You may have noticed a quaint stone wall with two decrepit wooden gates on Louis Botha Avenue between Acorn Lane and Death Bend. Or perhaps the row of magnificent plane trees just behind the wall caught your attention as you navigated this most notorious of Joburg roads. If you were brought to a stop in traffic, you may have even looked beyond the wall and the trees and seen an imposing double storey property in the distance, and wondered how it came to be built here.
Louis Botha Avenue entrance and stone wall (Brett McDougall)
This large property, consisting of ten Houghton erven (or part thereof), was consolidated by Mrs FM Bagley between 1922 and 1925, with the main dwelling being built during this time on erf 906.
No details of the original owner, Mrs Bagley, have been found, but the name appears against a number of Houghton properties in the valuation rolls of the 1920s and 30s, so it is possible that Bagley was a property speculator. The property was purchased by Mrs A Block in the late 1920s. Ann Block was born Ann Hillman, and she married Isidore Jack Block in 1924. The dashingly handsome Isidore Block was born in 1893, and educated at St John’s College, Houghton...
