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1962 and they bought a smaller house, ‘Lamorna’, 10 Ley Road, St. James, which has been in

the family ever since. (Figs. 1.53 & 1.54.) Business stress led to Gerald having a serious heart
attack in the same year and he had to sell his beloved palomino horse Pinto that he rode from

Cutting’s Stables which stood on the site of what is now the Marina da Gama in Muizenberg.
Gerald died in 1965 at the age of 60, the youngest of the family but the first to pass on. Ruth

stayed on at ‘Lamorna’ until she sold the home in 1987 to me, her son Derek and my wife Pat.
In 1991 we, together with a group of residents, extended Capri Road and built garages with

walkway links to our homes. Pat and I retired to ‘Lamorna’ in 2002 and soon after moving to

St James we bought, renovated and sold another cottage nearby, ‘Naweek’, 54 Upper
Quarterdeck Road.

George Findlay & Co. Ltd. was merged with Arderne Scott Timbers in 1966 and the company

traded for a short time as Arderne Scott Findlay. It was later absorbed into Federated Timbers,
part of the Barlows group. The Parliament Street property was initially leased to the music

shop Darters, before the façade was removed and the building was converted to a Foschini

store. (Fig. 1.55). Eventually this structure was also demolished and rebuilt as a parking
garage. The garage has a pedestrian bridge link at an elevated level to the Mutual Building

diagonally opposite that had been converted to apartments. As Property Management

Executive of Old Mutual Properties, for many years I was responsible for the management of
this historic structure that had operated as the organisation’s head office from 1938 to 1953,

and it was good to see it given a new lease of life as the residential complex Mutual Heights.
The Commercial Street premises were ultimately to suffer the same fate as those in

Parliament Street, when they were demolished in 2011 as part of a new parliamentary precinct
project. When I joined Old Mutual in 1970 I had no idea that the Findlay family had been

associated with the organization going back to 1845, the year it had been established.

The Findlay family has been an integral part of the history of Cape Town during the period it

has grown from a small town of some 20,000 people in the early 1800s to the major
international city it is today with a population approaching 4 million.

By the time George Findlay & Co. Ltd. was sold in 1966 it was 153 years old, having been

established in 1813. At the time it was the oldest firm still carrying on in business in South