From the Golden Cage to ‘steak, egg and strips’
THE OLD picture this week is of Durban’s Killarney Hotel, on the corner of Monty Naicker (Pine) and Sylvester Ntuli (Brickhill) roads.
It comes from our archives and was published on August 24, 1989. The caption read: “The arrow on the right shows the window which Clint da Silva fell from.”
The 11-year-old Krugersdorp schoolboy had fallen four floors to his death while playing a game of blind man’s bluff the previous evening. Da Silva was one of 41 schoolchildren and eight teachers who came to Durban for the Berea Rovers hockey tournament.
“He and his friends were in high spirits when he fell through the window,” it reads. He died instantly.
In the background of the old picture you can also see the famed photographic shop Wysalls.
The building was designed by architect Geoffrey Eustace le Sueur and was built in 1939. It was originally built as flats, with Durban’s architectural digest noting it was converted to a hotel in 1960.
However, a 1958 booklet advertising the hotels of Durban lists the Killarney, and boasts that with 300 rooms, it was the largest hotel in Africa.
Its telephone number was 27181, and it was picked out as offering three great assets – exceptional value for money, exceptional service for price, and close proximity to the beaches.
All rooms had bathrooms, telephone and radio, and it was noted that the “table” was excellent. It also boasted a cocktail bar that “gave a nice feeling of expansiveness”.
It was owned by Roye Palmer, who was described as “a kind and good host”.
The daily all-inclusive rate was 23 shillings and sixpence.
An earlier advertisement for the Killarney boasts that “Durban’s newest and up-to-date fully furnished flats and rooms” came complete with “crockery, cutlery, linen etc”. The hotel was two minutes from the beach and close to theatres and the centre of the city.
It was managed by letting agents LA Fletcher & Co of Smith Street.
Local historian Gerald Buttigieg, writing in Facts About Durban, remembers the hotel as a favourite with the “Transvaalers” who descended on Durban during holiday seasons.
“Here come the Vaalies,” he writes. “I well remember my cousins ,who lived in the far western Transvaal, would travel down to Durban during July holidays and, more often than not, stayed at the Killarney Hotel. It was a done thing to meet up with them and spend time together going around Durban. The Killarney was very popular, and its lobby used to be like a railway station.”
But it wasn’t the excellence of its rooms, or its reasonable accommodations that made the hotel famous, but more its roaring nightlife, that expansive cocktail bar always being a feature.
Buttigieg finds reference in a 1958 telephone directory to an establishment called the Golden Cage at the Killarney.
In the ’60s it may have morphed into a nightclub called El Paso, or the Zanzibar Room, and by the time the disco era of the ’70s hit, it was Travolta’s.
David Baird, in an article, Watering Holes of My Youth, remembers it.
“Travolta’s opened and closed more often than a 50c hooker on a Friday night, and had many, many names and incarnations. It had a glass dance floor and did all that disco stuff, in spades. It was also the venue for the first lunch-time strip shows in Durban, with dancers gyrating in thongs and their decency kept intact by stick-on nipple caps.”
Allan Jackson, also on Facts about Durban, remembers the thumping music. “Conversation and, therefore, picking up girls was difficult due to the volume of the music played.”
In the ’80s, the bar, Monk’s Inn, and the disco – now known as Club Med – continued the party with “steak, egg and strips” on the menu at Monks most lunchtimes, while Thursday nights saw Miss Lucky Legs featured at the Med. Sunday nights were comedy nights, with Colin D the resident stand-up comic.
It would seem happy hours were staggered, so the crowd moved from Monks to the Med seamlessly.
On the Facebook page Durban Down Memory Lane, Craig Eyles remembers the vibe. “Ahh, the old Kill a Larney: Tenderised steak bludgeoned beyond recognition, eggs (apparently), ice-cold watered-down lager, heavy hangers in tassels, gagging clouds of Chesterfield and testosterone. The perfect student Friday.”
In 2019, the hotel was turned into student accommodation, as our photographer Shelley Kjonstad’s modern picture shows.
The entrance to Monks Inn used to be on the corner, and today looks like it houses a corner café.