Page 110 - Bulletin 7 2003
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(Figs. 3.19, 3.20 & 3.21). The HBCC exported the canned rock lobster to France
where it substituted for lobster during the salad season and was reportedly much in
demand among the Parisian bourgeoisie.
By the end of the First World War the local rock lobster resource had been severely
depleted and the canning industry relocated to the west coat. The HBCC failed to
follow suit, however, owing to the death of its founder in a fatal factory explosion in
1914 and a subsequent dearth of capital. Rather, it went into a protracted decline
during the inter-war years. The proclamation of rock lobster sanctuaries, including
Hout Bay, in 1927, and increasing competition from a new freezing industry after
1930, starved the factory of raw material and it finally abandoned canning altogether
in the late1930s.
The efforts of other would-be industrialists to develop Hout Bay after 1918 were
stymied by the opening of the Chapmans Peak drive in 1922 as the final link in a
marine drive encircling the Peninsula and the centrepiece in Cape Town’s promotion
of itself on the international market as the “Riviera of the South”. The Cape
Peninsula Publicity Association thus campaigned vigorously and successfully against
three attempts to establish whaling stations at the Bay in the 1920s, on the grounds
that this would ruin the spectacle from Chapmans Peak Drive and hence do
irreparable harm to the city’s tourist appeal.
The Industrial Period
The impetus to the eventual industrialisation of the Hout Bay fisheries came,
ironically, not from canning or whaling, but from the traditionally conservative
farmer beach seine fishery owners, who pioneered the frozen rock lobster export
trade in the early 1930s. By renting cold storage space at Imperial Cold Stores and
redeploying beach seine crews to sea as rock lobster fishermen, the Bay’s farmer-
industrialists were able to keep operating costs low and capture a growing share of
the French and United States markets from the canning industry without giving
offence to the tourist lobby. Their success was also rewarded with the construction of
