Durban - This week’s set of pictures of old and new Durban take in the history of
St Aidan’s Hospital and were compiled by our correspondent Mark
Levin.
He writes that the first indentured Indians arrived in Durban in 1860 and the medical needs of the growing Indian community were largely met by Christian missions. For the first 30 years, the only educational facilities for Indian children were also provided by these missions.
The driving force behind the establishment of St Aidan’s Mission Hospital was Rev Dr Lancelot Booth, a surgeon and ordained Anglican priest, who came to Natal in 1876 for health reasons.
After he accepted an appointment in Durban in 1883, he acquired a home at 49 Cross Street (on the corner of Leopold Street near the old Alice Street bridge).
His rambling house with a corrugated iron roof became a centre of evangelical and medical work.
Not only did Booth pioneer nursing and first aid to Indian men, he also trained the first Indian stretcher-bearer corps for service in the Anglo Boer War.
One of the men who helped tend to the sick was the young lawyer Mohandas Gandhi.
Booth resigned from St Aidan’s in 1900 to take up a post in Umtata. His medical work was taken up by three Durban doctors, Dr Francois,
Dr Mundy and Dr Stanley Copley.
After attempts to build a proper hospital failed, St Aidan’s moved across the road in 1916 to a house directly opposite Booth’s old home.
The mission rented this house at £9 a month. The rent was twice increased, but in 1923 the lessor refused to extend the lease.
The first photo shows the house on the corner of Cross and Leopold streets from which StAidan’s operated from 1916 to 1923. Today, in the second photograph, the Lakhani Building stands on the site.
Still without funds, the hospital moved back to Booth’s old house. The corrugated iron building at the back served as an operating theatre until 1935.
Only after Lady Clarendon (wife of the Governor General of South Africa) and Kunwarani Lady Maharaj Singh (wife of the Agent General of India) had initiated a fundraising drive,
was St Aidan Mission Hospital able to move to its current site in Centenary Road in 1935.
The third photo shows 49 Cross Street during Booth’s time. Today
an electricity substation and public toilet occupy the front of the site, while behind is an open parking lot where some of the foundations still survive.
Our photographer Shelley Kjonstad shot St Aidan’s Hospital today which is in ML Sultan (Centenary) Road.