1. 18TH CENTURY ORIGINS
This account basically commences with Charles Samuel Barends (5 Aug 1848 to 1937).
He retired in 1936 at age 88 as Cape Town’s oldest master cooper having, with his father, run their business “Barends : Cooper” in a little shop under St Stephens church, in Riebeeck Square for, over 66 years. Riebeeck Square was once the fashionable centre of the city, and St Stephens once the Africa Theatre – the first playhouse on the continent.
As the years went by he added basket work to the business which gradually superseded the coopering. He and Sarah Caroline (nee Jearey) (5 August ?) were married in St Georges Cathedral, where he had, strangely against the normal religious practice up to then, been christened. The family resided in Albert Road, Mowbray. Three of their nine children succumbed to an influenza epidemic.
The name “Barends”, we always believed, came from the Dutch and, further, according to “The Cape Times” we were descended from Willem Barendz whose son was the first white child to be born in Cape Town – if not in South Africa – 6 June 1652.
The members of this branch of the family pronounce the first syllable of their surname in a sort of “clipped” manner as in “barrel”, tending it to sound more English than perhaps the majority being Afrikaans/Dutch where the first syllable is the softer intonation as in “bar” and “car”. There is a third, far less heard, version where the first syllable is pronounced “bear” resulting in the name sounding more like “Behrens”.
