Draft - Press release for Fairbairn Papers.

The papers cover the years 1781-1917 and relate to four generations of the Fairbairn family. There are personal documents and correspondence of John Fairbairn, who arrived in South Africa in 1823. He became involved in the prevailing fight for the freedom of the press being waged against Lord Charles Somerset. He edited and later became sole owner of the South African Commercial Advertiser, an early Cape newspaper, which advocated reform. He became a national figure, was elected to Legislative Council and served as chairman of the South African Mutual Life Assurance Society, of which he was a founder.

John Fairbairn's wife, Eliza, was a daughter of Dr. John Philip, missionary and champion of the rights of the native peoples of South Africa. There are papers belonging to the Philip family in this collection. These assist in providing information lost with the destruction of the Philip papers in the fire at the Library of the University of the Witwatersrand in 1931. Eliza Fairbairn's correspondence, although primarily personal, gives the woman's point of view of life at the Cape in the twenties and thirties of last century. There is an interesting scrapbook, presented to her by her father, which contains the letters and autographs of eminent men such as Lafayette, Lord Macaulay, Sir Walter Scott and William Wilberforce.

Other items of particular interest are a collection of photographs of hospitals used during the South African War of 1899-1902, from the papers of John Fairbairn, grandson of John Fairbairn, who was Hon. Secretary of the Red Cross Society in South Africa. There are also the drafts of five sonnets by Thomas Pringle, South Africa's first poet to write in English, in his own handwriting and with emendations.