RARELY PUBLICISED WOMAN

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 11, Issue 2, 5 March 1947, Page 6

RARELY PUBLICISED WOMAN

WIFE OF GENERAL SMUTS With the visit of the Royal Family to South Africa the rarely-publicised wife of the Union’s Premier will emerge from her usual background of obscurity to take her place in the spotlight. Much written and read about Field-Marshal Smuts, Prime Minister of South Africa, who now, after a chequered career, is one of the outstanding public figures of the world. But outside South Africa little is heard of Mrs. Smuts, who was married almost 50 years ago. She is a woman of outstanding qualities of mind and heart.

Mrs. Smuts was formerly Sybella Margaretha Krige and she and Jan Smuts met when they were fellowstudents at Stellenbosch University. She was a homely girl with a mop of unruly hair and a keen brain,

During the Boer War, Mrs. Smuts, like many other war wives, spent lonely years and suffered disappointments and sorrow. As her husband, then a young lawyer, became more and more prominent in the affairs of his country, she continued to lead a simple, busy life. She brought up a family of two sons and four daughters and she is never happier than when her plain, square, single-storey house, set in a model farm 10 miles from Pretoria, is filled with her children, relatives and friends. But the invading horde of visitors, who have the run of the house, do not invade the sanctum of the Prime Minister. Mrs. Smuts cares little or nothing for clothes, has little use for powder or lip-stick, and only on the very rarest occasions does she have her thick, now-greying hair washed and dressed by a hair-dresser. She has been known to attend receptions bare-headed and to arrive in a bus when others in far less exalted positions arrived in fine cars. South Africans understand her thoroughly, they admire her for her cleverness and devotion to home and family, and they love her for her naturalness and ready sympathy.