Britain. This sentiment was associated with the visionary independence ethos encapsulated by the history of the United States. To the author and politician Percy Fitzpatrick, one of the conspirators behind the Jameson Raid, Graaff had earlier suggested that everyone born in South Africa should co-operate in an effort to create a “United States of South Africa, upon friendly terms with England, but confining the direct Imperial right to a naval base in Simon’s Town and possibly a position in Natal”.31
Fitzpatrick, also famous as the author of Jock of the Bushveld, described Graaff as an “apostle of republicanism”. Later he declared that shortly after the Jameson Raid, Graaff had expressed the same thoughts to the Rand mining tycoon Alfred Beit, also one of the conspirators behind the incursion. Graaff would also have suggested that, if Beit and Rhodes supported the idea, they would escape the “consequences” of their association with the incursion. However, they preferred the “consequences”, according to Fitzpatrick.32
One of the consequences was that Rhodes was tried in Britain, but acquitted in an inquiry in which his role and that of the British authorities in the plot were covered up. Jameson, who was extradited to Britain by Kruger to be punished, was sentenced to 15 months’ incarceration, of which he served a few months before being released because of ill health. The 64 members of the Reform Committee were arrested and their leaders, Lionel Phillips, John Hays Hammond, Frank Rhodes and George Farrar, were sentenced to death in the Supreme Court on a count of treason, on which they had pleaded guilty. Kruger commuted the sentences to a fine of £25 000 each. Cecil Rhodes paid the fines.
The political dividing lines between Afrikaans- and English-speakers in the Cape Colony became more defined after the Jameson Raid, and the Afrikaner Bond again became the pre-eminent vehicle of Afrikaner sentiments and aspirations.33 Its political views and actions, however, were still based on a combination of colonial Cape-centredness, loyalty to the empire and the Crown, solidarity with their republican brothers in the republican diaspora and the pursuit of immediate and longer-term economic interests.34
Despite his disillusionment with Rhodes and his resentment of the Jameson incursion, it was speculated for years that Graaff had helped one of the most prominent Reformists to escape from Cape Town. That escapade in the middle of the night was discussed mid-1896 in the Cape Parliament in a debate about Charles Leonard, chairman of the Transvaal National Union.
Leonard, an attorney in the employ of the Alfred Beit, was one of the leaders of the Reform Committee, together with Randlords like Lionel Phillips, George Farrar and Percy Fitzpatrick, as well as Rhodes’s brother, Colonel Frank Rhodes. At the time of the Jameson Raid he was not in Johannesburg, because the Reformists had sent him and Phillips to Rhodes in Cape Town to have the incursion postponed. That was after it had emerged that Jameson would lead his troops under the British flag, while Leonard and other Reformists wanted to revolt under the Transvaal flag.35 Leonard was opposed to the threat to Transvaal’s independence. He and Phillips were assured by Rhodes that he was not planning to convert the Zuid-Afrikaansche Republiek into a British colony.36
In the Cape parliamentary debate it emerged that after the failure of the Jameson Raid, Leonard had secretly departed from Table Bay harbour on 19 January 1896 aboard the Guelph – before a warrant for his arrest (for public violence, sedition and treason) could be served on him and he would be extradited to Transvaal. According to the Cape attorney-general, Sir Thomas Upington, Leonard’s doctor, J.F. Manikus, had earlier issued a medical certificate that Leonard had been in Sea Point, “suffering from congestion of the brain and nervous prostation”, and would not be able to travel for at least two weeks. According to the police, Upington declared to roaring laughter, “Mr. Leonard’s brain was not so congested and his nervous system not so prostated that he was not prevented from obtaining in Cape Town a complete disguise, including a false beard.”37
Leonard, who then settled in Britain, was, however, spotted with Graaff in Cape Town shortly after the Jameson Raid by Sir Graham Bower, who left for Pretoria on 2 January 1896 with Sir Hercules Robinson for negotiations with Kruger, who had invited the British there at the recommendation of Hofmeyr. That night at around nine o’clock Graaff, again described by Bower as Hofmeyr’s lieutenant, came to the carriage of the British high commissioner at the Cape Station with Leonard. “I thought they were a queer couple, but there was a good deal of changing sides at the time. Moreover, C. Leonard was an orator,” Bower said. Graaff and Leonard insisted that Hofmeyr should also go to Pretoria, and Bower sent a telegram, approved by Robinson, to Hofmeyr. En route, Robinson received a telegram in which Hofmeyr declined the invitation and declared he would ask Chamberlain to investigate.
A few months later a columnist, “Lobbyist” of the Cape Times, alleged there was collusion between Graaff, Leonard and the Transvaal government to enable Leonard to escape from Cape Town in order to promote the Transvaal case in London.38
Cables were published to prove the allegations. Graaff, however, categorically denied it on 7 July 1896.39 The editor of the Cape Times, Edmund Garrett, wrote to his cousin, Agnes Garrett: “You will see that we have gone in for the Disclosure business and got a little bitten though obviously on the right track.”40 The paper continued to exert pressure for the appointment of a select committee to investigate Leonard’s escape. A day after Graaff’s denial the paper published a letter by Leonard’s brother, J.W. Leonard, stating he had sent the cable that “Lobbyist” claimed had been sent by a senior Transvaal official. The paper immediately accepted Leonard’s statement and withdrew the allegation. On 9 July the paper quoted Charles Leonard as denying in London that his escape had any links with an alleged Transvaal conspiracy. He stated that legal problems and “befriended police” had prevented his arrest in Cape Town.41
A few years later the Cape Times stated:
“The full story of that exciting episode has never been told, but rumours of it were current at the time, and probably Sir Thomas Upington could have given more information on the subject than he vouchsafed when he was cross-questioned in the matter on the floor of the Cape House of Assembly. There is no doubt that Sir David’s part in the escapade was gratefully remembered by the Reformer to whose assistance he came, and it was quite in keeping with Sir David’s sporting instincts.”42
Although Graaff had categorically denied having helped Leonard, he probably did help someone else. The autobiography of his son Sir De Villiers Graaff contains a clue, when he wrote about the disappearance of Dr. Lawrence Herman from Cape Town shortly after the Jameson Raid.43 In an interview ten years before the publication of his memoirs he frankly declared his father had helped Herman, a physician, escape.44 Herman, a lifelong friend and advisor of his father’s, allegedly had close ties with Charles Leonard in the 1890s. In the Cape Times it was reported that shortly after the Jameson Raid, on 16 February 1896, “Dr. Herman” had become a member of the Afrikaner Bond at a meeting of its branches held in the office of Sir James Sivewright in Cape Town. Onze Jan Hofmeyr had chaired the meeting and D.P. Graaff and his brother J.A.C. Graaff had been present, according to the article.45
Everything considered, it seems to be quite certain that Herman was the man whom Graaff helped to escape from Cape Town – probably because Herman’s ties with Leonard were raising suspicion.
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