Welsh Immigrants in South Africa in the 1920s

Why would a young Welshman, in the 1920s, end up on a horse-breeding farm in the Orange Free State? It's a question the Hughes Chronicles never quite stops to answer — because for the family it describes, the answer was simply: everyone was doing it.

The wave of Welsh emigration to South Africa that ST Hughes was part of didn't begin with him, and it didn't begin in the 1920s either. From the 1860s onward, Wales and South Africa became linked by something more specific than empire — both were mining countries. Wales had coal; South Africa, from the 1880s, had gold and diamonds. The skills, the equipment, and even some of the engineers moved between the two. By the time ST was a young man, ‘going out to South Africa’ was a well-worn path for Welsh families, especially from the mining valleys of the south.

The 1920s gave that path new urgency. The First World War had been good for the South Wales coalfields — demand for coal was high, and wages followed. The 1920s were the opposite: a long, grinding decline, strikes, pit closures, and a generation of young men looking at their fathers' trade and seeing no future in it. South Africa, by contrast, was still expanding. The mining economy needed skilled labour, but so did the farms, the railways, and the new towns spreading across the Free State and the Transvaal. For a Welshman with no inheritance and no prospects at home, a ticket to Durban was a ticket to a country still being built.

The journey itself was, by the standards of the day, almost routine. Regular steamship lines ran from Cardiff and Southampton to Cape Town and Durban, carrying a steady stream of young Welshmen toward jobs that didn't yet exist for them at home.

What awaited them on arrival varied enormously. Some went straight to the mines. Others — and this is where ST's path diverges from the stereotype — went to the land. The Orange Free State in the 1920s was cattle and horse country, and a Welshman with an eye for horses (Wales has its own long tradition of horse breeding and racing) could find work, and eventually land, far from any mine shaft. Welsh communities formed wherever enough immigrants settled together — chapels, social clubs, and societies that kept the language and the hymns alive a continent away from home, even as the immigrants themselves became, in every practical sense, South African.

In those days, anyone disembarking at Durban faced an odd little ritual: shoes off on the dock before you were allowed ashore, lined up in the sun, collected again once the port formalities were done. It was bureaucracy, not ceremony — but it meant that for a moment, everyone arriving in South Africa stood on the same patch of dock in their socks, looking at a country they hadn't set foot in yet.

ST Hughes stood on that dock once as a young man with nothing but a trunk and a letter of introduction. Years later, that same dock would be the site of one of the family's best-known stories — but that one belongs to his daughters, not to him, and we tell it properly in the next piece. For now, what matters is simply this: ST arrived in South Africa in the 1920s with no money, no land, and no guarantee of anything — and within a decade and a half, he had a wife, two daughters, a farm, a herd of racehorses, and a remedy of his own invention that the family still talks about today.