Five Thomas Pringles are known to history: the founding editor of Blackwood's, the Scots settler leader to the eastern Cape frontier, the ‘father of South African poetry’, the champion of freedom of the Press in the Cape Colony, of the settlers in need and of the oppressed indigenous people, and, most historically memorable, the secretary of the Anti-Slavery Society at the triumphant climax of its campaigning. Yet it is this last seven-year role that is the least recorded, the most obscure.

In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries offices in organizations in what is today called ‘civil society’ were held by the socially prominent, by public men, parliamentarians, peers, baronets and knights. A second rank of officials, known as ‘servants’ (a usage surviving in ‘civil servants’) performed the day-to-day clerical work that enabled their organization to function.

Pringle first encountered these ‘officers’ when he was recruited by the Anti-Slavery Society in May 1827, four months after the Anti-Slavery Monthly Reporter had published his New Monthly Magazine article on Cape slavery in October 1826. They were Thomas Fowell Buxton, well-to-do landowner, brewery proprietor and Member of Parliament, successor to the ageing and ailing William Wilberforce as leader of the abolition movement; Henry Brougham, Whig politician, polymath, future Lord Chancellor; and Wilberforce's lieutenants in the successful campaign which in 1807 ended the slave trade in the British Empire: Thomas Clarkson, Stephen Lushington, Zachary Macaulay and James Stephen.