Durban - The old pictures this week feature Hillcrest Butchery, better known to locals as Grant’s Butchery, with owner Les Grant being very much a part of village life. Grant had been the butcher at Christians department store before opening up his own business across the road on the corner of Hospital Road and Old Main Road.
Jacqui Hicks, who grew up in Hillcrest and sent us the early photo, remembers the butchery well.
“The front façade of the small building was decorated around both windows with lovely blue and white tiles depicting sheep and cows. In true butchery tradition, the floor inside was covered in sawdust. Les Grant always wore a blue-striped apron and customers left the shop with neat brown paper parcels, bound with string tied in a loop for easy carrying.
“It was a different world back then,” she writes.
Such was the success of the butchery that the small building was replaced by a small shopping mall, probably in the 1970s, which housed not only the butchery, but Lester Hall & Associates, the United Building Society, the local dry-cleaners (owned by a school friend’s parents), a barber shop, a shoe repairer and, later, Nedbank. The second picture was from a post on the Facebook page “Durban Down Memory Lane”.
That centre too was demolished to make space for the massive Hillcrest Corner Shopping Centre, which extends far beyond the original scale of the property all the way to Crooked Lane (which today has lost many of its charming kinks and its oaks). The original little butcher stood below where the Butcher Block is today.
Following on from last week’s “Then & Now” on the Hillcrest Hotel, Hicks shared her memories of the famed establishment.
“The Hotel featured greatly in my early life,” she writes, “viewed mainly from the parking area outside the pub. My father, Clarry Fripp, called in at ‘the local’ on his way home to play darts. Very much the life and soul of a party, he found heading home somewhat difficult. After an hour or so of patiently waiting in the parking lot, I would hoot to attract his attention. One of the barmen, either Dan or Ram, would be sent out bearing a small bottle of coke and a packet of crisps ‒ and the darts would continue.”
She also says her mother, Biddy Fripp, was friendly with the lady called Ginger, who according to one story lost her bright red wig when an Indian mynah landed in her hair. “I stand to be corrected here, but I think it was she who worked as the main housekeeper at the Manor House, a grand Tudor-style home in Delamore Road. Today the house is surrounded by other homes in what is now Manorfields Country Estate.”
Next week we will feature Hicks’s old picture of the Caltex garage, another early landmark in the village.
The Independent on Saturday