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T The Inner Temple Moltenos
THE INNER TEMPLE MOLTENOS
By Master Simon Brown
The struggles of South Africa have produced many wellknown heroes and villains. Surprisingly, one eminent name rarely mentioned is Molteno, one of its leading families and philanthropists dedicated to battling imperialism, greed, corruption, and white supremacy, from settlement in the Cape until the fall of apartheid.
Five Moltenos were Inner Templars, three of whom were amongst the most outstanding people of their generations. The time has come for their history to be written and celebrated, as, more importantly, should be that of the indigenous African people who so hideously bore the brunt of it all.
Sir John Charles Molteno (1814–1886), who was born in London into a large Anglo-Italian family, emigrated to the Cape Colony in 1831, became its first Prime Minister in 1872. He was the father of 19 children, as well as being a leading merchant, sheep farmer and settler. The family prominently embedded itself into the fabric of the Cape through commerce, shipping, farming and politics, and were all acknowledged for their strong liberal attitudes.
His remarkable eldest child, Betty (Elizabeth Maria Molteno, 1852–1927), was an educationalist, ardent feminist, and apostle for universal (but qualified only by income level, property ownership and education) suffrage. A friend and supporter of Gandhi, she was regarded as “one of the most influential women in South Africa during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries” and “one of the most remarkable women of her generation”. Her partner was Alice Greene, related to Graham Greene.
Elizabeth Maria Molteno – Civil and Womens Rights Activist, Cape Town
© Unknown, Public domain via Wikimedia Commons
Four sons (Percy, James, Edward (Ted) and Clifford) were called to the Bar by The Inner Temple. Ted and Clifford became fruit farmers on an estate whose orchards produced more apples in the early 20th century than the total quantity produced by all the other growers in the Elgin Valley. Percy and James became leading opponents of the imperialism of Cecil Rhodes and of the Boer War. A grandson (Donald) was the staunchest of the white adversaries of apartheid.
Percy Alport Molteno (1861–1937) was admitted to The Inner Temple on 4 October 1881 and called on 26 January 1886. He was a stellar student at Diocesan College (Bishops) and Trinity College Cambridge (Mathematics and then Law Tripos). A polymath, he also excelled in all sciences. He practised law in the Cape for several years, but cases were thin on the ground. He moved to England with chambers at 2 Kings Bench Walk and married his childhood sweetheart who was the daughter of one of his father’s friends, the shipping magnate Sir Donald Currie who procured the exclusive Cape Government mail contract for his Castle shipping company that ran a weekly shipping schedule between England and South Africa, subsidised for speed of delivery by Molteno’s government.
On 5 June 1889, Percy opened a letter in his chambers instructing him on behalf of the Bultfontein Mining Company (one of Sir Donald’s corporate vehicles ) based at nearby Holborn Viaduct “to act as Arbitrator in the matter of the arbitration between De Beers Consolidated Mines Limited and this company for the fixing of the amount of the annual payment which is to form the basis on the consideration to be given by the De Beers Consolidated Mines Ltd for the purchase of this company’s property” . The agreement would give De Beers, Rhodes and business associate Alfred Beit of Hamburg, a much sought after highly lucrative diamond monopoly of the rich African mines. The arbitrator’s fee was substantial as the stakes were high. The four mines involved yielded £80 million over the previous 18 years and the subject was complex in law and fact, valuation and negotiation.
Percy Molteno MP
© Cape Archives, Public domain via Wikimedia Commons
The young Molteno went to the mines, assiduously researched them, made detailed observations of their engineering and human workings, questioned figures with authority and incisively challenged assertions and valuations. A complete mastery of up-to-date mining conditions enabled him to arrive at a successful and amicable finding to the satisfaction of both parties. The exercise gave him an understanding that, in the infant days of machinery and technology, human physical endeavour and performance were vital to successful mining at the end of the 19th century.
The awful toil of the local African miners – the true heroes of the diamond and gold mining bonanza (as in any mining activity of the 19th/20th century) – from the local population was critical.
His father-in-law was impressed. As a result, Molteno, now seeing his future in business, joined Donald Currie & Company which ran the Castle Line, delivering mail, plying trade and carrying passengers from the Cape to London and Europe. Eventually, it took over its main rival, the Union Line, and Molteno became the Chairman of the Union-Castle Line which now controlled the routes of South Africa’s foreign trade.
