Page 199 - KBHA BULLETIN 6

Road entrance and moving the Confessional to increase the seating in the Church. It was

also he who moved the St. James Mission School from Star of the Sea to Kalk Bay in 1947.

Bude

The next home of interest is No. 82 Main Road, known for many years as "Bude". It stands

at the bottom of Jacob’s Ladder next door to the Presbytery and was declared a National
Monument on 23 December 1983. It was originally a whalerman’s cottage which was built

circa 1795. The O’Reilly family lived there from 1916 – 1977.

In 1917, shortly after buying the house, Gerald O’Reilly employed the services of architect

John Perry (24 August 1917) to work on the improvement of the cottage, which had

become severely dilapidated, and its conversion into a double storey building with dormer
windows in the thatched roof. The Council acceded to the use of thatch with a fair degree

of resistance and insisted that it be incombustible. Perry agreed to torch the thatch on the
underside to ensure it became relatively fire retardant. The upstairs alterations included

three new bedrooms.

Alongside "Bude" on the Kalk Bay side of Jacob’s Ladder is "The Anchorage" and then

"Villa Capri" – the old whaling station of which much has been written.

The Homestead

Opposite the children’s playpark (Fig. 4.10) is "The Homestead", home of H. P. Hablutzel
in the early 1870s and the home which John Nicholls was renting when his two daughters

drowned off Danger Beach on 7 January 1874. According to Arderne Tredgold, in her book
"Bay between the Mountains", it was between this house and the house "Seaforth", which
stood on the Kalk Bay side of "The Homestead", that the "Wall of Hate" was built circa

196