Welcome to the Boom town

It is a Sunday afternoon at the end of the Cape winter and the dog and I are barrelling along the coast road, rain hammering on the windscreen, looking for stories.

It is the last great storm of the winter, a cut-off low that will bring biblical floods to the Western Cape, washing away bridges, burying mountain passes under mud and rock and leaving people wet and homeless and hungry.

At Kalk Bay harbour, the moored fishing boats are rolling like drunks as waves pound over the breakwater in green sheets of maelstrom.

It is Bailey the rescue dog’s first day trip and I have brought her to Simon’s Town to see Just Nuisance, the most famous naval dog.

Able Seaman Just Nuisance, to be correct, stands on a plinth, forever looking out to sea. A Great Dane who liked to hang around ships calling at Simon’s Town naval base, he was enlisted in the Royal Navy in August 1939 with the mustering of “bone crusher”. A rapid promotion to able seaman allowed him to receive rations, in return for which he escorted drunk sailors from the bars back to their ships. 

In keeping with Royal Navy shore tradition, AB Nuisance was a brawler of repute, fighting with the mascots of visiting warships and killing at least two of them.

He died in 1944 and was buried with full military honours at the top of Klawer Hill. 

Bailey, as it turns out, is spooked by the statue, as if something of the Great Dane’s dock-fighting aura still lingers. She much prefers the view of the harbour where a couple of SA Navy vessels hulk in the rain.

There is not much to divert us today. The storm has driven everyone indoors so we swish back up the coast until the guns of Lower North Battery appear out of the murk. The battery has always been a landmark for me, though the old naval 4.5-inch gun turret is long gone, corroded by the battering sea air and then cut for scrap.

Now a new, smaller gun turret hunches on the old gun’s spot, its barrel pointing seaward. The gun, like most of those at the battery, is used for gunnery practice. It makes sense. It’s cheaper than putting to sea in a warship. Since the new ships have smaller guns than the old 4.5s, the turret was redundant anyway.

Few people noticed that it had gone but some who did felt it hard. One of them was W/ O Oliver Smith, a gunner who joined the SA Navy when he was 16 years old and stayed for 34 years.

“I was annoyed that they pulled it apart,” Smith told me once. “That’s where I learned to be a gunner.”

I am thinking of W/O Smith as I drive. He’s gone now but I have a tape of our last interview which is playing as the dog and I cruise around Gun Town in the rain.

Noonday gun

The navy is never far away on the peninsula. There’s a daily reminder of the city’s naval roots when the boom of the noonday gun scatters the pigeons and makes tourists in Bo Kaap drop their ice creams.

There’s the battered museum ship, SAS Somerset, moored near the Victoria and Alfred basins, a cormorant-shit-covered relic that the residents of the multimillion-dollar apartments nearby would dearly love to get rid of.

There are old cannons by the roadside at Kloof Nek and in a park in Muizenberg.  There are World War 2 gun batteries in the mountains above Llandudno and Simon’s Town, and another on Robben Island. 

There’s also the old seaward defence vessel, SAS Oosterland, moored along the public access jetty in Hout Bay, along with a gaggle of dishevelled, rusting trawlers, abandoned yachts and even a couple of ruined cars, including a Citi Golf with no tyres but the steering lock still on.

The Oosterland was decommissioned in 1979. Plans to turn it into a pleasure boat seem to have come to naught. Its caretaker is a weather-beaten man in a well-worn naval shirt who also affects a full-length navy peacoat in foul weather, which in this part of the Cape is often.

He certainly looks the part, though Johnny Nine Fingers, the “skipper” of an engineless trawler moored nearby, snorts in derision when I ask him if the Oosterland’s caretaker is actually a navy captain.

Then there’s the Simon’s Town naval base itself, tucked into the arms of a bay that offers infinitely better shelter than Table Bay, chosen first by the French, then the Dutch and finally the English as their refuelling station. 

It took only a few centuries of storms and ships being driven ashore with huge loss of life for the British to decide Simon’s Town was a better place for a naval base. 

The harbour is best seen from above which Bailey and I do a few days later when the storm blows itself out. Our first stop is the Old Seaforth Burying Ground high on the slopes of Redhill where Jovan Brilovic has a view to die for.

