Wherever these French Huguenots settled they
brought civilisation in their train, and proved a blessing to the
country of their adoption. In England they taught us silk-weaving and
clock-making, starting the one in Spitalfields, the other in
Clerkenwell. In Dublin, where a strong colony of them settled, they
introduced the making of tabinet, or "Irish poplin," and I am told
that the much-sought-after "Irish" silver was almost entirely the work
of French Huguenot refugees. Here, at the far-off Cape, the Huguenots
settled in the valleys of the Drakenstein, of the Hottentot's Holland,
and at French Hoek; and they made the wilderness blossom, and
transformed its barren spaces into smiling wheatfields and oak-shaded
vineyards. They incidentally introduced the dialect of Dutch known as
"The Taal," for when the speaking of Dutch was made compulsory for
them, they evolved a simplified form of the language more adapted to
their French tongues. I suspect, too, that the artistic impulse which
produced the dignified Colonial houses, and built so beautiful a town
as Stellenbosch (a name with most painful associations for many
military officers whose memories go back twenty years) must have come
from the French. Stellenbosch, with its two-hundred-year-old houses,
their fronts rich with elaborate plaster scroll-work, all its streets
shaded with avenues of giant oaks and watered by two clear streams, is
such an inexplicable town to find in a new country, for it might have
hundreds of years of tradition behind it! Wherever they may have got
it from, the artistic instinct of the old Cape Dutch is undeniable,
for a hundred years after Van der Stel's time they imported the French
architect Thibault and the Dutch sculptor Anton Anreith.
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