Huguenots and the South African Cape

With the 1685 Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, French Protestants were stripped of any protect-ion they may have had in Louis XIV’s France. I thought I knew everything there was to know about the exiles' large communities in England, Ireland, Germany, Netherlands and Switzerland, but then people started talking about the small Hug­ue­n­ot diaspora in South Africa. I searched the other blogs and found a little eg The du Preez Family blog in Huguenot Exodus (1688 & 1689)

Cape of Good Hope and the Western Cape region

In fact the Dutch East India Co./VOC, under Jan van Riebeeck, had already made a permanent Calvin­ist settlement on the Cape of Good Hope. He arrived with five ships in Cape Town bay in 1652. Cape Town’s settlement was a predominantly as an interim port for VOC ships, en route from Europe to Asia. In order to fully stock Cape Town’s port, the VOC admitted good Protestant citizens who could settle as farmers and provide the food and drinks. As early as 1671 the first Huguenot refugee, Francois Villion/Viljoen, arrived at the Cape.

Clearly the Dutch East India Co. encouraged the Huguenots to emigrate to the Cape because they shared Calvinist beliefs. But they also recognised that most of the Huguenots were exper­ien­ced farmers from parts of France that specialised in wine growing. After their arrival at the Cape, the immigrants were expected to make a living from agric­ulture, business or by practicing a trade. If they decided to farm, they were allotted farm land without cost. As soon as a few families settled, they laid the first stone of the Cape’s Dutch Reformed chur­ch 1678, built and later renovated in the typical Cape Dutch style.

An agent was sent out from the Cape Colony in 1685 to attract more settlers and new immigrants began to arrive eg in 1686 the brothers Guill­aume and Francois du Toit reached South Africa. Timing was everything! With the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, many a French Protestant was looking around for a home. By 1688-9 the 201 Hug­uenot families who arrived were just large enough to leave an impression on the young settlement at the Cape, only 70 km outside Cape Town.

Franschhoek Valley, site of Huguenot vineyards

In 1688, French Huguenot refugees were given land by the Dutch government in a valley called Olifantshoek/Elephant's Corner. The name of the area soon changed to Le Quartier Francais and then to Fransch­hoek Valley. That year a group of c200 French Huguenots arrived from La Motte d'Aigues in Provence and other areas. As described by fellow blogger A Post-Modern Protestant in Paris in his post South African Wine a French Protestant Heritage, they specialised in vineyards.

When the de Villiers brothers arrived at the Cape with a reputation for viticulture, and in time, the brothers planted many thousands of vines at the Cape. They moved from the original farm that they had been granted, La Rochelle, to finally settle on individual land grants near Fransch­hoek in places they named Bourgogne, Champagne and La Brie. Lucky were the passing ships that stopped in Cape Town.

Huguenot Monument in Franschoek, 1945

Individual arrivals contin­ued on and off until the end of Company-supported emig­rat­ion in 1707. Undoubtedly these French Huguenot exiles created fertile valleys out of the tough land they had been given in the Cape. But the white pop­ulation in the Cape was small, so they soon married their children and grandchildren into the fam­ilies of other colon­ists. And it didn’t help that the Dutch East India Co. insisted that schools taught exclusively in Dutch. By the mid C18th the Huguenots ceased to maint­ain a distinct ident­ity. Within two generations even their home language largely disappeared.

What is left now? Some important surnames, today mostly Afrik­aans speaking, remain in families who had French-speaking great great grandparents eg Cronje/Cronier, de Klerk/Le Clercq, de Villiers, Terre-blanche and Viljoen/Villion. Plus a number of wine farms in the Western Cape still have French names, as do their products.

La Motte winery, named for the settlers' French home.

Then there is a large monu­ment, Huguenot Monument in Franschoek 1945, commemorating the arr­iv­al of the Huguenots in South Africa, that wasn’t inaug­urated by Dr AJ van der Merwe until 1948. The cen­tral fe­m­ale figure stood for religious free­dom, denied the Huguenots in their beloved France but offered by Dutch South Africa. A useful analysis of the Huguenot Monument can be found in the Franschhoek blog. Finally the Memorial Museum of Franschhoek next to the monument celebrates the his­tory of the French Huguenots who settled in the Cape.

