NEELS and ANNIE

Cornelis Willem DU PLOOY, born Hopetown c. 1870, died Kimberley c. 1963.

married 10 January 1898 at Hopetown

Anna Catharina DE VILLIERS born 8 August 1880 Hopetown died December 1958 Kimberley

Ouma Annie had a gentle nature and very blue eyes. She was a daughter of Genl P.J. de Villiers. During the Boer War, the family saw little of him because he was away on Commando. They were constantly worried that he would be captured. Being a citizen of the Cape Colony, a British possession, he was officially a rebel and could be shot out of hand.

Ouma married Oupa Neels du Plooy in 1898, when she was 18 years old. On the marriage certificate his trade is given as "wagon maker", but on his daughter Nellie's marriage certificate, his trade is  "blacksmith".  In the early 20th century, the motor car was starting to take over from the wagon as a means of transport and Oupa had to find another way to make a living.

He later went into the building trade: there are still farmhouses in the Kimberley district that were designed and built by him. A gable at the front of the house was his trademark, and no two were alike. They are all dated, and bear his initials in an unobtrusive spot.

Gables became fashionable among the local gentry and Oupa's designs were the in thing. He was in great demand by the local landowners, or more likely their wives, who wanted something a bit swish.

Ouma had several miscarriages, but raised six children, three boys; Koos, Piet and Neels and three girls, Sue, Nellie and Ann.

They lived in Hopetown, then in Douglas and later in Kimberley, first in a rented house in Adam Street, and then in 16 Tapscott Street.

For their Golden (50th) wedding anniversary, December 1948, the Queen sent a telegram! I like to think of Her Gracious Madge scurrying into the Post Office at Sandringham during a break in the Christmas festivities.

Ten years later they celebrated their Diamond Wedding. The Queen went round to the Post Office again.

In October 1918, when the Spanish 'Flu swept the world like a twentieth-century Black Death, Kimberley did not escape. Between the middle of 1918 and the middle of 1919, the worldwide pandemic killed at least 21 million human beings -- well over twice the number of combat deaths in the whole of World War I.

The whole town was stricken. The streets were deserted. 15-year old Nellie was the only one in the family who didn't succumb. She hardly slept, spent her days and nights nursing her parents and her five siblings and washing the bedclothes which were constantly sodden because of the high fever of the patients.

They all pulled through. When they were a bit better, Nellie queued every day at the soup kitchen in the Town Hall with a milk can, which she lugged back home full of soup to feed them. Then she herself got sick, not with the 'flu, but "a fever" … today we would call it stress and exhaustion.

Shortly afterwards, the family moved to 16 Tapscott Street, where Ouma and Oupa lived until 1953 when they moved to a house at 28 Synagogue Street.