Our history

The Cape Town Clothing Guild started its life in 1889 and may well be the oldest registered charity in the Cape Town area. Before the winter of that year, Lady Tennant, wife of then-Speaker of Parliament, initiated a work party at her home in Wynberg to sew clothes for the needy – and so the Guild was born.

There is little doubt that the Cape Town Guild drew its inspiration from an even older charity founded in Dorset, England in 1882 by Lady Wolverton who had formed a small guild among her friends to provide at least two garments a year to an orphanage. Lady Wolverton’s Guild grew quickly to help other charities too and soon attracted royal patronage.

HRH Princess Mary, Duchess of Teck, became President in 1889 and the Guild was re-named the London Needlework Guild. The UK guild continued to work through both World Wars, through depressions and many social changes: it still exists and is known now as the Queen Mother’s Clothing Guild (see qmcg.org.uk ); it operates now much as it always has. (It has no formal links to the Cape Town Clothing Guild, which operates independently).

Back in Cape Town, Lady Tennant’s work parties flourished and in 1903, Lady Juta organised the endeavour into a network of branches (that still exists today) spread throughout Cape Town’s ‘villages’. This organisation very closely resembled that of the London Needlework Guild established some twenty years before. Interestingly, in 1899, Princess May (the future Queen Mary) (whose mother was then patroness of the London Needlework Guild) diverted much of that guild’s produce to provide comforts for the men in hospitals in South Africa during the Anglo Boer War.

Annual Reports issued through the years trace the Cape Town Clothing Guild’s history and the times through which it lived. The 1904 distribution took place in the YMCA rooms and the report records that clothing was mostly distributed through 23 hospitals, orphanages, homes and societies – four of which the Guild supports to this day in their current guises, namely St George’s Home for Girls, Leliebloem House, Salvation Army (Beth Rogelim Men’s Home and Carehaven) and Nazareth House. Lady Hely-Hutchison, wife of the Governor of the Cape, was the Guild’s Patroness in 1904. She was joined in later years by a string of prominent women who lent their patronage to the Guild. These included HRH Princess Arthur of Connaught, Viscountess Gladstone, Her Excellency Viscountess Buxton, HRH Princess Christian of Schleswig-Holstein and HRH Princess Alice Countess of Athlone.

In 1907, a grant to the lepers on Robben Island was noted, and in 1917, the first "corporate" donation was accepted from Messrs JW Jagger & Co. The Annual Report of 1919 noted difficulties arising from the war and the “epidemic that raged in the Cape Peninsula during the Spring''. The Cathedral Hall was selected in 1920 as a more suitable venue for the distribution. “Beautifully finished articles made by girls of Mowbray Public School” were gratefully accepted in 1921. Early Annual General Meetings were grand occasions with a well-known speaker and many civic dignitaries and leading citizens present. In 1926, the AGM, due to be held on 19 June, was cancelled owing to the Salt River “railway tragedy” in which many of these leading citizens lost their lives.

Signs of difficult times were clear in the reports of 1931 (“prevailing depression”) and 1940 (“money spent on men’s boots”). The distribution venue moved to the Zionist Hall in 1941 but wartime pressures played on the Guild’s operations: a drop of 700 garments was noted in 1941 and a concern expressed not to “neglect older obligations with preoccupation with war work”; the report of 1942 was short owing to a “need to conserve paper”; 1943 saw a drop in the number of garments owing to “difficulty in obtaining supplies”; in 1944, the Guild’s work was “maintained despite war”, although the number of societies receiving garments was curtailed; rolls of material were given in 1945 “in place of made garments owing to difficulty in obtaining garments”.

The annual report of 1978 noted 8 475 items distributed, which was the highest total since 1940. The war had diverted members’ efforts and meant that nearly 40 years passed before pre-war peaks were again reached. In this context, the 2020 distribution in Grassy Park of 25 542 garments in the teeth of the first wave of the Covid-19 pandemic – “albeit a month late and with essential service permits, a track and trace register, temperature checks, masks and plenty of sanitiser” – is testament to the resilience and enduring strength of the Guild.

Today’s Guild has perhaps a lower profile than it did in its earlier colonial years but its service to the neediest in Cape Town has endured and grown over the years. The Cape Town Clothing Guild still operates very much according to the original organisational structure established by its founders – using branches/groups to elicit donations, and volunteers to sort and distribute the clothes to other charities on an appointed day of the year near the start of winter. In 1989 (the Guild’s centenary year), Mrs Pat Jeffery described the Guild (of which she was then President) as “a low-profile organisation that quietly gets on with the job year after year – often a recipe for longevity”.