Page 25 - Bulletin 15 2011

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Captain George’s third son, John Sinclair Findlay was born in 1836. He joined the merchant

Johannes Marquard who traded from a large house in Wale Street that stood on the site of the
present Cape Provincial Administration building. John married Marquard’s daughter Johanna

and they had two sons and two daughters. Their home was ‘Rus in Urbe’, 10 Breda Street in
Cape Town but he died while recuperating from an illness at his brother’s holiday home,

‘Vancouver House’, in 1895.

In 1885 John’s oldest son George Marquard Findlay (Fig. 1.25) founded a legal practice in

Cape Town, Findlay and Tait, which became one of the leading partnerships in the city, and
two years after his father’s death George Marquard bought the house on the opposite corner

of Hillrise Road, ‘Ambleside’, 106 Main Road. (Fig. 1.26.) He sold it shortly afterwards and
built ‘The Ark’, 193 Main Road, Kalk Bay in 1897. (Fig. 1.27.) George Marquard’s older son,

John (known as Jack) (Fig. 1.28) matriculated at SACS in 1916, halfway through the First
World War, and immediately volunteered for the Royal Flying Corps in England. He was

soon promoted to the rank of Captain and was wounded while flying a Sopwith Camel fighter

over France. In 1928 he married Thelma, the daughter of Niels Thesen, a member of the well-
known Knysna family of shipping and timber merchants, who by then was living with his

family in ‘Ambleside’. Jack and Thelma lived in a home in Rodwell Road, St James, which

Jack named ‘Hursley’ after the airfield where he had trained in the RFC. (Fig. 1.29.) Jack, in
turn, became a senior partner in Findlay and Tait.

Captain George’s youngest daughter, Emily Durham Findlay, born in 1841, married Stephen

Trill, my great-grandfather and in 1889 the couple bought the old whaling station, ‘Villa
Capri’, from Emily’s brother, George James Findlay.

Captain George continued to run his timber and hardware business successfully. In 1861 the
building occupied by Jane’s haberdashery business, at 3 Keizersgracht, was sold on auction to

the S. A. Mutual Life Assurance Society (Old Mutual) which demolished the building and
built its first head office on the site. (Figs. 1.30 & 1.31.) Jane Findlay sold the haberdashery

business and the family moved to ‘an excellent house with a beautiful garden and a first rate
view’ called ‘Myrtle Grove’, 4 Schoonderstreet at the top of Hope Street in the Gardens. The

International Hotel was built on the site in the 1880s, and this was later demolished and

replaced by the Gardens Shopping Centre in Mill Street.