The Fishy Smiths

by Mike Bruton

  Doug Rivett also authored an article in the Ichthos newsletter entitled ‘JLB Smith, the chemist, as I knew him’, in which he shares his observations on Smith’s character:

  ‘When I came to Rhodes in 1939, Doc Smith, as he was generally known, was in his early forties, at the height of his intellectual powers, and Senior Lecturer in organic chemistry. … He was a superb lecturer. His lectures were carefully prepared and clearly delivered. On such occasions he wore the customary black gown. But his ideas on the theory of organic chemistry reactions were unorthodox (as I discovered later), although in all fairness it should be remembered that this facet of the subject was still in its rudimentary stages. He made frequent use of problems in his lectures (of which I too am a great believer) and had written a book on the subject, Numerical and Constitutional Exercises in Organic Chemistry in collaboration with Professor Rindl of Bloemfontein.

  ‘Naturally he ran the organic chemistry practicals for the second and third years where one was taught the usual techniques of filtration, crystallisation, distillation, etc. used in preparing organic compounds. In addition, we identified unknown compounds using his book A Simplified System of Organic Identification (1940). He was also in charge of the quantitative and qualitative inorganic practicals. Over the years he had devised his own scheme for qualitative analysis which was used and improved by successive classes of students. The first edition of his book A System of Qualitative Inorganic Analysis appeared in 1941. I find it interesting to read in my copy the alterations my class had to make as it shows how he continually strove to improve shortcomings in the scheme. It should be stressed that the spectroscopic methods of analysis in use today were unknown then and the methods we used are nowadays referred to as “wet chemistry”.

  ‘It must be emphasized that while Doc Smith was carrying his full share of teaching duties in the Chemistry Department his ichthyological plate was overflowing! He had identified the first live coelacanth early in 1939 and must have found far too few hours available in his day for all he wanted to do. He used to arrive in the Chemistry Department … punctually at 9.30 a.m. after several hours work in the morning at home, always dressed in a light grey suit. He wasn’t a sociable person, not easily approachable, stern and unsmiling. For him life was a serious business with time to be used to the full.

  ‘But he had a lot of time for his students, especially the better ones. Once a year on a Sunday morning the third years were invited to tea at his house on Rhodes Avenue. I am not aware of any other staff member who did this. He also had the interests of the broader student community at heart and in 1943 became chairman [of] the Students (now Sports) Union even though he was a very busy person.

  ‘I got to know Doc even better during my MSc year where for my thesis he put me on to examining the volatile oil of Agathosma apiculata, a pungent shrub growing on the coast at Port Alfred. It was then that I discovered that he suffered from bouts of stomach upset, the result of dysentery originating from the East Africa campaign during World War I, that left him weak and very frustrated.

  ‘Doc was extremely apprehensive of cyanide and very sensitive to its smell. On one occasion, minutes after starting a second year lecture, he suddenly ordered the class to leave the room immediately as he smelt cyanide. This was later traced to an open bottle. It is well known that people vary considerably in their sensitivity to the smell of highly toxic hydrogen cyanide gas. Some cannot smell it at all. Needless to say the class was filled with fear and trepidation! The occasion made a deep impression on at least one member of the class as he recounted the event to me fifty years later!’ (Rivett, 1996).

  According to Mike Davies-Coleman (pers. comm., 2017), who studied chemistry at Rhodes University under Doug Rivett and later served as Professor of Organic Chemistry and Head of the Chemistry Department:

  ‘JLB Smith was a rigorous analytical organic chemist who demanded non-negotiable accuracy from undergraduate chemists in analytical practicals. A student was only able to go onto the next practical if his (I guess there were very few hers around back then in the thirties and forties at university certainly in chemistry) analytical mastery passed muster with JLB Smith. JLB Smith also demanded complete silence in undergraduate practicals and there was no talking allowed.’

  He further comments:

  ‘Chemistry was a robust science back in those days with plenty of bangs and copious clouds of fumes and gases. It was not for the faint hearted. I know because Doug was fearless in the lab and was always keen to do chemistry on the robust scale. He would have got this from his training under JLB Smith.’

