Featured image: Strand 1928
Every town has an origin story, but The Strand has more names in its history than most towns have had years. It has been renamed by schoolmasters, magistrates, town councils and, eventually, its own impatience with the name Somerset kept insisting on. Vlooibaai. Mostert’s Bay. Van Ryneveldsdorp. Hottentots Holland Strand. Somerset West Strand. Somerset Strand. Die Strand. And finally, in 1937, simply, The Strand. Or just Strand, if you want to be formal about it and more uppity still, St Rand. A beach does not usually need this many introductions before people stop asking its name, but this one, it seems, kept giving new answers whether anyone had asked again or not. The Morkel family played a large part in the history of the Strand but it was never called “Morkelsbaai “.
Each name is a chapter. Together they tell the story of a beach that nobody meant to turn into a town, but which somehow became one anyway.
The beach was there long before anyone named it anything. Five kilometres of white False Bay sand, sheltered by the curve of the Helderberg mountains at its back and open to the sea at its front. The Khoikhoi had camped here seasonally. The first Dutch explorers noted the beach as early as 1696 when a VOC corporal named Muller first set foot on what he called Milk Bay, Melkbaai, for the milky colour of the waves in the south-easter.
But the first person to actually settle and farm the land was our old friend David du Buisson, the Huguenot schoolmaster turned farmer, whom we met in Story 16. His farm Vlooibaai ran from the Lourens River mouth south to the sea. After his death in 1722 the farm changed hands and the beach gradually became known as Mostert’s Bay after the Morkel family who eventually owned much of the surrounding land.
For a period, the beach carried yet another name. In 1822, D.J. van Ryneveld, the Landdrost and Civil Commissioner of Stellenbosch, bought a stretch of the land at Mostert’s Bay and built himself a house he called Eengesind. He then did something that quietly shaped everything that followed: he allowed other farmers to camp on his land and, later, to build their own holiday homes there. For a while the little settlement that grew up around his house was known, in his honour, as Van Ryneveldsdorp, Van Ryneveld’s Town.
By 1822, the same year Somerset West was founded just inland, a census of the little beachside settlement recorded just 27 people living near the beach. Of those 27 residents, 19 were male and 8 were female. Of the 19 men, 14 were from the island of Java, men of Indonesian descent, the free descendants or escaped slaves of the Cape Colony’s eastern slave trade. The women were all Khoikhoi. They had married and formed a community of their own on that beach, outside the official town, largely invisible to the colonial records.
Javanese men and Khoikhoi women. On a beach at the foot of the Helderberg. Twenty-seven people, living quietly, before the holiday-makers arrived.
The Strand developed during the 18th and 19th centuries primarily as a fishing and holiday settlement for inland communities, particularly families from the Stellenbosch district who came down to the coast in summer. The pattern was simple and unchanged for decades, inland farmers endured the heat of the Winelands summer and when they could, they brought their families down to the beach for a few weeks of relief. Makeshift holiday cottages appeared. A small fishing community took root permanently. The town grew the way beach towns always grow, slowly, informally, one cottage and one fishing boat at a time.
Strand and Gordon’s Bay became stopovers for travellers by horse cart to Hermanus, in the days when that journey took four days and the return trip made nearly two weeks of travelling for a weekend by the sea. Those were committed holidaymakers.
In the late 1960s, my parents and their friends would often spend a day walking along the shores of False Bay from the Strand to Muizenberg. The route was largely uninterrupted, except for the section near the white cliffs where passage could become difficult depending on the state of the tide. Despite this obstacle, the journey was a popular outing and offered a unique way to experience the coastline long before modern recreational activities became commonplace.
The Strand’s emergence as a seaside resort gathered momentum in the early twentieth century. Local memory credits a Boer War veteran named Thomas Wade with an earlier structure on the beach around 1904, quite possibly a rough jetty for landing fishing boats rather than a bathing pavilion, the two easily blurred together after a century of retelling. A larger and more formal timber bathing pavilion with changing cubicles and showers followed, the first major public facility of its kind on the beachfront. It was damaged by fire and eventually destroyed in 1923. A substantial brick pavilion replaced the earlier wooden structure in 1929. The final touch came in 1934 when the famous Strand Jetty was built by Murray and Stewart alongside the pavilion. Australian Jarrah timber was used for the main structure, massive square piles driven deep into the seabed and connected by heavy timber bracing and decking, renowned for its strength and resistance to decay. The jetty extended about 70 metres into False Bay and quickly became one of the Strand’s most recognisable landmarks.
