History inn the making

A heatwave had engulfed Tsitsikamma Village all day but late that afternoon, as if someone had clicked a switch, a gale erupted, bending trees nearly double, whooshing through a champagne draft of cool damp air and throwing up a space station of white cloud against the pitch black western horizon, just visible from the tranquil courtyard of the village inn.

We had talked history all afternoon, delving into the fascinating stories of the different people who developed the inn and how their endeavours intertwined with the evolution of the whole region.

So perhaps this was Nature sending us a reminder: It all depends on me. It all flows from me.

My story was on the inn but each of the folk I spoke to deserved a whole story of their own.

First there was Henry “Hennie” William Read, 86, whose naval architect great grandfather James Read and great grand uncle William Oliver Read in 1808 pursued a non-paying client from Cape Town up the southern Cape coast.

Having caught him and extracted their money they established a farm on the edge of Plettenburg Bay which eventually became Keurbooms.

In 1890, just up the coast, in the Storms River mouth area, Frank Mangold, son of pioneering Gqeberha engineer and businessman James Mangold, established a sawmill and, having married Anne Read, he brought in Anne’s cousin, Hennie’s grandfather Henry Benjamin Read, to manage the mill for him.    

As recorded by historian Dean McClelland in Gqeberha of Yore, a system of pullies was installed to lower logs from the mill on top of the cliff above the Storms River mouth, where the SANParks camp is now situated, down to lighters, which ferried them to the SS Clara, which conveyed them to PE.

 There the timber was used  for the construction of buildings, furniture, wagons and railway sleepers.

Mangold helped Read establish a home for himself in Storms River Village and to do so they built onto the old shooting lodge in the village left behind by Captain Henry Duthie, who had married George Rex’s daughter Caroline.

Rex was said to be the illicit son of King George II and his Quaker mistress Hannah Lightfoot and in the early 1800s he roamed the area shooting wild boar and pickling it in cold seawater.

The house that Henry Benjamin had built was sold to a man named Foster who acquired a liquor license and in 1946 he extended the building with the help of a master builder who had worked on the team that built Groote Schuur Hospital in Cape Town — and they created a hotel.

Hennie Read went from Tsitsikamma Primary School to high school in Springs on the East Rand and after matriculating he got the opportunity to study engineering.

He worked for Union Corp until 1986 and then established his own consultancy in Johannesburg and was subsequently contracted to design shafts and refineries for mines as far afield as Australia, Slovakia and Mongolia.

But he never lost touch with Tsitsikamma Village and today he lives in a house with a magnificent private library on a 6th generation Read property over the road from what is today Tsitsikamma Village Inn.

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In 1981, the hotel was taken over by Jan du Rand and his wife Ina, who added a swimming pool and started Saturday braais and a Storms River half-marathon.

Du Rand also initiated an Elvis Festival, which allowed him to showcase his love and knowledge of the music icon and his private collection of ’50s Cadillacs, and to start Marilyn’s ’60s Diner, which is still part of the inn today.

He went to hotel school in Switzerland, returned and added 16 Swiss-style chalets and then in 1994, he recounted, one of the old wooden hotel rooms burnt down.

“That triggered the construction of the much loved ‘village square’ for which the inn is still known today.

“Because of the fire I got hold of renowned architectural designer Martin Rattray, brother of the Zululand battlefields historian and tour guide David Rattray, who was murdered in 2007. Martin came up with the idea of the ‘village square’.

“We kept the chalets and conference room but added a series of different rooms around this expansive garden courtyard all in different styles including Cape Dutch, Victorian, Arniston and Edwardian.”

Married half a dozen times and as colourful a character as the historic inn he once owned and helped develop, Du Rand has a 1959 Chevrolet Impala in his garage and an abiding love for the Tsitsikamma, “where the bees never stop working”.

“One of my fondest memories as an innkeeper is lying in bed in the early morning and listening to the quiet of the village and then the buzz of the newspaper delivery van arriving which presaged a Herald sailing over my wall.”

Current Tsitsikamma Village Inn owner and general manager Chris Sykes was a weapons instructor in the navy in Simon’s Town but one day he decided enough was enough and he climbed on his beloved motorbike and headed up to the Northern Cape.

Having spent several years with Orange River canoeing operator Felix Unite, he and his new wife Irma de Villiers relocated to the Eastern Cape.

They were managing a backpacker lodge in Storms River when in 2010, he recalled, they got an offer they could not refuse.

“I had got to know Jan and he called me and said we should meet him at the Storms River Bridge Petroport. We did so and he told us he wanted to sell the inn — and he wanted us to buy it.”

Sykes said they had immediately wanted to take up the opportunity but being short of capital had roped in friends David and Wilma Pienaar  from Oudtshoorn who had helped them meet the shortfall together with Jan himself who had put in the final risk deposit required.

He said he and Irma soon realised they needed an attraction to tide them over through the quiet winter months.

“With that realisation in mind, being keen mountain bikers ourselves, we launched the Storms River Traverse, and that has been a great success.

“We’re hoping also to introduce a ‘forest festival’ which will celebrate the skills of the old woodcutters together with food and tourism products from the area.”

It’s common cause between Read and Du Rand that the inn has never been in better shape with De Villiers’s innovative marketing matched by Sykes’s energy, hands-on management and eye for an opportunity.

Having built his own aquaponics tunnel, he supplies the inn with most of the vegetables it needs, and he brews his own beer and makes his own cheese, using local herbs.

He said he also marketed a line of African coffees, in line with the inn’s ethos.

“We like doing it because their beans are hand-picked, which ensures similar ripeness and quality all the way through each bag, and because they’re the little guys, and they’re African.”

My sons and I used the inn as a base to do the last four nights of the Tsitsikamma Hiking Trail and I got up before dawn and sat on the veranda outside my room to check our logistics and my bulging rucksack.

The fountain in the pond opposite tinkled, I had a cup of coffee and the inn cat came to sit with me while I unpacked, repacked and considered.

Then the birds started to cheep and it was time to get the boys up and go to breakfast.

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