(Reviewer: David Scher, Vol. 66, #2, Rosh Hashanah 2011)
Hout Bay is an enchanting town and fishing harbour, nestling in a lush hill-bedecked valley of the Cape Peninsula. It is justly regarded as one of the most beautiful sites in South Africa. With its stunning mountain setting, its entrance guarded by the oft photographed Sentinel peak, Hout Bay draws thousands of visitors to its shores.
Edited by Gwynne Schrire, a seasoned and prolific historian, writer and researcher on local, family and Jewish history, Embracing Hout Bay highlights the immense contribution of the Dorman family to the development of the town.
When Simon Dorman, aged forty-seven, first visited Hout Bay in the early 1890s, he found a small community of fisherfolk around a beautiful bay and small-scale farmers in the adjoining valley. For Simon, Hout Bay seemed the ideal place to live in and to raise his six children then living in distant Lithuania, where poverty, persecution and pogroms overwhelmed Jewish life. In December 1897, Simon’s wife Sarah, and their children began a lengthy and protracted journey to the tip of far-flung southern Africa. Their journey and Simon’s struggle to establish himself in their new surroundings are graphically and movingly recounted.
From an entrepreneurial point of view, Simon Dorman was remarkably innovative and daring. Together with his son, Barney, he moved from running a shop to vegetable gardening. When customers would chat to them about their fishing successes, they decided to try their luck in this industry. Apart from dispatching fishing crews, they established a smokery to smoke fish their boats caught. Their difficulties were legendary. Even taking the fish to the market posed severe problems. As Barney later recalled, “the roads were so bad it was very difficult to come through without getting stuck. When the wagons would get stuck so badly we had to take things up by fish cart. Transport in those days was either by horse or by mule. There were no trains and no trucks. We used to take the fish…. using a wagon with four horses if the load was big, and a cart and two horses if small. When the motor cars started we changed to those”.
As the Dorman fishing business expanded, and their fish sheds grew in size, so their competitors threw obstacles in their path. Some local farming families, who wanted to monopolize the industry, tried to prevent the newcomers, Simon and Barney, from increasing their fishing operations by preventing them from enlarging their sheds.
Only an appeal to the Resident Magistrate saved the situation. In the event, the Dormans prospered and farming, dairy and assorted property interests were added to their portfolio.
Sadly, the family’s path to success was not always easy. As far back as the 1920s, there was conflict within the family over business interests, and although settled out of court, the wounds ran deep. The most serious conflict revolved around the estate and bequest of Simon Dorman’s younger son, Alfie, who died in 1948. Having no children of his own, Alfie had wanted to leave his fishing business to his nephew Harold, the only adult male Dorman descendant in the family. However, due to Harold being subject to a ten year business restraining order, Alfie, on legal advise, amended his will in favour of Harold’s son, Stanley, effectively making seven-year old Stanley, the owner-in-waiting of his fishing business.
By 1965 Stanley, armed with a Bachelor of Commerce degree, was ready to take a closer look at Chapman’s Peak Fisheries, which his Uncle Alfie had bequeathed to him seventeen years earlier. It was in a parlous state. Morale among the skippers and the crew was low, the boats were old and in a state of disrepair and the company itself had large bank overdrafts and unpaid accounts. The harbour was also effectively controlled and monopolized by South African Sea Products Ltd (SASP), a fierce rival. As if that was not enough his father, who had managed the company until then, was himself struggling with his debt-ridden farm, Oakhurst. When Harold died in 1968, Stanley was already in the hot seat, fighting to save Oakhurst from bankruptcy, while endeavouring to revitalize the ailing fishing company.
It says much of Stanley Dorman’s pugnacious character, financial finesse and courage that, despite knowing little about the fishing side of the business, he was able to make a success of his inheritance.
One of the most disheartening episodes in the book is to read about the vindictive machinations of an established competitor, SASP, who used every trick in the book to ruin Dorman’s company. They tried to prevent him from obtaining bait and ice, then fuel, then accommodation for his fisherman, then repairs and spares for his boat. They even attempted to boycott the catches his fisherman off-loaded.
Much of the source of this campaign came from SASP’s senior manager, Abe Wisenberg, who coincidentally was married to Alfie Dorman’s niece Sylvia (daughter of his sister, Bertha). Wisenberg harbored a huge resentment against the Dorman family. The origin of this resentment lay in Alfie’s distant will. He bore a huge grudge that it was Stanley and not himself or his wife Sylvia who had inherited Alfie’s Chapman’s Peak Fisheries. This was despite the fact that Alfie had bequeathed to his sister Bertha and her daughters £500 each, sizeable amounts of money for those days. Even in his eighties, Wisenberg harbored a grudge about his wife’s uncle’s choice of beneficiaries in a will drawn up half a century previously! A defamatory remark made by him in December 2000 to Stanley’s son Lance required and got an immediate apology.
