Archive

In Part 5 of this series of articles on the early development of business in Hermanus, DR ROBIN LEE of the Hermanus History Society turns his attention to the large number of references to formal and informal gathering places for residents and visitors that his research has brought to light. […]

By the 1950s, business and domestic life in Hermanus co-existed side-by-side. Many of the town’s early settler families lived in traditional fishermen’s cottages on large erven that were used for keeping livestock and growing food, also for commercial purposes and to house employees. In Part 4 of this series of […]

In Part 2 of his comprehensive history on the early development of business in Hermanus, DR ROBIN LEE of the Hermanus History Society examined the important factors that allowed businesses to gain momentum in the late 1800s and early 1900s. This week, Part 3 focuses on the period 1915 – […]

In Part 1 of this article, we looked at the earliest moves towards developing businesses in Hermanus, and how they gained momentum in the late 1800s when original settler families, who had arrived as fishermen, entered the property market and bought sites. From the information available for the period 1895 […]

In addition to three books about our fascinating region – Annalize Mouton’s A Bend in the Road, on Tesselaarsdal, Robin Lee’s For Keeps, a collection of articles on the history of Hermanus, and a new illustrated souvenir of Hermanus, Just Hermanus, the culture of books, reading and writing seems to […]

In this article, which forms part of a comprehensive series on the chronological history of Hermanus, Dr ROBIN LEE of the Hermanus History Society focuses on the history and development of the town’s business sector. On 8 March 1978, the local newspaper (then known as The Times of Hermanus) published […]

Generally, the owners and managers of Hermanus hotels kept quiet, orderly establishments. Their guests were mainly middle- to upper-middle-class individuals and families, not given to riotous nights. But sometimes events beyond their control occurred and resulted in a story that would go round the village. Then, it might be passed […]

Hermanus New Harbour, part 2 We can see the second reason that the New Harbour never became the commercial success it could have been. It became the object of arbitrary decisions by the responsible government department that found itself suddenly responsible for “small harbours”. During its first 50 years of […]