Stamboom Eric Esterhuizen » Robert (Ruben) (Lt) HART (1777-????)

Persoonlijke gegevens Robert (Ruben) (Lt) HART 

• Hij is geboren op 5 januari 1777 in Strathavon, Avondale, Lanarkshire, Scotland.
• Hij is overleden op 14 Sep (June)1867 in Glen Avon, Somerset East.
• Een kind van James III HART en Isabel BROOM
• Deze gegevens zijn voor het laatst bijgewerkt op 6 november 2009.

Gezin van Robert (Ruben) (Lt) HART

Hij is getrouwd met Hannah TAMPLIN.

Zij zijn getrouwd op 8 april 1804 te Island of Guersney, hij was toen 27 jaar oud.

Kind(eren):

1. Ann (Anna) HART  1805-1889
2. Harriet HART  1807-1807
3. Susanna HART  1809-1809
4. Robert III HART  1810-1867 
5. James IV (Lt) HART  1811-1876 
6. Caroline HART  -1815
7. Margaretha (Margaret) HART  1815-1904
8. Eleanor Evelyn HART  1818-1840
9. Sara Elizabeth HART  1820-1875
10. Richard HART  1821-> 1822

Notities over Robert (Ruben) (Lt) HART

1795 visited the Cape.
1802 stationed in India wit Wellington's forces
1803 ca returned to England and was posted to Hanover, Germany with rank of Sergeant.
1807 January 7 landed in Cape Town as Ensign, bringing with him many things dear to his heart, such as rose-cuttings and a variety of fruit-trees.. Was appointed Adjutant to the Cape Corps.
1810 Promoted to rank of Lieutenant. One of his tasks was to select a site for the Military Headquarters in the Eastern Cape. The place he selected later became Grahamstown.
1811 (29 June) Appointed executor of the estate of the late Captain Lewis McKenzie.
1813 (2 October) Subscription to Bible and Schools Commission, Grahamstown.
1817 Cape Corps disbanded. Succeeded Dr. Mackrill as Superintendent of Somerset Farm, supplying wheat and fodder to the Military.
1820 His address given as Erf 34, Graham's Town, Albany Cape
1821 As recognition for his service he was given the farm "Naudesrivier" which he renamed "Glen Avon", Somerset East, Cape. He built the Old Homestead in 1822, "The Retreat" in 1824, the first Watermill in 1827 and the second mill in 1861.
1825 Recorded as Merino Farmer at Glen Avon
1825 Somerset Farm became Somerset East
He was a Calvinist Presbyterian but identified himself with the Dutch Reformed Church. He became the senior elder of the DRC in Somerset East and laid the foundation stone of the first DRC church in Somerset East as Heemraad for the area. Later he also contributed 1,300 Pounds for the building of the Presbyterian Church.
From the Series «b»'«i»They Were South Africans' «/b»«/i»a broadcast on the English Transmission by the
well-known South African Journalist and Historian, John Bond. The following article was published in
the SABC magazine on the 19th July, 1954.
"The name of Robert Hart must be unknown to almost everyone who is listening to me tonight. That
is strange, because Hart, as far as I can discover, was the first English-speaking South African. He was a
founder of that new race whose arrival in South Africa tipped the scale the right way when it wavered in
the balance between civilisation and barbarism.
Robert Hart would have asserted to that. He came to South Africa in its darkest period when the
Dutch East India Company's rule was breaking down completely. His whole life, from the day he landed
in 1795, was devoted one way and another to shoring up the shaky structure of Cape civilisation as
tribal Africa surged against it.
That very crises in the rise of our country was a result of the Afrikaans colonists' success, with
precious little assistance from their rulers, in crossing the desert zone which had insulated the Cape from
the Bantu for almost 140 years after Van Riebeeck. Naturally they clashed when they met and it so
happened that the Boers were the losers. They were driven out of the Zuurveld where Albany and
Alexandria now stand in the Eastern Province. Just six years after that retreat, Robert Hart landed in
Simon's Bay with the British Expeditionary Force. You can picture him as a tall, raw lad of 17 wearing
the green and black-striped kilt of the newly founded Argyllshire Highlanders.
Robert had run away from his home near Glasgow to join the colours a year before, when all Britain
was arming to fight the French Revolutionary armies.
On the 4th September, 1795, his troopship sailed into False Bay with 13 others to relieve the tiny British
force which had captured Muizenberg. Within a week of the Argyllshire Highlanders were marching
into Cape Town in the name of King George III and his Serene Highness the Prince of Orange whom
the French had expelled fro the Netherlands.
I do not know if any of Hart's numerous descendants all over South Africa retain the diaries or
letters he wrote during the following seven years. The family tradition is that he fought in all the
campaigns that were going and if he was a member of the light Grenadier company of his regiment that
is exactly what he would have done.
If so, he must have been present at the troubles in Graaff-Reinet, which was then the outside edge of
civilisation in Southern Africa, and he must have fought right through the third Kaffir War.
The third Kaffir War means nothing to our generation. But in the terrible years from 1799 to 1802 it
looked as though Cape Town itself might be in danger. The Amaxhosa impis plunged westward almost
to Swellendam, killing and pillaging everywhere.
Those years of hard and hungry campaigning in dense bush where you never knew when to expect a
shower of assegais, were Hart's apprenticeship to his new country. Fighting side by side with the
frontier Boers, he came to appreciate their courage and kindness and learned their language. He found a
way, too, to understand the feckless, cheerful Hottentots who often fought alongside the British
Redcoats.
He became accustomed to the huge herds of elephants that roamed the forests of the Eastern Cape
and to the lions and the swarming game in the more open country. He probably helped to erect the first
permanent building in the Eastern Province, Fort Frederick, nucleus of the future Port Elizabeth.
In about 1802 Hart left for India. Peace was dawning in Europe and the officers of his regiment had a
hard struggle to find volunteers for the East. Every man was dying to get home again. But Hart
volunteered. It was typical of the man.
He called at the Cape again on his way back from India.
We next find him, a full-fledged warrant-officer, taking a decisive step in London in 1804. He
married a girl fro Jersey, Hannah Tamplin.
War marriages are supposed to be unstable, but stability was in Hart's bones and in other spheres it was
to be the supreme gift, perhaps of his race to South Africa. I suspect Hannah found Robert's stories of
the wild Cape frontier as fascinating and strange as Desdemona found Othelo's recital of his narrow
escapes in Africa.
Africa was often in his thoughts. The famous Sir John Moore was training the Argyllshire Highlanders
and other regiments to go into action against Napoleon when a British fleet slipped south in 1805 to
recapture the Cape. Almost immediately afterwards the occupying force sent word to England to fetch
out Sergeant-Major Hart.
I think Hart had always hoped, and in fact schemed to go back. The lad who had run away from
home to join the army found something in the free, adventurous life of South Africa that he preferred to
