Two Pinelands Sailors Captain Richard Lawrence Vere Shannon OBE Richard Shannon saw active Service in both World Wars. He joined the Royal l Navy in 1915 and in 1919 he was promoted to Acting Lieutenant. After the war he left the Navy to become a farmer. By 1927 he was back at sea as master of the RRS …
The Wells and Eglin families played a major role in the life of Pinelands from the early years. Major Frank Wells moved into 12 Meadway in 1922. Frank’s brother-in-law, Carl Eglin and family moved in next door at 10 Meadway in 1923. The houses were named Wellesley and Caronel respectively. WELLS FAMILY Frank Wells, also known as Bolshie …
Vera Jenkins was a well known character in Pinelands for her cheery disposition, always referring to herself as “old doll”. Residents always looked forward to her cheeky somewhat irreverent poems about Pinelands and life in general at public meetings of the Ratepayers Association. Even her closest friends acknowledged she was eccentric. Vera and her husband, …
Hannes Uys moved into “Sonskyn” at 10 Homestead Way with his wife Helga, son Pieter-Dirk and daughter Tessa in 1949. The road was named after the old Uitvlugt Farm homestead which had stood at numbers 4 and 6 but which had been demolished some seven years earlier. Hannes had grown up in Paarl but studied …
Princess Alice, the granddaughter of Queen Victoria, and Jan Smuts, Prime Minister of South Africa, not only featured in the early life of Pinelands with roads named after them in Pinelands but both enjoyed mountain climbing. This is illustrated by a story given when they visited Bains Kloof. While the group they were with travelled …
Two unlikely men met during 1917 in Letchworth, England which directly led to the founding of Pinelands, the first Garden City in South Africa. Ebenezer Howard was an urban planner and inventor. Richard Stuttaford was a South African politician, philanthropist and businessman. Howard, living in Stamford Hill, was an unassuming person and in the words …
At 3 am on the morning of December 1967, three of the four heart surgeons and an assistant standing around the operating table at Groote Schuur Hospital had all lived in Pinelands. On the table was Louis Washkansky, the recipient of the world’s first human-to-human heart transplant. The operation took three hours and forty-five minutes …