At this time, the bulk of foreign trade was fruit. In 1841, his father had unsuccessfully tried to export dried fruit. A global Phylloxera epidemic spread through the Cape vineyards in the 1880s and they were turned into orchards. Molteno’s brilliant mind and extensive detailed research of refrigeration – including that of California – revolutionised fruit exporting.
On 31 December 1892, his first shipment of refrigerated fruit arrived in Britain, opened by John X Merriman, a leading Cape politician who had served in Sir John Molteno’s Cabinet, and who became the Cape’s last Prime Minister. The fruit was in perfect condition; land prices soared, the fruit industry thrived, and the Union-Castle’s monopoly fortune was made. Rhodes, typically, seized the opportunity acquiring over 20 farms and turned his exquisite vineyard manor at Boschendal into a fruit farm. Molteno and his brother, Charlie, established South Africa’s first fruit export organisation. Molteno himself became regarded as the pioneer of the lucrative South African export fruit industry.
The South African economy was set for a Golden Age. The discovery of diamonds had already begun it in 1869 (Sir Donald Currie, like Rhodes, was one of the main investors in gold and silver mines). However, the ill-fated Jameson Raid in 1895 ruined it. Molteno wrote “What a blow to all our hopes of friendly feeling and consolidation of races has been given by the wicked attempt of foolish men elated by the enormous gains which Africa has yielded to them – what a miserable return to have made over her for such benefits”. The men to whom Molteno was referring were the Imperialists Rhodes, Chamberlain and Milner, not his extremely wealthy father-in-law who was no Imperialist.
Molteno was deeply committed to South Africa and its people. He was a close friend of the great activist John Tengo Jabavu who described him as “a true son of the soil and a South African patriot”. He was a prolific letter writer, advocating responsible government (that is, full selfgovernment for the colony excluding defence and foreign affairs) and a vehement opponent of the ensuing Boer War.
After the disastrous war, he and his colleagues sold the UnionCastle Line to Cunard, following Molteno’s failure to persuade the newly formed South African government to renew the mail contract on the basis of an ongoing subsidy. Instead, he devoted his time and considerable fortune to post-war humanitarian support in ravaged South Africa. He was furious about the treatment of the Boers through Lord Kitchener’s tactics of scorched earth and concentration camps.
In 1906, Percy was elected as a Liberal MP for Dumfriesshire. As a radical, he was a civilised yet divisive figure inside and outside the party. Churchill, a fellow Liberal MP at the time but a staunch Imperialist, could not abide being in his presence, once creating a fuss in refusing to sit next to him at a prestigious dinner. He became deeply involved in creating the Union of South Africa in 1910. Although he had supported the cause of the Boers against the Imperialists during the war, he, along with two of his brothers who were Cape MPs, was opposed to the movement to unite all white South Africans to the exclusion of black ones.
He criticised the Boers for their brutality and treatment of indigenous Africans. He was sympathetic to African wishes to be treated in legal and political terms on the same footing as white people. Molteno prophetically warned the leaders in the Union of South Africa of the troubles ahead of Afrikaner nationalism and apartheid to which he could see no end.
Defeated and disillusioned by South African politics, Molteno turned to supporting humanitarian issues such as the Vienna Emergency Relief Fund that he started in 1919 after WW1 (in which one of his brothers fought at the Battle of Jutland) and to the activities of the fledgling African National Congress (ANC). In 1921, he endowed the Cambridge University Molteno Institute which focused on plant and animal disease control in tropical and sub-tropical regions. His interest in science not only involved refrigeration but also hydro-electricity. He initiated, plunged into the details and finance of an innovative hydro plant on a stream that flowed from the mountains to provide electricity at his home at Glen Lyon on the Highland estate that his wife had inherited from her father.
Described as “acutely intelligent and diligent” with enormous influence, opponents such as President Botha would listen to him and occasionally heed his cogent advice. Thoughtful, with highest level contacts and great wealth, he was yet a very unostentatious animal-loving man who repeatedly eschewed titles and honours yet served with the ‘great and the good’ on foundations such as the Royal Institute of International Affairs along with Otto Beit and Baron Rothschild.
He established the Common Sense magazine to enable writers to present articles on controversial issues of the time that were to be based on reason, evidence and ethics, rather than on emotion and nationalism. He was a prodigious writer and correspondent and proud of his Italian Milanese heritage which, typically, he assiduously researched.
