Page 111 - Bulletin 18 2014

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mountainside is to be turned on its way and conducted to the houses in the city far

below.” (Cape Times, 22.4.1887.)

The result was that the Woodhead Tunnel and a series of dams on the top of Table Mountain,

added to the inadequate Molteno reservoir. Cape Town’s dam building stood it in good stead

during the South African War. There was enough water for the huge pressure put on the town
by the military activity and to cope with the great cleansing that took placed with the plague

epidemic in 1901. But even here water was running short and it was soon clear that Cape
Town would have to look beyond the city for water. Piping in water from Steenbras or

elsewhere was of a different order in financial and engineering terms from dams on Table
Mountain. Cape Town would raise the finances but the smaller municipalities could not.

Unfortunately, the South African War was followed by a deep depression which lasted until

about 1908. It was so severe that recent Australian immigrants were shipped home by their
government. (It was estimated that 12,690 Australasians left South Africa between 1905 and

1907, 1,200 of them repatriated by the Australian government in 1907.) 1906 saw the

‘hooligan riots’ – unemployment riots. Even in Cape Town the aversion to expensive
schemes held sway. This was no climate for reform.

Unification

But change was in the air. The Peninsula was expanding and becoming a more sophisticated

place. As South Africa slowly worked its way towards union, municipal amalgamation

remained in the air. The creation of the Union of South Africa in October 1910 led to a search
for a new national identity.

In November 1909 a conference of representatives of the Peninsula municipalities
recommended that a Joint Committee, comprising representatives of each municipality, be

appointed to investigate and report on the question of unification. The first meeting of the

Cape Peninsula Unification Joint Committee and the Peninsula Municipal Union Society took
place on 17 May 1911 and their work continued into early 1912. Wynberg declined to