Indelible memories still stamped in the minds of kortbroekies of yesteryear
IN 1951, I was a real kortbroek when I first saw the Union-Castle mail ship Capetown Castle.
To meet my grandparents who were arriving from Durban in the liner, we made an early start from Mowbray in our old Lincoln car that was a bit of a mechanical wreck, having never recovered from someone forgetting to put the bung back in the oil sump after a service!
The Lincoln smoked its way to the harbour, we parked behind the cargo shed at A Berth and, as was the custom in those leisurely days, we walked to the wharf.
The ship was alongside, the heavy, wooden gangway was already in place, and eventually, my moustached grandpa Fred – in his Sunday best and wearing a hat – and the quaintly attired petite figure of granny appeared at the top of the gangway.
Long before Union-Castle ordered the liner, a letter had appeared in the Cape Times lamenting that no Union-Castle vessel carried a South African name. “…It would a graceful recognition of the country that has poured so many millions of sovereigns into the coffers of the UnionCastle Company,” wrote a Mossel Bay resident under the nom de plume Old Voyager, “if they named their first mailboat (sic) Capetown Castle…” The writer pointed to the close affinity between Union-Castle and Cape Town, compared to Welsh or Scottish villages with a castle on their doorsteps.
Perhaps Union-Castle management read that letter, for, in 1937, they named their largest pre-war ship after Cape Town’s castle, and she was followed by two intermediate liners, Durban Castle and Pretoria Castle, named after cities without castles. The South African names were not received well in Britain, where another letter appeared in a journal, pointing out that UnionCastle ships derived their names from ancient British castles, “…not from forts of colonial Africa”.
Undeterred, Union-Castle took the city’s mayor and mayoress to Belfast to perform Capetown Castle’s launching ceremony, and folks attending a special luncheon in Cape Town’s City Hall listened intently to a live radio broadcast of the Belfast ceremony.
Many regarded the mail ship as having the most beautiful lines of any liner, and for a while she was the largest motorship, longer than Cunard-White Star’s Britannic and Shaw Savill’s Dominion Monarch.
During her maiden voyage to Cape Town in April 1938, “talkie-movies” were shown for the first time aboard a vessel on the South African trade, and, can you believe it dear reader, two projectors were used to avoid breaks while reels were changed!
When war broke out in September 1939, Capetown Castle was in Port Elizabeth, preparing to sail for East London and Durban. Her speed allowed her to continue on the mail service until February 1940 when she was requisitioned for trooping duties. Despite four bombs narrowly missing her and the attacking aircraft raking her decks with gunfire while she was off Northern Ireland in October 1940, the liner survived and returned to the mail service in January 1947.
In 1960 off balmy Las Palmas where the Union-Castle mail ships used to bunker, the north-bound Capetown Castle had stopped to embark the pilot, and her passengers watched as he boarded. When her master, Captain Bill Byles, ordered dead slow ahead for his ship to get under way again, a blast swept the engine room starting platform. Six engineers were killed and others were badly burnt.
She was repaired and resumed service for five years. A short spell as an “extra liner” preceded her final sailing from Cape Town 50 years ago. Her career spanning three decades had ended.
Sadly, grandparents do not come by sea anymore, and today’s kortbroekies will not have those golden dockland memories.