Dr Jane Elizabeth Waterston(1843-1932)

Elizabeth van Heyningen

The letters which comprise this volume of the VRS series were written by Jane Waterston mainly to Dr James Stewart, the Principal of Lovedale Institution, between 1866 and 1906. They passed into the hands of Stewart’s granddaughter, Marjorie Grant, whom some of you may recall was South Africa’s Chief Guide in the 1950s. Marjorie Grant in turn gave them to Lucy Bean, journalist and founder of the South African Women’s Auxiliary Services during the Second World War, to edit. Lucy Bean most kindly allowed me to participate in the editing of the letters. It was one of the most fascinating projects I have been engaged in and introduced me to a series of remarkable people, many of whom have reappeared in my research over the years. Consequently, I am able now to expand a little on the letters as we published them.

The first of these remarkable people was, of course, Jane Waterston herself. She founded the Girls’ Institution at Lovedale College, at Alice in the Eastern Cape. Subsequently she became, not only South Africa’s first registered woman doctor, but one of the first women to qualify as a doctor in Britain. In later life she became an ardent imperialist, of the type which Sir Alfred Milner admired, as a result of which she was appointed to the Concentration Camps Commission during the South African War. Yet, despite her dedication to Africa and its people, she is largely forgotten today.

Jane Waterston came from a comfortable middle-class family in Inverness. Her father was the manager of the Caledonian Bank there. But behind the façade all was not well. Both Jane’s mother and two of her three sisters seem to have suffered from the hypochondria which was so typical of middle-class Victorian women, crying hysterically and drowning their nerves in sherry-negus. At least one of her two brothers was little better. Although she supported her family financially after the death of her father, Jane kept her distance from them, for she was well aware how parasitic such people could be. She understood, too, the frustration of an intelligent woman with no outlet for her energies – the result, she wrote much later, was to play havoc with ‘delicate nerve cells’. She became a fierce proponent of higher education for women although she was never an active suffragette. She was also the first woman to obtain a Certificate in Psychological Medicine from the Medico Psychological Association of Great Britain and she was, for many years, on the board of the Robben Island and Valkenburg asylums.

Jane’s family circumstances may have been one factor in propelling her into mission life. Her religious convictions were, of course, another. Unlike her family, who were members of the Established Church of Scotland, Jane was a member of the Free Church, which had broken away from the Established Church in 1843, the year of her birth. Members of the Free Church espoused a curious mix of Calvinism, capitalism imperialism and eugenics, summed up in James Stewart’s credo.

Two iconic figures influenced Jane’s beliefs at this stage.

The first, David Livingstone, provided the inspiration for her desire to work in central Africa. General Charles Gordon, also an evangelical Christian, fired her faith in the aggressive imperialism of her later years. Like Livingstone, Jane always believed that Africans were redeemable. Although she clearly had a good scientific brain, she was contemptuous of modern evolutionary thought.

‘I am sick of Tyndale and Darwin, the ape-faced man’, she wrote on one occasion.

Whatever Jane’s secret ambitions, it was a meeting with Dr James Stewart about 1866 which took her to South Africa. Not only had Stewart accompanied David Livingstone on one of his journeys, but his views accorded closely with Jane’s.

In 1866 he had just been appointed as principal of Lovedale Institution in the eastern Cape and he at once employed Jane to start a girl’s school at Lovedale. In 1867, aged just 34, she accompanied Stewart and his newly-married wife, Mina, to the Cape.

Jane’s aim at Lovedale was to educate the young women for intelligent domesticity, helpmeets to the young Christian men emerging from the boy’s school.

‘I reasoned after this manner, that homes are what are wanted in Kafirland, and that the young women will never be able to make homes unless they understand and see what a home is.’

The students which Jane encountered were an outstanding group. Elijah Makiwane was the second student to qualify in South Africa as a minister of the Free Church of Scotland. More controversial was Pambani Mzimba, who preceded Makiwane as the first student to qualify in South Africa. Unlike Makiwane, he became impatient of the constraints of the white-dominated Free Church and, in 1899 he broke away to form an independent black church, a source of great grief both to Stewart and Jane, neither of whom could understand his motivation. Most famous was John Knox Bokwe who became one of Xhosa’s most celebrated hymn writers. All three married young women educated by Jane and she took a deep interest in their careers. When Maggie Majiza became engaged to Elijah Makiwane she wrote:

‘When I see her face all alight with intelligence and feeling, I know what an amount of brain and natural refinement she has got. I cannot but feel pleased that Elijah with all his deep feeling, and sensitiveness, has got one so well able to understand and appreciate him as Maggie is.’

But for all the interest she took in Lovedale, Jane Waterston was not satisfied. She yearned for central Africa.

‘I am happy here in everything but one, and that is, these poor wretches of women up country. I am a woman myself and it haunts me more than I can tell you, the thought of these poor wretches whose present life is misery, and their hereafter.’

