The Robber Baronet
- Cameron Luke Peters
- 1 hour ago
- 11 min read
An Unbelievable Sketch of Sir David De Villiers Graaff, the first Afrikaner Mogul
Words: Cameron Luke Peters
“Graaff fulfilled an ideal that had taken root among some wealthy business people internationally by the end of the 19th century - that wealthy people had a moral duty to start giving away part of their fortune during their lifetime. The American steel tycoon Andrew Carnegie was probably the first industrialist to openly declare, with scorching judgement in his ‘Gospel of Wealth’, that those who do not do this “will pass away ‘unwept, unhonoured and unsung’…”
From ‘Sir David Pieter de Villiers Graaff, First Baronet of De Grendel’ by Ebbe Dommisse
If you ever train to become a licensed wine guide for tourists in the Western Cape, you’ll probably get taken to ‘The Bolt’ (De Grendel): an incongruously gorgeous wine estate on the sea-facing side of the Tygerberg Hills. Sprawled around it, all along the West Coast, are the endless garden suburbs and industrial labyrinths built on the brink of the Boerewors Curtain. And not so long ago, everything you can see there, from Paarden Eiland to Parklands, was once owned by one man. Even the Ysterplaat and Wingfield Air Bases, your host will cheerily inform you, are still on lease to the Department of Defence (for some use or other) by the enormous Trust set up in his name. And all of it still constitutes just a fragment of the estate of the only line of the English aristocracy left in South Africa - the Graaff Baronetcy. If the patriarch’s name wasn’t already a clue, the first title-holder started life as a Dickensian plaas boytjie in Villiersdorp in the Overberg.
Sir David Pieter De Villiers Graaff (1859-1931) is one of the missing links in South African history and one of the strangest enduring personalities in our sense of our selves. He is a difficult person to fabricate or even imagine from today’s point of view. I first became fascinated by him as I spotted his name anywhere and everywhere whilst tumbling down the rabbit-hole of Cape Town lore. As a raging leftie at heart, I almost wanted to reveal him here as a forgotten Afrikaner counterpart to Cecil Rhodes - a sinister man-behind-the-throne, prime author of most of our pains. But the opposite turns out to be true. In an era when politics is run like a morality abattoir and billionaires intervene directly in politics to personally snatch candy from babies’ mouths, it’s astonishing to learn about a South African magnate for whom revolutionaries would probably spare the guillotine. Although the journalist Pieter Du Toit has gone a long way to humanising the Stellenbosch Mafia, I don’t think their good works deserve anything like the honouring I’ll offer their forebear.
Let me explain. Sir David was born as klein ‘Dawie’, on a farm called Wolfhuiskloof near Franschoek, on the 30th March 1859 at the most decisive turning-point in South Africa’s colonial history. Long before diamonds and gold were unearthed upcountry, the Cape was just about to pivot from being a backwater service-station for Dutch and English trading-ships to becoming a capital investment in its own right. Indeed, Sir David’s life played out in exact parallel to the industrialisation and exploitation of South Africa. He was the sixth of nine children born to a struggling blacksmith (and part-time dentist) and a farmer’s daughter. Even though his grandfather had founded, and named, Villiersdorp, and one of his ancestors had sculpted the miraculous pulpit of the Groote Kerk in Cape Town, he grew up near the bottom of the Boer hierarchy. His parents had eloped. The soil was poor. He herded cattle and pigs and was only taught up to Grade 5 by a travelling English schoolmaster.
However, when he was 11-years-old, like a twist from Great Expectations, a wealthy, beloved oud-oom - his father’s half-brother Jacobus Arnoldus Combrinck - paid a visit from Kaapstad and impulsively took Dawie under his wing. Almost every adult who knew him as a child would later reflect that this was not a surprising move:
“Graaff impressed everyone with eyes to see. [...] [Once] [h]e had been sent with a message [to the local dominee]. There was something about him that arrested Mr Botha’s attention, something in the precise way he delivered the message and something altogether intangible, but Mr Botha marked the boy from that day on.”
The Cape Town to which Dawie arrived in 1870 was a seething cosmopolitan metropolis - at least compared to anywhere else in the country. In fact, it was still barely more than 40,000 people. But it was about to explode like an American boomtown, and Dawie’s uncle, after decades of sly dealing, now ran Combrinck & Ross, the biggest butchery in the CBD, boasting tenders to the British Army & Navy. Dawie would start his working-life at ‘the Shambles’, the livestock corral and meat-market at the edge of the Grand Parade, on the site of today’s Golden Arrow bus-rank.
