Our History
Our History
Edited from our 2007 Greenfield Magazine, With thanks to Lesley Byram.
Behind the leafy trees of Claremont Road is a school with intriguing links to Cape Town’s history. The property, originally called Weltevreden, was granted to Lieutenant Jan Carl Winterbach in 1778 and it stretched from Harfield Road to Kenilworth Station and from the Main Road to the railway line. Its name was changed to Claremont Place and it is from this property that Claremont itself took its name.
By 1820 the two main buildings on the property were Claremont House, a beautiful thatched house which burnt down in 1926, and Greenfield House, the original schoolhouse. Greenfield House got its name because it stood where Claremont House’s garden ended and a beautiful, big, green field began.
Some of the trees, still growing in the Greenfield Grounds, are thought to have been obtained from Ralph Arderne, the next-door neighbour who had an interest in horticulture and collected plants from around the world for his gardens. His own property, called The Hill, was opened to the public once a year until it was bought by the city in 1928 so it could be enjoyed by everyone. We know it today as the Arderne Gardens.
It was a wine-farming area and Claremont Place had 4000 vines in its vineyard. In the 1800s they kept livestock at Greenfield, so they had a steady supply of milk, eggs and meat. They made their own butter, soap and candles.
Robert Clunie Logie owned Claremont Place in 1841 and he sold Claremont House to Sir John Molteno in 1863 when most of his eight children had left home, keeping Greenfield House for himself. Sir John had been living at Claremont House for 9 years when he became the first Prime Minister of the Cape Colony in 1872.
Robert Logie imported the first sewing machine to the Cape in 1856 and it was demonstrated to the public by his youngest daughter, Anna, who was still living with her parents and who taught Sir John’s children for a few years in a little schoolroom built onto Claremont House. This was the first hint of what was to become of the property.
When Robert Logie died in 1867, Sir John purchased Greenfield House, and his daughter Caroline lived there after she married Dr Charles Murray. They had seven sons and a daughter, and the rooms off the passage leading down to the Junior Clubhouse were their bedrooms.
Sir JohnMolteno built Barkly House , named after Sir Henry Barkly, a Governor at the Cape – in the grounds of Greenfield and gave it to his daughter, Maria, when she got married. It became the home of the Barkly house Pre-Primary School for a while and is now part of the new Claremont High School)
Sir John died at Claremont House in 1886 and the property was divided up and sold. Sir John’s son, Percy, who married the daughter of the founder of the Union Castle Line, bought Greenfield from his father’s estate on behalf of the Union Castle Line and stayed there whenever he visited South Africa.
The house was empty for many years before it was bought by Harry Blackburn, whose wife had lived at Barkly House as a child and who had family connections with the Moltenos. Mr Blackburn sold off the land in blocks before he went to live in Elgin.
In 1926 the Chiappini family settled into Greenfield. It was the year Sir John’s son, Frank, was killed in a train accident and Dr and Mrs Murray celebrated 50 years of marriage by throwing a big party at Claremont House. Before the end of the year the house had burnt down.
At the back of the house the garden was laid out in avenues of trees. The property also had never failing springs and plenty of water, probably why the playing fields are waterlogged in winter.