Hidden Treasure Victoria Manor Guesthouse

Maria Nyawula, Product Owner

Victoria Manor Guesthouse	<< Back

IN 1947 the British Royal Family toured southern Africa; drawing vast crowds wherever their white train stopped. In World War Two, South Africans of all colours had rallied to the imperial cause, many of them paying for their devotion with their lives. The Royal Family’s visit to South Africa, barely two years after the war, was an occasion of unprecedented excitement, a reward for the dominion’s service. When the royals arrived in Queenstown, it was simply the greatest day in the small Eastern Cape Town’s history. The Royal Family had to have the grandest treatment; so it was that they spent the night at Maidenhead, on the outskirts of the town. During the Royal Visit black South Africans were mostly consigned to the back rows; seldom were they presented to King George VI, Queen Elizabeth and the princesses. Fast-forward 60 years and the farmhouse in which Queen Elizabeth II stayed with her parents and sister is owned by a black South African woman. The farmhouse is more than 100 years old; it is filled with old furniture, period artefacts and pictures. Its gardens, though, are possibly in a better preserved state than they were in 1947. Situated just off the N6 highway between the Free State and Gauteng and the port cities of East London and Port Elizabeth, Maidenhead, now renamed the Victoria Manor Guesthouse, has ten bedrooms, each of them masterpieces; a tasteful blend of Victoriana and modern convenience. Maria Nontlupheko Nyawula is the smiling, softly-spoken lady of this manor. The 45-year-old is justly proud of her award-winning guesthouse, of it recently being named as the Eyeta award finalist for the Eastern Cape, and the fact that, in under three years, the guesthouse has gone “from zero to four-star”. When Maria bought Victoria Manor the house had been operating for many years as a guesthouse but it was in a woeful state. The sprawling house and its gardens had to be extensively renovated, threadbare carpets lifted to reveal beautiful old wooden floors, and fixtures and fittings bought and installed. The story of how Maria came to own this architectural gem is an astonishing one of sustained triumph over disaster, and the sustained kindness of strangers. In the late 1990s Maria left her job as a municipal clerk after her policeman husband, Max, was shot in the neck and boarded. Much of his payout went to buy Maria catering and sewing machines which she was going to use to start a business. But no sooner had the business started than their house burnt down, destroying all the machinery and Maria’s entrepreneurial dreams. With both her and Max unemployed, the couple took a gamble and bought a house in Milner Street, Queenstown. Then their daughter Sibongile, 14, was involved in a car accident which smashed her leg. If things could not get worse; they suddenly did. Sibongile developed cancer in her other leg and it had to be amputated. Desperate to find some way of supporting her family, Maria took a job as an au pair in Israel. Far from home, in Galilee she one day confided in a group of English tourists how much she was missing home and how worried she was about her daughter. The English tourists went home, canvassed support among their church group and arranged to sponsor Sibongile and Max to travel to Ireland for specialist medical treatment. Back in Queenstown, Maria decided to turn the Milner Street house into a B&B. But she had no furniture, and the house needed painting. “I didn’t even have a teaspoon,” she recounts. Somehow this determined woman convinced several store managers to advance her the paint, kitchen equipment, beds, TV sets and all of the other equipment needed to run a B&B, even though she had no deposit and no collateral. Somehow these people all trusted Maria when she said that they would be the first to get paid when she started receiving guests. Within no time the Milner Street B&B was full of guests; so full that Maria used to sleep in her car parked outside, and she immediately started making good on her promises. When Max and Sibongile returned to South Africa they were astonished at the success Maria had made of her B&B, such a success that soon she was able to splash out on realising her ultimate dream: the beautiful Victoria Manor Guesthouse.

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