The Unstoppable Mrs Antrobus

In the Eastern Cape town of Cradock, master restorer Sandra Antrobus is the defender-in-chief of architectural heritage. But her interesting story also involves pumpkins and pigs.

- Julienne Du Toit

When Sandra Antrobus clinks pre-dinner sherry glasses all round, sits back and begins her story in this manner, our eyebrows take a quizzical tack of their own.

“You see, it all began when my husband Michael decided to plant pumpkins on our farm, Longacre,” she says, and there’s that Eastern Cape sparkle to the eye that regulars to her establishment have come to know so well.

“Just before harvest, a typical Karoo hailstorm struck and the entire crop was ruined. At first we were devastated, and then we came up with the idea of pigs. We bought a bunch of skinny pigs and fed them the smashed pumpkins. Then we sold the beautifully fat porkers and suddenly a disaster became a windfall.”

To backtrack slightly in her story, when Sandra Moolman of Middleton near Somerset East married Michael Antrobus of Cradock in 1968, they set up home together at Longacre Farm on the banks of the Great Fish River, owned by his family since 1918.

The farmhouse where they raised their children (Cherie, Lisa and Philip) is one of the oldest buildings in the district. Its inner core was completed in 1794, a full 20 years before Cradock was founded. It has yellowwood ceiling beams the exact length of the wagon that originally transported them. Like most such buildings, it was added to piecemeal to accommodate growing families over the centuries.