Chairman’s
Annual Report, 2010
Like Madiba, the VRS
is 92 years old this year, and like him too, it is time for us to have a
conversation with ourselves – in other words to reflect on our activities.
However, that is where the similarity with the great man ends, because, as far as
the Society is concerned, 2010 has been marked by increased activity and
energetic, new initiatives, which have left us even more robust and
raring-to-go.
As you have heard, our coffers are well-stocked
and very skilfully managed by our shrewd Treasurer,
Piet Westra, who would have been headhunted by one or other bank long ago if
they had seen our financial statements over the last decade.
Our membership stands at 1244, up from 1200 a
year ago and from 1087 when the current Council took office in 2007. If you can
do anything in the next two hours to recruit the 7 new members we need to reach
1250, I unashamedly urge you to do so. As you will see when we launch this
year’s volume, I will not miss even half an opportunity to do so.
The reception of our recent volumes has been
positive among members and in the press and scholarly journals. One reviewer of
our 2009 volume of Alan Paton’s letters spoke of it as ‘an important volume…[whose editing] is admirable [and which is] handsomely
produced and represents something of a breakthrough into new territory’ for the
VRS. ‘We must congratulate the VRS for bringing history to our very doorstep.’ (Colin Gardner in Natalia,
2009). Of our 2008 volume, the writings of Isaac Williams Wauchope, that leading historian of
Yet, these achievements have not just dropped
into our laps. They are the product of long hours of deeply committed labour, readily given by a team of members drawn from both
the Council and the general membership, and, of course, by that unstoppable
workaholic, Cora Ovens, whose pilot light for the Society burns 24/7. The VRS
takes its hat off to all of you, and is filled with heartfelt gratitude and
admiration for your generous input to its operation and wellbeing.
The terrain on which this zeal has been
exercised to such good effect is diverse:
·
The most
public has been in giving the VRS a book-selling and a member-recruiting
presence at conferences, meetings, public lectures and book fairs –for
instance, at the South African War Conference in Ladysmith (6 volumes sold), at
lectures on Le Vaillant (vol. 38) and Albert Hilder (vol. 31) at which 14 volumes were sold, and at the
CT International Book Fair where a 12-person team working in shifts over 4 days
sold 43 volumes and enrolled 29 new members. These 12 – some of whom also did duty
on the other occasions – deserve to be named and famed: Nigel Amschwand, Tanya
Barben, Ian Farlam, Alan Morris, Cora Ovens, Howard Phillips, Chris Saunders,
Arne Schaefer, Sandy Shell, Chris van der Merwe,
Elizabeth van Heyningen and Margaret Kooy.
·
Less
prominent but no less important in making the Society known to a new generation
have been a number of talks at schools and societies and the presentation of
some of our volumes as VRS prizes to university history departments or as
donations to public libraries (like the revamped Yeoville
Public Library in
·
More
immediate in generating returns was Cora Ovens’ bright idea of reducing our
considerable back bookstock by offering a selection
of leftover volumes as R50 ‘specials’. By last week she had sold over 1100 of
these. You can see why Piet Westra is smiling tonight. Cora is smiling too, but
not only for financial reasons. Her success means that she and her new
assistant, Sandra Commerford, can now get into our store-room without having to
thread themselves between sky-high piles of back volumes.
Reference to Sandra Commerford as Cora’s
assistant brings me to Sandra’s predecessor, Doreen Ovendale who, earlier this
year, decided to call it a day as our ‘Woman Friday’. For almost 11 years
Doreen drove in from Simonstown every Friday to
provided voluntary assistance in our office, whether as accounts clerk, book
parcel wrapper-and-despatcher or membership monitor.
She also readily visited the post office on the Society’s behalf, posting and
collecting books and letters. In my first annual report in 2002 I referred to
her as a voluntary helper who helps to ‘keep the Society’s wheels oiled and
turning smoothly.’ On that occasion I presented her with a bottle of wine to
keep her activities ‘well lubricated’. Now, 8 years (or over 400 Fridays)
later, it is my bitter-sweet task to present her with another gift, but this
time to mark her retirement from he role as the VRS’s
‘Woman Friday’. Let me read in public the heartfelt sentiments in the note
accompanying the book voucher (not for a VRS volume either) which the Society
is giving to you as a sign of its extreme gratitude to you for your labours on its behalf since 1999, including roping in your
sterling husband, Owen, to help us out on numerous occasions.
It is also my sad task this evening to say
another public farewell, this time to a second longstanding actor on the VRS
stage, Professor Rodney Davenport, who is retiring from the Council this year
after 20 years’ service, two of them as chairman of the Society.
For me, Rodney is a five i’s man – no, not a reference to
some rare ophthalmic condition, but to his integrity,
insight, indefatigability, imperturbability
and his informed opinion. These i traits have been invaluable to the
VRS over the last 20 years, never more so than between 1999 and 2001 when it
was reeling under the body blows of the deaths of Arthur Davey and Frank
Bradlow in quick succession.
For me, as a fledgling member of Council and
then a novice chairman, Rodney was an ideal mentor who simultaneously
encouraged my out-of-the-box thinking and tempered its more wayward
manifestations. I remember a lunch at Rhodes Memorial in about 2000 at which we
discussed the Society’s future and he advised me to take the VRS in new
directions by all means, ‘but make sure that you take the members with you’. I
hope that I have followed your wise words to your satisfaction, Rodney.
As a mark of the Society’s appreciation of the
great service you have rendered to it, I wish to present you too with a gift on
behalf of your fellow councillors and members.
From talking about those who have sustained the
VRS so nobly in the past, let me turn, finally, to our activities in present
and the future.
New publications in the immediate pipeline are
three collections of letters, those of Thomas Pringle (1820 settler, poet,
author and journalist), of Dr A.B. Xuma (doctor and
ANC president in the crucial 1940s) and President M.T. Steyn (president of the
OFS from 1895 to 1902).
In the reprint category, this year’s two
volumes, the Journals of Olof Bergh and Isaq Schrijver and the Journal
of Hendrik Wikar, have done
well. Almost 2/3 of the 60 that we reprinted have been sold, while the demand
for reprints of Jan van Riebeeck’s Journal has been such as to compel us to reprint the
reprint. The new Council which you elect tonight will have to decide whether to
continue the reprint series and if so, what to reprint next year.
With that reference to the new Council which
will serve until 2013, the 95th year of the VRS’s
existence, I conclude my annual report. May the new Council consist of four c people – no, not a reference to their
maritime inclinations or our location 100 metres from
the sea tonight – but to their commitment,
canniness, creativity and, Mr Westra, their cleverness with cash.
Howard Phillips.
27 October 2010.