The man behind the name of Barbourfields: Henry Robert Barbour

For some people, Barbourfields is the neighbourhood they grew up in. For others, it is football: the team they followed, the people they went with, the matches they can still talk through years later. Far from Bulawayo, the name can be enough to start a conversation between people who have just discovered they share a home town.

Behind the familiar name was Henry Robert Barbour, a man whose public life can still be traced through election results, a government commission, an old photograph and an inscription at City Hall. The outline survives more clearly than the everyday person. We know rather more about the offices he held than about the sound of his voice or the things that made him laugh.

He served as Mayor of Bulawayo in the 1920s, with the best-supported dates placing his term between 1924 and 1927. In 1924, he was also elected to Southern Rhodesia’s Legislative Assembly as a Rhodesia Party member for Bulawayo South. For a time, his public work took him from municipal affairs to parliament.¹

There is a photograph of a ceremony at Rhodes’s grave in March 1927 in which he is identified among those present. Decades later, a woman who had attended the gathering, Madeline Heald, helped identify the men in the picture. Beside number eight she supplied his name: H. R. Barbour, Mayor of Bulawayo.²

It is a small act of remembering, but a useful one. Someone knew who he was and made sure that a face in a group photograph kept its name.

One of the most appealing glimpses of Barbour takes us into Hillside.

In 1978, local historian Monica Waddy recorded that he had owned a property at 12 Oxford Road, with what she described as Hillside’s first swimming pool.

A visiting champion swimmer from England stayed as his guest and gave a demonstration for councillors and their wives. Waddy linked the interest it generated to the establishment of the Borrow Street Baths.³

Her account gives neither the swimmer’s name nor the date. It preserves a wonderfully particular connection: a public swimming bath whose beginnings, as she recorded them, lay in a gathering at someone’s home.

For anyone who remembers the Borrow Street Baths, it gives a familiar place another story to carry.

Across Bulawayo, the name Barbour would become associated with another kind of recreation. Later accounts remember him for encouraging the provision of local sporting facilities. The council also identifies him as the former mayor after whom Barbourfields was named.⁴

His municipal involvement certainly outlasted his mayoral term. When the foundation stone for City Hall was laid on 14 June 1939, H. R. Barbour, J.P., appeared among the councillors listed on it. His name remains part of the building’s recorded inscription.⁵

The neighbourhood bearing his name developed its own life. The council describes the later stadium as an athletics ground built in the 1950s, subsequently incorporating football. Its name came from the neighbourhood around it.⁴

Over the years, Barbourfields became home, a destination, a meeting place. The families who lived there, the players who took the field and the people who came to watch gave the name associations that no naming resolution could have planned.

A person might hear it and remember a house. Another might remember the person who first took them to a match. Someone else, living thousands of miles away, might remember the friends they would hope to see if they went back.

Henry Robert Barbour left his name in Bulawayo’s public record. Generations of Bulawayans have carried it into their own stories.

The next time we say “Barbourfields”, there is a little more to remember: a mayor of the 1920s, a councillor whose initials are recorded at City Hall, and, in one local historian’s account, a Hillside swimming pool and a visiting swimmer whose name we have yet to find.

And there is still room in the story for someone who remembers more.

A note on what is not claimed

This account rests only on the sources below. No dialogue, private thoughts or undocumented scenes have been invented. The proposed Australian birth, carpenter’s occupation, family connections and death date are omitted because they have not been securely connected to the mayor. Nothing here claims that he donated the land for Barbourfields or that his sporting advocacy was the original council’s reason for naming the neighbourhood.