Ridge tents, bedrolls, stretchers and tarpaulins, cut and sewn in Graaff-Reinet since 1902.
See what we cutA hundred and twenty-four years at the same two machines. Eleven thousand metres of cotton duck cut in a year, most of it in the four months before Easter. And somewhere near two hundred tents a season coming back through the door to be re-proofed instead of replaced, a few of them older than the people carrying them in.
Jacobus Bokseil opened a sail loft on Church Street in 1902, cutting canvas covers for the ox wagons still working the transport road between the Karoo and the Port Elizabeth docks. The road went quiet by the twenties. The loft did not. By 1948 the same cutting floor was turning out bell tents for surveyors and prospecting camps, and by the sixties heavy proofed tarpaulins for lorry beds on the N9. The wagons went and the trade stayed exactly where it was: heavy cotton duck, a straight seam, and brass that does not pull out of a corner. We are the fourth generation and still on Church Street. Four people on the floor, two industrial machines older than any of us, and one cutting table that has not moved since 1902. Everything on this page is cut in this building. Nothing is imported and nothing is sewn anywhere but upstairs.
Church Street yard, Graaff-Reinet. Weekdays 7h30 to 17h00, Saturdays until noon. Re-proofing takes ten working days in winter and about three weeks from September. We quote a new cut in two.
