STORY 80
In 1946, with Europe still picking itself up after the Second World War, a Scottish couple named Dr George and Cora Haydock left Helensburgh for the Cape, carrying with them an idea they’d already begun planning before they ever boarded the ship. They wanted to start a school. The crossing took three or four weeks by boat and family lore has it that Mrs Haydock didn’t wait for dry land to begin teaching, gathering children on the voyage itself and holding her first informal classroom somewhere on the open ocean. It’s the kind of story that’s hard to verify with certainty, but it has become part of the school’s own told history, which counts for something in its own right.
By 1948 the Haydocks had settled in Somerset West and rented premises in Station Road. Somerset House School opened its doors there with roughly fifteen pupils, boys and girls together, taught by qualified staff who promised the usual subjects alongside correct speech, good manners and deportment. Even at that small scale the school reached beyond the classroom, with a ninety-foot hall used for physical training, eurhythmics, ballet and concerts and pupils already playing cricket, rugby, netball and tennis against other schools on weekends.
Two years later, in 1950, the school moved to the site it still occupies today, the old Cloetenburg homestead, formerly known as the Oatlands Guest House, a building whose gable had been standing since 1785 and whose land had once formed part of Governor van der Stel’s enormous Vergelegen estate. The school was only two years old when it inherited a piece of ground with two and a half centuries of history already behind it.
The Haydocks led the school from its founding into the late 1960s, after which their son-in-law Les Webb took over as headmaster. Webb’s tenure ended abruptly when he died suddenly of a heart attack in 1973, a loss that must have shaken a school still very much run as a family institution. The following January, Peter and Jinny Rickards arrived, Peter an experienced teacher previously associated with Bishops Preparatory School in Cape Town and within months of their arrival the Board of Governors managed to purchase the school property outright. For the first time, Somerset House wasn’t simply occupying a historic site, it owned it. Rickards spent a decade strengthening both the buildings and the school’s academic footing before retiring in 1984.
His successor gave the school its longest and perhaps most colourful chapter. Mike Taylor became headmaster in 1984 and stayed for twenty two years, a keen mathematician, chess player and long-distance runner who completed ten Comrades Marathons and twenty two Two Oceans Marathons during his time at the helm. Under his leadership the school more than doubled in size, adding classrooms, a swimming pool, tennis courts, a sports hall, two computer centres and a library, all while the old Cloetenburg buildings were carefully maintained rather than pushed aside. One story from the school’s old newsletter has stuck around for good reason. Teaching a maths class one day, Taylor grew frustrated with wrong answers and jokingly threatened that if the next pupil got it wrong, he’d go lie down in Drama Street and let a car run over him. Someone got it wrong. Taylor walked outside and lay down in the road. Whatever one makes of the teaching method, it’s exactly the kind of story that outlives every lesson plan a headmaster ever wrote and it’s easy to see why the school later established a bursary fund in his name.
Through all of this, the old farm buildings never stopped working for a living. The wine cellar that once stored Cloetenburg’s harvest became a nursery school until 1987, then a hall, then classrooms, before being restored into today’s Guild Hall Knowledge Centre. The old stables and carriage house served as the school hall from 1976 until the library moved there in 1988, later reopening as the Ould Hall Art Centre, restored by architects who deliberately left visible traces of the building’s many earlier lives rather than smoothing them away. That restoration work culminated around 2013 and 2014, following a heritage and urban design framework the school itself commissioned, aimed at protecting the old werf, its tree-lined approaches and the relationship between buildings that had stood since the days of Cape Dutch farming.
The school’s motto is Non nobis solum, not for ourselves alone and it’s hard to find a piece of ground in the Helderberg that has lived up to a motto more literally. A farmstead born from a governor’s disgrace, a widow’s purchase, generations of Cape farmers, an English rebranding, a guest house for travellers and finally a school, each generation handing the same walls on to the next for a different purpose entirely.
Between You and Me: Somerset House sits just up the road from schools I did attend, yet I never set foot inside it myself and I won’t pretend otherwise. What draws me to this one isn’t a memory but the sheer improbability of it, that a governor’s failed farming empire from 1700 ended up, three centuries later, as a schoolroom with children doing sums under a gable older than the town around it. If any reader has a Somerset House memory of their own, particularly from the Rickards or Taylor years, that’s exactly the kind of detail this story is still missing.
Historian – Harmen Bockelenberg
Next week: the last forge in Somerset West and the blacksmith who was, by the time he stopped, the only one left.
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