|
 Bunny Ball later married Frederick William, Daniel Mills’ oldest son,
and continued the tradition of spending their summers at Camps Bay.
The Millses would summer in Camps Bay, leaving the property in
charge of a German caretaker, Clem Goslett, who stayed there all year
round in a little cottage on the property. Clemmy “was a crafty character
because he claimed the cottage and some surrounding land by
prescription after thirty years or whatever it was, but he was a year too
early, so the family caught him out and made him pay a shilling a year
after that.”111 (An inscription on a photograph dated 20 January 1896
confirms this story but attributes the claim not to “Old Clem Goslett who
was caretaker of the Mills property where the house was” but to
“Sacristan, who kept geese and was caretaker of the rest of the property,”
and “paid no rent... and was going to claim the right to the house and
piece of land... The Mills family fortunately remembered in time.”112
Sacristan is possibly ‘Mr Secretan’ the wine dealer who lived in Camps Bay
in 1899.)
 Progress in the form of better transportation started to creep nearer. In
the 1870s and ‘80s Spyker’s Passenger Cart had carried passengers from
Sea Point to Camps Bay, the driver sounding a bugle as he turned each
corner on its bone rattling journey. (In 1866 J B Spyker, an accountant for
the roads department, had moved into a cottage in the Retreat where he
lived till1878. Apart from initiating a passenger service, he also started
church services in his home at which his daughter played the harmonium.
She was friendly with the Mills’ children and had joined them on their
nerve wracking outing to Robben Island.)
By 1883 Kloof Road had been improved, and a good road around the
mountain from Sea Point to Camps Bay had been planned. Thomas Bain113
was appointed engineer-in-charge of the new road which was to run along
the coast skirting the rock strewn beaches. The Government agreed to
provide convict labour on condition that the Cape Divisional Council
made £1 500 available for the construction.
Camps Bay
Bain moved into Clifton House for the four years that it would take to
turn the boulder-strewn mountain slopes into the beautiful scenic drive
we enjoy today. He started in 1884 near the Round House with the
construction of a bank across the Camps Bay stream with strong culverts
and retaining walls and a road to join Kloof Road near Clifton. The new
coastal road was to meet this road. It was intended that the Green Point
Tramway Co would run a tramway to Camps Bay along this road worked
not by horses but by the new-fangled steam engines. The tramway did not
materialize but attempts were made to send a ‘vehicle’ from Sea Point to
Camps Bay four times daily, the trip lasting 25 minutes each way, but so
few people made use of this service that it was soon abandoned.114
The road progressed slowly - not surprisingly the convicts did not
tackle their work with much enthusiasm, and forty of them were
considered dangerous criminals who had been removed from their
previous job on the Table Bay breakwater for mutinous conduct. Rough
huts were erected above the road for them to live in. Bain treated the
convicts well, learned their names and tried to make them feel that their
work was important.
“By mid-1886 the road from Sea Point to Camps Bay was sufficiently
complete for it to be opened to the public on Saturday afternoons and
Sundays and it became the fashion for young ladies and gentlemen from
Cape Town to cycle out to Camps Bay and back for a jaunt.” 115
By 1887 the coastal road with a toll-house where it joined the Kloof
Road had been opened to traffic. Completed in 1888, 51 years after Queen
Victoria’s Coronation, it was named Victoria Road.
Even the Mills family learnt how to cycle. Frederick Mills116 wrote to his
son complaining that his stay at Camps Bay was being inconvenienced by
transport problems:
No part of this
publication may be reproduced without the prior written consent
of both the publisher and Holiday Rentals in Cape Town
|
