Rickety Bridge - Going back to 1830. In that year the farm was owned by Catharina, the widow Pepler, and when her son married Catharina's second cousin, the twenty year old Paulina de Villiers, Catharina installed them in the newly built manor house with its built in wall cabinet that still graces the ‘voorkamer’ in thee picture.

The marriage was a family affair and Paulina and the Peplers could both trace ancestry back to Jacques de Villiers, one of the three original immigrant Huguenot brothers. Palina had two children and enjoyed the manor house for only six years before dying at her father's farm.

What was Paulina like? 

No pictures have come to light. Since she died in 1836 at the age of twenty six, one assumes she was not particularly robust and a picture of a frail beauty comes to mind. Paulina did have two children however, so frailty seems inappropriate.

Her death certificate records only that she died at Groot Drakenstein but the law required it to be signed by ‘a close relative, who had been present at, or near the persons death or, in the absence of such, by the person who shall have chief charge of the house in, or of the place on which, the death took place’.

It is Paulina’s father, Paul, who signed the certificate bu t it makes no mention of whether she was thrown from a horse, or if she had gone to her mother to be nursed.

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Rickety Bridge story. In 1847 Pepler sold the farm, really a collection of smaller farms, to a chap called du Toit who paid a deposit but agreed a mortgage of £500 for the balance with Pepler. Du Toit also arranged a loan of £1000 from Paul de Villiers of Boschendal, Paulina's father and his own father-in-law, giving himself a debt of £1500 on a property he had bought for £1125, and set about farming. In 1860 the bottom fell out of the wine business and du Toit was left with a debt of £1500 on a property valued at £580 - negative equity!! Du Toit declared bankruptcy and the piece of the farms that included what is now Rickety Bridge was bought at auction by Willem Jacobus Dirkse van Schalkwyk, the husband of Francina Hester de Villiers. The farm was owned by the van Schalkwyks from then until 1953.

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Paulinasdal

SO much for the general history of South African wine after Waterloo. Let me concentrate on Rickety Bridge.

In 1831, Albertus Pepler married Paulina Maria Deborah de Villiers, the daughter of Paul de Villiers of Boschendal and the couple moved into the new manor house on what was, at that time, part of a bigger farm called Zanddrift, owned by Albertus's mother, Elizabeth Catharina, the widow Pepler.

 Two years later, in 1833, to adapt to the changing conditions when Britain reduced the tariff on French wines, Elisabeth Catharina extended her holdings by 81 morgen of grazing land, giving the whole the name Zanddrift and seems to have used her son, Albertus, as farm manager.

In 1836 Paulina died at the age of twenty-six and, in her memory, her husband changed the name of the enlarged farm from Zanddrift to Paulina’s Dal, the change being recorded on several maps and documents.

The picture is looking up the valley from the manor house towards Franschhoek.

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My research into Rickety Bridge and the state of the South African wine industry uncovered the unscrupulous dealings in all kinds of rot gut during the Napoleonic wars, which almost finished that industry when Napoleon was defeated and French wine became available in Britain. One must remember that soldiering often exposed soldiers to water of doubtful quality and, those who could afford it drank wine, even rot gut in preference to what could be scooped out of the open sewers that were rivers in those days. The result was that South African wine, quite deservedly gained a reputation fr being undrinkable except 'in extremis' and the farmers, like the Pepplers at what would become Rickety Bridge, were forced to turn turn to alternative crops - like milk and pork.
The picture is of the Rickety Bridge the winery is now named after.

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Rickety Bridge sits near Franschhoek, the area of the Cape Colony set aside by the Dutch to accommodate the immigrant Huguenots, when Franch rescinded the Treaty of Nantes, which had given the protestant Huguenots the right to worship in their own way. In the opening years of the nineteenth century, a family called Peppler amalgamated their wine farm holdings into one unit called simply 'A piece of ground', part of which was to become Rickety Bridge.

For the Pepplers, it was a judicious move. At that time, in Europe, wine had reached the stage of a necessity. The water in rivers stank with raw sewerage and the growing industrial waste, (falling into the Thames was a death sentence, not because few people could swim, but from swallowing the stinking poisoned water).

Napoleon had closed the ports to export to anywhere British. Britain had added to the blockade the sanction of high import tariff - with a preferential one for South Africa. The supply of French and continental wine had, through all this, shrunk to what could be smuggled or slipped past the blockade by the Americans or other neutrals, and sales of South African wine boomed on a worldwide basis. At the turn of the century the price had been 60 Rix dollars for a 160 gallon leaguer, but, by Waterloo in 1815, it had risen as high as 180 Rix dollars for good wine, a threefold increase.  

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The picture shows Dee Cafari in Cape Town during a round the world race. Dee was a great person to interview, bright and intelligent, full of information and obviously enjoying her sailing.   Unfortunately Dee came into Cape Town second to the boat advertised behind her, the one sponsored by Rickety bridge winery. After writing up the notes on Dee and the race I decided to go to visit Rickety Bridge Winery at Franschhoek and found two more stories; one about the history of the wine farm and the owner from Sark.  In fact two stories and some nice Sauvignon Blanc.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Vital-Spark-No-Witnesses-What-ebook/dp/B00UNNKUUO

I've pretty much shaken off this winter cold and been bucked by having Bees in my Bonnet published on Amazon in both paperback and ebook. I'll get back to what happened after I got involved with Hooggelegen but first let me tell you I have struggled with the short stories in Bees. Not so much the ideas but the editing and proof reading. It is such a temptation to let it go before it is as good as I can make it. Even then the writers group will take one look at the first page and tell me I've forgotten one of those Oxford commas. One does one's best!

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