Page 127 - Bulletin 17 2013

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Rosmead Road

The buildings along Rosmead Road start with ‘Seaview House’ on the Main Road corner, the

site of which is today occupied by Edward Mansions. (Fig. 3.9.) The building footprints are
shown clearly on the accompanying 1920 map. (Fig. 3.10 ‘L’ Plan.) Rosmead Road was not

made up at the time. The land had been bought by Robert Andrew Fish from Francois and
Huibrecht Smit. Robert Andrew Fish was the son of William who had been born in Windsor and

was later the patriarch of the Fish family who lived in Windsor House at the bottom of Windsor

Road. The Fish family website gives Robert’s occupation as fisherman and he owned many
properties in Kalk Bay. His first wife had died in 1878 and he married Elizabeth Rachel Melville

the next year.

Elizabeth was the daughter of James Melville who had owned the early Kalk Bay Hotel on the

Main Road. She had married another well-known early Kalk Bay name – Thomas Cutting – who
died in 1877 aged only 53. Cutting was the self-styled ‘king of coachmen’ running a service to

Kalk Bay from his depot in Wynberg. There is a not very flattering description of Cutting’s
coaches written by ‘A Lady’ visiting the Cape in 1861:

“People cheerfully put up with Cutting’s line of broken down omnibuses, and jog and jingle into
town every day, without a groan, over dislocating roads and at eight miles an hour, exposed to
draughts, dust and a degree of stuffiness in those ancient arks that would create a revolution on
the Bayswater Road!”

In February the next year she and a party of five took Cutting’s omnibus, along with 12 others to
a ‘capital picnic’ at Kalk Bay which she described as

“… a little fishing hamlet, consisting of a few old-fashioned Dutch houses, and a dozen or so
fishermen’s huts straggling for a mile between the rocky beach, and the bleak precipitous
mountains ….”

Thomas Cutting had bought the Kalk Bay Hotel, by then probably called Melville’s Hotel, in

1862. He was planning to sell it but died before the sale went through and his wife Elizabeth
inherited it in 1878. When Elizabeth married Robert Fish, they had seven children between them

(and had another three of their own) and also owned substantial portions of Die Dam.