The Casual Observer

Port Elizabeth of Yore: Airfields, Airports & Aerodromes

By Dean McCleland in Port Elizabeth of Yore 15 March 2018 7 Comments

During the age of biplanes, aerodromes, airfields and airports were intimate places where family and their friends could view the passengers boarding while standing beside the plane. Today their signature features are formality, impersonality and huge scale, the very antithesis of the personal touch. This impersonality is exacerbated by the hub-and-spoke approach of air flight today.

Without radar, navigational aids such as ILS or concrete runways, these aerodromes served these fragile midget planes.

Main picture: Avro Anson F1 1143 based at 42 Air School

Collegiate School: The War Years

By Dean McCleland in Port Elizabeth of Yore 12 March 2018 0 Comment

It was not only during the six long years of WW2 that the “routine and normal” had all but disappeared, but also thereafter, with its continuing shortages and years of hardship. What the war years did engender, was a sense of connectedness, solidarity and responsibility. It was this civic mindedness which drove the community to surmount these challenges.

How did those years, fraught with possible dangers, or loss of a brother, father or even uncle in the crucible of war up north, as it was euphemistically referred to, affect one school at the heart of the community in Port Elizabeth?

Main picture: Senior Collegiate Girls School, Bird Street, May 1924

Port Elizabeth of Yore: The Era of Coaches Draws to a Close

By Dean McCleland in Port Elizabeth of Yore 11 March 2018 4 Comments

Prior to the advent of the railways, long distance travel was arduous at best and tediously long to boot. Imagine being jolted for days on end on an ox-wagon. Every single depression, or stone protruding from the ground along the way, would be felt. Unlike Europe, the Romans had never constructed roads in South Africa. In the Cape Colony, bush tracks ultimately became the “roads” through usage and not by design.

After the age of the post cart came the coaches, an imported concept from the American Wild West.

Main picture: Geo. Alcock & Sons Coach Builders, Blacksmiths & Farriers, Korsten, Port Elizabeth

Port Elizabeth of Yore: The Introduction of Air Flight

By Dean McCleland in Port Elizabeth of Yore 9 March 2018 1 Comment

It can safely be presumed that the residents of Port Elizabeth were equally as fascinated at the concept of air flight as the rest of South Africa. As a testament to that allure was the great fanfare that Allister Miller’s flight from Cape Town in 1917 engendered.

This is the story of how fascination transmogrified into plans and then planes. This was an age of dreamers and schemers.

Main picture: Experimental air mail service between Cape Town and Durban

Port Elizabeth of Yore: Pearson Conservatory

By Dean McCleland in Port Elizabeth of Yore 8 March 2018 0 Comment

One of Port Elizabeth’s little-known gems is this feature in St George’s Park. Think of Kew Gardens Conservatory – but on a far smaller scale – and you will have an idea of what to expect from the Pearson Conservatory.

Main picture: Interior of the Pearson Conservatory

Collegiate Girls School: Relocation to Bird Street

By Dean McCleland in Opinion Pieces 5 March 2018 1 Comment

Central to the story of Collegiate Girls School was one of change, growth and progress. The school never emerged at its current shape, fully formed. Instead it was a process of renewal. To underscore this, was the first giant leap from a small school in a large house at No. 15 Western Road to bespoke buildings in Bird Street.

It will serve us well to reflect that what is now viewed as a bold audacious step might equally have been a misstep. That required perspicacity and foresight and not 20/20 hindsight.

Let us again join the school on its next profound step.

Main picture: The first Collegiate School in Bird Street surrounding by a white trellis fence in 1878

Rare Stromatolite and Symbiotic Metazoan along PE’s Littoral

By Dean McCleland in Port Elizabeth of Yore 3 March 2018 1 Comment

It would not be incorrect to state that as a youngster, exploring the foreshore of Schoenmakerskop, I treated the slimy green pools above the shoreline as little more than abominable, detestable and obnoxious. If they had miraculously disappeared before my next visit, I would have celebrated their demise.

Little did I comprehend the significance of these glutinous bright green preternatural pools. Somewhat implausibly, their appearance belies their significance. In part thanks to a documentary by the timeless David Attenborough, did I later learn about stromatolites, yet I made no connection between these sludgy pools and those cyanobacterial mounds that David, in his inimitable fashion, waded out at Hamelin Pool, Shark Bay, Australia, to view close-up.

Main picture: Stromatolites at Seaview, one of the sites where the new species of prawn like burrower was discovered

Collegiate School: Reminiscences of the First Pupils

By Dean McCleland in Port Elizabeth of Yore 3 March 2018 0 Comment

None of the early records have escaped the ravages of times. Fortunately for history, this bleak situation has been somewhat mitigated by the first pupils recalling the first years.

With the assistance of these reminiscences, one can obtain an intimate view of what it was like to be one of the initial batch of pupils 144 years ago in 1874.

In this blog, four founding pupils will share their experiences.

Main picture: Miss Virginia Lavinia Isitt, Headmistress from 1874 to 1886

Port Elizabeth of Yore: The Birth of the Collegiate School

By Dean McCleland in Port Elizabeth of Yore 1 March 2018 0 Comment

By the 1870s the stark fact was that the girls in Port Elizabeth were receiving a second-rate education at the various private seminaries with their untrained and unqualified teachers. With the demand for quality education glaringly obvious, the residents called into question the lack of a sound establishment under a competent and qualified staff of cultured ladies. The residents’ hopes were realised when on Friday 19^th September 1873, a notice appeared in the local newspaper announcing the establishment of a girls’ school.

This would culminate in the birth of the prestigious girls’ school: Collegiate. Like all such endeavours, it would not emerge fully formed as it development would proceed through numerous iterations.

Main picture: No. 15 Western Road with its white front wall and white bay window, the original Collegiate School (looking up Whitlock Street).

Inappropriate Renovations of Port Elizabeth’s Historical Buildings

By Dean McCleland in Port Elizabeth of Yore 23 February 2018 0 Comment

Many of Port Elizabeth’s historic gems such as the Custom’s House have already faced the demolisher’s wrecking ball yet the more compelling danger to Port Elizabeth’s magnificent architectural heritage, is not the building’s outright destruction, but rather inappropriate renovations which wrench these buildings from their historical and social taproots, transforming them into anodyne objects divorced from their past.

For me, the amber light of caution has ineluctably been switched to red as unscrupulous developers and renovators take no heed either of the original design of the structure or the materials used in its construct-ion. In such a callous manner is this irreplaceable heritage being flushed away, substituted by architecture shorn of its historical roots.

This is a plea – nay clarion call – not for vigilance but action to stem the tide of ahistorical renovations couched in terms of restoration. For not to do so, will forever doom this jewel to its gradual but ultimate destruction.

Main picture: Many sins of omission and commission were committed in the restoration of these terraced houses in Donkin Street