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John Fairbairn (educator)
John Fairbairn (9 April 1794 – 5 October 1864) was a newspaper proprietor, educator, financier and politician of the Cape Colony. According to the Standard Encyclopaedia of Southern Africa, "The embryo of the State education system we know today, trial by jury, the principle of the mutual life assurance company – all these were fruits of his endeavours at the Cape". Early life John Fairbairn was born in Carolside Mill in the Parish of Legerwood, Berwickshire, Scotland on 9 April 1794, the son of James Fairbairn and Agnes Brack, who married at Lauder, Berwickshire 20 March 1783, James living in the Parish of Westruther, Berwickshire at the time. He attended the University of Edinburgh where he studied Medicine "acquiring at the same time a more than passing knowledge of classical languages and mathematics"."The Argus" Friday 31 July 1959 He did not graduate and, in 1818, he turned to education, and for more than 5 years taught at Bruce's Academy in Newcastle upon Tyne. Here ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Roxburghshire
Roxburghshire or the County of Roxburgh ( gd, Siorrachd Rosbroig) is a historic county and registration county in the Southern Uplands of Scotland. It borders Dumfriesshire to the west, Selkirkshire and Midlothian to the north-west, and Berwickshire to the north. To the south-west it borders Cumberland and to the south-east Northumberland, both in England. It was named after the Royal Burgh of Roxburgh, a town which declined markedly in the 15th century and is no longer in existence. Latterly, the county town of Roxburghshire was Jedburgh. The county has much the same area as Teviotdale, the basin drained by the River Teviot and tributaries, together with the adjacent stretch of the Tweed into which it flows. The term is often treated as synonymous with Roxburghshire, but may omit Liddesdale as Liddel Water drains to the west coast.Ordnance Gazetteer of Scotland, by, Francis Groome, publ. 2nd edition 1896. Article on Roxburghshire History The county appears to have orig ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Claremont, Cape Town
Claremont is a suburb of Cape Town, South Africa. It is situated 9 kilometres south of the city, and is one of the so-called " Southern Suburbs", it is situated alongside Lansdowne. It is an important commercial and residential area, which is currently experiencing significant growth and development. History Until the arrival of Dutch colonists in 1652, the uncultivated veld of the Cape Peninsula was used by the nomadic Khoisan as grazing for their cattle. The Dutch established an outpost on the shore of Table Bay, and in 1657 they established a number of farms south of the outpost. The most southerly of those original farms, named ''Louwvliet'' and ''Questenburg'', are today covered by the suburbs of Claremont and Newlands. The area was agricultural for about 150 years. Other estates that were established included ''Veldhuyzen'' in 1676, ''Stellenberg'' in 1697, ''Weltevreden'' (originally part of Stellenberg) in 1730, ''Sans Souci'' (originally part of Questenburg) in 1786, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Frank Watermeyer
Fredrick Stephanus Watermeyer (14 April 1828 - 28 August 1864), informally known simply as "Fred" or "Frank", was a journalist, advocate and a prominent Member of the Cape Legislative Assembly. Early life Born in Cape Town into a very educated Cape family, he was the younger brother of the great Ben Watermeyer. He was meticulously schooled as a child so that, although he was Afrikaans speaking, he was soon described as ''"one of such unmistakably English education as an old Kapenaar could possibly have."'' He was already the secretary of a public company when he was still a teenager, and at a similar time was working as an actuary and was a free-lance writer. A free and critical thinker, he also authored anonymous papers critical of the state and the position of his own religious denomination, Lutheranism. Legal career Frank Watermeyer was among the first Cape advocates to be called to the bar after a purely local examination (instead of having to go to Europe). He was a member ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Cape Argus
The ''Cape Argus'' is a daily newspaper co-founded in 1857 by Saul Solomon and published by Sekunjalo in Cape Town, South Africa. It is commonly referred to as ''The Argus''. Although not the first English-language newspaper in South Africa, the ''Cape Argus'' was the first locally to use the telegraph for news gathering. As of 2012, the ''Argus'' had a daily readership of 294 000, according to the South African Advertising Research Foundation's All Media Products Survey (Amps) Newspaper Readership and Trends. Its circulation for the first quarter of 2013 was 33 247. Jermaine Craig is the executive editor of the ''Cape Argus''. He replaced Gasant Abarder, who resigned in early 2013 to take up a post at Primedia in the Western Cape. History The ''Cape Argus'' was founded on 3 January 1857, by the partners Saul Solomon, journalist Richard William Murray ("Limner") and the MP Bryan Henry Darnell. However, political differences immediately surfaced between the partners. Sau ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Saul Solomon
Saul Solomon (25 May 1817 – 16 October 1892) was an influential liberal politician of the Cape Colony, a British colony in what is now South Africa. Solomon was an important member of the movement for responsible government and an opponent of Lord Carnarvon's Confederation scheme. Early life and background Saul Solomon was born on the island of St Helena on 25 May 1817. Although his family were St Helenan, they had close links to Cape Town. Saul spent his first years at a Jewish children's home in England, where he suffered from the malnutrition and rickets that physically affected him for the rest of his life. He then had a rudimentary formal education in South Africa before beginning work as an apprentice in a printing business. He later acquired the business and built it into the largest printing business in the country, founding the ''Cape Argus'' newspaper. He was also one of the founders of Old Mutual, today one of the largest insurance firms in South Africa. As repr ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Cape Peninsula
