The old pictures this week take in the many guises of Durban’s Alexandra Hotel at 124 Point Road, a site perhaps best remembered for its bar, Smugglers Inn, known fondly as “Smuggies”, which was the talk of Durban in the 1960s and the 1970s.
The original building, in the first picture, was designed by architect Philip Maurice Dudgeon in 1878, with the hotel opening the following year. At the time, it was the largest hotel in South Africa. It had a reputation as a “Gentleman’s Inn”, apparently including Transvaal president Paul Kruger among its guests.
The building burnt down in 1915 and was redesigned by James Donald Anderson.
In Facts about Durban, historian Gerald Buttigieg writes: “Many Durbanites may remember when Point Road was not that bad. In the late 60/70s , the bottom end of Point Road at night was always a hive of activity with Smugglers leading the way as an offbeat entertainment centre. If you were young and daring, a trip down that way had some entertainment value; strip shows, music, dancing, the occasional fight (known as a raut in the slang then) taken out into the street and a racial mix defying the laws of the day.”
The Alexandra Hotel may have been remembered for years for the name Smugglers Inn, but the original Smugglers Inn was across the road, in the Criterion Hotel at 85 Point Road. It had its own customs officer because you could go from a ship into the pub.
Hugh Scott Smith tells how his great-grandfather was manager at the Criterion Hotel in the 1880s, with Smugglers Inn going back to that date.
Lynette Brown, née Shires, tells how her father, John Shires, opened Smugglers at the Alexandra, with a silent partner known only as SK. She uses only initials because the famed businessman has never officially acknowledged his interest in the business. “You may know the building had been abandoned for many years before it was opened as the Smugglers, and the squatter who had been living there was given a job on the back door handing out tickets and dad still remembers him with great fondness,” she writes.
“My dad was an ex-mounted policeman and moved on to managing two big catering businesses. When dad and SK went to look at the building for Smugglers, neither of them owned a car, so they had to leg it down to the building.”
“Dad met many famous and interesting people there. Smugglers was ahead of its time, ignoring legislation regarding apartheid; one customer dad recalls with respect was Winnie Mandela. He says he invited coloured bands to play there because the white bands were getting too drunk. The bands really took off. On the second floor where the bands played and the people danced, he was always concerned the floor would collapse due to all the movement of the floorboards.”
Her father later went to help manage the Beverly Hills Hotel in uMhlanga.
Today, as Shelley Kjonstad’s pictures show, this once famed night spot and grand hotel is a parking lot.
The Independent on Saturday