A different view on current affairs & history
Blogs on Port Elizabeth
The Young Women’s Christian Association of Southern Africa (YWCA) was originally founded in Cape Town in April 1886. Thirteen years later in March 1899, moves were afoot in Port Elizabeth to establish another facility under the YWCA banner.
In 1988 the building, Lester House, was extensively renovated as chambers for the legal firm of Pagden and Christian.
This blog is a brief resume of the YMCA, its original home, Lester House to Pagdens Court.
Main picture: Lester House
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During a visit to the town in 1861 – 1862, Thomas Bowler painted the Town Hall which was in the process of being erected with scaffolding surrounding the building. An insignificant yet unplanned feature was included in that painting; a small cupola supported by pillars. As it was never included in the design and never existed, why was this appendage depicted? The reason why was it included in the painting was only uncovered by Dr. Joseph Denfeld some hundred years later. The answer lay with a non-Port Elizabeth photographer by the name of William Roe.
If Denfield is correct, what did William Roe do that compelled Bowler to inaccurately amend his painting?
Main picture: Painting by Thomas Bowler entitled Main Street Port Elizabeth
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These are the highlights of the recollections of Port Elizabeth in the 1830s and early 1840s by the Rev. Canon Hewitt. The extended full-length version has been lost over a century ago. Notwithstanding that, this brief summary provides yet another insight into the life and times of our ancestors in Port Elizabeth.
Main picture: The Commissariat building in Baakens Street
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This blog is based entirely upon an article entitled Christmas at Port Elizabeth from the defunct magazine An African City in 1913. What I have done is to insert comments regarding changes or to emphasize differences between then and now. In some ways it is familiar and in other ways so dissimilar.
Main picture: Aerial view of Humewood#03 1935
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David Livingstone (19 March 1813 – 1 May 1873) was a Scottish physician, Congregationalist, pioneer Christian missionary with the London Missionary Society, and an explorer in Africa. Livingstone had a mythic status that operated on a number of interconnected levels. As a result, Livingstone became one of the most popular British heroes of the late 19th-century Victorian era.
Main picture: David Livingstone
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South End, its people, its mosques and churches were all sacrificed on the altar of Apartheid. The people were relocated, a settled harmonious community was cast asunder, the buildings bulldozed. All except some places of religion escaped the carnage. Now in an island of destruction they represented no congregation as they had been transported to the northern most part of the metropole.
But survive they did. The Pier Street mosque suffered further threats as it forlornly stood erect in the path of the proposed freeway. It survived its near death experience as the route was amended to skirt the mosque but St. Peter’s Church barely survived as it was vandalised to within an inch of its life.
Main picture: A wantonly vandalised St. Peter’s Church
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Today New Brighton is a sprawling township between the Papenkuils River to the Fishwater Flats. But it was not always so. It commenced its modern life as a modest fishing village of a Settler Party from Deal in England who had high aspirations.
For the purposes of this blog, Deal Party and New Brighton have been combined as their histories are inextricably linked together. However this blog only covers the period 1820 to 1902 with a separate blog covering the period when it was converted into a Location.
Main picture: As there are no extant pictures of this era, I have included some related pictures instead. Photograph of a whale being cut up on North End beach. Supplied by Carol Victor of the NMBMPL.
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The meeting of the Khoikhoi – locally known as the Hottentots – and the white settlers in 1820 occurred on the day of their arrival as they were used to carry the settlers on their shoulders from their surfboats to the shore. How communication was possible is unknown but for good measure the Dutch farmers who were contracted to transport the settlers to Albany spoke neither Khoi nor English. Given the fact that the settlers arrived at the destination confirms that communication did occur, all be it, by means of gestures.
Of greater importance was the concept of housing. Simply put where did the Khoi stay? Being a nomadic people, the Khoikhoi would not have settled in one place but relocated as soon as the resources such as reeds or other resources were depleted in an area.
What has the discussion about housing have to do with a plague?
It will be made abundantly clear in a moment.
Main picture: The top of Hyman’s Kloof with Strangers’ Location in the background
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In unravelling the history of Port Elizabeth, very little is revealed about the history of black inhabitants of the area, with most problematic being that of the origins of the amaMfengu. For this purpose, it is assumed that the amaMfengu were those who had broken their allegiance with the amaXhosa chiefly families and decided to enter the Cape Colony and accept the laws and governance of the colonists.
Main picture: Beach labourers loading a surfboat with wool bales for onward transport to a ship at anchor in the roadstead
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Thomas Handfield arrived at Port Elizabeth as a 22-year-old settler from Ulcomb, Kent as part of Richard Daniell’s party. He later acquired land in the Baaken’s Valley on what is today Settler’s Park. In 1898 when the property was for sale, it was stated that the first colonial woolwashery had been located on this estate.
Main picture: Handfield’s Valley looking towards the sea
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