Touring Paradise, St George’s Street — ‘memory mile’ of a Naval Town part 2 October 15, 2008
Posted by dodo in : Map, Museum, Rail Pass, Sightseeing, South Africa, Tickets, Tour, Trails, Travel Clinic, Trip , trackbackFrom Jubilee Square to ‘Black Town‘ Jubilee Square, on the left, commemorates King George V’s Silver Jubilee in 1935. By coincidence, the drinking fountain in the square commemorates an earlier jubilee — that of Queen Victoria in 1897. It was moved here recently from its original position near The Residency. A statue of Able Seaman Just Nuisance was unveiled nearby in 1985.
About 50m beyond Jubilee Square you will see Alfred Lane to your right. A short way along the lane you can glimpse a mosque, originally a private house, in which religious services were first held in 1888.
On your right, after passing Alfred Lane, you will see Bayview House which once served as a tavern and lodging house for sailors. A former resident of the house papered some of the walls with postage stamps, including rare Cape of Good Hope triangulars. A little further on, behind the stone wall on the right, is the Old Hospital Terrace, built in 1812-1813. Used as a hospital until 1915, it is now a naval residence.
On the left side of the road, after crossing King George’s Way, you come to the imposing Phoenix Hall. Dated 1860, its street gable features a phoenix rising from the flames, and the Masonic emblem. You are now entering ‘Black Town‘, as this part of the town was known over a century ago. It was here that blacks, freed from slavers by the Royal Navy, awaited resettlement.
Die Stem van Suid-Afrika
Cross Church Street to the Dutch Reformed Church (1856) and the adjacent parsonage, built in 1899 and known as the Stempastorie (now the Museum for National Symbols), where the Rev M L de Villiers composed the music for Langenhoven’s ‘Die Stem van Suid-Afrika’. De Villiers was born in Paarl in 1885 andstudied at the Theological College, Stellenbosch, moving to Simon’s Town in 1918, where he stayed until his retirement in 1930. Langenhoven rejected De Villiers‘ first melody in 1919, but accepted a second melody in 1922; and when the new South African flag was raised for the first time on 21 May 1928, De Villiers conducted a performance of his own composition.
In the Stempastorie the sitting room has been arranged as in De Villiers‘ day, including the piano on which Die Stem was first played. Upstairs, the study where he composed the music has also been preserved. Also of interest are the flag room, with examples of all the flags that have flown over South Africa, and the heraldry room, where the country’s various coats of arms are displayed. The flag room has a collection of some 200 designs, some of them bizarre in the extreme, submitted during the competition to find a new flag.
Walking on a short distance from the Dutch Reformed Church, you will see the Catholic Church of Simon and Jude on your right, a handsome stone building with adjoining presbytery dating from 1855. The bell, dated 1871, was cast in the dockyard, complete with silver coins thrown into the molten metal to sweeten the bell’s tone. The large St Joseph’s Convent, adjoining the church, is now a boarding house.
Victory today at Trafalgar
Pass the East Dockyard Gate on your left, and after walking a short distance further, turn left into Martello Road to reach the historic Martello
Tower— which houses weapons, a newspaper of 1805 reporting the British victory at Trafalgar, and a large collection of South African naval uniforms and bells from South African ships. Exhibits in the grounds include a buoyant mine, a torpedo, and an old ship-board fire-fighting unit. The tower itself was built during the Napoleonic Wars to protect the town and harbour from a feared French landing.
Return to St George’s Street and cross to the old cemeteries. Among the graves is a monument to the men of HMS Nerbudda, which put out from Port Elizabeth in 1855 and was never seen again. An enormous stone near the St George’s Street boundary commemorates Adriaan de Nys, ‘onder Coopman en Hooft van de Baay Fals’, the Dutch East India Company’s ‘postholder’ at Simon’s Bay who died in 1761.
To return to your starting point, walk back along St George’s Street, stopping for a longer look at anything that caught your interest
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