Mydorp: Portrait of a Platteland Boyhood by D'Ewes, Dudley

(Cape Town: A. A. Balkema, 1954). 8vo; original red cloth, lettered gilt on spine and with publisher's monogram in gilt to upper cover; pictorial dustwrapper; pp. 96; line drawings in text. Dustwrapper sunned and fishmothed, with earlier owner's silking to reverse; earlier owner's bookplate to front free endpaper; trace of foxing to edges and endpapers, occasional fox spot elsewhere. Good condition. 'Mr D'Ewes was born at Warrenton, on the Cape-Transvaal border, in 1905. He was the son of a diamond digger, and was orphaned at an early age, his parents having died within 24 hours of each other. As a boy he went to live with relatives who farmed at Faure, and he attended the Somerset West High School. He knew poverty and hardship in his youth, but his intellectual qualities were recognized at an early age, and he was sent first to the University of Cape Town where he gained an MA in classics in 1927, and then on to Oxford where, at Keble College, he acquired a BA Honours degree in theology. ... For many years, from 1936, he was correspondent at the Cape for The Times, London, and he wrote several books one of which "Mydorp: Portrait of a Platteland Boyhood" was on childhood memories of the diamond-digging area in which he spent his earliest years.' - From an obituary portrait of 26 June 1980, the day following the death of Dudley D'Ewes. .