also became known as a generous benefactor – in education among other things; he financed a school that was named in his honour, the De Villiers Graaff High School in Villiersdorp, his home town. Upon his death during the Great Depression, his will provided for the creation of a baronetcy fund, which ensured that his hereditary title, linked to De Grendel, would exist until the tenth generation as long as there was an heir. Given Graaff’s contribution to the development and order of things in South Africa, the baronetcy, a rare honorary title of which only two remained in South Africa in 2009, is nevertheless of far lesser importance than the political role and the singular entrepreneurship that distinguished the Villiersdorp farm boy.
CHAPTER 2
The farmhand and the
pretty farmer’s daughter
The Graaffs have a long history in South Africa.
Those members of the family who came to South Africa mainly emigrated from Germany. Like most other German-speakers, they soon started speaking Dutch, at that stage the language generally spoken in the Cape after Jan van Riebeeck founded a refreshment station for the Dutch East India Company (DEIC) in 1652. For many German-speakers it was easy to switch to Dutch, especially for those from northern Germany, whose home language, Plat Deutsch, was closely related to Dutch.
The first Graaff, Johan Jürgen Gräff, came to South Africa from Dorn-Assenheim. He made the voyage from Germany on the Borsselen in 1761 as a soldier in the employ of the DEIC. Fourteen years later the second Graaff followed, the ancestor of Sir David Graaff’s South African family. He was Johannes Jacobus Graff (1754–1804), who came from Reidlingen, a town near Baden in the Black Forest. This Graff, as the surname was initially spelled before it was eventually changed to Graaff, was born on 21 July 1754 and came to Cape Town in 1775 as a 21-year-old soldier in the service of the DEIC. He married Anna Catharina Wolmarans in 1779 and then worked as a carpenter and painter.1
As a carpenter he became known for a singular heritage: the impressive pulpit of the Groote Kerk in Cape Town. Graaff – also named Jan Jacob Graaf in some documents (like those of the Dutch Reformed Church) – crafted the wooden pulpit resting on two lions following a design by the sculptor Anton Anreith. The pulpit of Indian wood is one of three designed by Anreith – the other two are in the Lutheran Church in Strand Street, Cape Town, and the Rhenish Church in Stellenbosch. The Groote Kerk paid £400 for the pulpit, of which Anreith received £180 and Graaff £220. It replaced the pulpit damaged by beetle infestations that stood in the original church building, inaugurated in 1704. Graaff finished the pulpit in 18 months and it was inaugurated on 29 November 1789.2 Over a century later, Sir David Graaff would serve as an elder in the Groote Kerk and was known as a benefactor of the oldest congregation in the country, where his ancestor’s handiwork still drew admiration.
A grandson of the Graaff ancestor, Petrus Norbertus Johannes Graaff, generally known as Nort (probably derived from the High German Norbert, with its Latin variant Norbertus), was David Graaff’s father. In some documents he was named Novbertus, supposedly due to confusion between an “r” and a “v” in old documents.
When Nort was born on 15 July 1823, the Cape was under British rule. The Dutch rule, initially ended by the first British occupation in 1795, was resumed from 1803–1806 under the Batavian Republic, but after that the Cape became a British Crown colony, a situation that would continue until unification in 1910.
In the middle of the 19th century Nort lived on a farm in the district of Villiersdorp, on the Franschhoek Mountains. On this farm one of the most beautiful love stories from the Overberg would play out – the romance between David Graaff’s parents, the story of the farmhand who won the heart of the pretty young farmer’s daughter.
