About Us
My husband and I have worked in the hotel and hospitality industry for the last 18 years. We established our first Bed and Breakfast, ‘Arum Chine’ in 1998, in East London, Eastern Cape, South Africa. What started out as a humble one bedroom facility, later grew to an eight bedroom establishment, offering additional self-catering facilities, to accommodate for the needs of our regular nat
ional and international clients. Arum Chine, meaning ‘Flower in the Gorge’ (* see excerpt below), became one of the top performing and well known Bed & Breakfasts in the area, and today still continues to thrive, having evolved to also operate as an hotel and chef school.
*Significance of the name:
Arum Chine was named in the memory of my father, Mr Hilbert Werner (born in King Williams Town, South Africa) and his wife, Mrs Myrtle Werner. Hilbert was the first South African-born curator of the National Botanical Gardens at Kirstenbosch, Cape Town, from 1948. He met his wife, Myrtle (nee Speke – relative of the great African explorer, John Speke) and married her in 1945, in England, where he did training at Kew Gardens, after attending Stellenbosch University. On retiring, Hilbert and Myrtle returned to the Eastern Cape, where they purchased a property called “Arum Chine”, in the Berlin area.