59 Brick Lane Spitalfields: Christian, Jewish, Muslim

By the mid-late C17th, the long street in the East End of London called Brick Lane was being built up from the south. The Huguenots were fleeing religious persecution by the Catholic Church and Catholic government in France. After the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, tens of thousands of Huguenots sought sanctuary in Britain and brought with them their weaving and silver-making skills.

Traders and weavers lived next to, but not necessarily in Spitalfields. Their late 17th and C18th domestic buildings were well appointed terraced houses, perfect for housing the French weaver families once they became successful; fine city mansions were built around the newly created Spital Square.

substantial  houses, built since 1700

59 Brick Lane, on the corner of Fournier Street, was a plain but quite elegant, rectangular dark brick building with tall arched windows. Even in a heavily built up street like Brick Lane, natural light could flood into the spaces inside.  The building was described as having 2 storeys with a plain band between floors, 6 windows with red brick gauged arches and stone keys, recessed windows, a Palladian window in centre with semi-circular headed windows at sides (1st floor) and 4 segmental headed windows (2 blank in centre) on ground floor.

How was this building used over the centuries?
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today 59 Brick Lane is an elegant mosque

The first community to use 59 Brick Lane were the recently arrived Frenchmen. The Huguenot community built La Neuve Eglise as a Protestant Church in 1743, along with a small school. As these Calvinists worked hard and prospered, some of them could afford to build large and handsome Georgian houses around Brick Lane, with glass-ceilinged workshops in the attics, where they set up their weaving looms. They didn’t forget their religious values either. In 1700, there were nine French churches in Spitalfields, although by the end of two generations of English born Huguenots, the French-speaking community was clearly being assimilated through inter-marriage.

Interior of 59 Brick Lane, when used as a Methodist chapel  (above)

Interior of 59 Brick Lane, when used as a Jewish synagogue (below)

The next group to use 59 Brick Lane were a different people. The London Society for Promoting Christianity Among the Jews used The Jews’ Chapel, as they called the building in 1809, to encourage the physical restoration of the Jewish people to the Land of Israel and to encourage the Hebrew Christian Messianic movement. The Society only lasted for one decade in Brick Lane.

John Wesley himself had lived not far away on City Road and preached his first covenant sermon at a chapel, just off Brick Lane. The simplicity and plainness of The Methodist Chapel, as the Wesleyans called it in 1819, would no doubt have suited them well.

When the local silk-weaving trades went into decline, the abandoned properties in this suburb were sublet and in the C19th the East End became a cheap place to live. Waves of impoverished and rather desperate immigrants arrived over the decades, slowly prospered and then moved out of Spitalfields as soon as they could. So as Icons Of England has shown, the building changed a number of times as each community established its own place of worship here.

With the huge influx of Yiddish-speaking Jews from Eastern Europe flooding into the East End in the 1880s and 1890s, our Methodist Chapel was converted into The Spitalfields Great Synagogue in 1897. Brick Lane was the heart of London’s Jewish community and this was the principal synagogue of the area. Plus there were schoolrooms under the roof for children of the masses of impoverished, hard working refugees. From the 1960s, the Jewish community in the East End dwindled, many moving into more salubrious north London. The building eventually closed.

Since 1976 this building, Brick Lane Jamme Masjid, has been one of the largest mosques in London; 4,000 worshippers can fit into the prayer hall. The mosque has particularly served the religious needs of the large Bengali community which arrived after World War Two. The non-structural fittings like pews were removed, the opening in the centre of the gallery was reduced in size, made octagonal and moved eastwards, while retaining the columns on the ground floor supporting the gallery. A partition wall was inserted around the western end of the ground floor, and a qibla was constructed on the ground floor under the SE corner or the gallery. The northern and central vaults were also converted to prayer halls. Rooms adjacent to the prayer halls were adapted for washing.

Once again there is an school for religious instruction here, on the first floor, but this time it is an Islamic school. The former Huguenot chapel and former Great Synagogue in Fournier St and the adjacent former school buildings, now used as ancillary spaces for the mosque, are Grade II listed buildings.

