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A woman of substance — the true Karoo legend who changed my life

Tony Jackman’s wildspastei (game pie) made from venison fynvleis, photographed on the old stove that belonged to Cradock hotelier Sandra Antrobus as a young bride. There’s a bit of the fynvleis in the small bowl. (Photo: Tony Jackman)

By Tony Jackman

25 Apr 2025

In the bosom of her Karoo hotel, last night, I hosted a dinner at the start of the annual Karoo Food Festival. I dedicated the evening to the spirit and memory of Sandra Antrobus — friend and mother figure — who has had a massive effect on the past 15 years of my life.

She must have been here, somewhere, that day in 1993 when we rolled into Market Street and were shown to Die Opstal, our Karoo cottage for the night.

In one of the other houses, pointing to a problem and asking a man to fix it. At the reception in the house across the road, smiling and saying welcome to Die Tuishuise. In the Schreiner Museum around the corner in Cross Street, honouring the writer who lived in the house she restored, with others.

Or at Die Wakis, her shop in town full of the lovely old things she loved. The lovely old things that she would fill up 30 houses with, as well as her hotel. But in 1993, when we first arrived in Cradock at the start of an adventure we did not know had begun, she owned only six of the houses in Market Street.

Maybe she smiled hello.

The Albert Room, Victoria Manor Hotel, Cradock. (Photo: Tony Jackman)

The 2025 edition of the annual Karoo Food Festival in Cradock started last night (Thursday 24 April 2025) with a dinner which I dedicated to the spirit and memory of Sandra Antrobus, the Cradock hotelier and Karoo legend who unwittingly changed my life, as she long claimed I had changed hers.

Many members of the Antrobus clan were there, and for some of us the spirit of our heroine was plain to see. It is as if Sandra’s very essence pulses in the walls and furnishings of the Victoria Manor Hotel and adjacent Tuishuise in Cradock’s Market Street.

For me it was a searing moment, with a direct line drawn between Sandra and I standing in front of the hotel a year earlier, when she had told me something terrible and sworn to confront it. Knowing her fierce Karoo spirit, I knew the battle would be intense. But even Sandra Antrobus ultimately could not defeat cancer.

Just one day short of a year since that moment in Market Street, here’s the latest edition of this lovely little Karoo festival, which by rights belongs in the heart of the town, rather than the farm 10km or so away where much of the festival has happened for the past few years, with food seemingly less and less to do with it. It is time to bring it back to town and to make it all about food again.

Tony Jackman and Ronelle Wright jointly hosted the opening food and wine pairing dinner at the Victoria Manor Hotel in Cradock on Thursday, 24 April 2025. Right, biltong pâté and Van Loveren Christine Chardonnay. (Photo: Jaco de Waal)

While my fellow host Ronelle Wright told lovely stories about the Van Loveren wines with which she paired the dinner, I told stories about Sandra and my now long friendship with her. We smeared my biltong pâté on the hotel’s lovely bread, with dabs of pear and sultana relish fortified with hanepoot.

Skaapstertjies (sheeps’ tails) cooked twice, first for hours with saltbush, then grilled. (Photo: Tony Jackman)

The night before, I had simmered skaapstertjies (sheeps’ tails) with saltbush, coriander, onions, carrots and celery for hours, cooled them overnight and sent them to the hotel kitchen in the morning. While I told the room about how Sandra had changed my life, our lives, Cherie Antrobus and her amazing kitchen crew grilled and plated the skaapstertjies and brought out finger bowls after I had declared that anyone who dare eat them with a knife and fork would be summarily marched out of the building.

Fynvleis, which Sandra Antrobus taught me how to make, was turned into individual wildspasteie (game pies). (Photo: Tony Jackman)

Sandra taught me how to make fynvleis (fine game meat cooked for hours) and then turn it into a game pie (wildspastei), and the crowd loved the individual pies as much as the tails, which made me hugely popular, which I say with gratitude.

