Tracey’s Folly still proud
Tracey’s Folly: The house on the hill, visible from far away
The beautiful home built by Percival Tracey high on a hill above eastern Joburg is being sensitively and lovingly restored by its latest owner.
Percival tracey always got home in his 1904 car, but usually with him sitting behind the wheel, the car inspanned behind a team of oxen.
“The car often broke down and Tracey, sitting behind the wheel, would complete the journey inspanned to a team of oxen. His family called the enterprise ‘Tracey’s Folly,'” records Nigel Helme in Thomas Major Cullinan: A Biography.
His home, a 40-room, three-storey house in Mountain View, was completed in 1907, and Tracey moved in with his family. It was the only house on the rocky ridge, its sparkling white Cape Dutch gables, tall brick chimneys and long wraparound veranda visible from miles around.
The 103-year-old mansion still stands proud on the eastern ridge, visible from Louis Botha Avenue.
Tracey was a mining magnate and his mansion compared admirably with other Randlords’ splendid homes – Northwards, Dolobran and Arcadia, among others in Parktown.
He lived in the house for only two years before he died, yet he must have enjoyed those short years.
The large, double-volume entrance hall is panelled with Burmese teak and contains two 300-year-old carved oak columns, a minstrel gallery, an inglenook (a fireplace nook) and a grand wooden staircase. Halfway up the staircase is a striking window.
“The Tracey family arms and motto Honores Ambire – Surround with Honour – are preserved on a cathedral glass [textured glass] window,” says Alkis Doucakis in In the Footsteps of Gandhi.
Almost every room boasts a fireplace, most with decorative Victorian tiles and elaborate wooden mantelpieces. Floors, doors and window frames are rich Oregon pine. Door handles and light switches are in unique brass styles, now irreplaceable.
The exterior brickwork is superb, with craftsmanship that is no longer available in this country. Jointing is evident – where plaster between bricks protrudes – and was done to prevent moisture accumulating in the spaces between bricks. Exterior piping is made of caste iron with brass bolts – it will never rust, and will be there forever.
Fifth owner
The Tracey family occupied the house until 1917, where after the Park Town School took over the building for 40 years, using it as a boarding house and school. In 1959, AECI bought the property, and turned it into a training school and guest house. The house was sold to interior decorator Dorothy Van’t Riet, in 1999.
Cargo Carriers, a family business, is the new owner, represented by Garth Bolton. The fifth owner, the company moved in in December 2008. The mansion will be the head offices of the company, and around 40 staff members have moved into their refurbished offices.
Bolton says he had his eye on the mansion for 10 years but it was snapped up by Van’t Riet in 1999. It came on the market again in July 2008 and he bought it on auction. Describing the moment of purchase, Bolton says that after his bid there was “a pregnant silence, my stomach was churning, then the hammer came down, and thank God, it was mine”.
For R22-million he gets three acres of land or five stands, in all some 14 500m2. Bolton has divided the huge house into spaces for training and offices, and he plans to restore the large coach house in the grounds.
Conservation architect Henry Paine was called in last year to give an assessment of the condition of the house. He said it was in reasonable condition, with some features, like a new kitchen and the separate rooms in the attic, having been insensitively altered. The coach house had been badly damaged and stripped of its original interior.
Paine was worried about the wood floors – in the past they were sanded too severely, meaning that their small, hidden interlocking mechanism was worn thin and could easily break, causing each plank to collapse. However, restoration of the floors has been successful; Paine has been consulted throughout the work.
He estimates that the replacement value of the house and the value of the land together total some R70-million, making it a bargain buy for Bolton.
Fixing the house
Then Bolton did a smart thing – he appointed Ryno van der Riet as his facilities contractor; in other words, the guy who goes around noting what needs fixing, then fixing it.
Van der Riet says it’s been a huge learning curve for him. “I have learned a lot. A lot of things cannot be replaced, they just don’t exist anymore.”
But what he has done is be resourceful – he has learned to source a craftsman, either a stained-glass expert, a specialist carpenter, or a coppersmith. And he has learned to make special tools, like the one to do jointing with bricklaying.
And he has developed enormous respect for the craftsmen of old. The caste iron piping with brass bolts is so easy to access, he says. The bolt is simply knocked out, allowing easy access to the inside of the pipe, for cleaning, for instance.
He has spent the past year replacing inferior South African pine strips on the floors with Oregon pine or deal, then carefully sanding them; stripping down painted window frames and doors, bringing them back to their original wood splendour; taking down bricked up doorways and fireplaces; re-wiring the whole house, using the original piping; and having old windows re-weighted so that they now open, after decades of remaining shut.
He has covered some spaces that were previously sash windows that were replaced with air conditioning units, with plain wood while he waits to find replacement sash windows. He has replaced inappropriate lighting with imitation period lighting that blends well.
The kitchen, originally with the remnants of a large chimney for a coal stove, has been modernised, as have the bathrooms, which now boast marble floors and marble counter tops. Heating was provided by a large antique coal generator which at some time was converted into a gas generator. Van der Riet has restored the gas heaters throughout the house.
The attic, which was originally a set of small rooms, each with its own fireplace, has over the years been converted into one large room, with attic windows looking out over the glorious view. It is now a large open-plan office, with restored wooden floors.
The house is perched on the edge of the ridge, with an indigenous garden stretching down the steep northern hill. There is also garden stretching south of the house, with a swimming pool, a gazebo and a small thatched house, as well as the coach house.
