When was the Pirates Arms built?
The Pirates Arms before renovation
The Seychelles Pension Fund, owner of the Pirates Arms, says the building, built in 1938 was then called the Empire Hotel and that there have been gradual extensions over the years, until it grew to its current size. Yet, this newspaper has received evidence from the daughter of one of the persons who built the edifice attesting to the fact that the 1938 structure was pulled down in 1969 and a new one was built: the Pirates Arms hotel.
In an article published in this newspaper on 26 January, the Seychelles Pension Fund (SPF), responding to a petition going around appealing to the President of the Republic to veto the proposed demolition of the Pirates Arms building, said that the complex was built in 1938 and gradually added onto over the years. This would make the Pirates Arms building 77 years old, an argument in favour of the building’s owner’s (the SPF) claim that the building “predates the Second World War”.
TODAY has however since received information that contrary to what the SPF claims, the 1938 building was not only not renovated and added onto over the years, but that rather in 1969, it was completely pulled down and a new one was built. It was completed in 1971 which makes the current building 44 years old, a significant 33 years less than what the Pension Fund had said.
The Pirates Arms now
The daughter of Ken Roberts, the man who with his partner Mr. Oswald, built the Pirates Arms building as it is now, has made available documents proving this. Gemma Roberts has informed TODAY that the engineer who worked on the project, Roy Garden “died a few months ago but shortly before he died, he sent me a detailed description of the project.”
Ms Roberts has made the documents available to TODAY and we are reproducing some of them here. She has emphasized that her contribution is being made solely to correct the historical details being given by the SPF in relation to the building, but that she is not making any comments as to the building’s present state.
The detailed description by Roy Garden is in fact a step by step account of the construction process: the site before construction began and the constraints which were faced. Most amazingly, late Mr Garden has illustrated almost every step of the process with photographs taken during the construction period. In themselves, these photographs are historical records and they even include one of the RFS Emmerdale’s sinking!
Other than the detailed account of the construction, Ms Roberts has also preserved other documents pertaining to the building, including the first architectural drawings which formed the plans of the Pirates Arms, drawn by Peter Wells, a chartered architect. Alongside these, Ms Roberts has carefully kept brochures promoting the hotel, just after its building as well as the establishment’s fact sheet. While these date well over 40 years ago, they are still intact and the printing quality and colour output of the brochure is testimony to traditional printing methods which predates today’s IT developments.
How the Pirates Arms came about
In 1960 Ken Roberts and his wife chose Seychelles as the country where they wanted to have a holiday home. The two came here and bought land at Bel-Ombre, settled down and had their child Gemma Roberts here. Originally a financier, Mr Roberts wanted to go into development projects and when the site where the Pirates Arms building is, became vacant, he sought financial backing for a project to build a hotel there. He entered into partnership with Mr. Oswald, bought the site and set about launching the project.
They secured the services of a chartered architect Peter Wells who designed the building and as engineer, they enlisted Roy Garden, who in his own account of the construction, admits to not having much experience. Mr Garden arrived in Seychelles in April 1969 on the SS Karanja from Mombasa in Kenya.
“I was a 24 year old engineer seeking adventure, work and a holiday. I had left my job as a junior site engineer on a railway construction project through the bush in Malawi, my home country,” Garden writes in his documentary of the Pirates Arms project. He said he was looking for a job and had advertised his services when he was “quite unexpectedly contacted by KP Roberts representing Oswald and Roberts who had outlined plans for rebuilding a town hotel at the Pirates arms site in Victoria.”
Ken Roberts, Oswald and Roy Garden
According to the late Mr Garden’s account, the initial concept included public and accommodation areas spread over ground plus two floors.
“The upper public areas were intended for functions, administrations and toilets. These two public levels were designed with large floor to ceiling heights, whereas the bedroom block had the total height divided into three: ground level was for linen stores, housekeeping, office and maybe rental offices, with the upper two levels being bedroom units,” he wrote.
Mr Garden further recorded that when the construction was in an advanced stage, a second stage was included which was in the form of another three level wing.
At the time that construction works started, the Barclays Bank was already present in the same location it occupies today with the same small lane way reserve separating it from the Pirates Arms building site. To the southeast of the site, where today the Capital City building stands, there was the sea, with the road to the Long Pier to the north. At that time, whatever land there was in Victoria was mostly reclaimed from the sea and comprised of lumps of coral and soil topping, which meant that the ground structure was full of voids between the old coral lumps with the voids flooding and draining with each tidal movement.
Since 44 years ago, most of the technology which is now taken for granted in construction barely existed and most certainly had not reached the country, such a terrain presented many problems and there was also hardly any experience in multistorey construction and no construction company was available locally. Seychelles being so far from everywhere, meant that even then, the provision of building materials was erratic as it relied purely on maritime transport in view of the fact that the airport was only then being built.
Getting past these problems took some imagination and careful planning. It also resulted in a lot of pioneering in terms of construction practices in Seychelles. For example, the Pirates Arms building was the first to be constructed here using the pre cast concrete slabs, which technology had hitherto been unheard of in these islands. Even then, the traditional method of casting the concrete slabs had to be adapted as the frames used elsewhere were unavailable here.
“This project did not have ownership of or hire facilities for large slab formwork and scaffolding, nor did it have the capability for big concrete pours at elevated levels. Hence the adoption of concrete ‘planks’ about 600mm wide, 150 mm thick, formed and poured on polished concrete base slabs at ground level and later lifted into place at the required level,” wrote Mr Garden.
Site foreman, Seychellois Marcel Sinon.
According to the carefully kept records of Roy Garden, the construction site was also the first local one that had workers wearing the brightly coloured safety helmets to safeguard against accidents caused from falling objects, although as he put it himself: “…and after the novelty had worn off and so were the hats! Other uses became evident –carrying water, storing nails, mixing rice etc...”
The project also provided a great training opportunity for Seychellois construction workers and the site foreman was Seychellois Marcel Sinon. The workforce was trained in areas like pre-casting concrete slabs, which was previously unknown in Seychelles. They learned to operate a manual bar bending machine and bar fixing, as well as operating and maintaining a concrete mixer, all of which were new techniques in local construction at the time.
The building was a challenge in those days.
Ingenuity had to be used to produce large slabs
Where the Capital City building stands today... there was the sea!
Cognizant of the threat of sea water contamination, the project developers had to ensure that as much as possible, they used washed sand and took other preventive measures. According to Mr Garden’s records among the biggest difficulties the project encountered, was the roofing.
“The final structural elements were the roofs- a cantilevering canopy extending over the sidewalk at the main entrance and the main roof involving a series of scissor trusses which proved very difficult to waterproof.” Apparently it later proved to be necessary to change the roof completely.
The Pirates Arms took around two years to build under quite difficult circumstances and using the limited technology available at the time. Still the hotel proved to be popular and to this day Ms Roberts still keeps the original fact sheet which gives the tariffs and the brochure used for its promotion abroad.
The original Pirates Arms’ tarrifs.
All those documents have been kept in pristine condition
Source: Today.sc 2-24-15