SIR JAMES LIEGE HULETT (1838-1928)

This day in 1838, South African sugarocrat and founder of Kearsney College, Sir James Liege Hulett, was born in Sheffield, England. Hulett was educated at Gillingham House School in Gillingham, Kent, and then St Martin’s Academy in nearby Kearsney. The former had originally been established by his grandfather and later re-opened by his father who also founded St Martin’s shortly afterwards.

A devout Methodist, Sir Liege was a capable and diligent student but, there were few prospects for a young man in the depressed economic conditions that followed the end of the Crimean War in 1856. After failing to secure employment in the civil service, Sir Liege responded to an advertisement in the Dover Mail placed by William Henry Burgess, a dispensing chemist with premises in Durban and Pietermaritzburg, and one of Natal’s first photographers. As a result, he successfully secured the advertised position in Durban which carried a salary of ￡30 per annum a year all found. After a voyage of 114 days, financed through a loan of ￡25 from maternal his uncle, George Flashman, a renowned #Dover furniture maker, he arrived in the prospering colony of Natal aboard the Lady Shelbourne in May 1857. Remarkably, the letter which accompanied Flashman’s loan has survived and was fortuitously rediscovered by the writer of this post at the bottom of a box in the Kearsney College archives.

Sir Liege never really settled in this job and he soon signed a lease agreement, with a right to purchase, for 160 acres of land, one of the Mount Moreland lots near Verulam on the Natal North Coast. With no capital and borrowed tools, he engaged a couple of African labourers to assist him to clear the forest and dense bush that covered his land so that he could plant arrow root.

Not content with his income at Mount Moreland, Sir Liege accepted a post as manager at the farm Driefontein near Compensation where Adolph Coqui had established a cotton plantation. He supplemented his salary of ￡80 per year by opening what proved to be a very lucrative trading store to serve a large Zulu settlement in the area. The cotton venture proved unsuccessful and Sir Liege was given permission to use the land while it was unoccupied. He made a good profit from mealies and planting cane, and then leased 600 acres at Nonothi and named the block Kearsney. where he experimented with several crops including mealies, sweet potatoes, chillies, arrowroot and, later, coffee.

At Kearsney, he built a gracious and stately mansion which became home to his burgeoning family which numbered six sons and two daughters by 1873. In 1877, Sir Liege decided to plant tea at Kearsney after borer had destroyed his coffee plantation. For the next sixty years, tea fields covering thousands of acres, were to dominate the undulating landscape before giving way eventually to sugar cane.

Soon after Natal attained self-government in 1881, Sir Liege ventured into the world of colonial politics. He rose to the position of Speaker of the Natal Legislative Assembly and later Leader of the Opposition. Pressing business commitments precluded him from accepting the honour of becoming Natal’s Prime Minister after the resignation of Sir Albert Henry Hine.in 1903. With the coming of Union in 1910, Sir Liege found himself back in politics having become a Senator in the Union Parliament. His son Albert then took the reins as Managing Director of his company and moved into the mansion. Sir Liege and Lady Hulett moved to the Manor House on the Berea in Durban, where he lived for the rest of his life.

Sometime later, Albert Hulett decided to vacate the mansion at Kearsney, Hulett entered into an agreement with the Methodist Church to transform the property into a school for boys and so Kearsney College opened its doors in 1923. The school eventually relocated to its present campus on Botha’s Hill in 1939.

Sir Liege continued to live at Manor House, visiting the headquarters of what was to become Tongaat Hulett Sugar South Africa once a day. On 17 May 1928 he celebrated his ninetieth birthday. However, within weeks he passed away on 15 June 1928 and was buried beside his beloved wife Mary in the grounds of the chapel at Old Kearsney near KwaDukuza on the north coast of KwaZulu-Natal.

Sir Liege Hulett was a remarkable man who made an immense contribution to the economic, social, political, educational life of KwaZulu-Natal and South Africa.

Postscript: On 19 January 2024, Tongaat Hulett announced that the then Chief Financial Officer of the company, Kearsney College Old Boy, Rob Aitken (Class of 1999) would take over as interim CEO from Dan Marokane on 1 March 2024