Given that we’ve forgotten everything but the pejorative use of the word, you can imagine what this Shambles was like: “[t]he abattoir was on the beach, so the blood could be washed away in the sea and the remains buried in the sand. There was no refuse removal, and the decaying meat, along with the putrid fish from the nearby market in Roggebaai [...] caused an unbearable stench. At night, street dogs rummaged in the waste, snarling and yapping.” For six years, Dawie would spend his working days here “skinning the animals [and] keeping the books and accounts” and his evenings learning English at night-school before returning to his uncle’s villa in Woodstock. By 17, he had not only become fully bilingual and completed his formal and informal education; his uncle trusted him enough to make him a general manager. As David’s father had just died, he was soon joined in the business by two of his brothers, and his sister Hannie moved in as their uncle’s housekeeper.
Over the next two decades, under the aegis of ‘Combrinck & Co.’, David would essentially take over and modernise the entire South African food industry. He and his brothers certainly looked the part of Victorian entrepreneurs - black-bearded, black-mustachioed, with suits and spectacles to match. In a time of mass global electrification, David frequently left Cape Town for months at a time to conduct corporate espionage across the world. Through the 1880’s, he visited London, Chicago and Buenos Aires and noticed that the greatest innovation in the history of food logistics was becoming mainstream - namely, Refrigeration, or Cold Storage. Just take a moment now to imagine what the world was like before fruit or meat could be freshly preserved or transported for longer than a few days. It was another reality entirely. Although one or two tycoons had made a go of exporting Cape produce in this fashion before, it was Graaff who imported and installed the first industrial cooling chambers in the country in 1890 and Graaff himself who would reap all the spoils.
By 1897, Combrinck & Co. would control the meat supply and distribution network for the entirety of Southern Africa, with subsidiaries in Port Elizabeth, Beaufort West, Durban, Pietermaritzburg, Aliwal North and Johannesburg, and Graaff was the richest man in the city. This attracted the ire of no less a figure than Cecil Rhodes, who despised monopolies (other than his own) and thus diversified De Beers, his diamond cartel, into a rival cold storage outfit to supply Kimberley and Rhodesia. But in the depression that followed the Boer War, many corporates were forced to merge or die, and Graaff ended up folding his company and his adversaries into a single international behemoth: Imperial Cold Storage & Supply. Now there’s a name with a menacing aura. But considering that Graaff and his brothers gave more than £100,000 in anonymous donations to the Afrikaner women and children who survived the Empire’s concentration camps, the irony would not have been lost on him. Incidentally, you can still go to the original ICS HQ at the bottom of Bree Street, one of the last surviving Cape Edwardian office buildings, now hosting a Waltons, a Col’Cacchio and a Starbucks.
It’s important for us to understand that this one company did almost as much to sew South Africa together as the railways, the highways, the Act of Union or Ouma Rusks. Indeed, it was the Tiger Brands of its time. But whilst David was building his empire, he was simultaneously rebuilding Cape Town. He had become a city councillor at the age of 23 and joined the ‘Clean Party’ of reformers pushing for the city to cover over its many open sewers. By 28 he had helped the municipality refinance its debts with Standard Bank and negotiated a huge loan to build new reservoirs on Table Mountain. By 31, he was the Mayor. He only served for two terms (of a year each) but the Cape Argus summed up his influence thusly on his re-election:
“When Cape Town is but a few years older, and our visitors more frequent, it will be [Graaff] the people will thank for the care taken in the devising of plans for their health and comfort. In those days, not so far away, we shall have a floating bath out in the bay, a theatre worthy of the artists we shall receive, an hotel fit to receive a distinguished visitor in, a sea-wall promenade which will be a place worthy of the attendance of our wives, our daughters and their friends, and streets which are well paved and cleaned.”
This would all prove true. Graaff even oversaw the transfer of the Company Gardens from the colonial government to the city and then restored it to become the tourist attraction it remains today. He declared at the end of his first mayoral minute that he “only desired to see Cape Town made the queen of South African cities, a metropolis worthy of the country.”