My recipe for the classic Pears Belle Hélène of every small-town hotel menu of the Sixties ended a dinner that had been blessed with pairings of Van Loveren Family Vineyards’ premium Christina range of very fine wines. Their Christine Brut welcomed us. Straight on to a delectable Christina Chardonnay with the biltong pâté, the 2022 cabernet sauvignon with the skaapstertjies, Christina Shiraz with the main course and finally Gewürtztraminer, with its rose petal allure, with dessert.

She would climb up ladders on to roofs

Cradock's Market Street during an earlier Karoo Food Festival. (Photo: Tony Jackman)

That first visit turned out to be all about lamb, as well as Die Opstal and its charms. Like all of her Tuishuise in Cradock, which now number 30 or so, Die Opstal was, and is, filled with the ou-Kaapse meubels — traditional Dutch and English furniture from earlier times — and finished with fine fabrics in drapery, bedding and upholstery.

Sandra was a woman of substance and resourcefulness. She had all sorts of local experts on hand, a phone call or raised hand away. A woman who would sew curtains to fit a particular window, a man who was an expert upholsterer, people who knew how to mend, polish or somehow give new life to something most people would discard.

Word has it that she would climb up ladders on to roofs to supervise the nailing down of corrugated iron sheets and waterproofing.

As she bought one more house and then another, until she ultimately owned nearly every house in the street, she would pile the kids into the car and drive off to Port Elizabeth and Port Alfred, scouring secondhand furniture dealers for beds, chairs, sofas, wardrobes, bedside tables, lamps, mirrors, framed paintings, anything that was part of a traditional home. She’d bid at auctions and wait for the goods to turn up in Market Street.

Her life was filled with lists. In the morning, she’d sit up in bed with her diary and plan her day, who would do what, which element of which house needed attention, which piece of furniture needed what kind of repairs, which wall needed painting, fence needed fixing, copper goods needed polishing, and who she would assign to each of every day’s many tasks.

In her armchair next to the fireplace in the hotel lounge, Sandra would hold her lists close, like a babe in arms. Guests would be assigned to rooms upstairs in the hotel itself or to the tuishuise on both sides of the street. She was the self-taught hotelier, as if born to it.

But she had not been. Sandra Moolman was born to an Afrikaans family in Middleton, near Somerset (later Somerset East) in the Eastern Cape and was a schoolteacher — she taught in Durban for a period — before she married Michael Antrobus, a learned Cradock man-of-books and many stories who was to pioneer pecan farming in the district. Michael was a direct descendant of the Antrobus clan that once owned the land on which Stonehenge stands. They married in Port Elizabeth in 1968 but were to become a part of the very fabric of the Cradock community.

I came to Olive Schreiner — who was born 100 years and one month before me and with whom I have felt a kinship for half of my life — first via her cottage in Matjiesfontein, which the village’s Scots founder, James Logan, Laird of Matjiesfontein, had built for her. This was where she wrote many of her now famous letters and several chapters of her Thoughts on South Africa, which ought to be required school reading.

Direct lines between people of past times and ours

Schreiner lived in many Karoo towns, but Cradock always held her heart. If we can draw direct lines between people of past times and our own, I can imagine these women having had plenty to discuss, were they to have coincided in one time.

When I first came to Cradock in 1993, to spend just one night in one of the Tuishuise that were going to change my life, I had only mild ambitions of writing plays for the stage. I’d written one manuscript, long forgotten even by me. In the afternoon we visited the Schreiner Museum and my fascination with Schreiner deepened. That she had written parts of The Story of an African Farm while living in this house, pacing Cross Street right outside. Sandra’s house, as I now think of it, was just around the corner, although she did not yet live there at that time.

But somehow these two women would hold me and, 17 years later, bring me back here. In between there would be long roads driven many times — especially between Cape Town and Sutherland and back, always via Matjiesfontein. On occasion, to Hanover, another Schreiner town.

Then one day we decided to drive that route again, skirting the upper Drakensberg and the Malutis, and finally bearing down on Cradock. Turning into Market Street, we parked outside the Victoria Manor Hotel. At reception, they gave us the keys to Lion House, across the road. What once had been a small affair of six period houses had blossomed into much of the street.

