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In 1827 George Thompson62 a successful Cape Town merchant
published his travels and adventures in Southern Africa which were ghost
written for him by Thomas Pringle.62 In his book he decided to give a
selection of examples of “the respectable class of houses in Cape Town” to
“afford a fair criterion of Cape architecture” including a view of his own
residence and house of business.63 Among the dwellings he chose to
illustrate with wood engravings was “a small marine villa at Camp’s Bay
occasionally occupied by his Excellency”64 based on a drawing by John F
Comfield,65 a teacher who arrived with the 1820 settlers and taught at the
English Grammar School in Cape Town. (Two lithographs of his pictures
were probably the first pictures ever printed in South Africa.)
The drawing shows the building with its outhouses. Thirty-three George III
pennies66probably from Somerset’s time were dug up some years ago in a
garden behind the Marine Hotel which was presumed to have been on the
site of one of these outhouses.
The ownership of the Round House is clearly associated in the public
eye with Lord Charles Somerset, yet when Campbell visited the Round
House in 1819, it was Horak, not Somerset, he visited. It was Horak, not
Somerset, who had been granted title in 1814 and it was the Round House
of Horak, not Somerset, that was sold in 1837. Somerset, who lived a
quarter of an hour’s ride away in Marine Villa would not have needed two
houses in Camps Bay. Horak, a shrewd merchant, would have regarded it
as expedient to satisfy the Governor’s request to use his house as a
shooting box and there must have been some arrangement between them
because in 1822 when Somerset was shooting buck and birdsfrom the Round House and William Jones was improving it, Horak was living at
Nooitgedacht. In 1827 after Somerset’s departure under a cloud for his
extravagances, Horak’s address once more became ‘Director of the Town
Shambles, Round House, Camps Bay.’
Somerset improved the shooting box. He enlarged the Round House to
its present size by adding an elevated curving verandah around the side of
the circular redoubt. These faced out on to the seaview with French
windows to close them. French windows and shady verandahs were the
latest fashion in the Regency England Somerset had just left and Jones
installed them in the Governor’s House in Camps Bay as well.68 This does
not sound as though Somerset had it tough when he was out shooting,
living rough. Camps Bay
 One writer fifty years ago imagined that “Sleeping in the shooting box
must have been similar to and less safe than spending a night in a rest
camp in the Kruger National Park with the roar of the lions to curdle one’s
blood.”69 She did not take Somerset’s tastes into consideration. Her
perspective might have changed had she realized that his little shooting
box with the lions prowling around contained a saloon, hall, three rooms,
kitchen, pantry plus three additional rooms below as well as slave lodges,
store room, stable, wagon house, cow house, garden house and other
outbuildings.
This was clearly Horak’s farm, not just a shooting box fifteen feet in
diameter with gun cupboards. Furthermore, as Somerset lived in
Newlands and had a Camps Bay summer house nearby that Jones had
altered for him with all the mod. cons. necessary, he could not have
needed so much accommodation just for camping out.
When Government House nearby was put up for sale by the cashstrapped
British Government in an effort to redeem some of the money
spent by Somerset, it was bought by the Attorney-General Anthony
Oliphant. Had the Round House belonged to Somerset it would have been put up for sale as well.
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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