Was your Ancestor a Photographer? Have we not all sat down and looked through that lovely old tin or album of photographs from the past and wondered not only who are the people in the photographs, but also who the identity of the photographers?This invention was a different and new experience that our ancestors had to cope with. Can you imagine having to get dressed up in your best outfit for a man who you have never before met in your life and to have the confidence to pose for a complete stranger and “smile for the dickie-bird” for someone hidden under a black cloth?

(John Herschel) This must have been a daunting experience for many, but for some a real chance to prove either how beautiful or how important they really were.
The advent of photography is a mirror to the past – and enables us to look back in time and preserve memories which we sometimes forget.

Photographers:James Bruton
Sir Frederic Stow
James Chapman
Frederick Yorke
Hermann Marloth
James Cameron
William Syme
Alfred Duggin-Cronin
Elizabeth Webster
Gilarmi (Guillarmo) Antonio Farini
Leo Weinthal
Arthur Green
Samuel Baylis Barnard
William Groom
Daniel Francois Du Toit
Ambrose Lomax
Arthur Elliot
Thomas Daniel Ravenscoft
Carl Hager
George Ferneyhough
Franz Ginsberg
John Hecht
Antonie Johannes Theodorus Janse
Charles Smyth
Egbert Van Hoepen
Joseph Barnett
Horace Walter Nicolls
Leon Schauder
Paul Selby

 

One of our subscribers wrote an article about his visit to Cape Town to search for the Shoyers, one who was a photographer:

The Shoyers in South Africa

We spent a week in Cape Town from 29 October 2001 and our aim was to try and find the addresses where the Shoyers’ lived and where they had their photographic business. We needed to learn whatever we could about them. Everybody that we met was very helpful and went out of their way to help us.
The lady who had done some original research for me had directed us to go to The Deeds Office at The Receiver of Revenue, Plein Street, Cape Town. We had three home addresses:

Oakvale, Oakhurst Avenue, Rondebosch – This was the home of Arthur Shoyer (Mayor of Rondebosch in 1908), and of his son Arthur Frederick Shoyer (who won a scholarship to Cambridge University, England in 1890 to study medicine). It was where Arthur’s first wife Caroline Watkins (whom he had married in London in 1869) died and where Arthur himself died in 1929. The house was inherited by Arthur’s second wife Edith.

Selsley, Main Road, Rosebank – Home of Arthur’s younger brother, William (his partner in the photographic business of Shoyer Brothers) and where he died in 1930.
Sawkins Buildings, Main Road, Rondebosch – Home of Arthur’s younger son Henry (Harry) Shoyer (born in London 1872), and the address from where his wife Louise ran a drapery business in 1926. Louise was the daughter of Arthur’s second wife Edith from a previous marriage. I don’t think that marrying your daughter-in-law’s widowed Mother is illegal!

The Deeds Office was very helpful as I doubt that they get many British tourist visitors to their 12 th floor office. We were shown detailed micro-film maps of the area showing the individual plots of land into which Rondebosch was divided (Rondebosch and Rosebank are adjacent to each other). Then we were shown the original registers (I do not think that these registers are normally shown to enquirers!) with a separate page for each plot listing the owners, and showing how the plot was transferred from one to another, back to 1849. In 1881 Arthur and William became the owners of several plots covering an area about 400 yards wide and half a mile long sloping down to a small stream called the Black River. The register showed that the plots were gradually sold off by about 1900 leaving Arthur with just three adjacent ones, but the plot numbers did not quite tie up with the map, and none of the plots were named. So we knew the road, but we did not know which were the three plots in question along it.

Now we drove out to Rondebosch itself. This is a suburb on the eastern flanks of Table Mountain and the whole area is dominated by this 3000ft high rocky mass. It was obvious that Main Road was so altered that we would find nothing, so we went on to Oakhurst Avenue. This was a quiet tree lined road, but none of the houses was called Oakvale – in fact most had numbers and no names. We had passed a public library so we went there and asked if they had a local history section. They pointed us to a box on the counter with several pamphlets and books in it, including one called “Street Names of Rondebosch” by Peter Hart. This proved to be gold dust!! Under Oakhurst Avenue we learned that Arthur Shoyer, “a prominent local citizen”, had owned numbers 11, 13 and 15 named respectively Ropley Villa, Lerwick and Oakvale, and that in 1894 Arthur had been invited to name the new extension to Oakhurst Avenue that was to run across his land down to the Black River. He called the new road Ropley Avenue in honour of the village in Hampshire, England where his father and grandfather had come from. (Unfortunately this name has now been dropped and the whole road is called Oakhurst Avenue). We went back and found the three houses! Oakvale was much altered with a modern extension but we rang the bell, explained ourselves to the owner and took a photo. Lerwick (No 13) next door seemed much more original so we photographed that also – despite a lot of barking from a large dog. It was a single storey detached house with a corrugated iron roof and a shaded veranda built (so we learned later) about 1900. So, we had found our first address!

