Granny Mac was more than our grandmother, she was the matriarch of the family. Adversity came in many forms, all steeling her for the next calamity. But she endured, persevered and overcame all these trials and trubulations. First the family lost its farm on the Gamtoos due to floods, then the cattle herd at De Stades due to rinderpest, but the cherry on the top was the death of her husband, Harry William, due to Black Water Fever in 1925. Despite all this misfortune and adversity, she survived and prospered. With her tiny frame and diminutive size, she was the epitome of the fighter that she was.
This is the story of that amazing woman.
Main picture: Schoenmakerskop and Daisy’s Tea Room with its famous home-made buns became a popular destination due to the convergence of a number of simultaneous events namely the invention of the motor car and the opening of the coastal road to Schoenies in 1922.
This odyssey could equally have been called The Schoenmakerskop Idyll because for me, it was Schoenmakerskop which defines Granny Mac and our branch of the family in particular. Not a weekend would pass when the family was not at Schoenies as it was affectionately known. We quickly became expert swimmers and knew every nook and cranny along the craggy coastline.

The early years
Little did Daisy – as she was affectionately called – know that she would not have an easy life. Daisy Beckley was born on 11th July 1882 probably at Draaifontein Farm which was the Beckley’s residence. The Beckleys were a well-established farming family in the local area. She and her two sisters married three McCleland brothers.

Harry William McCleland married Daisy on 11th May 1904 in the St Albans Church on the Beckley’s farm named Draaifontein. According to Daisy, they were the first couple to marry in the newly completed church. Harry was 15 years older than Daisy.

Five children were quickly produced in succession and then another some 8 years later Bryce appeared:
- Thelma Adelaide on 24th February 1905
- Kathleen Mary McCleland on 8th February 1907
- Francis Joseph Walker on 19th September 1909
- Harry Clifford – Cliffie to most people – on 15th September 1911
- Florence Maureen on 2nd February 1914 and
- Bryce Beckley on 24th August 1922
1905 Gamtoos floods
In order to provide for the family, Harry William farmed vegetables in the Gamtoos River area. Around 1903/4 Engineers from Scotland arrived in the Gamtoos Valley to build a railway bridge over a river in the Melon area. On the day of the official opening on the 15th September 1905 of the bridge, which is on the Avontuur Railway line, Daisy with her young African maid and baby Thelma [ 24 02 1905 – 15 Sept 1974] left home to attend the opening of the bridge. Walking along the Gamtoos River bank, Daisy noticed a horse rider in the far distance gesticulating to them to climb higher up, which they did. Shortly after that the river came down in flood. Daisy was later to learn that their home and vegetables had been swept away. The horse rider was Daisy’s husband, Harry. The Moolman family in the Melon area offered them accommodation until they were able to move the the Valley House at De Stades.
At De Stades where Harry started a dairy farm. This venture came to a disastrous finale when their dairy herd was wiped out by the rinderpest in 1912.


Ultimately a change of occupation was called for. Initially the family relocated to a house next to the Priory in Mount Pleasant. This allowed Kathleen to attend school for a year. What happened to Thelma’s schooling cannot be ascertained. At the conclusion of that year, they relocated to a tiny hamlet some 10kms outside the nascent Walmer called Schoenmakerskop. With little else but a cow, some chickens and an African worker to care for their depleted stock, they made a fresh start. Farming, however, was not to be part of their new beginning. With their meagre possessions they rented a wooden holiday cottage, Tipperary, on erf 3 at Schoenmakerskop circa 1915. The family would stay here until Elizabeth Daisy McCleland purchased the Hut in 1918. It was here that Daisy in desperation commenced operating a tea room on the verandah of the house.
The Schoenmakerskop idyll
Like all good English speaking men, Harry William McCleland signed up for active service in WW1. In Harry’s case, the truth is not so prosaic. Rather it was driven by the need to provide for the family. I suspect that he must have felt like a failure having failed twice as a breadwinner. His solution was to volunteer for war service, a rather dramatic solution. What counted against him is the fact that he was too old to be accepted. To bypass this requirement by mis-stating his date of bith as 1873 instead of 1863. Incongruiously he stated initially that his date of birth was 1863 instead of 1867. Then to rectify matters, he amended the 6 to a 7 making his date of birth 1873.

After training he was deployed to German East Africa. For four long years, the Germans under the skilled and artful Lieutenant Colonel (later General major) Paul Emil von Lettow-Vorbeck, played cat and mouse with the South Africa forces under General JC Smuts.

For most soldiers this was a debilitating experience. Unlike France, in the scarred trenches and the bomb-ploughed fields of Flanders where death and wounding came in equal measure from continuous shelling, bullets or shrapnel, their nemesis was the lowly mosquito. Harry fell victim to malaria.

On returning home Harry was to suffer inordinately from recurring bouts of blackwater fever, a complication of malaria.
No 32 – the Hut Tea Room as it was originally called – was bought by Elizabeth Daisy McCleland for £23 in 1918. This plot The original tea room was well known for the best home-made buns all baked by Daisy McCleland. While her three daughters assisted in running the tea shop and waitressing, Daisy would continue to bake her well-known buns. In the very early days the restaurant was named “The Hut Tearoom“. Amazingly this fact was only ascertained on her death when the official documents were perused.