From his final resting place you can see clear across False Bay and along the gleaming strip of beach to the long, blue hump of the Hottentots Holland range on the other side of the Cape Flats.

The bay is unnaturally calm today and the sets are rolling onto Muizenberg’s shore in fine, parallel lines that have brought out the surfers in droves. It is not the swells or the play of sunlight on the sea that dominate the view but rather the sight of the SA Navy Dockyard spreading out along the coast below.

Brilovic’s grave is an excellent place from which to wonder about the activity, or rather the lack of it, going on in the dockyard this morning. A Valour-class frigate, one of the four purchased in the famous arms deal, is tied up at her berth as is the supply vessel SAS Drakensberg. The hydrographic vessel SAS Protea is also in port. Another frigate is on station out in the bay.

Dominating the centre of Brilovic’s eternal view, however, is the actual dockyard itself where the SA Navy repairs its ships. It’s hard to be sure, for the grave is high on the hill, but the usual clamour of a harbour and the industrial cacophony of a working shipyard seem eerily absent.

If it were, say, 1981, this would make unsatisfying viewing for any Cold War spy, one of whose alumni, Comm Dieter Gerhardt, pursued a long parallel career as head of the SA Navy Dockyard while also passing secrets to the Russians.

It is not clear from Brilovic’s headstone whether he was a sailor or civilian. But there are plenty of other memorials here to sailors who were lost at sea or were killed by enteric fever or died in accidents. One cross, erected in the memory of Arthur J Walker, stoker on HMS Monarch, by his shipmates after he drowned in the bay on June 13 1901, is a reminder that the sea is a harsh mistress and that naval histories are written in the blood of lost sailors.

In December 1965, a 32-foot sailing cutter on a training cruise was swamped by heavy seas close to the Kalk Bay harbour breakwater, drowning eight of the 11 crew aboard. It was the navy’s worst loss of life in a single incident since the converted trawler Southern Floe sank with 24 hands out of 25 after hitting a sea mine in the Mediterranean in 1942.

Tragedy would strike the service again on February 18 1982 when the navy’s flagship, the frigate SAS President Kruger, was rammed by the replenishment vessel SAS Tafelberg 145km southwest of Cape Point after a change-of-course manoeuvre during an exercise went horribly wrong.

Sixteen sailors died, 14 of whom had been asleep in the petty officers’ mess, right where the tanker’s bows sliced into the frigate. Two more sailors drowned as they abandoned ship.

When the SAS President Pretorius, which had also been taking part in the exercise, drew close to pluck the survivors from the sea, another survivor remembered seeing men armed with rifles standing at the rescue ship’s railings. The guns were in case sharks turned up.

The sinking sent shock waves through the fleet. The “PK” had won the Cock of the Fleet trophy shortly before the tragedy. The trophy, a gold-plated rooster, was lost with the ship. So was Oliver Smith’s framed cartoon of Charlie Brown’s Snoopy, sitting on his kennel and saying “F... It”.

Smith’s gravelly voice fills the air from my car radio. “We were asleep. I thought we’d run aground, there was this terrible grating thumping sound. We went to our action stations to get our life jackets. My life jacket was in my office and the big picture of Snoopy had fallen off the wall. I picked it up and hung it back on the bulkhead. Another officer was yelling at crew to wipe their feet as they rushed into his office to get their life jackets. It’s funny, the things you do.”

Sitting in his life raft minutes later, Smith watched his ship slip away. “I was thinking ‘I must get new covers for these guns, they’re pretty tatty’.”

By dawn, he was safely aboard the rescue ship. “In the mess I was very grateful for everything the guys had done. I said ‘when we get back to harbour, you must come aboard my ship and I’m going to show you a good time’. And there was just this terrible silence.”

I’m thinking of Smith again as I clamber up to see the heavy guns at Scala battery, high above his beloved Lower North Battery. On a day like this it’s hard to imagine that cold, bitter night way off Cape Point where the frigate went down. False Bay is a flat, blue sheet of metal under a cobalt sky. The air is spiced with fynbos and the sweet calls of sunbirds.

We head to Lion Battery. If we rush we will get there before noon. We do but the battery is closed for visitors. Maybe next week, says the leading seaman at the gate. 

The minutes tick by. Noon. Boom. Pigeons scatter. Bailey barks. Somewhere down in the Bo Kaap an ice cream spatters on the cobbles.