Merrivale (K 12)

Name: Merrivale

Merrivale, Kwazulu-Natal, South Africa

www.umgenisteamrailway.co.za/Inchanga.php

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Another 'hardy annual' amongst 1890s railway debates concerned the 'Extension to Howick Railway Bill'. Should a spur be built off the main line at Merrivale to take in Howick, especially now that the Falls had earned themselves a reputation as inland Natal's chief natural spectacle? (The Drakensberg became generally accessible only with the building of the Winterton branch in the 1900s.) We must remember that, in the last years of the nineteenth century, the Thomas Cook euphoria took Kodak-wielding imperialists to the Rockies and the Pyramids, and now it had even reached the sleepier quarters of the Southern Hemisphere. The Colonial Secretary argued that a line to the Falls was necessitated since 'tourists from Great Britain and other countries are coming to South Africa more and more every year, and we want to encourage traffic of that kind'. But, in a colonial parliament, to move solid Victorians to any sort of action you had to enlist a moral principle rather than a pleasure principle, and this Mr T. Kirkman, member for Alexander County, was well able to do. In his vocabulary, the proposed four miles of branch-line took on a neo-Kantian hue. 'I have looked upon this railway,' said Mr Kirkman, 'and still look upon it, as an educational railway'. This certainly sounds better than a 'tourist' railway, and in fact our nineteenth-century idealist gives us one of the earliest hints that, by now, 'industria' had enveloped the colonial Capital. The new branch to the Falls would take city dwellers - so Mr Kirkman claimed: ‘. . . away from this humdrum place in which there is nothing whatever on which to spend their time or to interest them. (‘Oh, oh' from several Hon. members, and 'Shame' from Mr Tatham.)

Apparently Mr Kirkman's colleagues were reluctant to discover in Pietermaritzburg a sort of tropical Leeds, but their dissension only spurred him on further: ‘The railway will enable people to see something more than public houses . . . It will lead to the non-necessity for such places as inebriate retreats . . .’

(At which point, of course, he veritably echoes Thomas Cook, whose tourists were sent off to the ends of the Empire with much 'prohibitionary' enthusiasm.) But was Pietermaritzburg of the 1890s so squalid that a railway line should be built for its moral health? Mr Kirkman thought so: ‘Young men and others . . . should have an opportunity of seeing something other than the walls of churches, something which will appeal to them far more eloquently from nature, from the running water and from anything that appeals to one's inner senses, something above the life of a city like this’.

One could hardly deny that Howick would provide the spiritually starved with the sight of running water. But Mr Kirkman's radical secularism was too much for a colonial assembly, and to everyone's relief Mr Hulett quickly moved closure.

In some smoky and steely heaven, which blends incipient Wordsworthianism with the 'Cape' 3 ft. 6 in. gauge, I hope that I survive to assure a spectral Mr Kirkman that no one derived more joy from his 'educational' picnic line (it was completed, eventually, in 1911) than I did. But of course the motive power - by the time the ride to Howick became my chief means to witness 'running water' as a spiritual refreshment - was ·electricity, and I must now observe another historical fact that will seem of relevance only to the most 'smitten' sort of historian. Maritzburg was, for nearly two decades, the chief town on the longest electrified line in the world. Even the development of the Garratt locomotive could not defer the decision, in the early 1920s, to surmount the extraordinary difficulties of the Natal route by using the new-fangled traction that was now proving itself in the Alps and the Rockies.
http://www.pmbhistory.co.za/?showcontent&global%5B_id%5D=26
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SOURCE: Pietermaritzburg 1838–1988: a new portrait of an African city, edited by John Laband and Robert Haswell (Pietermaritzburg: University of Natal Press and Shuter & Shooter, 1988), pp. 139–141.