Hylda M. Richards (1898-?) was a Rhodesian writer. Best known for her controversial autobiographical narrative Next Year Will Be Better (1952), she also wrote humorous verse under the pseudonym T.
Life Hylda Richards was born in London in 1898. After World War I, she and her husband struggled for eight years to farm fifty acres in Kent, before deciding to emigrate to homestead in Rhodesia. She sailed for Cape Town in July 1928, travelling on by land to Salisbury. The family trained for a year on a farm near Salisbury, before moving fifteen miles away to a farm of 2,500 uncultivated acres. For some time they were crippled by debt, and they only became financially secure in the late 1930s.Julia M. Wells, Quinine, Whisky, and SunHelmets: Amateur Medicine in British East and South-Central Africa, 1890-1939, MA thesis, Victoria University of Wellington, 2016, pp.5–7 Next Year Will Be Better chronicled their efforts at farming there.
During the 1930s and 1940s Richards wrote humorous verse, under the pseudonym 'T', on everyday travails of the farming life. Annual collections of this verse "became something of a Rhodesian institution". A selection was published as Hurrah for the Life of a Farmer! (1958). For five weeks she also worked as temporary editor of The Weekly Advertiser, "a little weekly paper" in Salisbury.
In 1974 Richards published a biography of the pioneer Dan Judson (1864-1942), a telegraphist who arrived in Rhodesia in 1893 and led one of the relief patrols to the Alice Mine at Mazoe.David William Kenrick, Pioneers and Progress: White Rhodesian Nation-Building, c.1964-1979, PhD Thesis, University of Oxford, pp.247–8. In the 1970s she also provided miscellaneous contributions to the amateur history journal Rhodesiana, the journal of the Rhodesiana Society.
Works
Cape Town: H. B. Timmins, 1952.
References
External links Mapping the Contours of an Imperial and Domestic Settler Subjectivity: Hylda Richards and the Heteroglossia of her Epoch Hazel Tafadzwa Ngoshi