Eight years ago a group of businesspeople hired a whale crier and forever changed the state of tourism in Hermanus
Andrew McUtchen
When Pieter Claasen first lifted a horn- shaped strand of kelp from the sand, and sounded a resonant bass note to the cliffs of Grotto beach, his audience could hardly have been more unappreciative.
“Hou op met blaas!” his mother snapped, probably before delivering a swift klap to the side of the 11-year-old Claasen’s head. This is as his sister, Emily Josias, remembers it, and as she told it to a packed church three weeks ago at the funeral of Hermanus’s – in actual fact the world’s – first whale crier.
“He used to make sounds from everything he could get his hands on: kelp, bottles, strange things,” Josias said in a lyrical and adoring obituary, which promised mourners that “tonight the wind is going to blow its wildest”.
If Claasen’s ill-tempered mother could have known that, nigh on half a century later, her son was to sound the same subsonic note to a cobbled street of rapt, copper-bell swinging poms in Topsham, Exeter, as honorary guest at the annual Town Crier Festival, she might have exercised a little temperance. If she had also known that her strident son would be later listed in a famous German calendar as being among the two main attractions in South Africa, she might even have tried a little tenderness.
Because in the eight years since a group of Hermanus businesspeople, embattled by the typical low tourist figures of the off-season and known locally as the Monday Club, decided to hire Claasen to sound a horn whenever whales were visible in Walker Bay as a tourist novelty, Hermanus’s whale crier has become a worldwide phenomenon.
More than 30 international media interviews take place every year, as well as an average 10 television appearances, not to mention the national and local press. More than 60 000 tourists now flood the quiet Western Cape village in the once “off” season (June to October), an exponential improvement on the “pre- crier” period figures.
Owner of the local guest house (Kenjockity) and founding member of the Monday Club Jim Wepener remembers his being the only guest house in town in 1991. There were about two B&Bs. This year, there are more than 150 accommodation houses in Hermanus, ranging in price and location from the Marine hotel, to a couple of backpackers.
One simple idea, Wepener chuckles, has transformed the town into a tourist mecca in both the summer and winter, performing the guest house owner’s equivalent of alchemy. “Right place, right time,” he sums up with a sage nod of the head.
The combination of a timely concept, a specially tailored white tunic (designed to harken back to ye olde days of English heraldry) and a local personality in the cheerful Claasen did indeed amount to pure gold. Maybe for that reason Claasen’s previous employers, the local Hermanus museum, were reluctant to let him answer the call of the horn.
Wepener recalls: “The major problem was that, once we had decided that Claasen had the knowledge, and theatrical personality for the job, we found it very difficult to ‘borrow’ him from the museum. They allowed us to have him only for one hour per day. Oh, they hated it,” he says, between clenched teeth.
“I had to keep on phoning saying, ‘There are queues of foreign tourists waiting for him at the post!’ And they would say, ‘No, he’s too busy rearranging the brochures at the front desk.’
“It was a never-ending battle: the more famous Pieter became the more they would try and cramp his style. He was very soon required full-time, and that ended all that!”
To add to the trouble in the early months, Claasen’s friends and other locals made it game to rename him “papegaai”, mocking his fancy dress, and limp kelp appendage. But the more Claasen blew his horn, the more his detractors changed their tune, until eventually there were none. He became an international icon for Hermanus, and a beloved symbol for whale-watchers everywhere. At Claasen’s funeral service Simon Roberts, the editor of the BBC radio programme Wild Life, sent a personal note expressing his heartfelt condolences; a poignant echo to the humble kelp horn heard all over the world.
Hermanus’s second whale crier, Wilson Salukazana, who has been working in the two years since Claasen fell ill with diabetes, says that the skills required to be a good whale crier are more social than technical and that this is where Claasen set a fine example.
“Don’t get me wrong,” Salukazana cautions, “you must be able to answer the questions put to you by the tourists, like ‘Where do the whales come from?’, ‘What type of whale is that?’, also to know the names of their stunts. But to be a really good whale crier, like my late friend Pieter, you must be able to give the community excitement. When I come out at 10 o’clock in the morning in the season, the people just get so excited. They are waving at me, asking me to be in photographs, and that is even before I blow the horn. When I do that, things get really crazy!”