all others. By 1807 Robert was back in Cape Town as a junior commissioned officer of the Cape
Regiment, with its British officers and Hottentot rank and file. He and Hannah had the chance now to
meet nearly all the founders of the oldest English-speaking families - Tennants, Duckitts, Rexes,
Andersons, Murrays, Galdwelis and others who landed before 1803.
Four years later Lieutenant Hart set out with his regiment on the most decisive campaign perhaps, in
South African history - the recapture of the Zuurveld. Their orders were to make the Great Fish River
once again the effective boundary of the Cape Colony, instead of Algoa Bay. They did it. The
Amaxhosa tribes which had defied ejection for 20 years were driven back across the Great Fish River.
Whatever else one may say about the campaign, it turned the tide. It provided the English-speaking
South African with his cradleland in Albany and Bathurst and gave the future Voortrekkers their secure
civilised base with its port, garrison, wagonmakers and traders.
To consolidate this victory Colonel John Graham founded a military headquarter near the Fish River
which has ever since borne his name. Hart was one of the very first landowners in Grahamstown and
there he grew vegetables in his spare time for the Cape Regiment.
That was in 1812. Five years later the Harts trekked away with a posse of children on their wagons
to a new life on the Somerset Farm. This frontier establishment 60 miles north-west of Grahamstown
had been designed by Lord Charles Somerset for an agricultural research station, but its first manager
found the task beyond him and recommended Hart, the farming major of the Grahamstown garrison to
succeed him.
From 1817 to 1825 Hart reigned over the Somerset Farm. He made it a model for the whole Cape
frontier. He brought 600 acres under cultivation - a vast area in those days. He demonstrated the first
up-to-date farm machinery ever seen in that wild region, only a dozen miles from Kaffirland. On the
Government's behalf he supplied rations to the entire frontier garrison from the sea to Cradock, buying
large additional stocks of wheat and slaughter animals from he frontier Boers. He thus gave them the
first orderly, convenient marketing they had ever enjoyed. Since money was meaningless on the frontier
he secured shipments twice a year through Algoa Bay of the goods the Boers wanted most. Travellers
remarked with amazement that on this bustling farm the very Hottentots seemed to acquire the energy of
tireless Robert Hart.
The first big test for the Somerset Farm came in 1819, when the Amaxhosa tribes stormed down on
Grahamstown itself in a desperate attempt to recapture the Zuurveld. A still bigger test was to come a
year later when Hart had to start supplying the 1820 settlers with rations as well as the troops. Without
Somerset Farm many of the settlers might have perished of hunger in their first disastrous years of
blight and flood. The organising skill, energy and integrity of Robert Hart saved his countrymen.
Do you remember Thomas Pringle, the first South African poet, who led the only party of Scots
among the 1820 settlers? They had to pass the Somerset Farm on the way to their holdings in the wild
Adelaid mountains. Hart gave them a royal welcome. Pringle tells us that when the rugged pioneer heard
the Scottish voices of the womenfolk he all but broke down, in spite of his iron nerve and rigid look.
There swept over him then the long-buried recollection of his Scottish mother from whom he had run
away so long before.
Hart in person led the Pringles to their destination. He gave them their first fruit trees. He guided
Thomas Pringle through the moss-hung elephant-haunted forests of the frontier which still live in
Pringle's poems. Eventually he appointed young John Pringle, Thomas's brother, as his assistant
manager, and presently welcomed him as a son-in-law. For Robert and Hannah Hart's six daughters
were in great demand among lonely young Englishmen and Scotsmen on the frontier.
Once the 1820 Settlers had made the Zuurveld the most intensively settled part of white South Africa
instead of the wildest, the Somerset Farm had fulfilled its function. In January 1825 Hart heard the great
Government farm he had built up proclaimed a new town with the name of Somerset East which has
ever since honoured him as its founder.
It is not easy to start life all over. After 30 years in the service. Fortunately Hart had been granted
land a few miles away in 1822. With the help of a small pension he was now able to farm for himself.
He named his land 'Glen Avon', no doubt from the river Avon which runs through his native
Lanarkshire in Scotland. The farm remains in the possession of his descendants to this day.
The last phase of Hart's long life - he lived to be 90 - was immensely constructive. He had hundreds
of friends amongst the Boers, not least Piet Retief, for whom he stood surety in Grahamstown. He
probably knew all the leaders of the coming Great Trek. One of his first actions on gaining his freedom
was to join with his Afrikaans neighbours in establishing a Dutch Reformed Church as a centre of
civilisation and Christianity on the frontier. He held his post as a foundation elder of the Somerset East
Church until he was 70 and fought a bonny battle for the Kirk and its independence.
Another of his earliest actions as a free citizen was to found the Agricultural Show of Somerset
East - a prodigious novelty on the Cape frontier in 1826. Nominally his friend Landdrost Mackay was
president but it is almost certain that Hart was the driving force in this move for better farming.
In his later years the austere, God-fearing old man became a legend on the frontier which he had
done as much as any single individual to establish and civilise. One of his descendants, the late Sir
James Rose Innes, Chief Justice of the Union, recalled the old man's intense practicalness. When
neighbours borrowed his coffin which had been kept ready in the loft according to farming custom, they
found Hart had not left it idle. It was packed with dried peaches.
He and his son had much trouble to face on 'Glen Avon' as the Kaffir wars surged again and again
around them. Just after the 1835 war he had 200 cattle stolen and spirited into Kaffirland. Despite his
Scottish persistence, even Hart could recover only 23. In the War of the Ax, ten years later, he suffered
considerable loss through helping the Government to the best of his powers with cash and grain when
everyone else held back. When the last, worst war of all broke out in 1850, farmers of both language
groups in Somerset East felt they could stick it no longer. They met, elected Hart, who was then in his
seventies, to the chair, and passed a resolution warning the Government that they would have to trek
west to some safer region. Not long afterwards that westward trek began. But Hart himself, our first
English-speaking South-African, was made of sterner stuff. Others could trek if they wished. The old
man, a great pioneer, a great farmer and a great gentleman remained to the end of his days in the district
which he himself had put upon the map of civilised South Africa.
EXTRACTS FROM «b»«i»'THEY WERE SOUTH AFRICANS«/b»«/i»' by John Bond.

