Books by John Stanford

From 1913 to 1920, the Molteno-Murray family published a private journal called "Chronicle of the Family". It appeared three times a year, providing news of the family scattered throughout South Africa, Britain, and Kenya - a means, as one of the editors put it, "of preventing the younger members growing up strangers to each other." When war was declared in 1914, the Chronicle began to include letters from family serving in the military and medical corps in diverse contexts, including the war fronts in German East Africa and South West Africa, the trenches of France,and naval battles. News from home continued with accounts of life on a Karoo farm, a horse trek in Basotuland, a leftist political rally in London, and reminiscences of older family members.

John Stanford was born in 1929 on Inungi, his father's farm in East Griqualand. After qualifying as a civil engineer and working for a short time in Canada, he returned to Inungi to work alongside his father. In 1965 he took over the running of the farm.Cut off from the rest of the Kokstad district by the Umzimvubu River, Inungi was mountainous and remote. Horses were indispensible as transport, fire and flood were ever-present hazards, living was exhilarating but tough for both farmer and farmworkers.This memoir spans John's life from his childhood years until 1984 when the farm was expropriated for inclusion in Transkei. In his factual and vigorous style, it tells of the risks, disasters, joys and satisfactions of a self-sustaining way of life.