Missing memorial plaque finds way back home
A memorial plaque commemorating the lives of Will and Mabel Downer has found its way back home after being removed from a stone bench at Water’s Edge Beach more than a decade ago.
The plaque was found on the west coast of Namaqualand by a farmer and was couriered to Will and Mabel’s grandson, William “Billy” Downer, earlier this week.
Mr Downer said his father, Geoff Downer, had the memorial bench with wooden slats built for them in the late 1990s.
However, he said, about five years later, a brass plaque on the bench had been “ripped off” and disappeared.
It was later found by his neighbours on a nearby road in Seaforth.
He knew if he remounted the brass plaque it would “disappear” again so he consulted with his handyman who suggested a PVC strip with a plastic plaque mounted to it.
He said the plastic plaque remained there for many years before it disappeared in the mid-2000s.
Then, last month, he was contacted on Facebook by a farmer in Namaqualand asking if he knew Will and Mabel Downer.
Hannes du Toit had found the plaque, still attached to the PVC strip, in Kwaasbaai about ten years ago.
“A piece of the PVC that looked like wood was visible in the sand and I pulled the entire thing out,” he said.
Mr Du Toit said he took it back to his farm, Skuinskraal, near Garies where it was stored with other items he had found on the beach.
This included a Spanish message in a bottle that he had found years earlier.
At the time, he said, he was not “tech savvy” and it was only recently when he was given a smartphone that he created a Facebook profile and tried to locate the author of the message in the bottle.
“Within five minutes, I had located him on Facebook and he responded to my message. Facebook opens up a whole new world. At the time of writing the message, he was a commander on a Uruguayan warship. He is now retired,” Mr Du Toit said.
He had then decided to locate the relatives of the couple on the memorial plaque.
“I posted it on Facebook, and one of my friends, Nico Bronkhorst, took it upon himself to locate the Downer family,” he said.
Mr Bronkhorst shared his findings with Mr Du Toit who then made contact with Mr Downer, who confirmed that Will and Mabel were his grandparents.
Mr Downer said whoever had defaced the plaque must have discarded it in the sea from where the currents must have carried it southwards out of False Bay, around Cape Point, and then all the way up the west coast in the north-flowing Benguela Current many hundreds of kilometres to Namaqualand.
As Mr Du Toit only goes to town once a month, the plaque was only couriered earlier this week.
Mr Downer said he had offered to pay for the courier costs, but Mr Du Toit would not hear of it.
“Heroes such as Hannes du Toit restore one’s faith in the goodness of humankind,” Mr Downer said.
Mr Downer said the plaque would not be remounted on the bench because it would most likely be ripped off again. Instead it would be mounted in a “safe place” in Seaforth.
He said his grandparents first visited Seaforth in the 1920s after immigrating to South Africa from London. His father, Geoff, was still a small boy at the time.
“Subsequent generations of our family still love and visit Water’s Edge, down to the great-great-grandchildren.”
He said the original smaller bench had been enlarged and the wooden slats had disappeared.