Opposite the library was a modern shopping mall built probably about 1970, and we suddenly noticed that a chemist shop was called Sawkins. The library told us that Sawkins Buildings had been on the site of this shopping mall, and found an old photo to show us what had been there. In the middle of the present-day road is an old horse trough, and in the photo of the original Sawkins Buildings was the same horse trough! Sawkins, by the way, was Mayor of Rondebosch in 1903.

Rondebosch library had no old street directories. They directed us to the Cape Archives, back in the centre of Cape Town, where they were able to produce directories for 1919 and for 1928. The mystery of the name of William Shoyer’s house, Selsley, at 10, Main Road, Rosebank, was solved! We had thought that it might have been named after the place where William and his wife Henrietta Smith (born in Coventry, England in 1857) met, but no! In 1919 the house was already called Selsley and was lived in by somebody else. Apparently William came t here between 1919 and 1928 and retained the existing house name. We did not have time to call up the directories for the intervening years to see when he had arrived there.

Our map of Rondebosch showed two cemeteries very close to Oakhurst Avenue and we hoped to find Shoyer graves in them. Unfortunately they have now been redeveloped and lost. The authorities made some effort to trace local relatives and offer them the grave stones but, as the last Shoyer died in Pretoria, 1000 miles to the north, in 1959, nothing is left. We subsequently discovered that they were buried in Maitland Cemetery, Cape Town and have photographs of the graves.

Now we started to search for the sites of the two addresses where Shoyer Brothers had carried on their business – 27, Adderley Street, and 43, Grave Street. Grave Street ran past the graveyard of a large and ancient church (the Groote Kirke) and is now called Parliament Street as it runs upto the South African parliament building. These two addresses are in parallel streets and only a few yards apart so when the Shoyers moved from one to the other (we could not find out which was first) they did not move very far! 43 Parliament (Grave) Street is now a 1960′s office block so no luck there. Adderley Street is “Main Street”, Cape Town and we found number 27 in the actual act of being demolished! They were knocking down the whole block which had the date 1903 on so we took photos. Then we went to the Cape Archives and they put the name Shoyer into their computerised index and came up with a lot of photos taken by the Shoyers.

They were mainly studio portraits of unknown people, but two were of their premises in Adderley Street! And they were NOT the 1903 building being demolished but an earlier one! and one small part of that earlier building was still part of the building currently being demolished! The name Shoyer Brothers shows clearly in the photos.

Now another piece of luck. Two of the studio photos of unknown people were not credited to Shoyer Brothers, but to William Shoyer, Photographer of 77, Loop Street, Cape Town and were dated 1870! Thus it would seem that William went out to South Africa as a bachelor before 1870 (he married in St Georges Cathedral, Cape Town in 1882), and that his elder brother Arthur, with wife Caroline and two small sons, Arthur Frederick and Henry, joined him later and they went into partnership. This had to be later than 1872 when Henry was born in London. We went to Loop Street and No 77, now with a rather run down café on the ground floor, is still there!

Finally we went to the Rondebosch Diocesan College (familiarly known as “Bishops”), to see where Arthur’s son Arthur Frederick was educated and from where he won his scholarship to Cambridge. We phoned the school and spoke to the Principal’s Personal Assistant who passed us on to the Old Boys Secretary who made us extremely welcome. Bishops is a boys school with 1100 pupils ranging from pre-prep to those about to go to university. It is in the great tradition of English public schools with ivy covered buildings, chapel, rugby and cricket fields and a great scholastic and sporting tradition. The Old Boys Secretary gave us photocopies from the school magazine of 1890 recording the scholarships and prizes won by Arthur Frederick plus a copy of his obituary from a 1924 copy. They also found the obituary of Godfrey Arthur Shoyer who was also a pupil at Bishops and was the son of Henry Shoyer (and thus a grandson of Arthur Shoyer) and so a cousin of Frank Shoyer. He died in Pretoria in 1959 having worked all his life for an insurance company, and being well known for his interests as an amateur astronomer and as a stamp collector.
Shoyer was also noted for photographing the great comet of 1882.

By Charles Halifax

Tags: Alfred Duggin-Cronin, Ambrose Lomax, Arthur Elliot, James Bruton, James Cameron, Plein Street, Samuel Baylis Barnard, Shoyers, Sir Frederic Stow