Van Blerk Genealogy

Name

Clairvaux House in Clairvaux Road, Kalk Bay belonged to Gerhardus. There were stables at the back of the house in a cobbled yard. He owned enough cows to supply all local needs and milk was delivered each day to the residents. Each day the cow s went up the mountain to graze.

Water was always a pressing need and troughs containing water for the cows were placed on the
mountain between the waterfall and the beginning of [what was afterwards] Boyes Drive. Gerhardus owned the rights to fresh water from the stream. He served on the committee of Kalk Bay Public School for thirty years and at one time even kept th e key to the school and the teacher had to call at his house for it. He had another key, one to open the tank on the mountain which supplied the railway with water for the steam engines.

Clairvaux House became a maternity home under Matron Gatenby but it closed down in 1946. Since then it has again been a private residence.

Fish Hoek Valley by Malcolm Cobern page 214

On 16th March 1827 Mr J.A. Hurter became the owner of land between the Silvermine stream and Kalk Bay Mountain. By 1900 ownership had passed to Mr G.C. van Blerk of Kalk Bay. Agricultural farming was established there in the1830’s and continue d into 1900. The area was known as Klientuin (little garden). The cultivated section only occupied the eastern end of the valley where the residential area is to-day. The ground was naturally damp and any extra water could have been obtained fro m the river only a short distance away. The water from the springs, which was about a mile away, was too far for practical use. Mrs de Villiers then entered into a business deal with Mr van Blerk for the purchase of the water rights from the Kli entuin springs.
1902-08-11 Gerhardus bought erf 89622, what is today known as Dalebrook Flats - at the pedestrian crossing as you leave Kalk Bay just after the Anglican Church, from Henry William Mills.

The 1936 Slum Clearance Hearing: by the 1930s Gerhardus held eleven rental cottages in Die Land, Kalk Bay's fishermen's quarter, already condemned as unfit for habitation by a 1915 Medical Officer of Health inspection. When Cape Town's Slums Clearance Committee moved to declare them slums outright in 1936, Gerhardus retained Dr T.E. 'Eben' Donges (later State President) and J. du Toit of Jan S. de Villiers to argue he had never received any complaint about the properties -- a claim the Council's own 1915 inspection made difficult to credit. He met the threat by giving all tenants a month's notice and moving to demolish the cottages outright, which would have displaced some sixty-eight people. His lawyers told the Committee the proceedings were harming a sick man's health. Council backed down and declared none of his properties slums that year, though most were acquired and cleared within a few years for the Fishermen's Flats development. Source: Steve Herbert, '"Die Land", Kalk Bay: A Social and Architectural History,' Kalk Bay Historical Association Bulletin No. 21 (March 2018), pp. 158-161, citing Western Cape Archives Repository and Deeds Office Registers.

The hill above Clairvaux Road still carries his name today: Gert's Koppie.

A Contested Inheritance: when his mother died, around 1908 or 1909, Die Opstal (the family homestead) passed to his youngest brother rather than to Gerhardus, despite Gerhardus having already received a substantial tract of land of his own. Gerhardus felt the homestead should have come to him and contested the will in the Supreme Court, losing at what family memory records as great financial cost to himself and to the estate. A Kalk Bay resident who had known him, Vincent Cloete, separately recalled that the land from Clairvaux Road toward Muizenberg, as far as St John's Road, had in fact belonged to Gerhardus regardless of how the court case went -- whether this reflects a later informal settlement or simply a difference of memory is not recorded. This Supreme Court contest has not yet been matched to a specific archive reference; treat as strongly supported family tradition rather than documented fact. Source: From Blerick to the Cape, Chapter Thirteen.