  As a young staff member of RUC, Smith participated in sport and games (mainly tennis and bridge) and coached the college’s 3rd to 5th rugby teams. He was also an active member and eventually Chairman of the RUC Sports Union well into the 1940s (K van Zyl, pers. comm., 2017). About 50 years later, on 21st October 1974, his second wife, Margaret, wrote to John Donald, Secretary of the Sports Union:

  ‘I am both touched and delighted to have been elected an Honorary Vice-President of the Rhodes University Sports Union. You are probably unaware of the fact that, when we were first married, my husband, Professor J.L.B. Smith, was Chairman of the Sports Union (called Athletics Union at that time). In this capacity he did the work of the Sports Officer – supervised the staff and, with Joe King, was responsible for the remolding of the Great Field.’

  JLB Smith, Chairman of the RUC Sports Union, at a swimming gala in 1943. Front right: Four-year old William Smith.

  One of JLB’s contemporaries on the Sports Union committee (a Mr Sutherland) regarded him as ‘a bit odd’, even ‘slightly round the bend’, and ‘an honest but sickly man’ (SATV documentary, 1976). In 1931 an important athletics event took place on the Great Field at RUC. Danie Joubert, a student at Stellenbosch University, equalled the world 100 yards dash record of 9.4 seconds. The official time-keeper was JLB Smith (K van Zyl, pers. comm., 2017)!

  Although his passion for fishing was developing into a serious, even an overwhelming interest, ‘Doc’ Smith was – officially – still fully occupied in the teaching of, and research in, organic chemistry. In spite of his extraordinary capacity for work, something would have to give.

  1After Smith and Rivett’s paper, a 72-year gap would ensue before the Marloth Medal was awarded again – in 2018 to Professor Guy Midgley for his outstanding contributions to ecology and ecological policy.

  2Today it is an essential component of the new-age ‘nutraceuticals’ industry in South Africa and has been combined with other products arising from indigenous knowledge, such as rooibos tea and bitter ghaap (Hoodia gordonii), to create nutritious drinks and medicines. Buchu leaves are chewed to cure stomach complaints, rheumatism and gout, and the leaves are crushed to make ‘buchu brandy’, a potent drink, and to flavour food, soft drinks, wine and perfume. The San and Khoi-Khoi use buchu as an insect repellent and deodorant, and mix it with sheep fat to make skin moisturisers. Until recently most buchu has been harvested from wild plants but the international demand for the herb has encouraged many farmers in the Cedarberg district to grow it commercially in irrigated fields (Bruton, 2010, 2017a).

  CHAPTER 5

  Henriette Pienaar

  First marriage, and raising a young family

  THE ONLY hint gleaned by even the closest associates of JLB Smith in Grahamstown that he had had a first marriage was a comment in the 1976 SATV documentary They called him Doc. There it is stated that he was depressed in the 1930s following, among other things, the failure of his first marriage. His second wife, Margaret, told colleagues that JLB had enjoyed fishing with ‘his son, Bob’ – clearly not William, the only child from his marriage to Margaret. The best conclusion one could draw was that Bob was the issue of an earlier marriage. The name Henriette Cecile Pienaar is scarcely recorded in any publications that review the life and work of JLB Smith except, very briefly, in Thomson (1991) and Weinberg (1999). As a result, details about his first wife are revealed here for the first t
ime (see the Acknowledgements, page vii, for the author’s sources).

  Four Afrikaans families made a significant contribution to the development of education and theology in the early years of the Union of South Africa: the Murrays, Pienaars, Neethlings and Hofmeyrs. It was from this pioneering stock that Henriette Cecile Pienaar was born on 12th November 1897 in Somerset West.

  Henriette’s maternal grandfather, Dominee Johannes Henoch Neethling, came from a very prominent family. He married Maria Murray, daughter of the original Scottish immigrant Andrew Murray, and was founder, with John Murray and NJ Hofmeyr, of Victoria College, which became Stellenbosch University in 1918. Her paternal grandfather, Barend Theodorus Pienaar, was a highly respected sheep farmer who decided not to join the Great Trek, instead buying and farming the new merino sheep, and becoming very wealthy. On one of his four farms he established the village of Nieu-Bethesda in 1875, now an important cultural destination.

