Weekend Argus (Saturday Edition)
A life spent in devoted service
Staying power is the inescapable symbolism of District Six’s 130-year-old St Mark’s Church – and of the humble man who arranged flowers there for more than half a century, writes MICHAEL MORRIS
AMIDST trees and shrubbery and a trimming of neat pavements, St Mark’s is cloistered today in an embrace of contemporary buildings that form the continuing elaboration of the Cape Peninsula University of Technology.
Set against the new bold planes of concrete, steel and glass, the stone church’s late Victorian profile, the arched windows and warm biscuit-coloured façade give it the appearance of being the endeared heart of a precinct that could not be without it. This is arguably true.
For years, though, St Mark’s stood alone in a wasteland of rubble and patchy grass, a tenuous, if stubborn, remnant of what was. All around it, the bustle of life had been bulldozed to oblivion – or so it may have seemed.
There remained, however, an obduracy of spirit; among the banished congregants, some clung on, and one among them proved a stayer of note.
At 83, Douglas Snyders – though stooped, and a man who chooses his steps carefully – is what is usually called spry. He seems lithe enough, and, though he counts on a splendid silver-handled stick, he can get about without difficulty, and doesn’t look his age. But his spryness is less a physical condition than a liveliness of spirit shot through with an almost boyish streak of mischief.
He can barely wait to describe – with a likeable smirk – his snapping imperiously at the incumbent parish priest of the 1970s “to mind his own business” and keep his nose out of the flower arranging.
By then, after all, “Dougie” was an old hand, neither needing nor tolerating interference.
Snyders grew up in Mathew Road in Claremont, and St Matthew’s, a few blocks away, was his childhood parish.
He had an early introduction to flowers when he and his siblings were each given “a patch of the yard” to grow things in – but his lifelong role at St Mark’s was an accident of fate.
“My father, Nicholas, had a good friend who lived in District Six, just up the road from St Mark’s, and I would often join him on his regular Sunday visit.”
One Sunday, young Douglas complained to his father that if they didn’t get moving, they’d miss Evensong at St Matthew’s. As a compromise, they elected on this occasion to go to St Mark’s instead.
In time, they became regulars at the Sunday evening service. Snyders’s lifelong association with the District Six parish was sealed in 1958 when, the serving sacristan having grown too old for the job, St Mark’s was looking for someone to take over the job of flower arranger.
At 24, Snyders volunteered. He had, he said, “fallen in love with St Mark’s”.
On Sunday April 2, a special commendation delivered during the service by Father Austen Jackson captured the scale of Snyders’s devotion to his humble task: “Through 59 seasons of spring, summer, autumn and winter, the solicitude and love he brought to this ministry has amazed and inspired God’s people and the many visitors to the church over the years.”
The tribute went on: “This deliberate spirit of resilience represents a compelling and symbolic larger poignant truth; its back story is the dismemberment of District Six that the Group Areas Act visited upon it. This once bustling commun- ity of families, schools and churches was cut up into a thousand pieces and scattered far and wide.
“Those who committed to saving St Mark’s from the demolitions had to find their way back by road or rail each Sunday morning to make sure that the worshipping community survived. Douglas was part of this remnant for whom St Mark’s will forever be indebted.”
Father Jackson noted in his commendation that for the past 39 years – the near lifetime that Snyders has spent living in Mitchells Plain – the flower arranger travelled all the way into town every Saturday, bought his blooms from the flower sellers at Trafalgar Place in Adderley Street, and made his way up to the church on Clifton Hill to prepare the displays for the Sunday services.
Fittingly, the parish (along with the 131-year-old Moravian Church in District Six) will be celebrating the life of Douglas Snyders in a flower festival this spring, a prelude to a larger festival of St Mark’s next year.
Snyders, who earned his living as the despatch clerk for Edson Press – first based in town and, latterly, Mowbray – makes light of his 59 years of service to St Mark’s, calling it a “labour of love”.
“I still enjoy doing arrangements, though these days I have to sit and work… I used to stand.”
There were no secrets, he said. “But I suppose I have a good eye. And my style hasn’t changed.”
On a memorable occasion in the 1970s, unbeknown to Snyders, then rector Father John da Costa happened to spot him taking apart an arrangement he wasn’t happy with, and muttered: “You blithering nit… it was perfect as it was!”
“I spun round,” Snyders said, “and I told him: ‘Father, get out! This is my time’.” He added: “I became the subject of the Sunday sermon… which I didn’t think made a good point. Father Da Costa argued that ‘something that’s nice is nice’, and that wasn’t good enough for me.”
On another occasion, an overly fussy priest had had the temerity to advise Snyders that “I don’t like marigolds, and I don’t like zinnias”. “And I said to him, ‘Father, you take what you get’.”
He had no favourites, he said. “All flowers are my friends.”
Of the material vicissitudes and hardships of the apartheid years Snyders utters not a single word, yet, as Father Jackson notes of him, “he is a signifier of the spirit that refused to give up”.
“It would have been easy to demolish this building if there was no resistance,” the rector said. “And this wasn’t just a short-term knee-jerk reaction; it had to be sustained, there had to be a group committed to coming every Sunday. Many fell along the way, but many stood true and kept coming.”
For eight years, Father Jackson noted, there was no priest because the congrega- tion was too small to sustain one. But even then, the parishioners kept coming.
The parish has a long history. The present church was commemorated as a tribute to Queen Victoria in her Golden Jubilee year of 1887, though the parish itself had been around for a while, the first entry in the baptismal register dating back to 1871.
Kensington-born Father Jackson, who started out life as a trawlerman before taking up his calling to the priesthood – serving in parishes as diverse as Elsie’s River and Klawer – was appointed rector of St Mark’s last year.
Today, he has the satisfaction of presiding over what he calls “a proud self-sustaining community” that has resumed its place at the centre of the life of the city.
“St Mark’s was part of a bigger community that bustled with life, with music and culture, and our vision for next year’s festival is to celebrate this – not memorialise it in the sense of something of the past, but celebrate what has survived and triumphed. It is a triumph over political forces that succeeded in breaking up the physical District Six, but failed to break up the community whose endurance St Mark’s represents,” Father Jackson said.
“The church is a remnant of something bigger, which survived right across the community of the city. And it is in this context that we invite the city to celebrate with us, in the Flower Festival this year, and in the St Mark’s Festival next year.”