Murder most foul - Observatory - Serving your Community

Jan 06, 2009 at 03:39 AM

Home

Know Your Suburb

Murder most foul

19 Isipingo Street

It was in this house, 19 Isipingo Street, where one of the country's most infamous murders took place: a family visit turned to tragedy when a brother shot and killed his step brother.

The murderer? None other than Herman Charles Bosman, one of South Africa's most beloved writers and creator of the famous Oom Schalk Lourens stories.

The body Of David Russell

Bosman, at the tender age of 21, was on holiday from a teaching spell in Groot Marico in North West province when he accidentally shot and killed his step brother, David Russell, in his Bellevue home.

In 1926 he was convicted of first-degree murder and was sentenced to death. But his sentence was commuted to life imprisonment and he was taken to Pretoria Central Prison.

But three years and nine months later he was a free man, and at the end of 1930 he moved to Johannesburg.

Herman Charles Bosman at 21, the time he was arrested for the murder of his stepbrother.

Not that the city was a stranger to him: he was born in Kuils River, just outside Cape Town, but spent most of his life in Johannesburg. He was educated at Jeppe Boys High School in Kensington, and Wits University.

And he loved the city, as is clear from a series of short essays in his Johannesburg. Bosman reminisces about "Old Jo'burg", where he lived in the early 1920s and again in the 1930s and 40s - and where he died in 1951 at the age of 46.

He strolled around the city, seeking out places where he had memorable experiences - and writes a visit to Jeppe Boys High School elicited a "sweet sadness" but also a "mild resentment" at the thought that his photograph was not on the walls of the school hall.

And he was an avid campaigner to preserve the history of Jo'burg. He was exasperated by the demolition of the Magistrate's Courts in 1948 - and the Wanderers and the Standard Theatre - but he wasn't opposed to all demolitions. He says in Unsocial Reconstruction he'd like to get rid of the Wanderers cricket ground, and the railways.

Herman Charles Bosman

In place of Wanderers he'd like to create a "large, unkept, much-forested park, in which dogs and children were free to run, lovers to walk, and uselessly meditative men like me to ramble".

He suggests that "lovers and loafers" need places like rambling parks in which to find themselves. In this park they "acquire dignity, they are positively beautiful, and they absorb beauty, in wild surroundings".

For him "no city is truly a city without such a park", but acknowledges that Zoo Lake in Parkview is something like what he had in mind.

And as for the railways, his solution is easy: "I should give it to Germiston or to any other town that thrives on smoke and noise."

Adapted from Lucille Davie's article on http://www.joburg.org.za/

Source: Bosman's Johannesburg, edited by Stephen Gray (Human & Rousseau, 1986)

Posted 25 November 2005