More than this, she wanted to go as a doctor. In the early 1870s this was no easy option for Britain had only one woman doctor. The Society of Apothecaries, which had inadvertently licensed her, promptly changed its rules to prevent any other woman following suit.

But 1874 was a propitious year on two counts.

David Livingstone had just died and the fanfare which followed his funeral enabled James Stewart to found the Livingstonia Mission in Nyasaland in 1877. Jane Waterston followed these proceedings with deep interest over the next few years.

Then, on 11 October 1874 the London School of Medicine for Women opened its doors to the first fourteen students.

Jane Waterston was amongst them. For all these women the struggle to qualify was hard. Years later Jane described her experiences:

‘’It was a queer medical school. No hospital attached, not a single examination in the United Kingdom, and the whole thing so unpopular that lecturers to us ran some risk of forfeiting other appointments. I can hardly understand now our faith in the future that led some of us to risk our all on the chance of something turning up from somewhere that would give us a hospital and the right to practice.’

Quite apart from the general difficulties, Jane Waterston found conditions particularly hard, for she was at odds with the other students and the principal. She described herself as ‘a white crow among the students’. But more difficult were her relations with Elizabeth Garrett Anderson.

I think the time has come to introduce you to a remarkable clan whose lives touched Jane Waterston’s at many points through her life. It was Elizabeth Garrett Anderson who had first qualified as a doctor and she started the London School because she was determined that other women should be able to do so as well. But she and Jane did not get on. They clashed over Jane’s sabbatarianism – her determination not to study on Sundays. ‘I am too Scotch for her’, Jane told Stewart.

‘Mrs Anderson is very clever and does many a kind deed but there is a hardness about her that revolts me and certainly a godlessness that it is painful to see. She is frank and honest, but hard and politic too, a great deal of Mr Worldy Wiseman about her. She blows me up whenever she has a chance, for we are antagonistic natures, but I think she does see that I get on well with the poor women and girls that come about or are in the Hospital . . .’

In the end Jane had to obtain her first qualification in Ireland where she gained the licentiate of the King and Queen’s College of Physicians of Ireland in 1878. She did not stop there. In 1888 she took the Licentiate of the Royal College of Surgeons in Edinburgh and the same year she was awarded her MD in Brussels, since she could still not qualify in England. In 1889 she was awarded an ad eundem degree from the University of the Cape of Good Hope, a confirmation of her Brussels doctorate.

There seems little doubt that she was a good doctor, thorough and meticulous. She was delighted by modern advances in antisepsis and asepsis.

‘What a wonderful difference the antiseptic method makes in a confinement. My patients are delighted with the sweetness of their rooms and the absence of fever, even of milk fever. To do it perfectly takes any amount of carbolic wool and gauze, Iodoform pessaries, Quinine and Condy. But the purity and sweetness of the patient, bed and room are worth it all.’

With her sights set on central Africa, in 1879 Jane Waterston set off for Livingstonia, then run by Robert Laws. It was a disaster.

Although Laws is much esteemed in Malawi, he and Jane did not get on. The men seemed unable to cope with an intelligent single woman. She found her medical and educational qualifications ignored and she was left with the most junior classes to teach. It seems likely that Laws responded as Dr Dalzell had done in Natal some years before, as Stewart explained.

‘Dr Dalzell and Miss Waterston did not get on well. He has not sufficient esteem [for] the sex as a whole, whatever he may have for individuals, to please Miss Waterston. When she came out with her strong views about women's rights and women's ability, then he would rap out something about 'a philosopher in petticoats' - one of his expressions to her and so they went on.’

More serious was the behaviour of the missionaries to their black converts in Blantyre which Jane could not condone. She seems to have lost her faith in the value of mission work. After only six months she fled Livingstonia, returning to Lovedale for a brief period and then set up as a doctor in Cape Town. Here she found a ready acceptance, not only amongst her patients, white and black but amongst her medical colleagues. Unusually, she seems to have been accepted from the first and ultimately became president of the Western Cape branch of the British Medical Association in 1905.

But she was also extraordinarily active on a number of other fronts. Above all she became a significant political figure. To a large extent her activities were devoted to the Africans to whom she was so committed. By 1890 the zeal which she had brought to mission work had been replaced by the political fight to protect African rights.

The 1890s were the Rhodes years and Jane started with friendly feelings towards Rhodes. In Nyasaland she was the first doctor to reach CJ’s brother, Herbert, when he was accidentally killed in a fire. When Rhodes became prime minister in 1890 she had high hopes of him but was soon disillusioned by his actions, notably the passing of the Glen Grey Act and the attempts to weaken the legislation limiting the supply of liquor to Africans. She also fought hard to prevent the cuts in government provision to Lovedale, which provided much better education to blacks than most white farm schools. She was such a frequent visitor to parliament that she acquired her own seat in the visitors' gallery.

And then came the Jameson Raid and the South African War.