There are two stories about how the swimming area got its name. “The first one is that apparently large water storage tanks once stood in the area for storing water from the springs and the second one is that a tank washed up from a nearby shipwreck. There was a metal outlined shape at the mouth of the gully visible a few years ago – possibly from the shipwreck. Some people also call it Nuns Pool but according to Luc the purists would point out that Nun’s Pool is to the right of Tanks. Graham McCleland recalls that his dad Bryce used to call it the “Ladies Pool”

On the sandy hillock behind the Tea Room, is this incongruous structure. Known as the Fortress Observation Post. It was constructed during WW2.
It is rumoured that some local lads – George and Clarence Wood – played some part in widening the main pool when they acquired some dynamite.
Harry suffered bouts of severe pain caused by the recurring malaria preventing him from working. Rosemary – Kathleen’s daughter – states that she is not sure whether it affected his lungs, but her Mom told her that he used to be in a lot of pain at times and would actually roll around from the pain. On 13th June 1924 Harry finally succumbed to the malaria which in those days was called Black Water Fever.

After Harry’s death their son, Harry Clifford, my father, was placed in an Afrikaans boarding school in Alexandra, which he abhorred due to his treatment there while the girls had to assist their mother full-time. Naturally when Clifford was home on holiday, he was press-ganged into churning milk and ice to make ice cream. Bryce being only two years old was not affected by this upheaval as he was far too small to assist in any meaningful way. Kathleen would also do part of her schooing in Alexandria but she boarded with an Afrikaans dominee.
A heavily rutted track, “upgraded” to limestone / gravel road, connected Schoenmakerskop with Walmer which also probably possessed no tarred roads at that stage. Before the opening of a railway line to service Walmer up to the terminus at 14th Avenue, the closest shops were those in Main & Strand Street as Walmer in those early years was devoid of shops. The only form of transport to town was by horse or if the family accompanied them, it was by means of a horse and trap. This conveyance is a carriage seating five drawn by a horse. From this, I can conclude that the McCleland possessed, apart from a cow and chickens, a horse. Apparently Daisy, who was a feisty self-reliant person, was forbidden from riding the horse as one of her family at Draaifontein was killed in a riding accident. Perhaps the horse had been scared by a snake causing the horse to bolt. One wonders which route they would take to town. With no “dip” at Third Avenue, Newton Park, and the Baakens slicing the area into two, the only routes to central P.E. was either through South End or across the Baakens at Target Kloof. I would speculate that they would take the South End route, the original route from Walmer to Port Elizabeth, as the gradients were less severe dspecially when using a horse and trap..
With the opening of the coastal road past The Willows, Schoenmakerskop had its brief place in the spotlight. The trend-setters and fashion conscious who alighted their new impressive Model T Fords outside the Port Elizabeth Town Hall would drive in convoy along the beach front, out past the lighthouse and The Willows to their destination, Daisy’s Tea Room. Here they would be served by the three charming women, my aunts, Kathleen, Maureen and Thelma.


On 11th August 1930 disaster struck again. On waking up during the night by some sounds, Francis Joseph Walker McCleland, my uncle, confronted an intruder in the tea room. In attempting to strike the intruder using the shotgun as a club, a shot was fired and Francis was fatally wounded. He died a few days later in the Provincial Hospital. The death of Francis within the closed-knit community of Schoenmakerskop sent shock waves through the local inhabitants. With Schoenmakerskop being so isolated, it was unlikely that the assailant could be an outsider. The perpetrator was never apprehended. A young life at 20 years of age was tragically snuffed out long before its time.

Blaine recalls the incident as follows: “I heard that Francis confronted the burglar with a gun and took pity on him and tried to hit him with the butt instead whereupon it went off and shot him in the stomach. Perhaps they had just struggled for control of the gun. Whatever the case, my version is that the gun was not the intruder’s. He took a day or two to die.”

For a number of years after her husband’s death, Daisy became the belle of the ball – the life and soul of the party – and apparently Daisy could party. Daisy acquired a number of male friends but apparently none matched the high standards that she set so she never remarried. One of the males who seems to have been at Daisy’s side for a number of years was a Mr. Clemence. He worked for Fischer’s Jeweller’s, the well-known jeweller in Main Street. Mr Clemence was to meet his maker in a most tragic way. Sometime during Thursday 6th October 1938, while Henry was motoring alone between Sidbury and Alicedale, he suffered a fatal heart attack. His death certificate records the cause of death as Angina pectoris, commonly known as angina. This is the sensation of chest pain, pressure, or squeezing, often due to not enough blood flow to the heart muscle as a result of obstruction or spasm of the coronary arteries. Apparently after experiencing the angina, Henry’s vehicle had rolled into a ditch.

In a number of photos in my possession show Daisy accompanied by a male friend. According to Rosemary MacGeoghagen, the mysterious Mr. X is most probably a Mr. Clements. He was a jeweller who worked at Fisher’s Jewellers in PE. He travelled a lot and died of a heart attack in his car on route to Alicedale.