Lion House is still my favourite in Market Street. Alongside it, then, were the terraced houses of another guest house, so that Sandra’s view from her hotel reception was of houses she could not own; I always thought it a kind of torment for her, an itch to scratch.

That evening we crossed the road and entered the dining room off reception, with its red walls and curtains and Karoo buffet. I know I’ve told this story many times but it belongs here too, in this farewell to my friend. But that night, I was yet to meet her.

Candles shone on each table, the light reflected in rectangular mirrors on which were silver ornaments and salt and pepper cellars. Red roses preened in silver vases. A lady in rose-red slowly made her way from table to table, then reached us and pointed at me. “You are Tony Jackman. You are the reason for my success.”

She owed me a sheep — I’ve had it in chops

I have always denied it, arguing that somebody else would have written a story raving about her Tuishuise, but she was and remained adamant. And I cannot lie to a dead woman. I accept it, and am grateful to have played a little part in her life’s work. If the words that I write can have an impact, I need to accept it when it happens.

She owed me a sheep, as she now famously said at that table, and even if she hasn’t actually given me a whole sheep, I’ve had it in chops and shanks over the last 15 years.

Sandra came over to Lion House for a drink the next evening at 6pm, because she wanted to get to know us. Always, with Sandra, many direct questions. She would have made a fine reporter, always knowing what to ask and never being too shy to ask it. Tell me about you, tell me things I don’t know about you. What else do you write? So I told her: I write plays. For the stage.

Well, then, you must stay for the Writers’ Festival, she said in that Sandra way of it being almost an order more than a suggestion. It was the first edition and was to be held the following weekend. But we had to leave the next morning; we demurred. “Then you must come back.”

Di, in the third chair, leaned forward as if she had a gees about this; a feeling. You should come back, Tony.

And I did. That festival introduced me to all sorts of people who have come to be a part of my Cradock life over those 15 years. Paul Walters, emeritus professor of English at Rhodes, who is a wonderful friend who recently donated his father’s collection of rare Spode to Sandra, and now to the family. Etienne van Heerden, gentleman-writer of Afrikaans words and careful thought. Basil Mills, Grahamstown/Makhanda eccentric historian, recreator of battles and friend of reptiles, who I once baptised Crocodile Cradock. Quietly spoken master interviewer Izak de Vries. Darryl David of so many book festivals. And the entire Antrobus clan of two and now three generations.

You don’t argue with Sandra

On the Saturday evening of that first festival, Sandra announced that I would be talking to the room about my plays. No no, I said, they haven’t been produced yet. (There’d been a reading of one of my plays, then called Bloody England, at Pieter-Dirk Uys’s Evita se Perron, which Pieter had kindly given me use of. Claire Berlain and Darron Araujo played the main roles, script in hand.)

But you don’t argue with Sandra. So I told them about that play, and in the conversations that followed later that evening with Paul and others, the idea was mooted that somehow I should bring something the following year. In July 2011, Bloody England was performed — a staged reading — with Lynita Crofford as Schreiner, John Caviggia as Rhodes, and Francis Chouler as Julian Granville, a fictitious character.

At breakfast the next morning, I was told that Sandra wanted to see me in the red dining room. It was empty, and we sat down at a table.

“Now, she said. What are you writing next?”

Well, I said, I’ve wanted to put Emily Hobhouse on the stage for a long time. Right, we’ll have that next year, is the gist of Sandra’s response. And so it was.

I came back a week later (this was becoming a habit) and was given Etienne’s house (one in the street had been named after him, being a novelist with deep Cradock toots) and spent a week writing An Audience with Miss Hobhouse, a one-woman play written with Lynita Crofford in mind.

The play made its debut on the Grahamstown Festival Fringe in 2013 and won an Ovation Award for the production. Lynita later won a Fleur du Cap for her role. It subsequently had three runs in Cape Town, a brief one in Johannesburg, and played at various festivals including KKNK and Aardklop.

