Property @ Bowring have had so much fun running their THEN & NOW Campaign. We’ve taken some of the entries, and found a few other memories to end off.

Our winner is without a doubt Andy Whittet who sent in the entry below. Northcliff Hill taken from the corner of 4th Avenue and 5th Street Linden.

“Linden was built during the war with low grade cement. As a kid we moved to 108 5th street Linden during 1955. I rode my size 24 bike everywhere and knew almost everyone. The original Rose Garden managers house was next door. Built by Emmarentia Mark. It had hand pump water well. In 6th street was Giskens dairy. Cows ate our roses."

Andy Whittet

NORTHCLIFF HILL

WELTEVREDENPARK, FAIRLAND, RANDPARK RIDGE

People have been living on Northcliff Hill for hundreds of thousands of years.

Remnants of the stone age man’s 3 settlements have been found there (dating back between 250 000 and 500 000 years).

300 years ago, the Iron Age farmers moved in with their Kraals.  An inspection of a 1933 photograph taken from the air showed a substantial number of stone-walled Iron Age sites on the hill.  These have been destroyed – some to make garden walls. 

The ridge could be destroyed by ill-considered property development – especially now that an application to have the hill and its archaeological sites declared national monuments has been turned down… the Heritage Portal

Weltevreden Park, or as it was formally known, Weltevreden Farmhouse, all began with the Smit and Badenhorst families. In 1860, the land belonged to the Badenhorst family.

Then, in 1872, Badenhorst decided to split the land up. He kept a piece for himself and divided the rest into two portions.  The land was sold to his brother, Hendrick Badenhorst and to Cornelis Johannes Smit in 1872.

Cornelis Johannes Smit bought the land, by paying for it with a wagon, a herd of oxen and 700 British pounds.  The farmland included Fairland and Randpark Ridge, continuing all the way to Allen’s Nek and Constantia Kloof.  Northcliff Melville Times 2016.

It was after the second Anglo-Boer war that parents of the Weltevreden area decided to build a school.

The first school began in 1903 with twenty pupils and clumsy, homemade desks below Madge Avenue. It soon burned down and they moved to a bigger house. The schooling was all in Hollands- in fact, Fairland School was the first school in the Transvaal where the teaching was done entirely in Hollands, not yet Afrikaans.

The Weltevreden School became the Fairland Government School in 1907. Today it is Laerskool Fairland.

R1 note – 1965 – 1978 and replaced with the R1 coin.  The ½ cent coin was discontinued in 1973

Ingrid Barker remembers the price of bread being 9c. Her mother sent her to the shop to buy bread with 18 ½ cent coins.  She lost one coin and the shop refused to sell her the bread.