Reflections at a personal waypoint
THIS week, I will extend the Biblical time frame for life by reaching three score years and seventeen! All those years ago, my dear mother missed the Royal Family during their 1947 visit as she was in a Durban maternity home delivering me.
When I was still a natbroek, our family migrated this way aboard Pretoria Castle in 1949. I can recall several snippets from that voyage, including the mailship’s call at Port Elizabeth. While she was anchored in Mossel Bay to load cargo and to embark a few passengers, I got a face-full of smoke from the coal-fired tug, probably William Messina that, for years, towed lighters and carried passengers to and from anchored ships.
I reflect on my happy kortbroek and langbroek days in Little Mowbray from which I have many maritime memories. Our smoky Austin 10 and later, a troublesome, tired Studebaker ferried us to the docks over weekends for us to enjoy tea and home-made
biscuits at A Berth, watching the occasional passing ship.
One Sunday, we saw Shaw Savill’s Southern Cross on her maiden voyage. Her unusual livery and her radical design with her engines and funnel aft drew much attention. That day, using my father’s Box-Brownie camera,
I took my first photograph of a ship – the tug TH Watermeyer – but when the chemist handed over the wad of eight photographs later in the week, I was distraught! Although I had captured the tug, I had cropped her bow and stern, and she was steaming downhill!
Later, still a kortbroek, I often travelled by train from Mowbray to town to board the maroon “docks bus” for a day of harbour wandering. Sometimes my Raleigh bicycle carried me to my second home. How I enjoyed watching the pageantry of the mailship’s prompt departure, boarding ships, riding on tugs, and eating vinegar-soaked slaptjips made by the Portuguese family who ran the Harbour Café at the time!
Filled with anecdotes, information and photographs and stimulating my maritime interest immensely was the daily column by Cape Times shipping editor George Young with whom I did the daily Dockland round in the summer school holidays and prepared the Harbour Log for his shipping page. What an adventure into shipping!
Several Little Mowbray folks were associated somehow with ships. Three people in our road worked in Union-Castle’s passenger department, while our neighbour was an executive in a forwarding and clearing agency. Across the road lived a senior figure in the Post Office’s foreign mail department at a time when most international mail was seaborne.
A near-neighbour had been on the tugs before taking his steam power
expertise to the Worcester powerstation.
Enticed by a chocolate, I accompanied my mother to the shops in Durban Road. A tug engineer’s wife ran the dry-cleaning depot. With others, the fish shop owner had immigrated from his native Madeira aboard the Portuguese liner Patria, and his shop sported an I&J calendar showing the company’s latest trawler. In the 1950s, I recall the George Irvin-class of trawlers featuring on the calendar.
The genteel Mr Harnekar had a small grocery shop where his relatives, Dawood and Ebrahim, assisted him. Despite apartheid’s regulations, those pleasant people provided a wonderful service to local residents.
One year, Ebrahim went to India to visit family, travelling – I think – from Durban in British India Line’s Karanja that, with her sistership Kampala, operated between the two countries.
In that grocery shop stood a huge hessian bag from which sugar was decanted into paper packets for customers. Days earlier, that sugar bag – with hundreds of others – had arrived from Durban in a Smith’s coaster.
I was the pack-donkey to lug the groceries home, past the well-frequented “horse fountain” that assuaged the thirst of many passing horses drawing carts and wagons.
Much has changed. Point-to-point ocean passenger services have ceased, taking with them those magnificent liners; containerised shipping has replaced interesting conventional
freighters and coasters, while custombuilt sophisticated bulkers have replaced the war-built trampships I once watched loading grain at Collier Jetty, or discharging timber or phosphates. Large tankers now move crude oil to Saldanha Bay.
Recent callers at the Cape illustrate other maritime changes. With her 4 000ton crane dominating Dockland’s skyline, the heavy lift vessel Aegir – used mainly for work on undersea installations – called last week for bunkers and stores, before heading for Singapore.
En route from Dubai to Europe, the gas carrier LNG Cross Rivers was in the anchorage for a crew change and stores, while dozens of other gas carriers and tankers pass this way – laden from the Arabian Gulf to Europe and in ballast on the return voyage. Their diversion via the Cape must raise European energy prices to dizzy heights.
On Monday, MSC Splendida – a floating block of flats – brought thousands to Cape Town and others embarked for her trip to Walvis Bay. Repositioning to Europe via the Cape rather than through Suez, the cruise ship Silver Whisper bunkered on Monday.
While this old codger has seen many remarkable and far-reaching changes, shipping remains the lifeblood of the local and global economy.