The Rise of the Blue Moon Hotel    (Lin Sampson recalls a vanished icon – Sunday Times   01/01/2004)

photograph by G.F.A Kuhnert

The Blue Moon Hotel in Main Road, Lakeside in the 1940's at the height of the jitterbug era.

In the days when ducktails fought larneys, and girls wore circular skirts and bobby socks,
a Cape Town dance hall provided an outlet for the crazy need to jitterbug the night away. 

Every now and again something comes up that epitomises an era. The Blue Moon Hotel in Lakeside was one such icon. Now sadly pulled down, it strikles the memory like a match. It was the replica of the moon that got to you with its big, half cheese blue grin plastered on the outside of a custard coloured Deco Building.

As a child it beckoned me, spoke of something slightly sleazy, a garden of only half understood anticipations.

The saying was "Bop and spoon at the old Blue Moon". Duncan Hammond who grew up across the road from the hotel has turned a 50 year old dream into a reality. Hammond, a sales rep has written a rock musical called Last twist at the Blue Moon Hotel. He says "Although we moved, I could never get the place out of my head. I spent the first years of my life watching people come and go. There was an alley besides the hotel where all sorts of things would go on. Just looking at it made a certain part of my anatomy hard".
Hammond recalls going to Normans Milk Bar in Muizenberg where the ducktails did wheelies outside and the Empire Cinema where the kids used to swop comics - and of course Spotty Dog. No parent with a child could pass Spotty Dog without stopping for a hotdog.
The Blue Moon Hotel opened in 1939 on the eve of World War Two and closed in the mid 1960's. It was at its height in the fugitive era that spanned the end of the 1950s and the beginning of the 1960s. A time when apartheid held the country in a vice-like grip and the Immorality Act ruled. Many people smooching in cars (made in those days with one long seat ) remember being hauled out and having torches shone in our faces.

Those days were a sort of post-war binge which left grown-ups even those who had not experienced the war with a wild desire to jitterbug. From beneath the strangehold of apartheid, a froth of talent began to emerge, at first in small bubbles and then in a seizure of excitement.

photograph from the National Library of South Africa

Peter Hunt who played in a band called The Plainsmen at the Blue Moon says, " It was an extraordinary time. A lot of people immigrated and most of them did very well. There was Richard John Smith who was Chers original manager, and Matt Lange who is now married to Shania Twain."
It was the time of LM Radio ("Check your time with the LM chime"), hotdogs(never hamburgersin those days) the V-8s, Simba chips, Chocolate Logs, strawberry milkshakes and packets of 30 cigarettes. And what ever happened to Canada Dry? The drink at the Blue Moon was brandy and Coke and the barman used to stack the glasses prefilled with tots of brandy so they were always ready for the crowd.

Clothes had started to relax from the corsetted silhouettes of the 1950's into pedal pushers and stove pipes. The big colour combo was pink and black. Girls wore circular skirts that flew around them when they dances and bobby socks and fountain ponytails.

In an effort to upstage a mothers twinset, the prevailing fashion was an Orlon cardigan done up at the back with lots of tiny pearl buttons. Denim had only just appeared on the scene and blue jeans were not allowed in dance halls. denim was considered dangerous and a little decadent. In Cape Town it was the era of the Alhambra Theatre, which had a starry ceiling and the Waldorf, where everyone went for birthday parties. Part of the drama of the city was reinforced by the fact that Cape Town was still a working port, and a spattering of dark dives with names like the Navigators Den and the Catacombs emerged.

Local bands such as Dickie Loader and the Blue Jeans played a baggy accomodation of international hits by stars like Buddy Holly and the Crickets and Bill Haley and His Comets.

Peter Hunt recalls the the fashion of the day for band members revolved around tight stovepipe trousers in a shade of powder blue. Nowdays life is dominated by the gangs from the Cape Flats. In those days the gangs came from the southern suburbs. The name on everybodies lips was The Duke. A regular customer in those days was Michael Walker who says "I dont know what his real name was something Russian, I think. He would arrive with a cavalcade of henchmen. Nobody danced until he went onto the dance floor. He was the king.  He would pick a girl and they would start the dance and then he would say "OK guys" and evryone would go onto the dancefloor."
It was a great time for fights; people knocked each other out with monotonous regularity. The prevailing war was between the ducktails , who mostly came from the poorer suburbs, and the larney boys from Rondebosch and Newlands.

photograph from the National Library of South Africa

Walker" Duckies were a big thing. There was the ducktail lingo "Im taking my goose for a gander" meant you were dancing with your girl. If you got lucky the term was, "I really changed my oil". People loved the Blue Moon because it had this famously sprung dance floor. Peter Hunt says "You could just stand on it and feel yourself moving. It sort of glided under your feet."
It also boasted the first mirror ball in South Africa which hung from the ceiling in all its glittery glory, turning reflectively as it highlighted the crush of hot eared young men and fully blown over talcumed young women with sweat seeping into pancake makeup.
People went there for different reasons . Some went to pick up girls. My own parents who hated the middle class gentility of a place like the Kelvin Grove, frequented the Blue Moon because it was edgy and frequently broke through the colour barriers.

Joy Human was a habitue of the Blue Moon in those far off days. "I met my husband Robert, there when I was 15 years old in 1963. I had to get my mother to write a letter to say that I had her permission to go there. In those days my husband, to whom I have been married for 36 years was an apprentice electrician and would often go directly from the dance to his shift."

But most people went to the Blue Moon because they loved to dance. They came from rich and poor suburbs. What held everyone together was the glue of fancy footwork, twirls and glides, the bob, the jitterbug, the waltz and the quickstep.

Michael Walker says "It was all good clean fun but the holy grail was dance."