A different view on current affairs & history
On Monday 13th March 1967, a Vickers Viscount 818, on a scheduled fight from Port Elizabeth to Johannesburg, via East London and Bloemfontein, crashed into the sea somewhere off Kayser’s Beach, near East London.
What train of events was the cause of this crash? Why did twenty passengers and five crew vanish without a trace?
Main picture: Vickers Viscount 818
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During the latter stages of the Boer War and the defeat of the conventional Boer forces, the fighting devolved into a guerrilla war with the open veldt and the scattered Boer farmhouses providing the logistics system. In order to sever this supply line, the farm houses were torched, and the animals slaughtered, in terms of the Scorched Earth policy, while the wives and children were placed in concentration camps. Without this sustenance, all the Boer forces apart from the bitter einders opted to surrender.
Main picture: Memorial at the North End Cemetery to those who died at Port Elizabeth’s Concentration Camp
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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
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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
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