uMhlanga: Where it all began – Part 3

FOLLOWING on from last week’s barracks built by William Alfred Campbell, there was a boarding house built in 1931 called Wave Crest, situated where today’s uMhlanga Sands Hotel starts.

The boarding house was short of accommodation and used obsolete trams as annexes for a while. The uMhlanga Rocks Hotel used to run a twice daily bus service between uMhlanga Rocks’ railway station and Mount Edgecombe, to meet up with the mail train, which also delivered bread from the bakery in Durban.

In 1930 a businessman started his own bus service, but during the war the then Durban Corporation took over the service.

Evacuees from Egypt were sent to The Sunnyside Hotel (what Wave Crest had become later) and St Merrons, where the Cabana Beach Hotel stands today. In those days, according to On the Rocks, uMhlanga Fun Time, cottages in the area were built on wooden stilts or piers with slatted windows so rain would run off.

The shell of the building was often made from oregon or finished pine with asbestos walls inside and out and a corrugated asbestos roof. Costing about 250 pounds at the time, cottages were available for rent at 10 pounds a month if they were situated on the beachfront, or five pounds if they lay back from the sea.

There was a 23 acre commonage where the uMhlanga Country Club stood, if you had a beachfront cottage, or one that bordered on this land, you were allowed to raise your cattle there and also collect firewood.

This concludes our series on the history of uMhlanga. Read Part 1 and Part 2 of where it all began.