James Tennant Molteno, Percy’s brother (1865–1936), matriculated with honours from Diocesan College (Bishops) and law at Trinity College Cambridge where he was noted not just for his academic brilliance and diligence but for his unusual strength and physical fitness (he excelled in boxing, swimming and shooting). He divided his time at university between frenzied study and backpacking around Europe, attending drunken parties with fellow students. He also acquired a passion for horse racing and card-playing that remained with him for the rest of his life. After graduating with honours, he was admitted to The Inner Temple on 12 January 1886 and called to the Bar on 28 January 1889, before returning to Cape Town to become an Advocate of the Supreme Court.
Sir James Molteno – First Speaker of South African Parliament
© Unknown, Public domain via Wikimedia Commons He entered the Cape Parliament in 1890, at the age of 25 as an opposition MP. The Logan scandal in 1893 revealed the degree of corruption in Prime Minister Rhodes’s business dealings. Molteno, increasingly suspicious of Rhodes for what he considered his unscrupulous craving for power, immediately accused Rhodes of engineering the infamous Jameson Raid that took place in 1895, calling Leander Starr Jameson, his trusted lieutenant, a “fool” . Prophetically, he wrote that the raid was the beginning of the divide between Boer and British that would eventually culminate in the Boer War.
In 1899, he petitioned Queen Victoria stressing the seriousness of the impending conflict. It included key information that was not disclosed to London by the British High Commissioner in South Africa, the arch Imperialist, Sir Alfred Milner who was intent on taking the Cape to war. Milner avoided delivering it. Molteno then used his family connections to take the petition – as well as Milner’s private statements on his warlike intentions – to the British press and parliament, causing great embarrassment to Milner and the Colonial establishment in South Africa.
Molteno was an exceptionally skilled debater and public speaker. In parliament however, he quickly gained a reputation as a jovial tease, with an uncanny ability to both foment and soothe disagreements in the house – while all the time taking an amused backseat. His friends and colleagues in parliament gave him the nickname ‘Baby Molteno’, as he was the youngest of his extended family to be politically active at the time.
When war broke out, Molteno, like his brother Charlie, a fellow MP, was a fierce critic of the malpractices that took place in the Cape under British martial law, and regularly smuggled evidence of them out of the country via his family connections, to sympathetic MPs in the House of Commons.
He fought on behalf of his old friend and liberal ally, John X Merriman, who became the last Prime Minister of the Cape from 1908 to 1910. Like his oldest sister, Betty, Molteno was a strong advocate of women’s suffrage and in 1907 narrowly failed to achieve it, due to Merriman’s desertion from the cause, in what he described as the most painful thing of his career.
After the elections of 1908, when the Merriman government came to power, Molteno was the unanimous choice as Speaker. As Speaker of Parliament, Molteno abandoned his jovially anarchic style of politics, and became solemn and decisive. With the political storms of the Boer War and the upcoming Union, controlling parliamentary procedure was a challenge.
Sir John Charles Molteno © Public Domain
The Cape House had also more than doubled in size since its creation and was considerably more politically diverse. It was therefore essential to wield a firm and detached authority over sessions that were often very raucous. However, remaining aloof and serious seemed to have sometimes been a challenge for Molteno. Parliamentary writer Ralph Kilpin found the contradictory Speaker rather amusing, and described in his book, The Old Cape House, how Molteno once firmly silenced disruptive parliamentarians who were roaring with laughter in the backbenches, only to whisper audibly to the culprit as he passed the Speaker’s seat later: “You can tell me the joke afterwards”.
In 1909, at the Cape Prime Minister’s request, he joined the South African delegation as legal adviser, and submitted the draft South Africa Act which had been drawn up at the National Convention in London. This was in spite of his voicing considerable problems with many of its provisions, particularly those pertaining to franchise. Nevertheless, when the new Union House of Assembly was created, Molteno was asked to take up his office again. He had defeated the Transvaal’s candidate to become the first Speaker of the South African Parliament. In the ensuing year, he was responsible for compiling the first rules of procedure for Parliament.
Upon his final retirement, he wrote two racy volumes on the political life of the Cape including a protracted denouncement of Rhodes, Milner and other imperial figures which he claimed was a warning to South Africa of its future direction.
Donald Barkly Molteno (1908–1972) was a grandson of Sir John Molteno. From an early age he proved to be a serious boy with intense interest in current affairs. During WW1 he spent a lot of his time poring over war maps – his uncle, Captain Barkly Molteno, was in the navy and commanded HMS Warspite at the Battle of Jutland. He too attended Diocesan College (Bishops) and Pembroke College Cambridge, where he graduated in 1930 with honours in law. He was admitted to The Inner Temple on 29 October 1927 and called to the Bar on 17 November 1930.
