Some of the saddest local news we heard on Monday February 7 was about Centenary Hall in Bathurst being gutted by fire, which started at about 4am.
Ndlambe Municipality said the burglar alarm had been activated and Multi Security responded, and a separate police report said a security guard noticed smoke coming out of windows and rising from the roof, and summoned emergency services to extinguish the blaze.
According to posts on a Bathurst community WhatsApp group, people were seen running away from the scene of the fire, so community members suspect arson. The municipality, however, said it had no information on people running from the scene, or the cause of the fire. The municipality said the fire spread easily due to the high volume of wood in the building, and it burned so strongly that firefighters could not stop the blaze. Police spokesperson Sergeant Majola Nkohli said police had opened an inquiry to determine the cause of fire. He said no one had come forward with a sworn statement as a witness to seeing people running away from the scene, but police encouraged anyone with information to come forward.
It is the latest historical building that has gone up in flames and people have noticed a pattern. The big one was the fire at Parliament on January 2, for which a suspect was soon arrested even though his arrest raised more questions than answers. Then Komani (Queenstown) Town Hall, which dates back to 1882, went up in flames late on Friday January 28. Efforts to extinguish it were unsuccessful. The cause of that blaze is unknown and Enoch Mgijima municipality said there would be an investigation.
Bathurst’s Centenary Hall was built in 1920 to commemorate 100 years since the arrival of the 1820 Settlers and also to honour the coronation of King Edward VII. The building has been poorly maintained and although the offices inside were still used by the municipality, the hall itself was not used much in recent years, aside from a few church fetes that have taken place there, as well as being used as a an examination site for matrics from township schools. A small municipal library used to operate from an annex, and was run by volunteers at one stage, but that is also rarely open.
We await to see if the municipality will budget the funding needed to repair and restore this heritage site.
Bathurst Residents and Ratepayers Association (BRRA) chair Chris Boyd said BRRA had established a sub-group to investigate whether it was worth trying to save the hall.
– Jon Houzet
