to his success as mayor Graaff evidently received so much support that he would not find it difficult to be elected to the Cape Parliament. His intention to stand for Parliament was welcomed by the Lantern, which regarded his election as a formality: “… the Cape District could get no better and more enlightened representative within the solemn chamber of the Legislative Council…”32
A few months later, however, the Lantern had a bone to pick with Graaff:
“What is a man without his clothes, or a Mayor without his robes? Thomas Carlyle has declared that a man and a flunkey should always be correctly and distinctly apparelled, and why should not Mayor Graaff of Capetown? True, Mayor Graaff sports the ermine he has no more right to than Jones’s coachman has to the cockade and royal scarlet, but, then, he pays his money and takes his choice. Yes, we have a crow to pluck with the Mayor, and this is how we do it. It was we who went and got him photographed in his brand new official robes, to be resplendently and eternally advertised in these everlasting pages, and then he meanly goes behind our backs and gives our idea (and his photo) to that miserable Argus he is an unfortunate and helpless shareholder in. Mayor Graaff must therefore go to the wall this issue, for, after that, we will neither advertise him, nor his moustachios, nor his beef, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor anything that is his.”33
Despite this light castigation from a publication that was intensively involved with municipal matters, the public insistence that he should become a Member of Parliament remained strong.
CHAPTER 7
Power for the Cape
A month after his re-election as mayor, Graaff was elected unopposed as member of the Western Circle of the Legislative Council on 14 September 1891.
A news item in a local paper mentioned that he had incurred no costs for an election campaign. Due to the fortuitous circumstances that had enabled him to become a member of the upper house as a young man, he was planning to distribute among Cape Town charities an amount equal to what he would have spent on a campaign.1
Graaff, who was sworn in as member only a few months later, filled the vacancy in the upper house of the Cape Parliament left by Combrinck’s death. His responsibilities, therefore, increased in his second year as mayor, an even busier year than the first. Still, the additional duties did not distract his attention from the modernisation and improvements in Cape Town.
One of the innovations in Cape Town for which much of the credit would go to Graaff was the supply of electricity to replace gas lamps. This was made possible by means of improved water power, to which he had already referred at the end of his first term in his mayor’s minute: “With the water power now available, electric light should be possible and this will prove a boom and large returns from places of business and residences.”2
The idea that the city should get electrical power was not Graaff’s alone; other councillors had pleaded for it earlier. A start had already been made in 1883 when the Anglo-African Light Company supplied power to the railways for 22 lights at the docks and six at the station. The Cape Parliament was illuminated by arc lights. For most Cape consumers there was no centralised power supplier and each user had to generate its own power.3 Graaff’s drive to establish such a power supplier and replace gas lamps with electric lights appeared to have been decisive in the decade after the American inventor Thomas Edison had developed the electric light bulb in 1879.
Pressure for proper electric lighting for the entire Cape Town area increased shortly after Graaff’s second term as mayor had begun. The Lantern published an article describing the robberies and assaults on the Grand Parade at night. The article put the question whether it was “laziness, inertness or stupidity that is responsible for not properly lighting the city”. The author recommended to Graaff to gird his loins and provide proper lighting for the city.4 In an editorial in the same publication, which had been offended shortly before because Graaff had given a photograph of himself in his mayoral robe to the Cape Argus, the mayor was praised for what he had achieved for the city as a 32-year-old:
“He is the most valuable kind of man – a self-made man. But Mr. Graaff’s value to his fellow-citizens is not so much as an enterprising business man, as because the work he has done for Capetown in his municipal capacity. That Mayor Graaff is responsible for the improvements which are on the way, everybody must admit.
When Capetown is but a few years older, and our visitors more frequent, it will be the Mayor 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 the attendance of our wives, our daughters and their friends, and streets which are well paved and cleaned.”5
Before travelling abroad, on 14 November 1891 Graaff laid the cornerstone of the new opera house that was to be built on the Grand Parade. The building, which could seat 1 500 people, was erected on the corner of Darling and Parliament streets at a cost of £40 000, especially thanks to the support of Graaff and the industrialist Anders Ohlsson, who both served on the board of directors of the Grand Parade Buildings Company.6
Graaff departed for England on 18 November 1891 aboard the mail boat Hawarden Castle, accompanied by his sister, Hannie, and other relatives. Nearly all his colleagues in the city council and municipal officials came to bid him farewell.7 The long journey abroad, which he regarded partly as pleasure and relaxation and partly as work, took almost six months. After his visit to England he went to the continent and visited the United States. He familiarised himself with various urban innovations, including the advantages of electricity, which especially impressed him in Berlin.
Moreover, during his journey he was received by various dignitaries, including mayors and chairmen of chambers of commerce. His group had stepped ashore in Plymouth harbour and at the station a salon carriage awaited that had been sent by Great Western Railways for the purpose of transporting his group to London.
In London Graaff was interviewed by the publication South Africa at the Savoy Hotel in December, describing him as “young, rich, handsome – and popular with the ladies, who made him a presentation some few weeks back”. In the interview Graaff set out his plans for loans secured for Cape Town. His plans included a new reservoir, electric lights for the streets, a sea-wall promenade, new streets to the seafront, a fish market, a new city hall and new paving for the streets. The harbour would be expanded and the drainage system of the city would be changed to eliminate the bucket system, and land for this purpose had been acquired at Maitland. The people of Cape Town “are now forging ahead very fast, determined to make Cape Town the first, and the finest, town in South Africa,” he said.8
During his stay in London, where he kept up a demanding programme of meetings, he suffered from a cold almost daily.9 That compelled him to leave for the continent. In London he left a letter for his friend D.C. de Waal, who was also travelling abroad, complaining of “feet cold, hands cold, legs cold, the whole body cold!” The letter continued: “The cold is bad enough to kill an elephant. And every day more miserable. At night I put on my flannel vest and two pairs of pyjamas and I cover myself with three blankets, but I remain cold. The cold pervades everything, and as a rule I am quite a warm person.”10
In Berlin Graaff had a grand reception early in the new year. The mayor of Berlin, Herr Von Josczkenberg, made a secretary available to him, and he visited the institutions of the city accompanied by an experienced guide. He also studied in detail the city’s drainage and sewerage systems.11
The emperor invited him to the imperial box at the Berlin Opera and had a long conversation with him at the reception afterwards. Emperor Wilhelm II, who was fluent in English, wanted to know, among other things, what
