George William Stow

George William Stow (2 February 1822,

Biography

Stow received his education at a school on the

In the early 1870s Stow had set himself up as a wholesale wine merchant in Kimberley, a business that many found more profitable than digging for diamonds. However, geology was his first love and when he heard in 1872 that the Cape Colony Governor, Sir Henry Barkly, needed a geographical report on Griqualand West, he immediately put forward his name. His offer was accepted and a fee of £50 was agreed on. Sir Henry Barkly took Stow's maps and manuscript to England with him in 1877 where they were highly commended by both Sir Andrew Ramsay and Thomas Rupert Jones, but were never published, to the great detriment of South African geology. The documents were eventually returned and are preserved by the Geological Society of South Africa. In 1877 the Orange Free State commissioned him to do a geological survey.

While doing his field work Stow became familiar with rock art in the caves and shelters of South Africa. From the 1860s onward he recorded the rock art he encountered, and, in a letter to Thomas Rupert Jones, wrote:

"During the last three years I have been making pilgrimages to the various old Bushman caves among the mountains in this part of the Colony and Kaffraria; and, as their paintings are becoming obliterated very fast, it struck me that it would be well to make copies of them before these interesting relics of an almost extinct race are entirely destroyed."

Stow was a competent water-colour painter and 74 of his paintings were reproduced in "Rock Paintings in South Africa from Parts of the Eastern Province and Orange Free State" with an introduction and notes by the noted anthropologist Dorothea F. Bleek, daughter of renowned German linguist Dr

From 1880 Stow tried unsuccessfully to find a publisher for his Native Races of South Africa, eventually published in 1905 long after his death. He died in 1882 of heart failure in Heilbron in the Orange Free State.^[3]

Stow produced three volumes of verse –

• Thoughts on Britain and her destiny (1861)
• Lines on contemplation (1861)
• War: an ode (1867)

Marriage

His first wife was Caroline Elizabeth Skinner whom he married in 1844 – their two children died in infancy and she in 1867. The following year he married Frances Sophia, daughter of Rev. John Heaviside, and she died in childbirth together with her infant in the same year. In 1869 he married Fanny Lewisa Russel de Smidt, who produced six daughters and survived him.^[4]

Published books

• "The Native Races of South Africa: A History of the Intrusion of the Hottentots and Bantu into the Hunting Grounds of the Bushmen, the Aborigines of the Country" – McCall Theal, George (ed.); George W. Stow (illust.)(London Swan Sonnenschein & Co. 1905)

Bibliography

• The Life and Work of George William Stow, South African Geologist and Ethnologist – Prof. Robert Burns Young^[5]

References

External links

• The Digital George Stow

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