Page 4 - Bulletin 5 2001

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MUIZENBERG POT – POURRI

Barbara Titley

Introduction

My book is called “Muizenberg Pot-Pourri” because, as you know, a pot-pourri is a delightful

mixture of sweet-smelling ingredients. Similarly the book contains not a breath of gossip or
anything scandalous, so this evening I am going to talk about the off-beat characters of

Muizenberg.

Henry Peck

The first of these was, of course, Henry Peck. Nobody is sure how he and his brother Simon

arrived in South Africa since they were farm labourers in the Salisbury district of Wiltshire. It
has been suggested that Simon was shipwrecked in Simon’s Town and sent for his brother to join

him in what he was finding a very lucrative business, rowing goods, including contraband,

between the ships and the shore. But I think that they were shanghaied from the local inn in their
village and jumped ship in Cape Town! Anyway they amassed enough money to build and start

the famous ‘Farmer Peck’s Inn’ in Muizenberg in about 1826 and this, for the next thirty years,
was the main stop-over for travellers between Cape Town and Simon’s Town. (Fig. 1.1.)

Henry was completely illiterate, but was one of those lovable rogues who got away with

‘murder’! He was not a bit overawed by the gentry, and treated them as if he was doing them a

favour by serving them. In his memoirs A sailor’s life under four Sovereigns Admiral Keppel
remarks that, while driving a tandem from Cape Town to Simon’s Town, “at Farmer Peck’s Inn

the horses stopped without consulting me, and they were each given a bottle of ale, something

that all horses using the road had come to expect!”

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