STORY 60
The Public Library opened its doors on 20 December 1904, in a single room inside the Strand Town Hall, granted by the Municipality for five pounds a month. It was not, at the start, a grand undertaking. By the end of 1910 the whole collection ran to 1,600 books, there were 48 subscribers on the rolls and the daily attendance across the entire library averaged eight people. Miss D. Marais was the first secretary, followed later by Miss Daisy Bardenhorst.
The town kept adding to it, slowly, the way small towns do. By 1917 the collection had grown to 2,702 books and 55 subscribers and that year alone the library spent £68 5s 3d on 299 new titles, a level of care over pennies and shillings that tells you something about how seriously a small committee took a small room full of books. Mr F. A. Edmunds served as secretary that year and stayed on the committee for decades, eventually made a life member for it. Mr “Rolly” Roux, the magistrate in Somerset West, took enough interest in the place that he left a bequest in his will specifically to top up the librarian’s modest salary, a small act of generosity that outlived him. When he resigned in 1919, Mr D. McDougall took his seat on the committee.
By 1923 the one room in the Town Hall had been outgrown and the Council offered a plot of ground in Wesley Street for a proper building. Mr G. L. Murray drew up the plans for nothing, gratis and Mayor van der Spuy handled the finances. The whole build came in at £900, with a further £175 for an extension later on, modest sums even for the time. The new building was opened on 3 September 1924 by Dr D. F. Malan, then Minister of Education. At the opening there were 150 subscribers, daily attendance had climbed to 110 and the shelves held 4,937 books.
By the end of 1951, the numbers tell their own quiet story about who the library was serving and in what language. There were 393 adult subscribers and 29 juveniles. The English fiction collection ran to 7,625 books against 774 in Afrikaans. English non-fiction stood at 3,867 against 162 Afrikaans. Even the children’s shelves carried the same imbalance, 838 English juvenile titles against 476 Afrikaans.
The Wesley Street building served the town for close to fifty years, until the municipality joined the Cape Provincial Library Service in 1972 and began building the library that stands today, on the corner of Mills and Piet Retief streets. It opened its doors as a free service on 29 August 1974.
Between You and Me:
I seem to recall that an early library building stood on 39 Wesley Street and that the building was later repurposed as a weightlifting club of all things. The details stay in this story as open questions rather than settled facts. That feels right to me. Local history often survives exactly like this, not as a clean line in a council record but as something someone half-remembers and passes on anyway, asking to be checked.
Historian – Harmen Bockelenberg
Next week: Next week: Next week: nails by weight and milkshakes upstairs — inside the Strand Ko-op, the farmers’ cooperative that became the town’s general dealer and the New Year’s Eve night two children found its doors standing open.
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