Craighall

In 1943 my parents, Kurt and Lorna Hepner, then living in Parktown North, bought a 3 acre stand in Bryanston. The one they chose sloped gently northwards from Mandeville Road and afforded uninterrupted views of the Magaliesberg. It also had the bonus of a well, stream and large pond which teemed with birdlife such as red and yellow bishop birds nesting in the reeds and terrapins and moorhens on the water.

Unfortunately, the estate agent (brother of the well known Anglo American director Sidney Spiro) mistook the stand number and my parents found they’d bought stand number 511 instead of 512. They’d earlier purchased another stand on the other side of Bryanston, and luckily managed to do an exchange.

Steffen Ahrends was commissioned to design their house on Stand 512. My father disliked corridors, so rather than a long passageway with bedrooms opening off it, the house was much more of a square shape. It was positioned in the top eastern corner of the property so that the view down the slope was given maximum effect.

Steffen Ahrends drawing for Ponden House 1943

The roof was thatched and the upper storey displayed typical Ahrends dormer windows. The chimneys were covered with Ahrends’ wavy iron cowlings, also one...

When Johannesburg’s august Mayor, Harry Graumann (later Sir Harry), welcomed the Duke and Duchess of Connaught on 28 November 1910 he presented the Royal couple – who had come to South Africa to open the first Union Parliament – with a lavish commemorative book. This described the Town Engineer’s duties in terms of roads, parks, gas, electricity provision and other grand projects, but there was not a word about sewage, such were the Edwardian sensitivities to this delicate subject. Yet the disposal of human waste has determined the size and success of cities for millennia. Delta Park owes its existence to the expansion of Johannesburg’s sewage scheme during the 1930s when rural farmland on the outskirts of the city was transformed into the Delta Sewage Disposal Works.

Johannesburg is situated on the Witwatersrand watershed and rivers flow either to the south (into the Klip River, thence into the Vaal River, and eventually into the Atlantic Ocean) or to the north (feeding into the Crocodile River, the Limpopo River and disemboguing into the Indian Ocean). The city is somewhat unusual in always having separated waste-water (including sewage) from storm-water. Until a Town Engineer’s Department was established in 1902 after the South African War, sewage was collected in tarred buckets and removed beyond the town’s boundaries by horse-drawn night-soil carts to be used as fertilizer on neighbouring farms. Naturally, disease was a regular hazard.
             
Between 1902 and 1910 a very large gravity-fed sewage scheme (at...

As a callow teenager, Joseph Kirkman left an indelible mark on the annals of early Natal history. He is remembered for his efforts in assisting the American missionaries to establish a bridgehead in Zululand and his subsequent heroic exploits in assisting the evacuation of those missionaries following the turbulence consequent on the Retief massacre. He will also be remembered for having the expedient foresight to commit his observations of those calamitous happenings to paper, which provided unique insights and enabled historians to interpret some of the causes and consequences of those events more precisely. Regrettably, his records disappeared before qualified historians could carry out adequate studies.

Joseph was a scion of the 1820 Settlers. The young twin sons of 1820 Settler John Kirkman, John and Joseph, were orphaned in the early months of the 6th Frontier War. Their father and stepmother succumbed to the rigours of escaping the sacking of the Rev John Brownlee’s Mission station on the Buffalo River (the site of present-day King Williamstown), where they had taken refuge. With the missionary’s party, they experienced a harrowing flight to Graham’s Town, fraught with protracted terror and hardship.

Shortly after these tragic events, three young children of the folk involved were placed in the employ of parties of American missionaries who were destined for the hinterland and for Port Natal. These missionaries had been sent to South Africa by the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, of Boston, Massachusetts, as a result of advice sent to the Board by Dr...

Craighall is a popular, and some would argue trendy, suburb to the north of Johannesburg. It is hard to imagine that it was once the scene of dusty roads, dairies and a famous lake and hotel. In 1987 Sheila Timmermans compiled a short history of Craighall (and Craighall Park) which was published in the Johannesburg Historical Foundation's Journal Between the Chains. The article contains some fascinating insights into the forgotten spaces and places of the suburb. 

Craighall Park in the year 1919, whilst only 10 kilometres from Johannesburg’s centre was a good day’s journey from town, by horse and cart, which was then a common form of transport. They often got bogged down in sandy and deeply rutted roads, which in many cases were private tracks belonging to farms and smallholdings. As each farm was reached, gates had to be opened and closed, causing more delays on the journey. Some of these gates were around Dunkeld, and even today a good example of the old private properties is to be found nearby in Craighall Park where one road changes its name three times. At one time there were gates between Norfolk and Cambridge Avenues, and another one separated Cambridge Avenue from Grosvenor Avenue. New visitors to the suburb frequently got lost because of these changed names.

The origins of Craighall’s street names are rather vague. It is assumed that Talbragar has Australian connections, Waterfall is called after the nearby waterfall, and Alexandra, after the wife of Kind Edward VII, Queen Alexandra...