Fynnland area – 1870s:
SIDNEY Turner, after whom Turner Street in Fynnland is named, lived on the Bayside of the Bluff with his family between 1876 and 1883.
Excerpts from some of his letters to his family in England afford glimpses of life on the Bluff at that time.
“You have no idea the work and trouble there is in taking a piece of virgin forest and making a garden of it… It is all thick bush to the water’s edge.”
“I can get a sea bathe thirty yards from our door. We get lots of fish with a net. The other evening I got 250 in one haul. The smallest weighed seven pounds… Oysters here are inexhaustible. You can sit down anywhere at low water and eat your fill without going 10 yards. I can get three or four buckets full in half an hour, and we are almost tired of eating mussels.”
“Do you ever get away for a day’s fishing or shooting? Here it is a matter of pot-hunting. Fish and buck to eat ad lib. No fish or game means no dinner.”
“We have a regular farmyard here – ducks, fowls, pigs and rabbits. We intend going next year largely for poultry as so many ships require fowls when they leave the port that there is an unlimited demand for them.”
Apart from selling chickens to ships in the bay, Turner had received permission to cut an access road from his property to the top of the Bluff. He wrote: “I will sell all the wood in Durban at thirty shillings a load. I have natives clearing part of our block and expect to get enough wood to pay for the land.”
In the days before electricity and gas for cooking and heating, there was a constant demand for wood. The legitimacy of timber-cutting concerned long-standing Bluff resident Portland Bentinck Shortt. In October 1877 he wrote to the Surveyor General inquiring about what he called “wattle cutting on the Bluff brow” by Robert Armstrong who owned a property called ‘Culbin’. Hence, the derivation of the road named Culbin off Bluff Road near the clinic and that of Armstrong Road off Lighthouse Road.
Shortt’s concerns proved unfounded as Armstrong had official permission to do so. Shortt and his wife Jane had settled on the Bluff in 1869 having previously lived in Pietermaritzburg.
Their move seems to have been the consequence of insolvency because in August 1869, notices were published in both the Mercury and the Times of Natal concerning the auction of properties Shortt owned in Greytown, Pietermaritzburg and 220 acres on the Bluff.
In any event, the Shortts called their property ‘New Brighton’. Like most colonists, Shortt was not slow in complaining to the Colonial Secretary about issues that bothered him. In 1869 he had lodged a complaint about “reckless cutting of timber around the shores of the bay”. Although his complaint was referred to the Conservancy Board, the file does not contain any follow-up correspondence. In all likelihood enforcement of laws was just as haphazard or non-existent then as it is today.
Shortt, after whom a road in Fynnland is named, made a living from fish-curing, a salt works and jam making at New Brighton until his death on 28 February 1885.
Researched and written by Duncan Du Bois
