Page 144 - Bulletin 19 2015

141

up and Mr Anderson would don his top hat and take his cane, and start walking down to the
station in order to catch it.

Then, a few minutes later, as the train headed out of Fish Hoek station, the cry would go up

again, and this time, his youngest child, Effie, would head down to the station in order to
catch the train to school.

Finally, as the train was almost nosing its way into Kalk Bay itself, the boys, Harold and

Ernest, would gather up their bags and race down to the station – just in time to scramble on
board in order to go to Rondebosch where they were day boys at Bishops.

One day, Harold was late. If he missed the train, the penalty would be severe. The

headmaster of Bishops was the redoubtable Archdeacon Brookes, a severe disciplinarian and
would be bound to give a beating to any boy who arrived late for school.

Harold was not on the train. Looking down from the Anderson home, his mother could see

the train whistle impatiently, start moving at last, but then proceed only slowly by fits and

starts – with much whistling and slamming on of brakes, towards the next station a few
hundred yards down the line at St James. Only as it steamed in at last did the passengers

catch a glimpse of a small boy haring along the tracks in front of the engine. There was
Harold desperately running towards the next station in order to catch the train he had just

missed at Kalk Bay. As the driver’s cab eventually slid past him where he had clambered up
on to the platform, Mr Alexander, the driver, leaned out and shouted at Harold that if he ever

did that again, he would never take him on his train again.

But at least Harold arrived at school on time. And a thrashing was avoided!

There was another Anderson connection to this area. His sister Ellen Lovina Anderson had

married the Reverend George Ogilvie – the famous or infamous ‘Og’, headmaster for many

years of Bishops. We are told ‘Og’ waited 15 years to marry Ellen so that he could keep her
in the manner to which she was accustomed! In 1920 Ellen bought the erf (88656)

immediately behind Quarterdeck. When she died at her brother’s Kalk Bay home, aged 88 in
1925, she left this property to him.