Princelet St Synagogue, behind this Huguenot house

Another of the handsome Georgian houses in Spitalfields that were built by the Huguenots eventually became the Princelet St Synagogue. The front of the building is a former Huguenot house built in 1722, but at the rear was a synagogue, built in 1862. Like the other 38 synagogues in the City and the East End, Princelet St Synagogue lost its Jewish population in the two decades after WW2 ended.

Sandy's Row Synagogue, men on the ground floor, women section in the balcony

Sandy's Row Synagogue is fascinating for two reasons.  Firstly the synagogue was established in 1870 by a society of Dutch Jews, not Russians, Ukranians and Lithuanians. Secondly the synagogue, formerly a French Chapel, is the only extant, functioning synagogue in the East End today.

Two projects based on Spitalfields have recently come to my attention. Firstly a BBC programme called Saving Britain's Past was shown in Dec 2009. It did not ask whether the old Huguenot chapel cum synagogue should now be a mosque - that is beyond dispute. Rather it asked how today’s Bengali families could make the area their own, while not destroying the heritage value of old Spitalfields.

Georgian home in 27 Fournier St, restored by the Spitalfields Trust

Secondly The Spitalfields Trust bought crumbling Regency (1809-15) houses in Whitechapel, selling them on to Londoners who then let the Trust rebuild them observing strict conservation rules. For six years, Homes & Property has followed the story of the horseshoe of homes in a run-down part of East London. In this year’s Georgian Awards, presented by the Duke of Gloucester, the restoration work was highly commended. Plus The Spitalfields Trust project won first prize in Country Life’s national restoration competition.

One renovation stands out in particular. Fournier Street was the last street to be laid out on the Wood-Michell Estate and was originally known as Church St. 27 Fournier Street was built by Peter Bourdon of Spitalfields, who was granted a 98 year lease in 1725, the date that appears on the rainwater head on the front of the building. The weaver Mr Bourdon was believed to have been a prominent member of Spitalfields society. I assume from his surname that Mr Bourdon was a Huguenot. He would be delighted with how 27 Fournier St looks today.

The Tired of London, Tired of Life blog recommends visiting London's Museum of Immigration at 19 Princelet Street. The museum's home page says that 19 Princelet Street is a magical unrestored Huguenot master silk weaver's home, whose shabby frontage conceals a rare surviving synagogue built over its garden. The staff are working to save the building and to create a permanent exhibition documenting the history of the Huguenots, Irish, Jews, Bengalis, Somalis and others who shaped this Spitalfields.

Huguenot domestic architecture: 1696

Eggington House near Leighton Buzzard in Bedfordshire has been for sale. I am interested in the home for two important reasons. Firstly it was built in 1696, soon after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes (1685). The Edict forced Protestant Frenchmen to flee France or face forced conversion to Catholicism, galley slavery or even execution. Secondly not many William and Mary era homes survive for us to examine, splendid or otherwise.

Nikolaus Pevsner, my hero amongst architectural historians, carefully differentiated between this William III style and the later Queen Anne style of William’s sister in law. The houses and gardens of the William III era (1650–1702) were graceful but rather heavy, coming mid-way between the French-inspired Baroque of the Restoration and the rather austere Queen Anne period that might have better reflected Protestant Huguenot taste. For example, the use of brick became popular in Britain as an element of William’s international influence. He was, after all, born and raised in the Netherlands.

To restate the importance of the Huguenots on William III taste, note that among the Huguenots seeking refuge in Calvinist Holland was interior designer Daniel Marot, himself the son of an architect. The stadtholder soon  commissioned Marot to work on his palace at Het Loo in the Netherlands and other buildings. William also took a keen interest in the gardens that Marot designed, so it was not a surprise when Marot followed William and Mary to England.

Treasure Hunt made a similar point. Dyrham Park in Gloucestershire has a variety of Dutch art objects, collected by Secretary of War William Blathwayt during his travels with King William III to the Continent. Blathwayt adored Dutch paintings, seventeenth-century Delft glazed earthenware, cut flowers, Dutch stamped leather wallhangings and a state bed in the style of Daniel Marot.

South Bedfordshire in particular discovered late-Renaissance mansion architecture from France and the Netherlands. It foreshadowed the distinctive brick houses of the 18th century which were introduced through the royal patronage of King William.

