Page 112 - Bulletin 11 2007

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Furthermore, (as was afterwards revealed) Bennett never checked out the completed
work done by the contractor, simply passing each claim for payment, without noticing

that claims included work which had not been carried out. Mayor Scowen had
instructed Bennett to make the payments to prevent Collie going insolvent resulting in

the calling of fresh tenders at a much higher rate. When this was discovered, Bennett

was forced to take the blame. In some places the drains sloped in the wrong direction,
the jointing of the earthenware pipes was so badly done that groundwater came flooding

in at the rate of eight thousand gallons a day, which would entail considerable extra
pumping and dilute the potency of the bacteria beds.

The contractor James Collie (who was a friend of Mayor Scowen) proved to be

something of a ‘Slim Jannie’ and, when part of the newly-laid pipeline near the Kalk

Bay Outspan became blocked and had to be opened, it was found that the earth and
stones used to fill the trench had smashed the pipes, which Collie had patched with

flattened paraffin tins and covered with cement. Also, no-one expected that a layer of

quicksand underlay the generating station site, which sucked down the sewage sump,
and this tank took two days to extract, and the wooden piles put down to reach solid

ground simply popped out.

The crowning misfortune for Bennett was the death of his brother in England in 1904
and during his absence, the very experienced City Engineer of Cape Town, Thomas

Olive, took over supervision, when all these deficiencies were exposed. He refused to

pay the contractor anything more until defects were corrected. (There was evidently
professional jealousy between Bennett and Olive whose drainage scheme for Kalk Bay

had been rejected.)

The Contractor could not proceed without money and once the completion date had
passed, the Municipality declared a breach of contract and took possession of the works

and all the contractor’s equipment. Collie tried to rescue his prized piece of machinery,

a steam-driven pulsometer pump. To recover this, the Kalk Bay Municipality sued him
and won their case. Collie then sued the Municipality to obtain payment for work which