Page 48 - Bulletin 13 2009

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The two buildings stand as a reminder to all at St. James of Fr. Duignam’s personality
and drive.

If you seek his monument, look around.

On the educational front, stories of Fr. Duignam are still told today of how he educated
the poor fisher-folk children in the basics of reading, writing and arithmetic. His

teaching of the religious doctrine to the children was paramount. Classes were held in
church on Sunday afternoons and before evening devotion. It was not uncommon for Fr.

Duignam to visit the home of an errant child to find out why he or she had missed Mass
and woe betide the child if found guilty of deliberately staying away.

Fr. Duignam served as a Councillor on the Kalk Bay-Muizenberg Municipality in 1895
and his work in finding a suitable cemetery for all religions is well recorded. Many a

time would he officiate over a burial at the Margate Road Cemetery in Muizenberg.

Here he would travel by trap, drawn by his horse Larry.

Prior to the establishment of the cemetery on Margate Road burials took place on the
mountainside above Seahurst Hotel. It was a poignant scene when Fr. Duignam led his

Filipino flock during a funeral procession. Men, women and children, dressed in their
most formal outfits, black suits, top-hats, starched white shirts and white gloves walked

along the streets of Kalk Bay to the old burial ground at the end of Quarterdeck Road.

Funerals (and weddings) were occasions in which all the Filipino community partook
and the scene of the priest, dressed in black with his flowing white hair and crook in

hand, leading the coffin bearers with up to two hundred mourners in a double line
walking reverently behind, was unforgettable.

In solemn dignity like a patriarch of old, Father Duignam led his beloved charges to the

graveside of a fisherman, a pauper, a wife or a child, where he would address the

mourners and give his final blessing to the departed.