  Henriette’s father, Pieter Johannes (‘JP’) Pienaar (1860–1952), who was born in Nieu-Bethesda on 1st October 1860, was a prominent Dutch Reformed Church Minister in Somerset West for 45 years (1891–1936). He married Henrietta Christiana Neethling (1864–1955), an actress, author, poet and musician. They had 13 children, nine boys and four girls, of whom Theodorus (‘Theo’) Barend Pienaar (1888–1960) was the eldest, and Henriette, the sixth child and second daughter. They were known as the ‘Rugby Pienaars’ because of the size of their family and the fact that seven of her brothers played provincial rugby. Theo, in particular, excelled in the sport and was a member of Boy Morkel’s famed 1914 Western Province team, considered by many to be the finest provincial team ever assembled in South Africa. In 1921, at the age of 33 years, he led the first Springbok rugby team to tour Australia and New Zealand.

  Theo Pienaar, Henriette’s eldest brother, Springbok rugby captain in 1921.

  JLB Smith’s father, Joseph Smith, was Postmaster in Stellenbosch and then Somerset West at the time that his son was a scholar at Diocesan College in Cape Town (1912–1914). The Smiths lived across the road (Lourens Street) from the Pienaar parsonage in Somerset West – a huge property that extended to the banks of the Lourens River. The proximity of their homes means that JLB (or ‘Len’, as he was known at this time) and Henriette would almost certainly have met. They are also likely to have known each other during JLB’s student years at Victoria College (1915–1918) and it is likely that they corresponded during his years at Cambridge University (1919–1922). The fact that they had known each other for so long before their marriage explains how their wedding could take place so soon after Smith returned to South Africa from England in late 1922.

  In the 1976 SATV documentary it is stated that Smith returned from England ‘with his young wife’ but there is no evidence of this, and Henriette’s family are unaware of her travelling to England at that time. There is also apparently no correspondence between JLB Smith and Henriette in the archives of the SAIAB and Rhodes University Archive in Grahamstown. JLB Smith and Henriette might have chosen to dispose of all the correspondence between them, or Henriette’s role in his career might have been purged from the record or ignored. Several correspondents who knew Margaret Smith in her later years commented that she had ‘cleansed’ the archives in both the Ichthyology Institute in Grahamstown and the South African Museum (now Iziko) in Cape Town in order, in their opinion, to cast JLB Smith in a positive light. Margaret is also known to have disposed of the so-called ‘Crackpot files’ in the Department of Ichthyology, which included oddball letters from people around the world asking for unrelated advice, disputing the theory of evolution, expressing disrespect for JLB, etc.

  Henriette Pienaar (far right, back row) with her sisters and friends, in the 1920s.

  At the age of 25, Henriette married JLB Smith on 22nd August 1922 in her father’s parsonage in Somerset West. By all accounts, the Pienaars did not approve of her choice of partner as, although they respected JLB’s academic achievements, they did not find him to be a likeable character and objected to his somewhat eccentric behaviour. For instance, when he brought Henriette to Somerset West shortly before the birth of their second child, Cecile, he would lie ‘… half naked, with only a pair of shorts on, on a long table standing beside the tennis court in the gardens of ‘De Oude Pastorie’ in Lourens Street. At the time he was following a special diet of eating nothing but paw-paws’ (A-J Tötemeyer, pers. comm., 2017). He would also walk about the house ‘almost naked with only a type of nappy on like Mahatma Ghandi’ (A-J Tötemeyer, pers. comm., 2017). After the marriage Henriette was displaced from her family and disappeared with this strange scientist into the relative oblivion (as far as the Pienaars were concerned) of the English university town of Grahamstown.

  Henriette was tall and elegant with a fair ‘Irish’ complexion and long black hair that was always tied back in a natural look, rather than the elaborate, ‘permed’ hair-dos fashionable at the time. Although she was intelligent, and qualified as a nursery school teacher, she was not academically inclined and would probably have regarded JLB Smith’s double life as a lecturer-cum-ichthyologist as an imposition on their family life rather than an exciting challenge. She was not lean and athletic – as JLB and Margaret were in their youth – but tended towards plumpness after their marriage, and had no interest in sports or angling, although she did enjoy casual outdoor activity and relaxing days at the beach.

