UP Alumnus and former professor’s great-grandfather’s book in Special Collections

After a series of posts about family heirlooms on Facebook, the UP Library’s Social Media team became aware of Professor Johannes Cronje’s Facebook post discussing his great-grandfather’s autobiography. Professor Cronje is a UP alumnus and former Associate Professor, and UP Special Collections was thrilled to discover that we have a first edition copy of his great-grandfather’s book!

The Autobiography of a Counter Jumper, in two parts: England and South Africa by W.F. Fish, follows the adventures of Fish, who left Southampton at the age of 20 with £5 to his name and travelled to South Africa to make his fortune. He started a cash store in Dordrecht in the Eastern Cape, lived through the Boer War and was inaugurated as mayor of Cape Town in 1925, a position he filled for 43 years.

UP Special Collections featured this book as its Book of the Week on the 8th February, 2021, and it proved to be an exceptionally popular post on our social media channels. On Facebook alone, the post reached 1262 people and generated 253 engagements, with 114 reactions and 29 comments. The excitement created by the post encouraged UP Special Collections to have the book digitised and uploaded to our Africana Book Collection on UPSpace, with the collaboration of our Digitisation Services. The high-quality digitisation and preservation work done by the Digitisation Office is greatly appreciated. The book is available from Special Collections as part of our Old Africana Collection and is now available online at http://hdl.handle.net/2263/78974.