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who set up a carpentry business to build wagons. Robert and his wife Maria had a large family

of six sons and three daughters.

William married Louisa Ruthven and they had a daughter, Ellen, born in 1840. Sadly, Louisa

died when Ellen was only two years old and in 1843 William married his second wife, Susan
Rapkin, in St Paul’s Church, Rondebosch. Susan’s strong personality matched his character.

In 1837, at the age of 14 she had come out to the Cape as a nursery governess. She had been

born in London as her mother was employed at Windsor Castle. The Duchess of Kent, mother
of the then Princess Victoria, had taken an interest in Susan and, under her patronage, had

arranged for Susan to attend a boarding school for girls in Kensington. Soon after Susan arrived
at the Cape, Victoria became queen. Susan was one of the first congregants to be confirmed in

St Paul’s. When they married, Susan was 19 and William 33; notwithstanding the differences
in their ages it was a very successful marriage. They had a daughter, Sarah, (1848) and sons,

William George (1851) and Edward John (1857).

William continued to invest in property along the wagon road and bought and developed
extensive new clay deposits from the Roodebloem estate at Papendorp, later renamed

Woodstock. He built many houses to accommodate his staff. In the 1840s Bo Dorp was built
at Mowbray. The population there was chiefly Malay and many of the men worked in the

brickfield as foremen or as independent draymen, delivering bricks in small hand-drawn carts.

William assisted in the establishment of St Peter’s Church, built near what was to become the
Durban Road Bridge over the suburban railway line. St Peter’s was controversial as it was one

of the few Church of England congregations in South Africa, founded in opposition to the much
larger Church of the Province of SA. Later the Hare family donated land for extensions to the

St Peter’s Church burial grounds, located some distance away on a site below what was to
become the Groote Schuur Hospital.

Having started with nothing, when he died in 1874 William John was a wealthy man, with an

estate valued at £40 000, a very large sum in those days. He was buried in a sarcophagus at the
family burial vault in the St Paul’s cemetery. William left the land at Papendorp to his older

son, William, and the properties at Mowbray to his widow Susan, on behalf of his younger son
Edward, who was only 17 at the time.