In the piece below, Miss E Dankwerts provides a short description St Michael and All Angels in Queenstown. The details appeared in the 1978 edition of Restorica, the journal of the Simon van der Stel Foundation (today the Heritage Association of South Africa). Thank you to the University of Pretoria (copyright holders) for giving us permission to publish.
It has been said that the history of St Michael and All Angels' is the history of Queenstown itself, and indeed there is good deal of truth in the statement. Queenstown was founded in 1853 by Sir George Cathcart, Governor of the then Cape Colony, from 1852 to 1854. One of his first acts was to grant a slte of two acres to the "English Church" of that day. Two years later, in 1855, the first English Church was erected. It had a thatched roof (replaced with iron in 1901), narrow Gothic windows which still exist, and "the first stained glass window in these parts".
A more recent photo of St Michael and All Angels Anglican Church (Wikicommons)
Very soon it became obvious that a much larger church was necessary, and the foundation stone of the present church was laid in 1882 by Thomas Scanlen, Premier of the Cape Colony. The architect was W H Read of Cape Town. When this happened, the first church - in a way...
