When the Majestic reigned no more

THERE is a wonderful old photograph taken during one of the last summers before the First World War erupted so suddenly in 1914. It shows three hotels on Durban’s Marine Parade standing confident in their Edwardian splendour overlooking the children’s paddling pool and Ocean Beach beyond.

- MARK LEVIN

The hotels are the Edward (opened in 1911), Fern Villa (later renamed the Majestic) and the Ards’s which was not actually a hotel but provided short-term accommodation in a choice location.

Hard as it is to believe, the recently laid out Marine Parade had not originally been a desirable location. Durban’s main swimming beaches had been at Congella and in Bayside, where the Marine Hotel held court on the Victoria Embankment. True there was one hotel on Ocean Beach, the appropriately named Beach Hotel, which advertised itself in the 1890s as “the only hotel in Durban facing the sea”.

What is omitted to mention was that to actually reach the sea, the extensive sand dunes had to be negotiated. That difficulty was resolved after 1904 when the Town Council began to clear the dunes and develop the area by laying out lawns and building a bathing pond.

These proved to be a great attraction, not only to the public but also to prospective hoteliers, one of whom was Mrs JC Young. If anyone understood the hotel industry, it was Mrs Young. She already owned and managed the 62-bedroom Fern Villa Hotel on the corner of Smith and Aliwal streets, which unusually for the time had an American novelty - a roof garden. There guests could relax at night time, watching “the moon rising over the ocean and the lights of the Berea twinkling like fairy lamps”.