Also restored is the swimming pool, and this year the terraced walkway of the northern garden will be reclaimed. Van der Riet also plans to get on to the roof with scrapers and brushes, and have it painted in winter.
Challenges and finds
There are still several challenges, though, he says – like the brass light fittings. He has learned about something called an “ernest thread”, a small brass ring bolt that surrounds the knob that switches on the light. He has had to source a turner to make new threads.
He is still waiting to find pieces of Burmese teak, on which he will mount the brass-plated light switches, as they were originally. But his biggest challenge was to supply ICT facilities to every room in the house. He has done very little chasing of walls, instead running cables under the wooden floorboards.
And he has made some interesting finds.
“This house is built forever – it will never fall down,” he exclaims. The exterior walls are 70 centimetres thick and each interior wall is 52 centimetres thick, each reinforced with a steel beam. In 103 years the house has developed just one crack, in the cellar.
Under the floorboards Van der Riet found an empty packet of Lexington cigarettes, priced at six pence, which he estimates dates back to the late 1940s. He found old plastering tools under the floor too. He also found an old medicine bottle, with the word “Poison” moulded on it.
And while restoring a fireplace, he found that a piece of wood lifts to allow for the storage of rifles in a long vertical shaft. “I have a lot of respect for the craftsmanship in building the house. These were genuines,” he adds.
Park Town School
The Park Town School moved into the house in 1917. The school had begun in Girton Road in Parktown in 1902, opened by Lord Milner for the sons of upper class families. It started as a wood and iron building, called the Tin Temple, so taking over this mansion was a huge step up.
“The school … was a great success, and many of the country’s eminent citizens had their first taste of learning in it,” recounts Helme.
AR Aspinall, the founder and first headmaster, moved his pupils into the new building and remained in charge for another two years. RGL Austin took over from him as headmaster, and left in 1945, to be replaced by joint owners and co-headmasters Terence Lawlor and Douglas Fraser McJannet.
Although it operated successfully for 40 years, by 1957 the school was taking strain. “In spite of every effort on their part to keep the school going, its closing is now inevitable,” reported Carole-Ann Brink in the Rand Daily Mail newspaper in May 1957. It seems the reason for closing was financial.
“The school desks, many of which bear the carved names of well-known personalities, still stand in the empty classrooms,” she continued.
Those personalities included the late Harry Oppenheimer; members of the Cullinan family, famous for finding the large Cullinan diamond near Pretoria; Alan and Oliver Fitzpatrick, sons of Sir Percy Fitzpatrick, author of Jock of the Bushveld; and neurosurgeons, specialists and lawyers. Some 32 Park Town School old boys died in World War Two.
The school had 62 boarders and 15 day pupils between the ages of seven and 13, said Brink. Dormitories were named after World War One events – Anza, Ypres, Mons, Delville Wood and Somme.
Secret passage and ghost
The attic was named Mons and had a secret passage running the length of the house, providing the boys with great fun. The story goes that one night, on entering the passage, they found a box with a note inscribed: “Please leave your litter here.”
There was reputedly also a ghost in the house, referred to as “Tracey’s ghost”. Lawlor once found two boys in an out-of-bounds part of the mansion and reprimanded them by saying they may bump into Tracey’s ghost, recounted Brink. Their reply to this was: “Oh, but sir, we saw him. He asked us to sit down and have some tea.”
Van der Riet says that in fact there are two passages running the length of the house in the attic, as well as a central vertical passage. The horizontal passages can only be accessed on hands and knees. He has made good use of the passages – he runs his cabling and piping through them.
But when it comes to the ghost, he says he has worked late at night in the house and has never had any sense of it. But an employee says she had an experience that made her hair rise and gave her goose bumps: she was working alone in the house about 6am when she suddenly felt that someone was watching her. She never saw anyone but got up and closed her office door, and the sensation disappeared.
“I definitely think there’s something here. I felt I was not the only person in the building.”
Cullinan family
David Cullinan, a former pupil and great-grandson of Sir Thomas Cullinan, responsible for the largest diamond found at Cullinan Mines, recalls seeing the ghost. One night as a seven-year-old, he left the second-floor dormitory to go to the toilet. At the end of the passage he saw the shadowy ghost of Tracey, which disappeared quickly.
“I told everybody, but they’d also seen it. It was quite an accepted thing,” he says.
Cullinan followed a family tradition in going to the school – Tom and Roley Cullinan, the sons of Sir Thomas, also went there. Because David Cullinan was the last family member to attend the school, he was given all the school photographs, and has several dining room tables and a chair from it.
He recounts that the boys were allowed to bring axes to school, to go into the grounds and cut wood “to build houses”. They would come across Afrikaans boys, whom they called “jongs”. There was some antagonism between the two groups, and Cullinan was shot with a pellet gun by one of the Afrikaans boys.
Classes were very small, he confirms – up to eight boys per grade. They were given a classical British education, learning English, Latin, French, with Afrikaans thrown in, in addition to the humanities.
Some traditions continued for years. Brink said the barber, LF Junge, had been cutting the boys’ hair from 1906 until 1956, some 50 years.
Van der Riet says he is determined to fix every single thing that needs fixing in the house, knowing it will be “an endless job”. Maybe Tracey’s ghost will finally be at rest, knowing the house is in good hands.