Eggington House, built in 1696

Eggington House was built in 1696 for Jean Renouille, a Huguenot described as a merchant tailor who fled from Montauban in Languedoc in SW France. Bedfordshire encouraged newly arriving Huguenots to settle in the towns and surrounding county, thus becoming an important centre for the Huguenot lace-making industry in Britain.

I’d love to know how Jean Renouille made his livelihood in Bedfordshire - we know for a fact that he eventually became Sheriff of Bedfordshire, an establishment position if ever I heard of one. And within a generation, we know the Renouille family must have integrated rather nicely, because they Anglicised the family name to Reynal, moved to the very smart Hockliffe Grange and let out Eggington to other well-to-do families.

Pevsner described Eggington House as an uncommonly fine example of C17th domestic architecture, completely up to the moment in features. It was built of red brick under a tiled roof with a panelled parapet. The main façade had 7 bays of classical segment-headed sash windows and was three storeys high. The roof line was concealed by a panelled parapet decorated with urns. Surrounded on three sides by its own land and woodland, the house was approached down its own gravelled drive through a set of gates. Pevsner didn’t call it smallish, but I will.

Descriptions in CountryLife .co.uk are very useful. The house has magnificent reception rooms, all with high ceilings and full length sash windows allowing light to flood into every room. The interior contains a staircase with twisted balusters. The drawing room is peaceful with light, soft-oak panelling on all walls with attractive carved wooden alcoves either side of a carved wooden fire-place with a French door leading out onto the terrace and garden. The sash windows have their own light oak shutters and with wooden floor boards and wooden cornicing. The study has walls of decorative painted panels, a unique painted alcove which is thought to be of the original William III style and an impressive marble fire-place. The dining room leads off from the reception hall with walls of painted wooden panelling, wooden floor boards and an open fireplace.

Over the decades, this house has enjoyed a series of impressive owners, including Sir Gilbert Inglefield, a Lord Mayor of London after WW2, and, more recently Lord Slynn. Slynn was no slouch himself; he held the office of Lord of Appeal in Ordinary, Judge of the European Court of Justice and Advocate General of the European Court of Justice.

I have seen some modern photos of Eggington House’s interior, but I wish I could find drawings or photos from previous centuries. [Since the house was requisitioned by the Army during WW1, it is possible that substantial internal renovations were required, post-war]. In general, we can say that William and Mary design styles included French, Dutch and eastern influences. In wealthy homes, these influences could be found in furnishings carved in walnut, fruitwood and ebony, along side marquetry. But perhaps Huguenots, in that first difficult generation of exile and adaptation, had simpler tastes.

If the house sells, I wonder if the new owners will know about the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, Bedfordshire's Huguenot community, the Dutch stadtholder, Daniel Marot and Jean Renouille.

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I couldn’t find many bloggers discussing Huguenot architecture, after the expulsion (1685). katy elliot blog has wonderful images from Huguenot Street: New Paltz, NY but the slightly later date (early 1700s) suggests that the New York Huguenots had been living for a generation in The Netherlands. She suggested that the windows and shutters felt Dutch and different from anything she had ever seen in New England. Sam Gruber’s Jewish Art and Monuments also has an image of Huguenot architecture, but again it is early C18th. In 1742 a Huguenot chapel was built on the corner of Brick Lane and Fournier Street in Tower Hamlets in London’s East End. Called La Neuve Eglise, this dark brick and rather austere building later became Spitalfields Great Synagogue.

I would like to write a post on The French Protestant Hospital, La Providence, of the same era. But sofar I cannot find any photos of its original 1718 architecture.

The best books are:
Cottret , BJ and P Stevenson Huguenots in England: Immigration and Settlement c1550-1700, 1992
Davies, Horton and Marie-Helene French Huguenots in English-Speaking Lands, 2000
Gwynn , Robin D Huguenot Heritage: History and Contribution of the Huguenots in England, 1985
Gwynn, Robin D The Huguenots of London, Alpha Press, 1998 (my favourite)
Sparks , R.S and Van Ruymbeke, B Memory and Identity: Huguenots in France and the Atlantic Diaspora, 2008
Vigne, R and C. Littleton From Strangers to Citizens: The Integration of Immigrant Communities in Britain, Ireland and Colonial America 1550-1750, 2002