The first hints of summer are in the air, and maybe the fourth surge of Covid 19 will not materialise in December. If the weather holds and Covid stays away, thousands of tourists, holidaymakers and owners of family holiday homes will be travelling to destination Hermanus in December. Their travel may be short and by car, say from Cape Town, or longer, involving air travel, from Johannesburg, the UK or the USA. But, we have built the town, it is now open, and they will come!

Hermanus has always been a destination. The first European settlers travelled a few kilometres from Hawston in 1955, when it was known as Herries Bay. And visitors and settlers kept coming through the 19th and 20th centuries. So, in preparation, here are three accounts of travel to Hermanus.

The Gearing Family

The Gearing family came to South Africa in the mid 19th century and settled in Cape Town. The eldest son of the family, Sydney Gearing, qualified as an engineer and set up a prosperous iron and steel manufacturing company in the city. Its most famous product was the highly lucrative windpump, often incorrectly referred to as a windmill but used all over the country to pump underground water to the surface where it could be stored for agricultural and domestic use. Sydney invented and patented the fan-shaped tail portion that kept the sails of the windpump facing into the wind at all times and was sold to farmers and others throughout South Africa. He also invented the braking mechanism that shut down the pump’s blades in high winds and prevented damage to the entire mechanised.

For some years, Sydney was elected Mayor of Rondebosch, which was then a local government of its own separate from Cape Town. As an industrialist and Mayor, Sydney was undoubtedly friendly with William Hoy, who was not then knighted and worked at the Cape Government Railways. Hoy was involved in building new railway stations as rail links were created in the interior, and every station needed a windpump. Probably, Sydney first heard of Hermanus from William Hoy’s fishing trips to the little town. In the 1890s, the Gearings built a cottage in Marine Drive in Hermanus and called it the Anchorage. The cottage still stands on the corner opposite the new parking area at Gearing’s Point, named after the family. The Gearing family visited Hermanus every year, and this story of one of their trips relates to the year 1900. We know this, as Gearing had to get special permission from the military authorities in the middle of the Anglo-Boer War. The story appears in Arderne Tredgold’s book “Village of the Seas”:

(Sydney) Gearings daughter, Mrs O M Grant-Dalton, described the journey they made to Hermanus in 1900. Mrs Gearing had to make preparations for a family of eight. “That was a real undertaking for my mother. She had to think not only of clothes for a family of eight but also food – we took most of our groceries with us (the shops were primitive in Hermanus then) and a large tin of Australian butter that was supposed to last one month. How far off Hermanus seemed then, a trek of two whole days.

We left Rondebosch before eight o’clock in the morning and reached Sir Lowry’s Pass by train about 1 p.m.” This station was the terminus. There they all packed into a covered wagon with eight mules belonging to a Mr Erwee. Some of the passengers walked part of the way up the pass to help the mules. “We usually made camp at Grabouw on the grass by the Palmiet River for the night. We children slept under the wagon and the grown-ups inside the wagon tent. There was a canvas manger for the mules along the “disselboom”, and they were tethered there. We went to sleep to the sound of munching. In the middle of the night, I woke everyone up by shouting, ‘Mother, Mother, the mules are eating my hair!’ “

When the Bot River was too full to be crossed at the usual drift, travellers had to make a long detour which brought them round to a little shop on the Hermanus side of the drift. They outspanned for lunch between Afdak and Hawston, and the last part of the journey seemed very long until they reached Onrus and caught the first whiff of the famous sea air of Hermanus. They travelled on and “at last we rumbled down the Main Street of the little fishing village in the afternoon (of the second day), the wagon wheels bouncing over the rocks especially as we turned through the rickety gate and over the grass to arrive with a flourish in front of the cottage”. The cottage stood on the corner of Marine Drive and Harbour Road, across the way from the house under the cypress tree.

The house referred to in the final sentence was originally built by Louis (Swede) Wessels in 1860 as a boat repair and building business. Later it would become The Cypress Tea Gardens and today is the Burgundy Restaurant.