The land upon which the hotel now stands was granted to Baron Pieter Van Rheede van Oudtshoorn in 1743.
After a progression of owners it was bought in 1890 by shipping magnate Sir Donald Currie to fulfil his dream of building a hotel to cater exclusively for the Castle Line’s First Class passengers.
The Mount Nelson hotel opened on Monday, 6 March 1899 to rave reviews.
Toward the end of the same year, the South African War broke out and the hotel was used as a base for Lord Kitchener, Lord Buller, Lord Roberts and a young war correspondent, Winston Churchill.
If British soldiers residing at the hotel during the war, behaved irresponsibly, they were sent off to Stellenbosch to work at the military horse stables, with the result that the word ‘Stellenbosch’ found its way into the Oxford Dictionary as a passive verb meaning ‘to be relegated, as the result of incompetence, to a position in which little harm can be done’.
The hotel was painted pink in celebration of the end of the First World War.
The first heated swimming pool in all of Africa was installed at the hotel in 1950.
Sir Laurens van der Post wrote: “I have travelled a great deal in the world … but my favourite hotel is the Mount Nelson Hotel in Cape Town”.
The grandfather clock in the Hotel Lounge dates back to the early 1800s. Apparently it struck midnight and chimed so loudly that an irate guest hammered two six inch nails into the chimes and the clock remained silent for 20 years before being repaired by a hotel guest. It no longer chimes as loudly.
John Lennon stayed at Mount Nelson Hotel just a few months before his assassination in 1980. He was booked in under the pseudonym ‘Mr Greenwood’ and is said to have been very tidy, going so far as to make his own bed.
Mount Nelson Hotel website
Sources:
Mount Nelson Hotel
Eyes on Africa
Ocean Liner Musuem
Image: Orient Express Hotels