatigable secretary, Cora Ovens, and her woman Friday volunteer, Doreen Ovendale, and those members of the Society who willingly offered their services when we needed them.

Let me give you some examples of this genius at work:

• In November 2008 Council member Sandy Shell, her husband Rob, and one of the editors of our 2008 volume, Abner Nyamende, gave freely of their time to travel to Grahamstown to launch that volume (the writings of the Reverend Isaac Wauchope) on his home turf in the Eastern Cape. That the VRS enrolled 5 new members and sold several volumes on that occasion was a not unintended consequence, I am happy to report.
• In January 2009, a bright idea emanating from Council member Alan Morris, was translated into very effective reality when his fellow-Councillor, Elizabeth van Heyningen, organized a UCT Summer School course on 5 VRS volumes, under the title ‘Lost Voices – South Africa’s history through the words of its people’. The 5 lecturers (all of whom were editors of past VRS volumes) had the 98-strong audience spellbound with their presentations and, going by sales of our volumes at the Summer School book stalls, also convinced a good number that they could not continue their lives without their own copy of the volume they had just heard about. All credit to Alan, Elizabeth and the three other lecturers, Gerald Groenewald, Ian Glenn and Abner Nyamende.
• Over the first six months of this year the VRS’s ‘Paton task team’ (Russell Martin, Ian Farlam, Elizabeth van Heyningen, Cora Ovens and I) burnt a great deal of midnight oil in order to get this year’s volume, Alan Paton’s selected letters, ready much earlier than usual so that it could be launched in Pietermaritzburg in July, at the international conference to mark the 20th anniversary of the founding of the Alan Paton Centre there. Moreover, they met this already tight deadline despite a last-minute change of printer because of the catastrophic fire at the premises of our regular printing house, Paarl Print, and an episode of ill-health which took Cora Ovens out of circulation for some weeks and required her to be replaced as indexer by the greatly willing Ethleen Lastovica whom we have to thank for stepping into the breach at such short notice. To cap this magnificent teamwork, Elizabeth van Heyningen and I travelled to the Pietermaritzburg conference to launch the volume, and again, not without some forethought, to recruit new members and sell volumes. The net result was 19 volumes sold, 6 new members signed up and an agreement concluded with the Alan Paton Centre to stock copies of the Paton volume to sell to those visiting the Centre.
• Councillors and volunteers gave of their time to sell VRS volumes and boost our membership at 7 other conferences and book fairs too during the past 12 months, in Cape Town, Stellenbosch, Pretoria and Montreal, and at the highpoint of our public marketing, the CT International Book Fair in the June 2009. There Nigel Amschwand, Tanya Barben, Susie Newton-King, Arne Schaefer, Sandy Shell, Piet Westra, Chris Saunders, Elizabeth van Heyningen, Margaret Kooy, Cora Ovens, Alan Morris and I set aside our normal middle-class reserve and peddled our wares without restraint and to very good effect (again not unintentionally), selling 67 volumes during the cycle of 4 days and enrolling 24 new members on the spot. Warm thanks are due to all our peddlers, whether they did one cycle, bicycle or tricycle.
• Finally, as reported in our recent newsletter, due to the initiative of a new member, Ian Clark, one of our editors resident in Johannesburg, Gerald Groenewald, gave a very richly-informed interview on the VRS to a local radio station in Gauteng. Thanks to both Gerald and Ian. We wait to see the not unintended effects of this exposure via the airwaves on our membership numbers.

The overall result of all of this publicity, this salespersonship, word of mouth and a brace of good reviews of our recent volumes (copies of which are pinned up for you to peruse) has been 95 new members and over 200 volumes sold to non-members since our 2008 AGM. Membership now stands at 1200. By this time next year I hope we will be closing in on 1250 members, a figure we last topped in 1995 when we boasted 1289 members.

What of the future as we move into the 92nd year of our existence?

Prospective volumes for 2010, 2011 and 2012 are (probably in this order) a special for 2010 (the letters between Patrick Duncan and Lady Selborne to coincide with the centenary of Union), the letters of that leading 1820 settler, poet and journalist, Thomas Pringle, and the letters and articles of Dr A.B. Xuma, president of the ANC in the crucial 1940s. Beyond these, the pipeline contains the letters of President M.T. Steyn of the Orange Free State, the second volume of François le Vaillant’s Journey into the Interior of Africa, the Cape letters of Dr James Barry, the political letters of Olive Schreiner, the 1830-1836 journals of Eastern Cape missionary the Reverend James Laing, the Diary of Ensign Beutler’s Expedition to the Eastern Cape in 1752 and the diary and essays of Samuel Hudson who arrived at the Cape in 1797 with Lady Anne Barnard. All of which should take us to and beyond our centenary in 2018.

The other arm of our publication enterprise, reprinting out-of-print VRS volumes from yesteryear, has continued to flourish. Of the 50 copies of the three-volume Van Riebeeck Journal which we reprinted this year, 48 have been sold, while demand for our other reprints has been ongoing, requiring us to reprint several of the reprints, which is easy to do thanks to the originals having been digitized. The facility to reprint which digitization gives us also encouraged us to respond positively to an approach by a Dutch digital publisher to digitize three of our Dutch-period volumes free of charge and put them onto CDs for sale in Holland. As a result, we will be able to do the same locally at no cost to us beyond that of burning a CD.

So much for our future. With regard to our past, as our store-room is bursting at the seams with leftover stock dating back to the 1950s, we will be embarking on a vigorous campaign to sell these off at cut-prices or to donate them to institutions which we deem deserving. If you have any suggestions as to institutions which fall into this category (e.g. libraries, schools, universities, clubs and societies) and which can collect the volumes from our office, please give this information to Cora Ovens who, with her characteristic zeal, will make the necessary arrangements.

Mention ‘administrative and secretarial zeal in the interests of the VRS’, and the immediate other association which comes to my mind is Doreen Ovendale, our unflagging voluntary helper in the office. Every Friday, come rain, shine or roadworks, she drives in from Simonstown to assist Cora in a variety of practical ways, checking accounts, invoicing members and dispatching orders. Look in on Friday morning during peak subscription or mailing time to see what I mean, and probably Doreen will have you helping her before you can say ‘Van Riebeeck’. Doreen, as we put it in the last newsletter, we don’t know how we would function without you. We appreciate your presence greatly and to demonstrate this, we would like to give you a present.

Zeal and financial acumen are also features of everything our treasurer, Piet Westra, has undertaken this year for the VRS. By ensuring that the Society is financially sound and on excellent foundations despite the difficult economic environment, he makes the job of being in the chair so much easier. Baie dankie, Mnr. Westra. Dis nie waar nie dat hy tans besig is om ‘n boek te skryf met die titel, Westra Side Story: How to keep your Rands when those around you are losing theirs.

In short, our 91st year has been a good one for the VRS. I hope that our 92nd, which will be the last of the current Council’s term, will be able to draw on Councillors’ and members’ genius to similarly good effect.

Thank you very much.