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living here for 17 years. People of many backgrounds and interests have settled here, and

being tightly packed between the mountain and the sea we have been obliged to interact. We
are human and we don’t all the time present that face we saw in 1980 in the Lever Street

Park.

Alice Pocklington, and Harriet and Charlotte Humphreys

Beginning in about 1870 there were three ladies, Alice Pocklington and the sisters Harriet &

Charlotte Humphreys, who came to Kalk Bay through the connection with Bishop Robert
Gray - the first bishop of Cape Town, who acquired a holiday cottage in Kalk Bay in 1855

where the Rectory now stands. They returned to England in 1877. R. R. Langham-Carter has

gone to considerable effort to trace their origins and careers but with very little to tell. (He
has written several carefully researched articles about them and Holy Trinity Church in

various magazines). It is known when Alice Pocklington died but little else is known of her,
and not even that is known of the two sisters Humphreys. When it was decided to erect a

memorial to them in Holy Trinity Church around 1914 it was not possible to find out whether
they were alive or dead. Incidentally, the memorial was erected and has an appalling error,

for it praises their “self-devotion” rather than their “selfless” devotion!

These ladies were well-off, and well-connected. They were amongst the first to play

Monopoly in Kalk Bay! At one time between them they owned the whole site on the which
Holy Trinity Church and the Rectory now stand, Dalebrook House, and probably this site (on

which the Community Centre is built) for they owned Douglas Cottage which is situated to
the rear. To them is attributed the responsibility for the building of Holy Trinity Church.

They raised the money, and they engaged the services of one of the leading church architects

in England, Henry Woodyer. I cannot prove it but I suspect that some of the plate in the
church was designed by another leading architect, Butterfield. Material of the finest quality

was imported, for instance the teak for the Roodscreen, and the tiles from the world-

renowned firm of Mintons in the Midlands, who also supplied tiles to the White House and to
Manchester Town Hall. I have found some of these while digging in the garden (l once

supposed these were surplus but maybe they come from the old Rectory when it was
demolished, for one of them has cement on the back), and, incidentally, a lot of horseshoes -

the stables were at the back of the Rectory.

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