Page 85 - Bulletin 12 2008

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southern Peninsula. But unlike Tulbagh and Zwartland, established around the same
time but slow to grow into villages, the shipping and attendant commercial activities at

Simon’s Town ensured its steady growth from the beginning. A fairly detailed map of
just after the British take-over in 1796 shows a dozen or so buildings, perhaps half of

them dwellings; a tiny hamlet had appeared. Most of these structures were situated, in

somewhat haphazard arrangements, on the foreshore below the main road. The local
population also included several fishermen’s and whalers’ families, such as were also

found at nearby Kalk Bay. Because of its close ties to the British Admiralty, the
appearance of the settlement over the ensuing decades is better known to us than that of

any other town in the Cape except Cape Town itself.

Two small forts, Boetselaer and Zoutman, built in 1794 to protect the well-established

harbour settlement, proved of little use during the attacks by the British. The place grew
in importance after the second, final occupation in 1806, and it was only then that it was

given the same Simon’s Town, presumably not after Simon van der Stel who had first

visited the bay in 1687, but after the bay that was named after him. In 1814 it became
the base for the naval squadron on the Cape station, and Visser’s lodging house was put

to use by the Admiralty. All the buildings needed for a port in those days soon followed:
sail-lofts, stores, naval quarters. The whalers were instructed to move to nearby Kalk

Bay because the stench their activities engendered proved too obnoxious to the sensitive
nostrils of the new establishment.

Significantly, the first local place of worship, serving the naval community, was an
Anglican one, so Simon’s Town became the first town in the Western Cape where an

English church predates the Dutch. It was housed in a converted warehouse and in the
sail loft of the new mast house, where it still is, known variously as St. George’s or

Dockyard church. It was in fact the first Anglican place of worship in the country. The
general populace got its own church of St. Francis in 1828, but it had been preceded by

the Methodist church; both also still in existence, the latter high up on the hillside. The

Dutch Reformed community had to travel to Wynberg for their services, until they, too,
were given a local church in 1855.