All thanks to Sandra’s firm combination of resolve and expectation. Years later, she named one of her houses after me — Jackman House, the mirror image of Lion House, is one of the terraced houses alongside that she finally bought and made her own. I wonder if she understood how much of an honour this was and is to me. It is priceless.

Serendipity, again

In between, our own lives changed, back in Cape Town, when a certain man whose name will not disgrace these pages bought Independent Newspapers, leading to both Di and I leaving and moving to Cradock. It was Sandra who made this happen, offering us a lease on her Schreiner Tearoom in Market Street at the precise point when we were floundering and needed to move somewhere to make a fresh start. Serendipity, again.

Our other connecting point is and was food. Sandra has been my Karoo guru for 15 years, teaching me all sorts of things and inspiring me to dig deeper into Karoo cuisine. Fynvleis, cooked forever until it shreds, finished with quince jelly and then made into wildspastei/game pie. How to make quince jelly, and I got a compliment from her for that (they did not come easily, you worked for her approval).

Slowly, over time, we all grew closer and closer. Sandra and I developed a friendship of mutual respect and admiration, along with Di and of course Sandra’s daughters Cherie and Lisa.

I felt hugely honoured the first time we were invited for dinner in her home and first stared up at her lounge ceiling, magnificently painted in gorgeous hues. As the friendship grew, things became more casual, and we would arrive for supper in her TV room. Michael was there for the first few years, then he fell ill and finally departed. Sandra was typically strong in the face of her loss, and determined to get on with life without Michael.

And she did, boy did she fight

At the Karoo Food Festival in April 2024, she stood in front of me with her back to the hotel, looked up into my eyes and said, “Tony, do you know I have cancer?” I said, well, I sort of knew but didn’t want to say anything until you were ready to tell me.

And she looked up at me with the most determined countenance and said, “Tony, I Am Going To Fight This!”

And she did, boy did she fight it. One evening in the TV room, Cherie said that mom was finding it difficult to eat — we called her mom, casually, as if she was mine too — and she’d heard that bone broth was good for people undergoing chemotherapy. Which Sandra was having, intensely, ever since the end of that food festival a year ago.

I’d been wanting to have a go at this restorative clear soup, packed with nutrients thanks to 48 hours of cooking with many bones in the pot, and said I’d make some.

Deks — those very large shiny aluminium pots — passed between my kitchen and the hotel kitchen for the rest of the year as a new batch of bone broth simmered for two days in my kitchen to then be transferred, for the staff to ladle it into tubs to be frozen. Every day, a tub would be thawed and heated for Sandra’s meals. She told me, with her ever-present kindness, “Tony, this is keeping me alive.”

But just not enough to fend off this terrible curse of a disease that takes so many of our best people from us. And the hope of the end of last year — doctors had been amazed at her improvement, and set new rounds of chemo at half-strength for late January onwards to get rid of what was left — turned to worry and sadness when she grew too weak to take the new season of treatment.

I was at sea when Sandra died on Tuesday, 8 April. Sitting writing in the Chart Room lounge on board Cunard’s Queen Anne between Durban and Cape Town. Sunshine and sea beyond the windows. Elegance all around me. I could picture Sandra amid that Cunardian style and pure class when the WhatsApp pinged from Cherie: “We’ve been told to prepare for the worst.”

In the early afternoon I lay down in our cabin for a nap. I dreamt that Sandra was on the ground next to me, leaning up on one arm, and then fell to the ground with her head down. I looked down upon her dark permed hair the way it used to be before the chemo. I woke up.

That evening Cherie’s WhatsApp pinged: Very sad to let you know that Mom passed away this afternoon. Finally she is at peace.

Coda

She must be here, somewhere. In her armchair in her TV room, listening to our stories. In a bedroom of one of her houses, supervising the hanging of curtains. Sitting in her red chair near the fireplace in the lounge of the Victoria Manor, doing her lists. I always look at the chair as I walk past. Maybe she smiles hello. DM

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