Together, the pavilion and jetty transformed the Strand from a quiet fishing settlement into one of the Cape’s most popular holiday destinations. A small but interesting detail is that the jetty was originally built partly to assist local fishermen, allowing boats to moor alongside and unload their catch directly, although it soon became more famous as a promenade and fishing spot for visitors.
I remember visiting the pavilion as a young child. At the entrance there were two boating areas for small boats. In the early 1970s I witnessed the demolition of the pavilion and it was transformed into a gravel parking area for a couple of years.
The current pavilion was completed in 1990. Unlike its predecessors, the modern complex incorporated restaurants, smaller shops, time-sharing apartments and a heated Olympic-sized indoor swimming pool, ensuring that swimming at the Strand was no longer dependent on the weather or the tides.
Today, the surviving section of the jetty lies in silent anticipation, waiting to see what the future holds. Scarred by time, storms and neglect, it remains one of the last physical links to generations of Strand residents and holidaymakers who walked its boards, cast fishing lines from its railings and watched the sun set over False Bay. Whether restoration or disappearance awaits, its place in the town’s history is already secure.
The railway changed everything. Strand was proclaimed a municipality in 1897, the year the railway line from Cape Town reached Somerset West and extended a short branch line to the beachfront. Suddenly the beach was 50 kilometres and a comfortable train ride from the city. Day-trippers arrived. Weekend visitors arrived. Families who had previously made the long journey from Stellenbosch could now step off a train and be in the sea within minutes.
The town that grew around that railway connection was officially called Somerset Strand, still clinging to the Somerset name that governed the whole area. It briefly went by Die Strand alone in 1918 before the name was finally standardised, in 1937, simply to Strand. Clean, direct, exactly descriptive. The beach. Die Strand.
One of the most important early farming families in the area was the Morkel family, whose principal holding was the farm Onverwacht, established around 1713–1718 when Philip Morkel settled in the Hottentots Holland region. Adjacent to it lay other key holdings including Vlooibaai and Voorburg, forming a network of farms that shaped the early agricultural development of the region and effectively covered large portions of the land between the Lourens River and the coastal dunes.
Onverwacht remained in the Morkel family for generations and is often described as one of the longest continuously family-held farms in South Africa. Portions of the estate were gradually sold off or subdivided as financial pressures, inheritance divisions and later urban expansion took effect. By the late 20th century, much of the surrounding farmland had been absorbed by the growth of Somerset West and Strand. Despite this, the original homestead and core farmyard, known variously as Onverwacht, The Bush and later Die Bos, remained within the extended Morkel family.
The 27 Javanese men and Khoikhoi women who were there first were, by then, largely forgotten. But they were there. And some of their descendants still are.
c1655 – Melkbaai
c1714 – Vlooibaai
c1718 – Mosterd’s Bay
c1850 – Van Ryneveldsdorp
c1882 – Somerset Strand
1918 – The Strand
1937 – Strand
Between You and Me:
I grew up in Strand, which meant that every day I walked past the beach on the way to school and every afternoon walked back past it on the way home. The beach was so constant, so simply there, that I stopped seeing it the way you stop seeing a mountain that has always been at your back. It is only now, reading about the twenty-seven Javanese men and Khoikhoi women who were the first community on that beach in 1822, that I understand what I was walking past every day. Not just sand and sea. The oldest community in the Helderberg, quietly going about their lives before the holiday-makers arrived and the name changed and the jetty was constructed. The question is though who wants a pool next to False Bay? Maybe Jan’s idea.
Historian – Harmen Bockelenberg
Next week: blasting open the mountain — the engineering story of Sir Lowry’s Pass, the soldiers and convicts who built it and the governor who got in trouble for ordering it.
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