Nort was appointed as a farmhand at the cattle post of the eminent farmer of Radyn, Pieter Hendrik de Villiers, founder of Villiersdorp. The cattle post, Wolfhuiskloof, lay at the foot of Wolfberg, one of the mountains surrounding Villiersdorp. Sometimes it was known as Wolfieskloof; the later owners simply named the farm Wolfkloof. A few kilometres away, and within viewing distance across the fertile valley, lay Radyn, the pioneer farm that initially belonged to a free burgher of Polish descent, Jan Jurgen Radyn. He had arrived in the Cape in 1707 as a soldier of the DEIC and made a wagon road that reached to the current Villiersdorp valley. The farm, retaining Radyn’s name, was taken over in 1836 by Pieter Hendrik de Villiers, a descendant of the Huguenots who farmed in the district of Stellenbosch, until he moved to what was then an outlying area. According to his descendant Sir De Villiers Graaff (a grandson), he was called Pieter Silwermyn, a nickname he acquired because of attempts to mine silver on the slopes of the Simonsberg on his earlier farm, De Goede Hoop, near Stellenbosch.3
Pieter Hendrik de Villiers, a respected man who also served as field cornet of the district, had the land of Radyn surveyed and subdivided with a view to founding a town, which came about in 1844, the founding date of what would later be known as Villiersdorp. Of Bo-Radyn he eventually only retained 293 morgen. The Cape Dutch homestead, with its exceptional unsymmetrical “H” shape, was declared a historic monument in 1975. On the pilastered front gable with its triangular pediment two dates appeared, 1777 and 1836, apparently indicating alterations.4
Various new residents settled adjacent to Bo-Radyn in the new town, initially called Akkedisdorp. However, permission was obtained from the colonial governor, Sir Peregrine Maitland, to name the town after its founder, P.H. de Villiers, and since then it has been called Villiersdorp.
De Villiers was the most prominent leader and government official of the area after his appointment as field cornet of the ward Boven Rivier Zonder End. He was married to Catharina Helena Minnaar and they had five children, two sons and three daughters. One of the daughters was Anna Elizabeth – the pretty Annie, with whom Nort fell in love; as the Wolfhuiskloof herdboy, he had to come to Bo-Radyn every now and then. It seems Annie also soon started to have feelings for the young, handsome Nort.
The owner of what would later be a show fruit farm, however, did not take kindly to the young man’s interest in his daughter. Therefore, Field Cornet De Villiers forbade the bywoner boy from coming to the farm. However, love is unstoppable. Nort would sneak through the bushes and shrubs, ostensibly to help Annie with the washing at the mill stream. For that he earned himself a thorough hiding from Sir De Villiers Graaff, according to a tale told to Cobus le Roux, a subsequent owner of Bo-Radyn.5
One of the love letters Nort had sent to Annie by messenger was later found by his son Dawie in a secret drawer of a large armoire, an heirloom that came from Wolfhuiskloof and after some roaming ended up on the Graaff family farm, De Grendel, in Tygerberg in the Cape. Even as a young man, Dawie, later Sir David, had an interest in beautiful furniture, carpets and paintings. For this purpose he often consulted a good friend, Dr. Lawrence Herman. Herman bought the ornate wardrobe for Graaff at an auction; it still stands in the manor.
One day, Graaff was admiring the walnut piece with its silver fittings, pulling out drawers and pushing buttons and hinges. To his amazement, one of the panels moved, swung open and a number of drawers appeared. In the third drawer there were a set of dentures and the title deeds of the old family farm Silwermyn. He discovered that the armoire had belonged to his own family while they resided in Stellenbosch.
Another drawer contained a letter to Mijn Schat (my darling). It was his father’s own passionate plea to pretty Annie of Radyn. The letter read thus:
“No longer can I endure our clandestine meetings. No longer can I humiliate myself by pleading with your parents. In their eyes I am not worthy of their daughter. No longer am I prepared to be silenced by your father’s arrogance and haughty demeanour when addressing me. You must decide now whether to come with me, as we have so often planned, or that we shall part.
“I shall be under the big oak tree at the end of the avenue at nine o’clock. Come warmly clad, as the journey will take two hours to reach the home of Tante Maria. If you are not there at ten o’clock, I shall depart alone. Do not fail me, my darling.”6
How the letter ended up in the drawer remains a mystery. Perhaps Annie or her mother hid it there. The conclusion of the saga, according to family tradition, was, however, that at the age of 23 Nort eloped with