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The Cape Town Directory for the year 1833 lists only two people living
in Camps Bay - J.A.Horak, of Camp’s Bay Road and A. Oliphant, Attorney
General, of Camp’s Bay.74 It was so uninhabited that Somerset’s
replacement, Major-General Richard Bourke, wrote to Lord Bathurst,
Secretary of State for War and the Colonies in London, in 1826,
recommending that Camps Bay be turned into a leper station as it
“contains few cultivated acres” and “being on the seashore and having but
one difficult approach” would do “extremely well” for the leper asylum.75
Three years earlier Dr James Barry as Colonial Medical Inspector had
campaigned to improve the conditions of the lepers, particularly the
treatment they received from the manager of the Leper Institution. She
drew up ‘Rules for the General Treatment of the Lepers’ stressing the basic
virtues of kindness, cleanliness and diet, giving some indication of her
criticism of the institute. This suggestion caused a great deal of alarm
among the residents of Cape Town who were not against leper asylums in
general but had strong misgivings if these were to be in their backyards.
However by 1826 Dr Barry had lost her position with much acrimony and
the new Colonial physician had different priorities. He felt that it was
dangerous to have diseased people so near to the town.
 Cape Colony was in the midst of a severe depression, and the revenues
had been considerably reduced. Lord Bathurst thought that the British
treasury stood to gain more if the property were sold and turned down the
leper project.77 Soon after that, the British Government took steps to make
money out of Camps Bay. For the first time they agreed to sell government
land and Major-General Bourke offered Lord Charles Somerset’s home in
Camps Bay for sale in July 1828. The property was subsequently bought
by the Hon. Anthony Oliphant whose son Laurence was born there in
1829.
In 1839 Oliphant moved to Ceylon to take up his appointment as Chief
Justice there but for a long time he retained his ownership of the property
which was let and became a boarding house called Camps Bay House.
His son Laurence Oliphant became British Charge d’Affaires in Japan,
and became famous as a Victorian Christian Zionist visionary who in
his book, The Land of Gilead, published in 1880, suggested that Israel be
colonized by Jews from Russia, Romania and Turkey. He spent his last
years in Haifa trying to promote such settlement.
Accommodation in Camps
Bay
Apart from the active social life centred on the Round House and
Government House, the rest of Camps Bay remained deserted and isolated
for the first quarter of the Nineteenth Century. Even its uncertain military
importance had gone. Under Major-General Richard Bourke, the strategic
value of Camps Bay and the other batteries were re-evaluated and as most
of the batteries had become obsolete by 1827 it was recommended that
these be dismantled with the exception of the “batteries and works at
Camps Bay Kloof” that were still listed on 1 July 1829 among the military
buildings that were transferred to the Ordnance Department, Cape of
Good Hope.
The Government land was granted to officers of H.M.Ordnance on 25
November 1844 and for many years the premises were occupied by the
officers and the Guard of a force of mounted troops stationed in Camps
Bay. There were still soldiers in Camps Bay in 1860, when Peter Hammes
was living at the dismantled battery, while Mr Fisher, the grandfather of
long time Camps Bay resident Sam Wentzel, was living in the old block
house as a lime burner. When the fort, which stood near where Kloof
Road joins Victoria Road today, was abandoned as a military installation,
people still continued to occupy the building. When the building became
too dilapidated for that, it was used as a cattle kraal until the walls
crumbled.79 Although still recorded on maps of 1876, the Camps Bay
battery subsequently disappeared, probably as a result of the construction
of Victoria Road in 1887, and the guns were lost in the sand and bush.
The battery was rediscovered quite by chance on 24 September 1962,
when Elias Matthee struck a heavy object with his bulldozer. He got off to
investigate and found two cannon and the remains of an old building - the
forgotten battery. The guns
are now mounted near the
Camps Bay High School.
No part of this
publication may be reproduced without the prior written consent
of both the publisher and Holiday Rentals in Cape Town
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