STOEP CHAT

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2 February 2023

Knysna’s Tough Woodsmen

Dipping into Winnie Tapson’s book Timber and Tides last night, I was intrigued by one of her anecdotes about the Knysna woodcuers.

Tapson arrived in Knysna as a child in 1901 aer her father had decided to set up a doctor’s pracce in the town.

She and her siblings thought the most excing paents to visit her father’s pracce were the woodcuers.

On the rare occasions that they came to the surgery, they would ring the bell “loudly and urgently” and the kids would rush to the door.

The loud bell-ringer was always a woodcuer who would say: “Ek is haasg! Sê vir die dokter hy moet gou maak! Die olifante sal my vang!”

They would rush to their father and say: “Hurry! He says he must get home before dark, before the elephants catch him!”

In those days the danger of walking into an elephant in the forest at night was real.

It was a tough life. Woodcuers were poor and apparently their staple foods were sweet potatoes, bread and black coffee.

Tapson said Knysna’s woodcuers had descended from selers in the late 1700s, and from the Dutch East India Company which had established woodcuer posts from Swellendam to Pleenberg Bay They lived isolated but independent lives, “refusing to work for anyone but themselves”.

They felled giant yellowwoods and snkwoods by hand and manhauled them to sawpits dug into the ground. One man would stand in the pit and another on the log and together they would push and pull the saw to cut the logs. Grueling work.

The woodcuers were somemes exploited by mber companies, described by Dalene Mathee in her book Circles in a Forest.

The companies would apparently tell them that, say, snkwood was fetching high prices so they must fell snkwoods, but when they arrived with snkwood they were told the price had dropped so sorry, we can’t pay you what we said.

According to Tapson, the woodcuers could be wasteful.

“A man would hack down a yellowwood or snkwood giant to see if it was sound and if not, leave it lying among the trees that had been damaged by its fall; and do likewise to the next and the next unl he found what he wanted.”

I suppose if you had to drag your giant tree through the forest, saw it and get it to the town, you would want to ensure it was good enough quality not to be rejected by the sawmills. And the forests must have seemed endless.

By 1913 only registered woodcuers could fell trees and only those trees marked by the Forest Department.

There had been about 4,000 woodcuers in the Tsitsikamma forest in the early days. This fell to a mere 239 by 1939.

One of my prized erfstukke is a beauful round table with a yellowwood top on a carved snkwood pedestal. It belonged to my great grandfather, Peter Carl Metelerkamp, who married Johanna Rex, one of George Rex’s granddaughters.

The wood must have come from trees felled by one of Knysna’s woodcuers, and somemes I like to imagine him.

I just hope the mber merchants paid him a fair price.