Then & Now: Parker Wood Building
PARKER Wood & Co Limited at 208-210 West Street was once a wellknown business in Durban.
Founded in 1860 by David Peebles Wood and Archibald Parker, it was incorporated as a Limited Liability Company in 1890. The capital was £800 000.
Parker Wood grew into general merchants on a grand scale with branches in Johannesburg, Harrismith, Pietermaritzburg and some surprising towns like Vrede, Frankfort, Lake Chrissie, Barberton, Carolina and Breyten.
They were stockists of everything from building and fencing materials to ironmongery, wagon covers, agricultural machinery and carpets.
The first undated photo shows their new premises (on the left) in
West Street taken from Aliwal Street. The photo is probably from the 1880s.
The second photo, taken in 1924, shows the greatly enlarged premises.
The original West Street frontage has been lengthened, with the addition of a new Aliwal Street frontage. They also had Rough Goods Store at Maydon Wharf. Their Durban staff numbered about 100.
The company name disappeared in Durban in the early 1930s, possibly as a result of a merger or a victim of the Great Depression.
By 1935, their premises had been altered for a car dealership, auctioneers and Henwoods Showrooms. During World War
II, the Navy, Army and Air Force Institute had one of their branches in part of the building.
Today, the “BP Building” occupies not only Parker Wood’s site but also the neighbouring buildings through to Pine Street, as seen in the December 2020 photograph.
Over the years, Parker Wood had some well-known directors, including members of the Campbell family.
In 1906, Archibald Mitchell Campbell was not only the managing director, but also a member of the Legislative Council of the Natal Parliament.
After Hugh Parker retired from Parker Wood in 1889, he became a director of various companies, including the Salisbury Gold Mining Co, a foundation committee member of Girls’ Collegiate School and a Pietermaritzburg city councillor.
He also found time to act as president of the YMCA in the early 1900s.
KLOOF classic car collector John Booth was working on the leather of the seat of an old Rover, that was once nearly turned into a Greased Lightning car, when he heard a “ping”.
“And there was this coin,” he said. It was an old and unusual penny that had dropped. The penny, minted in the 1950s and with a hole in the centre, was from the one-time Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland (now Zimbabwe, Zambia and Malawi).
Booth had always smelt a strong tobacco smell around the steering wheel, he said.
“Maybe it once belonged to a tobacco farmer up there,” he said.
People have shared their memories of such coins.
“One person commented on how, growing up in Zimbabwe they joked that the coin should have had a rabbit on it but you could never see it because it had slipped down the hole! Another recalled collecting 12 such pennies and linking them through their holes on a string, to make up a shilling’s worth” (12 pence made a shilling).
Booth now plans to reshape the coin in his lathe to fit it on to the gear knob of the 1948 Rover 12.
“If you look at the condition of the coin, it probably fell into the seat not long after it had been minted. It's not worn.”
Booth was given the vehicle by someone in Howick whose son had removed parts of it, including the roof, to make a Greased Lightning open-top, saloon car. “The body had fallen apart,
but the engine was still running. The guy said I could have it.”
Booth said he was modifying it as a roadster, “because it came out as a roadster, not a saloon”. It will join his collection of another Rover – a P400 – a 1935 Mercedes and a 1973 Ford Escort Mark 1 with two doors.