Historic Holy Trinity Church in Kalk Bay marks 150 years of ministry
Perched on the slopes below Boyes Drive is a quaint thatched sandstone church with its roots dating back to 1845.
On Sunday, September 29, Holy Trinity Anglican Church in Kalk Bay is set to celebrate 150 years of ministry with a special service to mark the occasion.
The community has loved the church that can accommodate 150 people for over a century.
According to a booklet printed for the special occasion, in 1845, a small chapel was built to serve the fisher and whaling men of the area, as well as those who burnt shells in kilns along the shores of False Bay to produce lime for building.
Initially, services were held in Dutch but as English-speaking residents from Cape Town began building seaside cottages in False Bay, the congregation soon outgrew the modest chapel.
In 1868, two women, Harriet Humphreys and Alice Pocklington, visited Kalk Bay with Bishop Robert Gray, the first Anglican bishop of Cape Town.
The bishop owned a holiday cottage in Kalk Bay to the left of the church, where the rectory now stands.
In 1873 they were joined by Harriet’s sister Charlotte.
According to the Kalk Bay Historical Association Bulletin dated March 2001, the ladies were well-off and well-connected.
They were among the first people to play Monopoly in Kalk Bay.
At one time they owned the entire site on which Holy Trinity Church and the rectory now stand, including Dalebrook House, and the site at the back.
The three women, collected from their private incomes and family in England, £1 500 needed to build the church and chose the English architect Henry Woodyer to design the church, which he modelled on the St Raphael’s Church near Bristol which he had also designed.
The foundation stone was laid on August 23, 1873 and John Gainsford of Newlands was given the building contract.
He obtained the sandstone needed for the building from a quarry situated on the south-west side of the waterfall above Kalk Bay.
William West Jones, the second Anglican bishop of Cape Town, consecrated the completed church to the Holy Trinity, on the Feast of St Michael and All Angels of September 29, 1874.
The women returned to England in 1877 and had within the seven years they spent there, not only built the church but also equipped Dalebrook House as a hospital for the fishermen, acquired Douglas Cottage as an orphanage, and gave the rectory to the Diocese of Cape Town. They had also been teaching in the school.
By the time the first rector of the church, James Baker, came to Kalk Bay in 1878, they had left.
According to records, the building you see now is substantially the same as it was over a hundred years ago.
A second vestry was added at the north-west corner in 1927 and was designed by Cape Town architects, Walgate and Elsworth who also designed the new rectory, which was dedicated by Archbishop John Russell Darbyshire on June 3, 1939.
The original rectory dated from 1816 and it was found on demolition, that the dining room floor rested on sea sand.
The church is also home to interesting and symbolic features and fittings have been added to it over the years.
The baptism font commemorates an early drowning in False Bay. A Cape Town businessman, George John Nicholls, took his three daughters, Edith, Emma, and Madeline, to the beach at St James on January 7, 1874.
The three girls were carried out to sea by the waves backwash, and their father, who could not swim, ran to a group of fishermen and promised them a handsome reward if they saved the girls.
The fishermen were able to rescue Edith but Emma and Madeline drowned. Despite their inability to save them, the fishermen were handsomely rewarded.
Mr Nicholls donated the baptism font in their memory the same year.
Mr Edwards said the sides of the font are carved with the symbols of the Passion of Jesus and the emblems of the four Evangelists.
The marble, he said, probably came from Carrara in Italy as no carving in marble was being done in South Africa at the time.
The entrance window was installed in 2011 and is the church’s most recently installed stained-glass window.
The design manufacture and installation of the window were specifically commissioned to celebrate the fisher folk of Kalk Bay given the importance of the fishing industry in Kalk Bay and the fishing community’s importance to the life of Holy Trinity Church.
Another interesting feature is a plaque dated December 14, 1907, which reads: “To the glory of God and in loving memory of Alfred Gordon Biden.”
The rector of the church, Reverend Richard Martin, said they had no idea who the family was and if anyone was related to Mr Biden, or had any information about the family, to contact the church.