Page 78 - Bulletin 11 2007

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roads, lighting, cemeteries, and the regulation of building, which will not be dealt with
here. Amenities include improving the attractions of the place for its residents and

visitors, providing recreation, libraries and entertainment – some of them can be
provided by private enterprise. Municipalities nowadays also provide services, which

include health services, housing and traffic control.

It must be remembered that once the water supply had been secured, the planning of the

remaining utilities in the period 1902-1903 was driven mainly by the considerable
requirements of the Muizenberg Foreshore Syndicate on the back of the Anglo-Boer

War boom, but these collapsed in the post-war recession of 1903-1909, leaving huge
over-capacity in the utilities.

The first public utility was water.

The water that householders bought by the bucket came from a variety of sources.

These included seasonal mountain streams, a couple of springs, and very largely from
the Silvermine River in which the cows of the farm higher up waded about, and into

which all the farm dirt went. Laboratory tests conducted in the early 20th century
proved conclusively that this water was polluted and unfit for domestic use. To be safe,

water had to be filtered in the home to remove all organic matter. To be completely safe,
one was advised to avoid drinking anything non-alcoholic.

The famous Cape hydrological engineer Thomas Stewart designed a dam in the
Silvermine valley holding 18 million gallons of water. Plans were drawn up in advance

of Kalk Bay’s 1897 Municipal Act, and by 1900 the scheme was ready to supply the
tea-coloured water to its first consumers. The dam we see in the catchment area of the

Silvermine River is probably not the dam which was originally built. The present one
looks much more like the larger concrete dam which was designed in 1917 to engulf the

original dam, and contracted to be built in 1918 but put off due to the post-war and post-

flu shortage of cement. This suspicion is confirmed by evidence given before the Cape
Peninsula Municipal Commission of 1902-03. G. C. Behr describes the Olifant’s Hoek