Norman Smith, the son of Harold Bayldon Smith, a well-known local architect and surveyor, recalls the houses in which he lived. In this blog he describes living in No. 22 Bird Street. In doing so, he provides us with a peep into what life in Port Elizabeth was like in that era.
Main picture: No 22 Bird Street
The father of Norman was Harold Bayldon Smith, an architect and land surveyor. When H.B. purchased the plot at No. 22 Bird Street in the early years of the 20th century his friends and colleagues teased him and doubted whether he could build an adequate house on so tiny a piece of land.

Undaunted, he got to work and in due time a very comfortable and commodious double-storied dwelling, complete with garage, graced this corner site at the lower end of Cora Terrace.
There was a third level, giving access to a miniature attic which was known as the box room. Inevitably all sorts of objects not required but with which it was quite impossible to part gravitated there to join the suitcases and cabin trunks for which it was originally intended.
One such treasure was a stuffed baby-elephant’s head. The box room was also a handy “gaol” for temporarily incarcerating naughty children ‘and I well remember the scary sight of those two eyes in the dim interior glowing with the reflected light from the open door.

A short distance up Bird Street was the Museum which housed among other things a magnificent collection of Japanese armour, inhabited by very life-like and threatening full-sized models of Japanese soldiers. These also scared me [I must have been a very nervous child!] However, a matter that concerned my father much more was the proposal by the Curator of the Museum, the excellent Mr. FitzSimons, to build a “snake park” to aid with his researches into sera for the treatment of snake-bites.

My father’s concern was the possibility of poisonous snakes escaping from captivity to the endangering of the public [and particularly of his two small boys],he therefore got up a petition for the residents of Bird Street to protest against the project. He met with little success. In due course he was vindicated because vendors of snakes caught in the wild occasionally arrived after closing time at the Snake Park. When this happened, it is quite understandable that they emptied their bags into the street rather than take the reptiles home with them.
Inevitably one such scaly refugee found its way into the garden of No 22. It was duly despatched, and my father carried the corpse down to the office of the Magistrate. He placed it on the great man’s desk, pointing out that this was the very circumstance against which he had been campaigning. The Magistrate regarded it and then said, somewhat unsympathetically, “And what do you want me to do about it, Mr. Smith? Arrest it?”.
Prince Arthur of Connaught visited Port Elizabeth in the ’20’s and, with his retinue, walked along Bird Street en route presumably to the Port Elizabeth Club. Naturally the entire Smith family [including the maid and the gardener] gathered to lean over the garden wall to watch this unusual and exciting spectacle. My brother Matthew chirpily sang out “Hullo Prince Arthur” and received the friendly rejoinder “Hullo my little man”. Which made our mother’s day!

We left No 22 in late 1924. Matthew had developed asthma and our Doctor Wilson had recommended that we move out “into the country”! My father had a plot in Mill Park which, it was felt, would be suitable! And so he built another house
Source
Houses I have lived in by Norman Smith [Supplied by Gillian Russell-Johansen]