We have a unique insight into Jane’s role in imperial affairs because of her close friendship with Edmund Garrett, the young editor of the Cape Times. Garrett was a cousin of Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, a passionate imperialist and later an intimate confident of Sir Alfred Milner. He also had very frail health, suffering from TB and Jane nursed him devotedly during various crises.

Garrett had been brought up by his cousins, Agnes (EGA's sister) and Rhoda, both leading lights in the women's movement and in the arts and crafts movement. His enlightened attitude to women undoubtedly strengthened the bond between the two. Jane was probably his most intimate friend in Cape Town 'Silly, nice, unreasonable, absurd, excellent, indispensable Physician!' he wrote on one occasion. Edmund Garrett is the only person to give any sense of her lonely life. ‘She has all sorts of odd kinks and corners from this long long solitude – partly her own fault mind you’, he told Agnes on one occasion. When she was ill, for her stay in central Africa had left her with a legacy of malaria, she battled on. ‘She will be all right soon, being made sufficiently of gutta percha. Some women can work as few men can.’

But the core of their relationship was politics – more specifically British imperialism in southern Africa for, by this time, Jane Waterston’s imperial views had become much more ardent.

Indeed, she had adopted the strident note which was a feature of British imperialism from about the 1880s. It's almost certain that Garrett and Jane collaborated closely over leading articles in the Cape Times, particularly in the runup to the SA War. Milner came to share Garrett's high opinion of Jane. She was 'a woman who is worth a dozen men', Milner wrote to the Colonial Office on one occasion.

Part of Jane Waterston’s decline from public view is a result of the criticism she has received because of her anti-Boer stance in the South African War. There can be little doubt that she was deeply prejudiced against the Boers and she probably knew few Afrikaners despite, as a Calvinist, sharing religious links with them. But one must remember where she was coming from. The central work of her life was her care for Africans and her hostility to the Boers was probably founded partly on their reputation for their maltreatment of black people in the Boer republics. Added to that was her belief that the British Empire stood for justice and equality. At the same time, I would not deny that, as she aged, her strong opinions hardened into bigotry. In 1918, for instance, when she was about 75, she finally resigned from the committee of the South African Library, of which she had been a member for many years, because she objected to the Library’s stocking of an Arnold Bennett volume, The Pretty Lady. She considered it had ‘pernicious tendencies’. (It seems to have concerned a man and his mistress but some reviewers consider it an underrated novel.)

In 1901 Jane was appointed to the Ladies Commission, which had been established by the War Office to investigate conditions in the concentration camps and chaired by Millicent Garrett Fawcett. Given her connections with Milner and the Garrett family, and her record of public service, the choice was almost inevitable but it was disastrous in terms of public relations, guaranteed to infuriate pro-Boers. I have no doubt that she did her work carefully and thoroughly for the Commission is no whitewash of the camp system. But she was not easy to work with. Lucy Deane, a fellow member of the Commission, leaves some memorable comments.

‘Today is spent travelling bang along the line back to Johannisburg which we reach at tea time. We were to have had a lovely lie-a-bed morning, breakfast not till 8.a.m., Alas! at 5.30 I was waked by a vigourous [sic] thump on my door and Dr. Waterston’s cheerful voice in strong Scotch: “Miss Deane, I’ve begged a pail real hot water for you from an Engine-driver, make haste dear and seize the chance of a real bath before the shunting begins at six!” I could have killed the dear friendly old lady! She is extraordinary. Never tired, never hungry, never quiet. Every morning at 4.a.m. her high Scotch voice can be heard ringing out over some energetic “ploy” or another and at 11 p.m. and midnight she is as lively as a cricket, sweeping out her cabin, inventing new dodges to keep out flies, or commenting to the whole train on any little event of the day, or telling stories of life in Central Africa. She never eats at all hardly. A cup of tinned coffee and milk and slice of Boer-bread for Breakfast; a spoonful or two of tinned fruit, or of cornflour pudding for luncheon, and a cup of tea and biscuit at 4 o’clock in the afternoon is all she eats; she never has dinner though sometimes she comes in and sit and scoff [sic] at us for eating it and when she can get “real” milk she will drink half a glass – but that is all.’

In the end, it has to be admitted, she considered that Jane was an unsuitable appointment, but that may have been due to sheer irritation.

One accusation, instigated by Emily Hobhouse, should be scotched. Hobhouse attacked the Ladies’ Commission for failing to investigate the black camps. But this was not part of their remit and, as the first government women’s commission ever to be appointed, they were not likely to stray from their instructions. But, as Lucy Deane records, whenever there was an opportunity, Jane visited neighbouring black camps. Generally, according to Lucy Deane, she was satisfied with what she saw and there is no reason to believe that she would not have taken action informally if she had not been.

In 1906 James Stewart died and we have few other records of Jane Waterston’s life, although she continued active for many years. The esteem in which she was held in Cape Town was demonstrated publicly when she died in 1932, at the age of 89. Her funeral cortège was a mile long and an ‘immense concourse’ of dignitaries gathered at her graveside to pay her tribute.