Ravenscroft Photographs

This photograph has been in my wife’s Goles family since it was taken by Ravenscroft in about 1919 (click here to read more about Ravenscroft). Standing in the doorway of the Olympia Café is my wife’s Greek grandfather Athos (Arthur) Goles – who owned and ran it from the day it opened. To the right is the Olympia Picture Palace the then new bioscope that, as can be seen, is advertising the film The Vigilantes released in the USA in 1918.

The photograph was only recently identified as a Ravenscroft when the badly foxed and damaged board it is mounted on was carefully examined and his signature in pencil was found.

The signature

Harbour Mansions was built by the then owners, the Lazarus brothers in 1918 to the drawings of architect Leon Norman.

Harbour Mansions plan. Drawings by Leon Norman 1918 (Western Cape Archives)

For its time and place it was a very big development and the building now known as the Olympia Building, remains a landmark opposite Kalk Bay harbour to this day.

At the other end of the ground floor was E...

Following my earlier post on T D Ravenscroft (click here to view), I have delved a little further into a couple of online archives and printed bibliographic records.

There is a most comprehensive entry for T D Ravenscroft in Vol 3, page 702 of the Dictionary of South African Bibliography  (HSRC, 1977). This entry, by M Bull records Ravenscrofts’s dates precisely as 1/5/1851 to 24/3/1948. In brief, Ravenscroft in 1869 was a pupil of the photographer William Moore of Hout St Cape Town. He married Elizabeth Viljoen of the Robertson district in 1871 and within a few years had set out with his wife by oxwagon on a journey for Krugersdorp and the Victoria Falls with their two young children. The photographic interest is that this resulted in a record of some 3000 scenic photographic views and panoramic views. “He first captured a panoramic view of the place by photographing it from a high-lying position; he then took more detailed pictures of the buildings, farming operations, mountain passes and whatever else was of interest”.  (It would interesting to have a more precise time line for that clearly historic series).

The DNB records that it was in the late 1890s that Ravenscroft became “the unofficial agent of the Cape Government Railways when commissioned to photograph all towns, cities and places served by the CGR, and between 1890 and 1909 his pictorial history of railways and places was “unequalled in breadth and detail”. The 1977 glass negatives were bought from Ravenscroft by the South African...

I was recently given four photographs of early 20th century Cape Town. They are all in sepia brown shades. The dimensions are 8.5 x 11.30 inches. The edges of the photos are in poor condition but the main scenes are clearly visible. I would love to date these photographs.

They are clearly from the photographic studio of TP Ravenscroft and the one of Sea Point has a stamp on the reverse TD Ravenscroft. 

Sea Point (TD Ravenscroft)

Some internet research shows that the Ravenscroft family is interested in their genealogy and run a website www.ravenscroft.co.net. A great deal of information about TD Ravenscroft and the Ravenscroft family is accessible on this site. Crofts the popular Parkview coffee shop on Tyrone Avenue, Johannesburg belongs to Grant Ravenscroft. 

Thomas Daniel Ravenscroft was clearly an extraordinary man. He was an early photographer in the Cape. His dates were 1851 or 2 to 1948 which made him the "world's oldest working professional photographer" during his long life. In the latter part of his life  (from the 1920s or 1930s, he lived in Hermanus or as it was called then Hermanuspietersfontein and was well known as a photographer of the town and he also did a photographic study of Stanford. Many of Ravenscroft's photographs are to be found in the De Wets Huis Photo Museum in Hermanus. 

Based on internet...