Family connection brings Barberton into SA historical novel

Grant A. Poulton · Novelist of the South African Frontier

One family. Four books. Blood, land, and the making of a people.

Barberton’s rich gold-mining history has found its way into a new historical novel, The Leopard’s Bloody Veil: The Forging of the Veldtsman, by Cape Town author Grant A. Poulton. Although Poulton is not a Barberton resident, his family roots stretch back to the early days of South African settlement, and the gold rush in the De Kaap Valley forms part of the story woven into his debut novel.

Spanning the years 1827 to 1888, the book follows a family’s journey through a changing South Africa, with the De Kaap goldfields forming part of a wider tale of hardship, adventure and heritage. For Barberton readers with an interest in the town’s history, the novel offers an opportunity to explore a familiar chapter of the past through the eyes of a storyteller with a personal family connection to the country’s history.

Grant A. Poulton’s father’s line runs back to John Poulton, a shoemaker from Wendover who landed at Algoa Bay in April 1820 and was settled at Salem Hills on the Eastern Cape frontier. Both of Poulton’s grandfathers descended from the 1820 Settlers. Both of his grandmothers were Cape Dutch.

His first novel, The Leopard’s Bloody Veil: The Forging of the Veldtsman, is set on the ground where those families met. A boy on the Winterberg survives a leopard mauling and carries its mark for the rest of his life. The road takes him across the Karoo, into the gold rush at De Kaap and the diamond fields at Kimberley, and down through Knysna to the Cape. The book runs from 1827 to 1888 and is the first of a trilogy that follows one family into the twentieth century.

“Our history folds into the sands of time as the older generation leaves us, and the stories go with them,” Poulton writes. “Lost, unless someone sets them down somewhere. That is what I am trying to do here.”

Poulton grew up in George, in the Southern Cape, and lives in Milnerton, Cape Town. Much of the novel began as stories told by uncles, aunts and grandparents. A school history teacher gave him the ambition behind it: to describe South Africa to a stranger who had never smelled it or felt the heat come off the ground. He has spent his working life in IT, and publishes under his own imprint, Wardenclyffe Press.

The novel is stocked by Clarke’s Bookshop and Exclusive Books in Cape Town, and sold on Amazon, Takealot, Makro and Clowder. Signed copies, inscribed to any name the buyer gives, cost R495 collected in Cape Town or R575 posted anywhere in South Africa, from grantapoulton.com. Book Two is being written.

Courtesy of author Grant A. Poulton, an exclusive glimpse into his novel for De Kaap Echo readers. Click to zoom / download.

Grant A. Poulton · Novelist of the South African Frontier

One family. Four books. Blood, land, and the making of a people.

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Grant A. Poulton
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