Towards the end of WW11, probably late 1945 the Churchill Dam was built to provide water for a rapidly growing Port Elizabeth. A team of Civil engineers was appointed to build the long pipeline  to Port Elizabeth.  This firm was Mc Nicol Construction.  Ian, the CEO was looking  for a place to build a house out of Port Elizabeth, somewhere where his two children could go to school and was introduced  to Leslie and Mervynne Carter, who had started Woodridge Preparatory School on the site of Cadles Hotel in 1936. He asked if he could build a dwelling on the West Side of the Woodridge  property . This would be a temporary  house for his family  while he completed the pipeline. Once the pipeline  was completed  he would  pass the house onto the Carters.

Ian was a Civil Engineer of note and set about build his new house on the Western boundary facing towards the beautiful Witteklip Mountains in the North.
As the war had depleted many of the building resources, Ian had to improvise. He used local stone found on the property to build a plinth to add to the foundations. The foundations were bedrock and extremely hard to dig.

Ian Mc Nicol, his wife, Irene and their two children lived there until around 1952/3 when they moved back to Johannesburg.

As far as my memory serves me, the McNicols were originally from Scotland and came from the small district of Windygates which was a group of small farms and estates brought together due to housing demands.