He spent the next year in common law chambers practising in London and living at Toynbee Hall in the East End where he witnessed the Great Depression. He paid for his board by giving free legal advice to the poor living in the surrounding slums.
He returned to South Africa in 1932 and was admitted as an advocate to the Bar of the Cape Provincial Division of the Supreme Court of South Africa. He was appointed as Queen’s Counsel in 1952 and practised at the Cape Bar until 1964. He was the President of the Cape Bar Council from 1961 to 1963.
In 1936, the all-white South African government, under the Boer War Generals J B M Hertzog and Jan Smuts, passed the Native Representation Act which removed the right of those Africans in the Cape Province who met certain educational or property qualifications to be on the voters’ roll in parliamentary constituencies. Molteno was junior counsel to the former Chief Justice, Sir James Rose Innes, in challenging this, albeit unsuccessfully. Ultimately, only three seats in Parliament were offered to those Africans who had lost their right to vote but no black or coloured person was allowed to stand for election.
In 1937, the ANC nominated the young Molteno as one of the three candidates it supported. He did so in the huge constituency called the Cape Western Electoral Circle and was duly elected. Over the next 11 years, he valiantly fought for the human rights of African South Africans making carefully crafted speeches on their behalf. As no coloured or Indian South Africans were allowed to be MPs, Molteno also acted as their representative in the whole of Union too. It was a heavy burden but one that was much appreciated by those he helped and represented. The South African Indian Congress founded by Gandhi wrote to him “conveying the gratitude of the Indian community for the liberal and sympathetic attitude shown by you towards our people”.
Over the next 11 years, he valiantly fought for the human rights of African South Africans making carefully crafted speeches on their behalf.
The 1948 election saw Afrikaner nationalism triumph and Molteno withdrew in disillusion from front-line politics to build up a legal practice to support his family. The 1950s saw massive extension of the segregationist apartheid laws, excluding 80 per cent of the non-white inhabitants from ownership of the land, skilled employment and basic freedoms. Along with two other brave advocates, he spent the decade constitutionally challenging these laws (including the discriminatory Group Areas Act, Job Reservation Act, Pass Laws) with just the very occasional limited success. His reputation burgeoned and he was constantly sought out by desperate South Africans who were the victims of the torrent of racist laws.
He became the key legal advisor to the ‘Black Sash’, a group formed by white South African women, to stand up for civil rights and oppose racism. In his obituary, it was recorded: “He taught us all we had to know about Civil Rights, about the inequities and iniquities of the pass laws and influx control… and so very much more. His knowledge and experience … illuminated all our efforts to inform and educate ourselves and the South African people”. In the first half of the 1960s, successive laws and ensuing disobedience and violence produced a police state where police were free to use detention and torture on a routine basis. Molteno became increasingly active in the politics of constitutional reform – a hopeless venture for liberals at this time – and civil rights, playing a leading role in the Civil Rights League. He was successively involved in the Liberal Party and the Progressive Party writing the well-thought out, but doomed, two-volume Molteno Report on constitutional reform. His case load involved representing victims of banning, detention, house arrest, and other forms of police repression. Eventually, his legal practice perversely dried up due to his known principles and activities; any potential clients who might afford his services feared that briefing him would prejudice their cases in the eyes of the judges.
In 1964, he was forced to turn to academia and charitable works. He became a senior lecturer in Roman-Dutch Law at the University of Cape Town and, as one of the leading constitutional and civil rights lawyers of his time, was appointed the first Professor of Public Law at UCT in 1967. At the time of his untimely death at 64 he was Dean of the Law School. His entry in the Dictionary of South African Biography says, “he was a man of great humanity, as well as of brilliant intellect”.
He is warmly remembered as ‘Dilizintaba’ (‘Remover of mountains’ or ‘Overcomer of obstacles’), a distinguished South African with a long record of service to his fellow countrymen, a superb incisive debater, an indefatigable fighter for civil liberties, and an implacable opponent of racial injustice.
Throughout his career in the related fields of law and politics Donald Molteno, like all Moltenos, was a living embodiment of those values that comprise the Cape liberal tradition from his grandfather’s day. First and foremost, it was a tradition that stood for limited government, or government under the rule of law. Second, it was non-racial in its approach, asserting that all persons of whatever race or colour were entitled to equality before the law and, subject to qualifications which were not racially defined, were eligible for the franchise at parliamentary and municipal levels.
The story of the Moltenos is one that should be much admired for their pioneering spirit, passion for equality and justice, determination, and bravery.
