Durban - The old picture this week features the premises of Durban’s oldest coffee company, Colombo Tea and Coffee, which was based in what was Broad Street, today Dr Yusuf Dadoo Street.
The picture was taken on June 17, 1977, with a caption: “The Colombo Tea and Coffee Shop ‒ listed for courage of its owners in resisting redevelopment.”
The courage referred to a 1973 spat over Trust Bank’s planned R4 million development of Broad Street between Smith and West streets. The shop’s owner, Norman Richardson, refused to have the building demolished and so wouldn’t sell to the developers. The iconic shop posted “We will NOT be demolished!” signs in their shop windows in defiance.
Eventually the new development took place completely around the original shop. Originally proposed as a multi-storey development, this was revised and ended up as a single-storey complex.
But the history of Colombo began 70 years earlier in 1917. James Brown Richardson (fondly known as “Jas B”) moved to South Africa in the early 1910s and worked for Thornton Tea and Coffee before being drafted for World War I.
When he returned, he found that his old employers had gone out of business. He would have to carve his own path in an industry for which he garnered an unbridled passion.
In 1917 he opened his own shop in Johannesburg to provide tea and coffee to the mines, but in 1922 when miners striking for the Rand Rebellion refused delivery and threatened violence, he packed up shop and moved to Durban.
In 1923, he and his son Norman, only 17 at the time, founded The Colombo Tea Agency in a basement of the old Barnes & McFie Arcade in Durban.
It was a place where people gathered to drink from the speciality menu, learn the news of the day, and meet with other locals.
Local historian Gerald Buttigieg, in Facts About Durban, remembers the old shop.
“I can well recall that I used to be sent to get the month’s coffee from the West Street Shop. The order my Mother gave me was always the same: ¼ pound Kenya ’A’ Turkish. The beans would be taken out the bins which lined the front counter and weighed out on a scale. Then they were tossed into a red, tall grinding machine which had two aluminium canisters with fancy lids. The idea of the two canisters was I think for people who wanted mixed coffee blends. After a few minutes grinding, the beans would end up as powder as per your taste. The Turkish was more of a rough grind suited to the way Greeks liked their coffee, black and thick. The coffee grinds warmed by the grinder were dished into a double paper package: the outer one orange having the Colombo advertising on it. I can still recall the strong aroma of the packet.”
By refusing to give way to a large corporation, Norman Richardson became a people’s hero, receiving a flood of appreciative letters from all over the country. The second picture posted by Buttigieg in Facts About Durban shows the buildings all around it demolished waiting for construction to begin.
Buttigieg notes that the shop also had a neon sign outside of an elephant treading on a monkey’s tail.
“The elephant seemingly caught the monkey by his tail. The neon sign used to flick from one action to the other. I wonder what the ’tail’ behind that one is,” he writes.
The third picture of the sign was taken in April 1995 by Giordano Stolley with the caption: “SOMETHING TO SHOUT ABOUT: a 70-year old landmark has to come down because the Durban Corporation thinks it is unsightly. Long-serving employee Gertie Peyper (pointing) does not think so.”
Soon after this Colombo Tea and Coffee moved to its factory premises in Gale Street, today Magwaza Maphalala. In 2016, it moved to its present location at 59 Adelaide Tambo Drive, Durban North. Its café is still a space to showcase its range of freshly roasted artisan coffees, that delicious aroma Buttigieg remembers from the early days still in the air.
The building today houses a Nando’s, as photographer Shelley Kjonstad’s picture shows.
The Independent on Saturday