The Old Diocesan Issue 10 - Magazine - Page 15
PICTORIAL
John X Merriman (1841-1926)
Eloquent, witty and principled, John
Xavier Merriman (centre) was the last
prime minister of the Cape Colony
before South Africa became a Union
in 1910. A highly respected politician
for decades to that point, Merriman
was, in fact, one of the three leading
statesmen responsible for that
unification, along with Louis Botha
(left) and Jan Smuts (right). Perhaps
it was no coincidence that Botha
sent two sons to Bishops. Another
politically influential OD, Louis
Esselen, fought with Botha in the
South African War before becoming
Smuts’s close political adviser.
AL du Toit (1878-1948)
In developing Alfred Wegener’s theory
of plate tectonics and continental drift,
geologist Alexander Logie du Toit may
well be the most influential OD in our
history. His seminal book, Our Wandering
Continents, published in 1937, was
an attempt “to explain the elaborate
architecture of the Globe”; notably,
he proposed the existence of two
supercontinents, Laurasia in the north
and Gondwanaland in the south. Du Toit
received multiple honorary doctorates
and awards throughout his career, and
was the first South African geologist to
be elected a Fellow of the Royal Society.
JLB Smith (1897-1968)
There are not many famous
ichthyologists in the world but,
in James Leonard Brierley Smith,
Bishops lays claim to one. Indeed,
having identified the first coelacanth,
hauled up by a fishing trawler off
East London in 1938, Smith would
go on to become something of
a cult figure, helping to put South
African science on the map. In 1952,
he acquired a second specimen of
the fish previously believed to have
been extinct for 65 million years.
His subsequent book, Old Fourlegs,
was an international sensation.
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