The Cape Peninsula ( af, Kaapse Skiereiland) is a generally mountainous peninsula that juts out into the Atlantic Ocean at the south-western extremity of the African continent. At the southern end of the peninsula are Cape Point and the Cape of Good Hope. On the northern end is Table Mountain, overlooking Table Bay and the city bowl of Cape Town, South Africa. The peninsula is 52 km long from Mouille point in the north to Cape Point in the south. The Peninsula has been an island on and off for the past 5 million years, as sea levels fell and rose with the Glacial period, ice age and interglacial global warming cycles of, particularly, the Pleistocene. The last time that the Peninsula was an island was about 1.5 million years ago. Soon afterwards it was joined to the mainland by the Geology of Cape Town#Tertiary to Recent events, emergence from the sea of the sandy area now known as the Cape Flats. The towns and villages of the Cape Peninsula and Cape Flats, and the ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Cape Flats
The Cape Flats ( af, Die Kaapse Vlakte) is an expansive, low-lying, flat area situated to the southeast of the central business district of Cape Town. The Cape Flats is also the name of an administrative region of the City of Cape Town, which lies within the larger geographical area. Geology and geography In geological terms, the area is essentially a vast sheet of aeolian sand, ultimately of marine origin, which has blown up from the adjacent beaches over a period on the order of a hundred thousand years. Below the sand, the bedrock is in general the Malmesbury Shale, except on part of the western margin between Zeekoevlei to the south and Claremont and Wetton to the north, where an intrusive mass of Cape Granite is to be found. Most of the sand is unconsolidated; however, in some places near the False Bay coast the oldest sand dunes have been cemented into a soft sandstone (calcrete), and form low cliffs at the edge of the beach. These formations contain important fossils ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
John Molteno
Sir John Charles Molteno (5 June 1814 – 1 September 1886) was a soldier, businessman, champion of responsible government and the first Prime Minister of the Cape Colony. Early life Born in London into a large Anglo-Italian family, Molteno emigrated to the Cape in 1831 at the age of 17, where he found work as an assistant to the public librarian in Cape Town. At the age of 23 he founded his first company, ''Molteno & Co.'', a trading company that exported wine, wool and aloes to Mauritius and the West Indies, and opened branches around the Cape. In 1841, he undertook Southern Africa's first experimental export of fruit, loading a ship with a range of fruits (necessarily dried, as no refrigeration existed yet) and sending it to Australia to test foreign markets. The experiment ended in disaster when his ship was wrecked in a storm – pushing Molteno close to bankruptcy. Disposing of the remains of his mercantile businesses, he immediately bought some land in the arid Bea ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Prime Minister
A prime minister, premier or chief of cabinet is the head of the cabinet and the leader of the ministers in the executive branch of government, often in a parliamentary or semi-presidential system. Under those systems, a prime minister is not the head of state, but rather the head of government, serving under either a monarch in a democratic constitutional monarchy or under a president in a republican form of government. In parliamentary systems fashioned after the Westminster system, the prime minister is the presiding and actual head of government and head/owner of the executive power. In such systems, the head of state or their official representative (e.g., monarch, president, governor-general) usually holds a largely ceremonial position, although often with reserve powers. Under some presidential systems, such as South Korea and Peru, the prime minister is the leader or most senior member of the cabinet, not the head of government. In many systems, the prime minister ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Responsible Government
Responsible government is a conception of a system of government that embodies the principle of parliamentary accountability, the foundation of the Westminster system of parliamentary democracy. Governments (the equivalent of the executive branch) in Westminster democracies are responsible to parliament rather than to the monarch, or, in a colonial context, to the imperial government, and in a republican context, to the president, either in full or in part. If the parliament is bicameral, then the government is responsible first to the parliament's lower house, which is more representative than the upper house, as it usually has more members and they are always directly elected. Responsible government of parliamentary accountability manifests itself in several ways. Ministers account to Parliament for their decisions and for the performance of their departments. This requirement to make announcements and to answer questions in Parliament means that ministers must have the priv ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Christoffel Brand
Sir Christoffel Joseph Brand (21 June 1797 Cape Town – 19 May 1875 Cape Town) was a Cape jurist, politician, statesman and first Speaker of the Parliament of the Cape of Good Hope, Legislative Assembly of the Cape Colony. Early life and education Christoffel Brand was born in 1797, during the twilight years of the Dutch East India Company and the Dutch Cape Colony. Brand came from a long line of Dutch colonial administrators: both his father and grandfather (Christoffel Brand (Simon's Town), Christoffel Brand) had been officials with the Dutch East India Company. He was the godson of Joseph Banks, the noted British naturalist, whom his grandfather had worked with. After receiving his initial education in Cape Town, Brand attended the University of Leiden from 1815, where he obtained a doctorate in law in 1820 with a dissertation on the relationship that colonies have to the mother country – ''Dissertatio politico-juridica de jure coloniarum''. He also earned a doctorate o ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Swellendam
Swellendam is the fifth oldest town in South Africa (after Cape Town, Stellenbosch, Simon's Town, and Paarl), a town with 17,537 inhabitants situated in the Western Cape province. The town has over 50 provincial heritage sites, most of them buildings of Cape Dutch architecture. Swellendam is situated on the N2, approximately 220 km from both Cape Town and George. History Early travellers and explorers who visited the Cape in the 16th century traded with the Khoikhoi people who lived on these shores and in the interior. When the Dutch East India Company established a replenishment station at the Cape in 1652, trade continued inland as far as Swellendam. In 1743 Swellendam was declared a magisterial district, the third-oldest in South Africa, and was named after Governor Hendrik Swellengrebel, the first South African born Governor, and his wife, Helena Ten Damme. This outlying settlement soon became a gateway to the interior, and was visited by many famous explorers an ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
