STORY 67
Every December the Strand beachfront filled with the same holiday sounds, radios, waves, children shouting from the shallows. Somewhere in the late 1960s, Die Burger decided the town needed one more thing to draw the crowds down to the beach a combination of “Boeresport” and our own Mej. Brander, Miss Wave, was born.
It was not a subtle affair. The Afrikaans daily sponsored and publicised it heavily, timing the competition for the peak of the December and January holiday season, when Strand’s population swelled with visitors from across the Cape. Young women, many of them holidaying from the Tygerberg and the Northern Suburbs, competed right there on the sand, in branded T-shirts and swimwear, with the pavilion and the crowds as their backdrop. There was nothing formal about the setting. That was the point. Mej. Brander belonged to the beach, not to a hall or a stage.
The competition ran for decades and it left behind exactly the kind of paper trail small-town spectacles do, a scattering of newspaper clippings rather than any single official record. One such clipping survives from the 21 December 1989 edition of Die Burger, naming the regional finalists who paraded on the Strand sand that summer: Adene Burger, Kerry Crauser, Janene du Plessis, Lara Field, Michelle Johnson, Christelle le Roux, Yvonne Lotriet, Adele Mostert, Vanessa O’Connell, Yolanda Palvie, Liezl Redelinghuys, Maresa Smit, Helga Strydom, Marinda van der Schyff and Esna Arangies. Fifteen names, fifteen young women who spent a December afternoon on a beach that, for one day, belonged entirely to them.
Alongside pageants like Mej. Kaapse Skiereiland, Mej. Brander became part of the fabric of mid to late twentieth century Afrikaner holiday culture along False Bay, the kind of tradition nobody planned to make permanent but that somehow returned every year regardless.
It did not survive the turn of the decade. By the early 1990s, as beach culture shifted and sponsorship moved toward broader regional and national competitions, Die Burger quietly let the standalone beachfront pageants go. The name did not disappear entirely. It lives on now in smaller school pageants and local sports festivals along the coast, a faint echo of the crowds that once gathered on the sand to watch the waves crown someone new each summer.
The 1989 “Mej. Brander” Finalists:
- Adene Burger
- Kerry Crauser
- Janene du Plessis
- Lara Field
- Michelle Johnson
- Christelle le Roux
- Yvonne Lotriet
- Adele Mostert
- Vanessa O’Connell
- Yolanda Palvie
- Liezl Redelinghuys
- Maresa Smit
- Helga Strydom
- Marinda van der Schyff
- Esna Arangies
Many of these entrants were students and young women holidaying from the wider Tygerberg and Northern Suburbs regions of Cape Town.
The finalists who where chosen for Die Burger‘s Mej. Brander-competition From left to right. Kerry Crauser, Yvonne Lotriet, Marinda van der Schyff, Lara Field, Vanessa O’Connell, Adene Burger, Michelle Johnson, Janene du Plessis, Helga Strydom, Maresa Smit, Christelle le Roux, Yolanda Palvie, Liezl Redelinghuys, Esna Arangies and Adele Mostert.
Between You and Me:
There is something almost touching about a newspaper clipping being the only thing left of an afternoon that once drew half the town to the beach. Fifteen names in a caption and nothing else. I wonder how many of those women still remember standing there or whether it has faded into just another old photograph in a family album, the kind nobody can quite place the year of anymore.
Historian – Harmen Bockelenberg.
Next week: the milk bar becomes a steakhouse. From the Springbok Café’s last soft-serve to the rise of Ben’s on the Beach and how that same corner of Beach Road eventually became today’s Sol’s on the Beach.
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