This year marked the 70th anniversary of the College of Medicine of South Africa (CMSA). The gigantic homestead at 17 Milner Road, Rondebosch that has housed the CMSA since 1969 was my mother’s family home for 25 years. 

My mother, Connie Valkin (nee Green), was asked to speak at a Western Province Conference marking the 70th anniversary in May and she gave the group of medical specialists gathered a much more personal history of the great mansion, which has been so beautifully preserved. 

The Conference brought together experts to discuss the accessibility of specialist medicine for the poor in rural South Africa. My mom, on the other hand, spoke of the privileged childhood she had in the beautiful house – an irony not lost on anyone! 

My grandfather, Solomon Green, came to South Africa at the age of 13 in 1913, without ever finishing school. He later joined his wife Esther Manne’s brothers’ growing shoe business – which later became a chain of about 45 stores, called Manne Brothers in the Cape and ABC shoes in the rest of the country. 

When they bought the house on Milner Road in 1944, they were expecting their fourth child. My grandfather loved the flat ground, the unobstructed views of the University of Cape Town and Table Mountain behind it, and the good schools nearby. My mother was the fifth and last child, and she was born there. 

The property had originally been owned in 1854 by Bishop Robert Gray, the first Anglican Bishop of Cape Town, who came to the Cape Colony from England to establish the Church of England, increase clergy, and build churches and schools. He founded Bishops Diocesan College in 1849 and played a significant role in the development of the Anglican Church in Southern Africa. Subsequent owners included Mr Frederick Fitzwilliam who rebuilt the house in 1918 to its current form, and Mr Philip Hill, a native of Maine, USA, who bought it in 1935 and named it Kennebunk after the town in his home state. 

Of the many rich and varied memories of childhood from my mother and her two sisters, Margaret and Judith, and brothers, Vic and Ivor, in these opulent surroundings, a few are worth recalling. Soon after the Green family moved in, some boys who lived in the neighbourhood and attended Bishops Diocesan were caught throwing stones at the windows. It was the mid-1940s and World War II was still fresh for many. When pressured into answering why they damaged the windows, they confessed it was because the Greens were Jewish. The police were happy to prosecute but the boys and their parents were desperate to make amends. My grandfather refused payment from the parents but determined the boys needed to learn a thing or two: they were to work weekends to pay for the damages and donate the repair money to the local war fund. He felt they needed to understand the horrors of the War and the Holocaust. In later years, the boys, one a judge and the other a senior bank executive, would always greet my grandfather when they ran into him on Adderley Street where Manne Brothers was headquartered, thanking him for the lessons learnt.  

The house has a square wooden staircase that ascends around the perimeter of the foyer. As children, my mother and her siblings would spy on visitors through gaps between the columns at the top of the stairway. When the Green daughters, Judith, Margaret and Connie, grew up, it was their dates they would secretly check on through the latticework, assessing how dressed up they should get, as the unsuspecting, nervous gentlemen were received by Solomon in the lobby.

The house had an orchard, a hot house, a pitch for deck quoits, a well, and a tennis court, which was the site of my parents’ wedding reception in 1969, just after Kennebunk was sold. My grandparents had thought flats would be built on the land but there was local opposition to the idea, and they were pleased to be able to sell it to an entity that would hopefully preserve it. Other Jewish families, such as the Blumbergs, Berolds, Blochs and Kushliks, who lived in the area, saw their Milner Road homes demolished or converted over the years by developers. Thanks to the CMSA, it is really only Kennebunk that is so beautifully nurtured with the original cabinetry and joinery.

The Green children all left South Africa at different times, and my mother left for Johannesburg. But whenever anyone visited Cape Town, they would pay a visit to Kennebunk with their own children and find The College of Physicians, Surgeons and Gynaecologists – later renamed the College of Medicine of South Africa – bustling with examinations or lessons or general office administration. On one or two visits my mother’s attempt to visit her old bedroom was disallowed because of an exam being conducted or a cadaver being dissected! ●

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