Hart and his wife, who died in 1854, had fourteen children, of whom a number died young. Four
daughters and his second son, James, survived him. His eldest son, Robert, predeceased him by two
months. On his death Hart was buried in the family vault which he himself had built in 1840 on the side
of a small hill at 'Glenavon'; he was the last to be buried there. He left more than 200 descendants, who
married into numerous Settler and other families, for example, those of Stretch, Meintjes, Cottingham,
Bowker, Van Aardt, Impey, Fleischer, Burt, Pringle, Ware and Townshend. One grand-daugher was the
mother of Sir James Rose Innes;* another married Sir Gordon Sprigg.
In 1931 a memorial window to Hart was unveiled in the Somerset East Presbyterian Church by his
oldest surviving grand-daugher. His bust, sculpted by I. Mitford Barberton, was placed in the vestibule
of the 1820 Settler Memorial Hall in Grahamstown in 1970. P.M.F.
«i»Cape Arch., C.T.: Death Notice; Last will and testament 16.5.1866;
P.R.O. London,: War office records register: - T. Pringle
Narrative of a residence in South Africa, Londno., 1835;
G.M. Theal, Records of the Cape Colony, v 12,14. London., 1902.
A. Dreyer, Gedenkboek van die Nederduits-Gereformeerde Kerk, Somerset-Oos' ' geskiedkundige
oorsig...(1825 - 1935) C.T., 1935'
R.H. Impey, Family history of Impey and Harts. Palmerston, Mission Press, 1935 I & S.
Mitford-Barberton, The Bowkers of Tharfiled, Oxford, 1952
Pamela Ffolliott, 'Father of the Settlers', Settlers 150 years supplied to the Eastern Province Herald
13.6.1970.
Private Family papers (compiled by Lilian F. Macdonald Stewart (great grand-daughter) and other
members of the family).
«/i»I

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