I wonder if Geordin Hill-Lewis cribbed his notes? I’d be pleasantly surprised to find out whether he knows that Graaff was the man who donated the velvet and ermine Mayoral Robe he wears at public functions, along with his official Rod and Hat. For his part, David continued to spearhead reforms even when his term was over and he was a mere councillor once more. The most tangible relic of his tenure you might know about is the Graaff Electrical Lighting Works beside the Molteno Reservoir in Oranjezicht. I’m sure you’ve spotted it? This was the first public power station in the city, and it used renewable hydro-electric power to light 775 streetlamps between District Six and Three Anchor Bay. One of Graaff’s successors, Mayor George Smart, christened it in April 1895 by smashing a bottle of champagne against one of its turbines before his wife pushed a button and electrified Cape Town all at once. This leap into the future had cost £75,000. Tired of years of budgetary delays, David had paid for all of it out of his own pocket.
It seems clear to me that at a very basic level, Graaff wanted to improve the city because he had to live and work in it too. His business would do better for all his reforms of course, but also he felt that Capetonians themselves deserved a universal standard of decency. This extended to the non-white population of the city: in 1891 he was encouraged to run for a seat in the Cape Parliament by a petition of 94 Bo-Kaap ratepayers who urged him to use his “eminent business tact” at a much broader level. And this he very much did. After a decade’s break from politics, in 1908 he was convinced by his friends Louis Botha and Jan Smuts to join the lengthy negotiations to tie the four colonies together, and later he joined the first Union cabinet as the first Minister of Public Works.
The rest is history. In brief, he was the most important white South African in the first half of the 20th-Century who never actually led the country. Among many other things, before he died in 1931, he broke the British shipping monopoly on mail and freight to our ports, he negotiated a loan of £7,000,000 from the British Government to fund our army during World War One, he represented the country at the Versailles Peace Conference in 1919, he brokered the deal to build the current University of Cape Town, he was the first major investor in any South African radio service and he bought the largest batch of capital shares in the Table Mountain Cableway. In fact, if you ride the Cable-Car today, you’re still essentially giving money to the Graaffs Trust - one of the biggest real-estate asset managers in the city, headquartered in Church Square near Fyn Restaurant.
However, the strangest part of his legacy is, of course, that Baronetcy. What is a Baronet? Basically, it’s a knight of the British realm who owns a lot of property and can pass the title on to his son. Only 14 South Africans - mostly mining magnates - have ever been so honoured, and the British monarch stopped conferring them upon us in 1925. Of all 14, the only surviving title today belongs to Sir David’s great-grandson Sir De Villiers Graaff. Anyone who knows the arc of Jan Smuts’s career - starting as a commando-leader sabotaging British troops and forty years later becoming Winton’s Churchill’s BFF - might get a sense of the paradox Sir David had to embody as a Cape Afrikaner aristocrat, loyal both to his people and his sovereign. In fact, one of the reasons he was offered the honour in 1911 - besides his contribution to the creation of the country - was because he was still a bachelor at 52 and it was thought the title would die with him. But within two years he’d met, courted and married the love of his life, Lady Eileen, and then had three sons (just to be sure).
Today, perhaps, we can see this title as one of the most curious relics of white liberalism left to us. In the decades building up to Apartheid, the country was ruled by a grand pipe-dream which imagined that if talented, broad-minded Afrikaners and Souties reconciled and worked together, in business and politics, to build a new national identity, they would not only bury the evils they had done to each other but their good works would trickle down to ‘civilise’ and ‘empower’ the non-white people whose lives they controlled and whose voices they disregarded. It sounds so naive today, doesn’t it? But the flame of this ideal was kept alive, even in the darkest years of Apartheid, by Sir David’s eldest son, Sir De Villiers Graaff, who became the leader of the United Party and stood in opposition to the Nats in parliament for more than two decades. It was also fanned by one of my grandfathers, Derrick Watterson, who was Mayor of Durban in the 80’s, served under Sir ‘Div’ for years and received bomb-threats from far-right activists.
I say all this to qualify my praise for Sir David. Hindsight and context should rightfully be unkind to us all. But the failed fantasies of the past and the wholesale cynicism that typifies our present shouldn’t blind us to the fact that we can demand better of our leaders today. When you can draw on examples like that of Sir David to show how competent, reactive, sincere and scrupulous an individual in power can be - especially when they do have conflicts-of-interest to navigate - it should only serve to raise your standards for humanity.
The next time you visit the Iziko National Gallery in the Company Gardens, keep a look-out for a surreal masterpiece called ‘Holiday Time in Cape Town in the Twentieth Century’ (1899). It was painted over 8 years by a savant artist named James Ford, who sold it for peanuts and died penniless. It depicts the Mother City as a retro-futurist Victorian paradise, barely recognisable (except for the mountain of course). In amongst the crowds, you can spot Sir David Pieter De Villiers Graaff, immortalised by a fantasy of the city he transformed.
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