Harry's Tales: Made To Measure
Harry Wroth's tale confirms that you need to be sure of your measurements when you order a new house.
This old family friend of ours was a wealthy retired company director. He had an annual trip which consisted of taking his wife by car from Cape Town to relatives at Vryheid in what was then called Natal.
He left her there then motored to Durban and took one of the two P&O liners to the Seychelles. These liners shuttled to and from Durban and India. They passed each other at the Seychelles with a one day stop-over at the Seychelles port. He thus had an option to return directly to Durban on the sister ship or stay over in the Seychelles for three weeks to await the return from India of the ship that took him there in the first place. He usually opted for the latter. He was, you see, getting on in years. He was South African and in 1954 women outnumbered men on the Seychelles by sixteen to one. At least, so he said.
Some months before leaving on one of these trips he ordered a wooden bungalow from a firm in Elgin. It was the first order they had ever received. He told the manufacturers that his Zeekoeivlei waterside plot was fifty feet water frontage and a hundred feet long. As far as clearance from the side boundaries they should allow four feet on both sides. The plot was virtually level.
He went off to the old man's heavenly isles and expected the bungalow to be in place on his return. It was. However, a considerable area of interior space had been lost. You see, the timber bungalow manufacturers' carpenters, joiners, and cabinet makers had used Imperial measures. The plot, of course, was in Cape feet!
