Changes in Salt River
wouldn’t get fired unless you do something wrong. I thought that here you won’t be laid off because this place is so solid. I never in my life dreamt that they would actually retrench,” she says.
The Shub family said it could no longer compete with cheap imports and needed to focus on Queenspark. The name Rex Trueform is still there on the building but its manufacturing operations, like many factories in Salt River, have been obliterated.
On June 14 2005, factory workers bade farewell to the company tearfully, filling up the streets outside the building one last time.
“I was just scared because all I could think was ‘Where do I go from here? I know nothing else’,” Lombard says.
In that same year, another development was to have a lasting effect on Salt River. The Old Biscuit Mill was bought and redeveloped to set the foundation for the upmarket Neighbourgoods Market. The old heritage mill would host business tenants, such as designers and architects, and be the site of a well-known Saturday urban market where the Cape’s cool kids could congregate over trendy foods.
For Lombard, the retrenchment was a gift in disguise: she had bought a house in Kitchener Street, Woodstock, soon after her husband died from pancreatic cancer in 1990. She bargained the owners down to R106 000.
Her bond was less than R1 000, and when she received her retrenchment package she was able to pay off what she still owed.
Lombard now works as a bursar for a primary school in Woodstock. She has witnessed the changes taking place in the community, and she has also seen how Rex has changed. She no longer believes Rex Trueform exists, saying that the company is now known as Queenspark.
But the company has kept its name for all these years, even as it made more pressing transformations to match the expectations of the times.
Bobbs says: “We never had so many black people in the company those years. But now the last couple of years back, they are employing black people. That is what they want now, you have to employ. You have to have. Which is good, because they also got to have some work.” The changes coursing through Salt River and Woodstock mimic the story of the Rex buildings themselves: one has been redeveloped, with a new Queenspark head office and an office park for tenants where the factory was; the other remains empty, a requiem to the families who have said their goodbyes. Its windows are broken and graffiti mark its walls. The entrances and exits have been locked up. No one is allowed in.
Golding knows the struggles of rising property prices and the demand for the Salt River/Woodstock node. Close to the inner city and a hit with a younger generation of urban wealth, the two suburbs are filled with opportunity.
But he also knows the older Woodstock that existed back in the day when people were still lawfully segregated. Golding lived in Greatmore Street when the suburb was racially split.
His history with Rex Trueform is also intimate. When he became an MP and attended the opening of Parliament in 1997, workers took the time to make the former unionist his first summer suit.
The architects of Rex Trueform created a building and a company that