My wife Joanne and I have just completed a wonderful storytelling trip
to Canada’s Yukon. The trip was not only a storytelling adventure, but a book
tour, but I did not read anything. It was all done with pictures and stories
about those pictures. As folks who have heard me storytelling will know I often
use the most modern form of Cantastoria,
the ancient art of telling with images. You can see more about this and other telling techniques here.
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| A short walk to the springs. There they are, a swim if you wish |
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| A bend in the river and a welcome stop for a picnic lunch not far from Faro in Yukon |
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| A tiny gap in the clouds as we drove back from Burwash Landing, where we told to 45 folks of a total popualiton of 95! |
At each venue I gave the audience a choice of some
stories about our time in Africa or ones about moose. Everyone chose A
Wildlife Vet in Africa. I guess there are lots of moose in Yukon. At
two venues I was asked to tell one brief moose story at the end of the set. Why
not?
Mairi Macrae of the Yukon Library system
who organized the tour with meticulous attention to detail wrote this in an
email at the end of the adventure.
Out of this
world! We had a great audience of 48 at Jerry Haigh’s African presentation. It
was incredible to see in photos and film the work that he was doing in the 60’s
on up until the present with all kinds of large mammals. The audience was
enthralled and I don’t think anyone had seen or heard stories like that. Jerry
(and his doctor wife Jo) have had the privilege of living a very interesting
and exotic life. On top of that, he is a great storyteller and a passionate
speaker. Very interesting Q & A as you can imagine. Definitely of all the
programs we have during my time here, this was one of the best.
During my tellings I did do something I have not previously tried. To
introduce myself I told the folks a bit about our (Jo’s and my) family history
and how we have fallen pretty close to the apple tree in terms of our
adventures. Here is that introductory piece.
Something I have never related before struck a chord with me and so I
began to investigate it further. As you have seen Jo’s parents were married in
a so-called Glove Wedding. Abraham,
her electrical engineer dad, was in India building that country’s first radio
factories, starting in Calcutta. He had been sent out by his employers, the
Philips Company of Eindhoven in 1932, and had left his fiancé, Tine, behind in
Amsterdam.
The official ceremony took place in Holland. Abraham’s brother Jaap
stood in for him and Tine was duly and officially married. She soon shipped out
for India
Naturally I knew that this glove wedding had taken place, but I wanted
to find out more about the process.
Of course I tried Google.
All I got was an endless stream of advertising sites for the sale of wedding
gloves. I guess they are a really big deal in several senses of the term. I
tried various combinations of search word, but it was not until I typed Dutch Glove Wedding that I made some
progress
There was just one hit, from an Australian newspaper article published on the 31st
of May 1919. It came from page 7 of the
Barrier Miner (Broken Hill, NSW : 1888 – 1954) and was barely intelligible as it had been
electronically translated. Many words were garbled, but with patience I was
able to decipher it. Here is that version.
THE
"GLOVE" MARRIAGE
Not long ago a Boer
in Pretoria was married to a girl in Amsterdam, the ceremony constituting what
the Dutch call ''handschoen" or glove marriage.
In spite of the
fact that a distance of 6000 miles separated the bride in the Netherlands and
the bridegroom the Transvaal they were, just as effectually married under the
Dutch law, as if both had been present in the same church
The bridegroom sent
to his friend or best man in Amsterdam a power of attorney to represent him as
his proxy at the ceremony, and at the same time forwarded his glove, which, at
the proper moment when the two were made one, was held by both the bride and
the proxy. The wedding was duly registered at Amsterdam and at Pretoria, where
the bridegroom filed an affidavit with the proper magistrate.
This curious form
of marriage is a purely Dutch institution, the custom having originated, it is
said, in the old times o£ Dutch-Batavian rule.
Now my
interest was even more peaked. I knew, or thought I knew that Batavia was the name used for Jakarta of the Dutch East Indies in Holland’s colonial days when they tried to run
the valuable spice trade. I decided to check and so, back to Google.
I was in for
a surprise. There are, according to Wikipedia, nine communities in the USA
called by the name. However, the name goes back at least 2000 years. It was “a land inhabited by the Batavian people
during the Roman Empire, today part of the Netherlands” I wonder if those
US towns were founded by Dutchmen.
The Barrier Miner reporter had underestimated his
distances slightly. Amsterdam to the Transvaal is about 13,000 km by road (if
you even get there these days, which I doubt). The bride would have no doubt
gone to Cape Town by ship, and then
overland, which would have involved a couple of thousand more. That would have
been some 9000 miles
Tine only had to go about 9000 km, or 5,600 miles. I’m
going to do some more digging as I do wonder if any other Glove Weddings to
India (Brits Indie as it was known in
those days to distinguish it from
Indonesia) ever took place
Anyway, we can be certain that Jo’s apple has indeed
fallen right at the foot of her parents’ tree.