By the late 1970’s, the fishing industry had taken a serious downturn. Tuna had virtually disappeared and hake and kingklip had become scarcer. The situation was exacerbated by cash flow problems, fuel price hikes and crippling overheads. A joint venture with Leo Raphaely and Sons (Pty) Ltd, an international commodity/shipping organization, had turned sour. Chapman’s Peak Fisheries, the company that Stanley had struggled so hard to establish, faced ruin. In a series of measures designed to save the situation, a cluster of workshops on Lot Fifty was put up for auction. There was no interest. All fishing companies were under pressure and saw no potential in them.
A desperate Stanley thought of a new venture. Since a 1974 trip to San Francisco, he had become fascinated by waterfront projects. He refined his ideas by visiting waterfront projects in cities like Baltimore, San Diego, Boston and Vancouver. Could an unwanted Lot Fifty workshop on the wrong side of Hout Bay harbor be converted into a waterfront development with shops and restaurants similar to those he had witnessed overseas? A tourist emporium lying adjacent a white sandy beach, near the yacht club and accessible to fishing boats, seemed attainable, even if it was a financially risky undertaking.
So was born the famous Mariner’s Wharf of Hout Bay – Africa’s (and the Southern Hemisphere’s) first harbor-front emporium. Opened by J.W. Wiley, the then Minister of Environment Affairs and Tourism on 22 November 1984, it has proved an enormous success with its host of freshfish and live lobster markets, nautical gift and souvenir shops. At the height of the tourist season, many thousands of visitors, local and overseas, visit the emporium. The jewel of the emporium is the Wharfside Grill Seafood Restaurant. A visit to the Restaurant is an extraordinary experience. At the entrance is a striking figurehead decorated with a section of jute rope bought at a naval auction. All the dining “cabins” have maritime appellations with their own specific character (for example, the Foredeck dining area, the Queen Mary dining cabin, the Union Castle dining cabin, etc). Seafaring items ranging from large-mesh fishing nets to original lifebuoys to mail ship menus, adorn the dining areas.
A remarkable item on display is an 8-foot-1-inch builder’s model of the Pendennis Castle, the Union Castle liner on which Stanley and his wife, Pam, had met in 1966. In November 1996, during an unscheduled visit to New Bedford in Massachussetts, US, Stanley and Pam stumbled upon a vaguely familiar ship’s model in an antique shop. In Schrire’s description: “Close inspection revealed it had been repainted, and peering out of the stern under peeling paint Pam could just decipher the letters ‘is’. Without disclosing its particular secret, which would then have pushed-up its price, Stanley negotiated the price down, bought it, and had it shipped back to Cape Town, together with a levy of American lobster traps, buoys, etc. When the ship’s model was stripped of its paint, the ‘is’ was revealed to indeed be part of the full name of the Pendennis Castle”.
From his schooldays, history has had a fascination for Stanley Dorman. In particular, the history of Hout Bay was very real to him, living as he did with its past all around him. It was not surprising, therefore, that once Mariner’s Wharf was up-and running, he should turn his attention to preserving the historical heritage of Hout Bay. Thus it was that during the 1980s, Stanley started restoring the Victorian Cottages of the fishermen for whom he had so much respect and affection. Stretching half a kilometer along the Main Road, these restored cottages in the appropriately named Fisherman’s World now house a plethora of studios and workshops for a variety of arts and crafts. Among the restored Main Road cottages are Homeleigh, the former Post Office from the 1930s, the old Dorman and Son shop, which is semi-attached to the 1912 house which Barney and Tilly Dorman moved into after their wedding, and even a Norfolk pine tree, reputedly planted by Simon Dorman’s wife, Sarah, during the 1890s. Stanley Dorman’s contribution to the restoration and preservation of historical Hout Bay has been enormous. As Pam Wormser, curator for many years of the Hout Bay Museum wrote: “What a comforting thought to know, that in you, Hout Bay has a benefactor – someone who not only owns part of its past but who also cares for it and best of all wants to preserve it.”
Speaking at the launch of Embracing Hout Bay on 10 June 2010, Schrire noted that Stanley Dorman had “changed the face and future of Hout Bay and South African tourism forever” through his establishment of the now world-famous Mariner’s Wharf and Fisherman’s World. She opined that it was the success of this venture that had in fact encouraged the later development of Cape Town’s renowned Victoria and Alfred Waterfront.
It is difficult to speak too highly of this outstanding book. Superbly written with lavish evocative photographs and illustrations, it is an absolute treasure. For those interested in Jewish entrepreneurial and family history, and in local Cape history, this moving family saga represents a major contribution and deserves a wide readership.
Embracing Hout Bay: Over a century of making things happen from Dorman & Son to Mariner’s Wharf and Fisherman’s World edited by Gwynne Schrire, Fisherman’s World (Pty) Ltd, Hout Bay, 2010, 184 pp. The book is available at Clarke’s Bookshop, Cape Town, and The Bay Bookshop, Tobi Information Centre and Mariner’s Wharf, all in Hout Bay
David Scher, senior lecturer in the Department of History, University of the Western Cape, has published extensively on pre- and post-1948 South African politics, including Donald Molteno: Dilizintaba – He Who Moves Mountains (1979) and The Disenfranchisement of the Coloured Voters, 1948-1956 (1983).
