ABSTRACT
William Graham Holford was born on the 22nd March, 1907, in a semi-detached suburban house on the northern escarpment overlooking the city of Johannesburg.1 He was the second son born to his parents George and Kathleen, and the first to survive infancy. Both of Holford’s parents came from the small, predominantly English-speaking world of the eastern Cape Province: both had impeccably respectable connections going back to the settlers of 1820. His mother’s family, the Palmers, descended through a line of naval officers and Anglican clergymen who had moved in the convivial social atmosphere of Port Elizabeth, a place of rest and recreation for the British in India in the days before the Suez canal was opened: while his paternal grandfather had been a Manchester exciseman, from whose wife three generations inherited a distinctive long upper lip. These Manchester Holfords were devout Wesleyans; and the exciseman had a son, William, who in 1855 sailed for South Africa as a Methodist missionary.2 For the next 25 years he worked at the Mission Press at Mount Coke, preached in English and ‘Kaffir’3 and raised, with his Cape-born wife, a family.
