January 23rd, 2006
The Marriages of Margaretha Hendrina Beck – a Capescottish-Indian Link
The Battle of Blouberg bicentenary this year reminds us that Britain took the Cape from the Dutch in 1806 to make the sea route to India safe, just as the Dutch had occupied it 150 years before in the interest of their East Indian possessions. Human connexions between India and the Cape were always present and took many forms, often bringing in connexions with Scotland. One such linked the 1820 settlers, via the Black Hole of Calcutta and the American War of Independence, with the daughter of a German soldier who came to the Cape in 1715.
The story begins with a late recruit to the Scottish settler party of 1820 led by Thomas Pringle. Charles Jervis Buchan-Sydserff was a 22-year-old half-pay Naval Officer who left the Navy for want of employment in it and sought a cadetship in the Hon. East India Company. He was nobly-born and, being a younger son, asked his brother John, who had inherited the family property, Ruchlaw near Prestonkirk in East Lothian, to put up the funds needed for his outfit as an East India Company cadet, their aunt. Lady Hepburn, having already offered to pay for the cadetship itself.
John refused, giving the reason that ‘if I advance money for your out-fit I should remain in debt untill my death. I am determined to enter by and by into strong measures to liquidate the debt my Father, his friends and their Dice Boxes have intailed upon Ruchlaw’. John’s refusal was dated August 1818, and a year later Charles was preparing to emigrate to the Cape, with ?1500 ready to contribute to the Scottish party’s funds. This must surely have been the premium offered by his aunt Lady Hepburn, widow of Sir George Buchan-Hepburn Bt, a Baron of the Exchequer in Scotland, John and Charles Buchan-Sydeserff’s paternal uncle.
May we assume that she favoured his emigration to the Cape and agreed that her funds be so diverted? For she was born Margarita Hendrika Beck, daughter of the wealthy brewer and cattleman Johan Zacharias Beck, born in Langensalza, Saxe-Gotha, who had come to the Cape as a soldier in 1715. His brother Johan Christoffel Beck who followed him to the Cape was the equally successful proprietor of the historic farm Boshof in Newlands where he was visited by the Lammens sisters on their way to the East Indies in 1736, as described in the previous issue of the Quarterly Bulletin.
Of Margarita Hendrika Beck it was said that she married ‘first for wealth. 21 second for gallantry and third for love’. The wealth was provided by Captain Alexander Grant of Shewglie whoni she married ca 1765, He had escaped from the bloody battlefield of Culloden in 1746 where he had fought for ‘the Young Pretender’ Prince Charles Edward Stuart, and later became an officer in the British forces in India, He was one of the small group who escaped the Black Hole of Calcutta in a boat, with the Governor, leaving the civilian prisoners to their terrible fate. He was pardoned, after publishing a pamphlet blaming the Governor, and by being one of the officers who persuaded Clive to attack at Plassey, giving Britain dominance in India, He later made a fortune as an East India merchant in London and died in 1768, aged 43, on his way back to India, leaving everything to his ‘beloved wife, Margaret Henrietta Grant’, his sole executrix.
For gallantry she married in London in 1769 another Scottish soldier, a kinsman of Grant’s, Simon Fraser of Balnain, who was killed at Saratoga as a Brigadier in 1777. She was given a copy of John Graham’s famous painting of Brigadier Simon Fraser’s burial on the field of battle, and inherited his estate too. We hear of her next when, in 1780, she lost a breach of promise case against one Schreiber, a London merchant. The following year she made her marriage ‘for love’ to Sir George Buchan-Hepburn Bt, uncle of John and Charles Buchan-Sydserff., who died in 1815. Margarita Hendrika herself died, thrice widowed and childless, in 1823 and is buried in the Buchan-Hepburn family vault at Prestonkirk. Her portrait by Raeburn remains in the family.
Her nephew, the 1820 settler Charles Sydserff, seems not to have inherited from Margarita Hendrika, He married Elizabeth Rennie, also of the Scottish settler party, and appears to have been a moderately successful farmer. He died in 1885 aged 88 on his farm Lausanne in the Queenstown district, where his son Alexander succeeded him. His earlier farm. Glen Yair, in the original Baviaans River location of the Scottish settlers, had been acquired in 1855 by a German immigrant whose family lived there for well over a century. His name was Joseph Frederick Beck, born in Wurttemberg. Whether he was related in any way to Charles’s aunt, Margarita Hendrika, my sources do not reveal. Her marriages had linked her with India and Scotland and her father’s German origin seems to have been the least part of her inheritance.
The published sources for this account are to be found in Quarterly bulletin of the National Library, 59,4, pp 160-70 (Gerald Groenewald); The history of the Frasers by A,W. Mackenzie (1890), The Scottish settler party of 1820, by J.V.L R.ennie, vol,3 (1991), The Scottish Studies Foundation website, and The Southern African review of books, December 1994 (Randolph Vigne)
By: Vigne, Randolph. Quarterly Bulletin of the National Library of South Africa, Jan2006