Benjamin Moodie of Melsetter was born on 1st January 1780 in the Orkney Islands in Scotland. He was the 10th Laird of Melsetter. On returning from the Napoleonic Wars in 1815 as an office on half pay, he was forced to sell the family estate heavily indebted and his father’s ill health. He led the first party of indentured Scottish artisans to settle in the Cape Colony. He was a pioneer and colonizer and was the eldest child of James Moodie (1757-1820), ninth laird of Melsetter in the Island of Walls, and his wife Elizabeth Dunbar (1798), great-granddaughter of Dunbar of Westfield. The Moodies are one of the most ancient and distinguished Orcadian families and claim their origin from Harald MacMudah (also known as Harold Mutadi), one of the last Norse earls of Orkney.
Benjamin Moodie, one of a family of five sons and two daughters, receiv
ed his early education at private schools in Orkney and Inverness.
In 1817 Benjamin married Margaret Malcolmson (†1838), also of the Island of Walls. The same year he put Melsetter up for sale and contracted with Hamilton Ross, a Cape merchant, to sponsor the large-scale emigration of Scottish settlers to South Africa. Most of the prospective emigrants, former tenants whom the eighth Marquis of Stafford had evicted from his Edinburgh estates, agreed to pay the partners approximately thirty pounds steerage money; those who could not were to be indentured to Benjamin Moodie for a stipulated period at the Cape. Although the Colonial Office showed little interest in the scheme, Moodie selected the first batch of fifty artisans and arrived with them at the Cape on 4th June 1817. Subsequent parties came out during that year under the same arrangement and brought the number to almost two hundred.
The reception accorded the emigrants was mixed. Lord Charles Somerset welcomed them at first since he proposed settling them in the Suurveld to stabilize the eastern frontier. When Benjamin Moodie rejected the plan, because he thought the frontier too exposed, Somerset’s support was withdrawn. The Afrikaner colonists treated the new arrivals with some suspicion, mainly because of their possible disruptive influence on the racial and economic situation. Moodie’s difficulties were further increased by the defection of his partner and the refusal of many emigrants to honour their agreements. Despite the assistance of the Cape Colonial Secretary, Lieutenant-Colonel C. C. Bird, he was unable to obtain legal redress and was forced to abandon most of his followers.
Benjamin’s enterprise was the first relatively large emigration to the Cape from the British Isles. It was soon overshadowed by the Settlers of 1820 but was nonetheless significant as a private undertaking, unaided by government, which benefited the Cape Colony at a time of considerable shortage of skilled labour and contributed to the formation of a larger English-speaking population at the Cape.
Shortly after his arrival, Benjamin Moodie travelled to the Overberg district of Swellendam, purchased the farm Melkhoutboom (or Grootvadersbosch) and, in 1819, decided to settle there. Here he had been joined by two of his younger brothers, John Wedderburn Dunbar Moodie, who arrived at the Cape in September 1819, and Donald Moodie, who arrived in 1820. Benjamin’s two other brothers both died young: James, who entered the Royal Navy and became a first lieutenant, was killed during the attack on Leghorn in 1814, and Thomas, the second eldest, who was in the service of the English East India Company, died in 1824. The brothers’ attempts to grow wheat and timber prospered, and Moodie was responsible for developing Port Beaufort, at the mouth of the Breede River, to serve the area’s export requirements.
When the Moodie’s’ patron, Sir Rufane Donkin, temporarily succeeded Somerset in office, Benjamin Moodie unsuccessfully petitioned him for compensation to cover the losses sustained in his first colonizing venture. But he obtained permission, together with his two brothers, to join the semi-military settlement of Fredericksburg, formed beyond the Fish River in the ‘neutral territory’. He never resided there, however, and, on the collapse of the settlement in 1821, the three brothers were granted 8 000 morgen in the Suurveld west of the Fish River. There Benjamin farmed at Long Hope (south of Cookhouse), assisting his brother Donald and other Settlers to establish Port Frances as an alternative port to Algoa Bay. In 1824 he became a founder member of Thomas Pringle’s literary society and took an active part in the attempts at social and political reform at the Cape in these years.
In 1825 Benjamin sold Long Hope and returned to Grootvadersbosch. His election as an elder of the Swellendam N.G. congregation in 1829 reflects the esteem in which he was held. He then added wool farming to his other activities, for, in 1831, Sir Lowry Cole had given him 5 000 morgen near Port Beaufort, where he developed Westfield, the second of his estates. When his trading ventures were challenged by Joseph Barry, the two amalgamated to float the Port Beaufort Trading Company, a venture that brought Moodie little personal profit.
Because of continued litigation over the sale of Melsetter and the sudden death of his wife, he decided to return to Britain for a short period in 1838. There he met Edward Gibbon Wakefield, the great protagonist of British systematic colonization, who persuaded him to act as agent for the South African Association in their efforts to buy land at the Cape for the settlement of British emigrants. After financial troubles had led to the abandonment of the scheme, Moodie agreed to assist another philanthropic organization, the Children’s Friend Society, in sending twenty-one children to the Cape. He arrived there in 1841, accompanied by his young charges and his second wife, Susan Barnett, whom he had married in London shortly before his departure. When the society was dissolved, he cared for the children at Grootvadersbosch until they were old enough to be placed in employment, and many of them subsequently married on or near Grootvadersbosch. From 1850 until his death, Benjamin Moodie lived mainly in semi-retirement at Westfield. He was, however, one of the four unofficial members of the Legislative Council who were appointed by Sir Harry Smith in September 1851 to fill the vacancies caused by the resignation of the ‘popular’ members. Benjamin was therefore one of those who debated the draft of the constitutional ordinance which was to bring representative government to the Cape Colony. In March 1852, he, with the other unofficial members, supported Robert Godlonton’s motion that consideration of the bill be deferred until after the Eighth Frontier War was over and when the ordinance was debated, Benjamin Moodie rejected it entirely. He remained a member of the Legislative Council until its dissolution in October 1853. From Benjamin’s first marriage, there were four sons and four daughters. The eldest son, James Benjamin Donald Moodie (1819-1894), moved to the Burgersdorp district and afterwards to Bethlehem in the Orange Free State, where he founded an extensive branch of the family. His eldest son, Thomas (‘Groot Tom’) Moodie, led the Moodie Trek of 1892 to Gazaland, Rhodesia, where he founded Melsetter and settlements near the Portuguese border. Benjamin’s second son, Thomas Moodie (1825-1884), who succeeded his father as laird of Grootvadersbosch, was an outstanding farmer at Westfield, Port Beaufort, where he lived. He represented Swellendam as an M.L.A. from 1864 to 1883. No children resulted from Benjamin’s second marriage.
Benjamin Moodie was a fine example of humanitarian idealism. What he lacked in practicality was more than compensated for by his nobility of spirit and breadth of vision. He died at his home Westfield in Swellendam on the 1st April 1856.
