The Castle of Good Hope
South Africa is not a great destination for castle enthusiasts. However, what we do have are forts. The Castle of Good Hope is a bastion fort.
Its predecessor, the Fort de Goede Hoop, was built in 1652 and now lies beneath the Grand Parade.
Hout Bay has the East Fort and the West Fort, gun batteries built by the Dutch and French in the late eighteenth century to discourage British ambitions. The remains of the Amsterdam Battery lie mostly buried beneath the V&A Waterfront in Cape Town.
Simon’s Town has a Martello Tower, one of about two hundred built by the British during the Napoleonic Wars.
Port Elizabeth has Fort Frederick, built in 1799 by the British to protect the landing place. Nevertheless, it has never been attacked by anything more dangerous than vagrants.
A Brief Military Detour to the Castle of Good Hope
I have a story about the Castle of Good Hope.
In 1965, I served as a conscript in what was then the 2nd Armoured Car Regiment, now the School of Armour. The base lay in Tempe, Bloemfontein.
For reasons I still do not understand, every year a troop of very happy soldiers left our Free State hell camp and travelled to Cape Town on what amounted to a holiday.
After a very drunken train journey, we fell in on the platform and marched to the Castle. I remember pedestrians clapping as we passed, as if we were returning from the wars.
Cape Town did not appear to have many soldiers at the time. It did, however, have hundreds of ice cream vendors. We later learned that they belonged to the Navy.
Life in Castle of Good Hope
With so many sailors available, we wondered why tank troops had been sent to guard the disused Wingfield Air Force Base under naval command. Military intelligence, as they say, is the original oxymoron.
The Castle served as our base for six glorious weeks.
We ate meals off proper plates, served by waiters. No steel varkpanne appeared anywhere. We were amazed.
Our routine was simple. Two days on guard at Wingfield, followed by one day off. We could explore Cape Town during the day, but not at night. That rule proved easy to break.
My mate Gary and I owned civilian clothes. We slipped out through one of the small exits in the Castle walls, hid our uniforms in nearby bushes, and headed for Adderley Street.
The Biscuit Incident
One cold winter’s night, fog rolled in from the Atlantic. At Wingfield, one of our squad, a postman in civilian life, opened a large parcel of biscuits sent by his loving mother and began eating them.
When asked to share, he refused.
A plot followed.
While the others distracted him with loud complaints about selfishness, I went outside. I then leopard-crawled silently back into the guardroom and lunged for the bag of treats.
Postmen must develop a sixth sense for danger. As I reached for the biscuits, his large boot connected solidly with my face.
What followed was not pretty.
They threw him out into the cold, wet night. We devoured the biscuits. I went to sleep bruised but well fed.
Military Justice (of a Sort)
Some time later, a flashlight beam woke me. A large naval petty officer stood over me and said, “So you are the bully!”
The next morning, two things happened at parade.
One soldier, very drunk, fell over. A vodka bottle rolled out of his battledress. We had obtained the alcohol by bartering with locals through a hole in the fence around the airbase.
I was then marched into an office. Behind the desk sat a young veldtkornet (a lieutenant). In those days, the army had revived the ranks used by the Dutch East India Company.
An elderly corporal and the aggrieved postman stood nearby. Neither man would have set IQ records. They delivered long and mournful accounts of my alleged crimes.
I had, they claimed, committed assault and battery, stolen biscuits, deliberately jumped on eight army beds until they collapsed, and ridden the corporal’s bicycle into a wall.
As they spoke, visions of the dreaded DB (Detention Barracks) filled my mind. Rumour had it that few returned sane, if they returned at all.
Then I noticed the veldtkornet biting his lip to suppress laughter.
I received one week of confinement to barracks. No DB.
A Final Note
The Castle of Good Hope appears briefly in The Boys from Umgazana, mentioned in a previous blog – see https://onehundredandtwenty.com/?p=240.
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