Bryce, would cycle daily from Schoenmakerskop to the Walmer Primary School in 4th Avenue, but would sometimes stay over with his sister, Kathleen Wood – nee McCleland – in Fordyce Road, Walmer where Kathleen Wood would look after him. Kathleen claimed that it was no great feat for them to cycle to Schoenmakerskop in order to have a swim on a hot day, visit their mother Daisy and then cycle back again when it got cooler. Michelle Beckley concurs, “I have checked on the map and this is a distance of at least 12km, one way, but apparently it was quite safe to do so in those days as there was no Walmer location at that stage.”

Blaine McCleland can substantiate that claim as he states that “Dad [Clifford] told of the countless times that he used to cycle from whatever building site to attend evening classes at some college and then cycle back to Schoenies in the dark. He talked about nearly riding over snakes that lay on the warm road at night. They wouldn’t have been tarmac roads then but they would probably still have been warm. [Blaine is mistaken as it was tarmac by that time]. Graham adds that Clifford also had to cycle these huge distances when he worked for Hubert Davies, a Building Contractor, in Port Elizabeth.
According to Rosemary MacGeoghegan, Elizabeth Daisy McCleland ran the tea room from 1914 until 1942 when she sold it and moved to Walmer.

Blaine was able to add the following interesting snippets of information:
A group of the boys from Schoenies once went for a day outing, walking to Sardinia Bay and back. Bryce’s back apparently ended up as one big blister and he had to lie on his stomach for a few days afterwards.
To substantiate the fact that the fish stocks had been depleted at Schoenmakerskop, Blaine claims that his father once asserted that “There used to be so many fish around then that after high tide they would chose a small pool and block the exit with their bodies and trap the fish in the pool as the water drained.” To confirm the abundance of fish, Graham McCleland recalls his father Bryce commenting, “We would fish with two hooks on their lines and pull out two fish.”

The Later Years
The original Tea Room was merely a wooden cottage that would in later years be demolished to make way for the brick building called “Ocean View Tea Room“. The name was later changed in the mid 1980’s to “The Seagulls”. Finally according to Joan Shaw, the author of the definitive book on Schoenmakerskop, Retha and Alf Taylor purchased the tea room in 1988. It was completely revamped and renamed the Sacramento in 2000

Initially after selling the tea room in 1942, Daisy stayed at 32 7th Avenue Walmer together with her unmarried children, Harry Clifford and Maureen. After a brief interlude at River Road with Harry Clifford and possibly his wife Eunice as they got married in June 1952, Daisy finally circa 1955 moved in with her daughter Thelma at 99 Albert Road. On the large two acre stand, a Granny Flat had been constructed. After Thelma’s death due to bowel cancer in 1974, she moved in with Kathleen at Fordyce Road.

The final picture that I possess of Daisy is with five generations of McCleland’s. According to Fay Forbes – nee McCleland – “that photograph of Granny Mac, Aunty Kath and Rosemary evokes SO many memories! I can even remember the perfume of Aunty Kath and her voice! Also recognise Granny’s headboard and clock!”
Daisy, or Granny Mac to me, finally passed away on 20th October 1977





Sources:
Books:
Gabriella Churchouse: The Reverend Francis McCleland: Colonial Chaplain to Port Elizabeth 1825 – 1853
Correspondence via emails:
Valuable input from obtained from the following persons:
Michelle Beckley – general information especially the earlier years
Julia Smith – the background to Schoenmakerskop
Joan Shaw – the Schoenmakerskop years
Blaine McCleland – Francis’ death, other snippets and corrections
Graham McCleland – Various snippets, elaborations and corrections
Discussions:
Various discussions with Rosemary MacGeoghegan
Machete used by Harry McCleland during WW1 in German East Africa:
[Photos courtesy of Barry McCleland]







There is a difference between death registration and estate registration. ALL deaths have to be registered (civil registration) by law whether it’s a baby 5 minutes old or a person over a 100 yrs old. It also gives the cause of death and intended place of burial.
However, estates are only registered if the person has left a will or anything of value above a certain amount (not sure what it is these days). I think one needs a copy of the death registration or death certificate when registering an estate.
I’ve looked among the PE 1925 civil death registrations on-line but haven’t found it – could have missed it. This form was usually filled in by a relative who reported the death or by the undertaker. It’s not easy to find these unless one is able to download the whole batch in one go. I only have a few PE ones downloaded and given to me by a friend some years ago and 1925 was not one of those so it’s a matter of paging through one by one. Unfortunately some deaths are reported very late and one has to wade through many before finding the one you need. I usually look at the date near the bottom of the page to see when the registration was done and start from there. One can’t look at the date of death only on the forms because of the late registrations. I started searching from about image no 920:

Lovely family history! I just want to correct the 5 generations of McCleland descendants. The picture was taken by my husband Hugh Brown in July 1977 at the home of my dear grand mother Kathleen Wood. In the picture is Kathleen Wood, Daisy Mc Cleland, standing Cynthia Fisher nee Wood, Pamela Brown nee Fisher and great, great grand child Bridgette Lark Brown.