  Henriette’s nickname to intimate friends was ‘Hatta’ but her parents and siblings called her ‘Ha-Riette’, with a soft ‘h’. According to several close family members (see Acknowledgements, page vii), Henriette was a lovable, happy, ‘always smiling’ personality in her youth, and a soft-hearted, home-loving, family-oriented person as an adult. She was quiet, sincere and generous, and enjoyed homely activities, such as knitting, sewing, reading, drawing, gardening (especially with geraniums), cooking and baking, as well as the company of children.

  Henriette was apparently a good mother and would have created a stable home for Smith during their 14-year marriage at an important formative stage in his career as a young academic. In the 1920s their lives would probably have been predictable and comfortable and, dare one say it, happy; although, later in life, JLB Smith would comment ‘As far as I am concerned, a happy person is a useless person. It is only people who are discontented and dissatisfied who achieve something’ (SATV documentary, 1976).

  JLB Smith with his eldest son, Bob, daughter-in-law Gerd and their children.

  JLB and Henriette had three children. For the confinements of the first two, Robert and Cecile, JLB took Henriette to her parents in Somerset West so that her mother could take care of her and the Pienaar family midwife could handle the births.

  Robert (‘Bob’) Brierley Smith was born on 20th July 1923 in Somerset West. He later married a Norwegian, Gerd Follesø, a teacher, in 1951. He was deputy principal or principal of schools in Mtunzini, Park Rynie, Howick and Estcourt in KwaZulu-Natal, and a lecturer at the Durban Teachers Training College. Bob and Gerd adopted two children, Donald (1958) and Cathy (1960). Donald became one of JLB’s favourite ‘gillies’ (fishing assistants) and went angling with him at the Knysna Heads from dawn to dusk when Bob and his family spent Christmas holidays there between 1957 and 1967. Bob retired to George in the mid-1970s, where he died in July 2009.

  Cecile (‘Pats’) Brierley Smith was born on 10th January 1925 in Somerset West and was a Wren in the Second World War. She went on to marry Edwin (‘Eddy’) Thurston, a pilot, in 1924 and they had six children. Cecile, who died in 1996, was devoted to her father and very close to her brother, Bob.

  JLB and Henriette’s relationship started to deteriorate in the late 1920s and early 1930s when he followed his medical doctor’s advice to spend more time out-of-doors and developed his passion for fishing and healthy exercise. According to members of the Pienaar family who were interviewed, there was considerable friction in the Smith household during these years. Many years later Margaret, JLB’s second wife, comment
ed, ‘I never did get into sewing much – I think my husband didn’t like it because whenever he and his first wife had a disagreement she’d go and sit at her machine and sew furiously!’ (Horning, 1979).

  Shirley Brierley Smith (aged 7 years), JLB Smith’s youngest daughter from his first marriage to Henriette Pienaar.

  Their third child, Shirley Brierley Smith, was born in Grahamstown, 12 years after their marriage and just two years before their divorce. She would later marry Johannes Hugo Viljoen, a veterinarian, although the marriage did not last. They had three children, and chemistry continued to run in the family as Shirley’s second son, Murray Viljoen, holds a doctorate in chemistry, just like his grandfather. Shirley died in the Strand on 2nd June 2018 at the age of 84 years.

  In the 1935 Voters’ Roll JLB Smith (‘owner’) and Henriette Cecile Smith (‘occupier’) are recorded as living in Gilbert Street, Grahamstown (F Way-Jones, pers. comm., 2017). The reality was, however, that Henriette’s personality and aspirations seem to have been diametrically opposite to those of JLB Smith in the mid-1930s, at a time when he was increasingly consumed in the practice of his dual careers, and regularly embarked on rugged fishing trips.

  JLB was apparently ‘furious’ when he heard about Henriette’s third pregnancy (with Shirley), which didn’t fit into his plans at all (A-J Tötemeyer pers. comm., 2017). They were separated for several months in 1936 before their divorce (National Archives) when Henriette, at JLB Smith’s suggestion, visited her family in Somerset West to show them their young daughter, Shirley, aged two – and never returned.