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Parker continued with his efforts and formed the Peninsula Municipal Union Society to

promote his plan. Dr Beck, a Claremont medical practitioner and Councillor, became his
chief ally and could point out with authority that public health in the smaller municipalities

was being badly compromised by the lack of a proper sewerage system. (Cape Town had
installed waterborne sewerage in 1899, but the water shortage threatened its efficiency.) The

public began to understand the urgency and the campaign gathered momentum. Parker made
several impassioned speeches and found another telling point: a large authority would be able

to afford to employ genuine experts to run its technical services – which were becoming more

complex by the year as the sciences of Municipal Engineering and Public Health advanced.

At length in 1912 a municipal conference was held and the delegates agreed that

amalgamation should go ahead. The exception was Wynberg, smugly asserting that it could
survive on its own. And so in 1913 the Greater Cape Town Municipality was formed and

John Parker very appropriately was elected as its first Mayor. He lost no time in seeking out a
suitable expert who could sort out his engineering problems.

The Right Man for the Job

Hydrology is one of the lesser known sectors of civil engineering, but a very important one. It
is concerned with the prediction of the amount of water that will flow in a river after a

rainstorm, and the degree to which its banks will be inundated. So it is essential for deciding
on the viability of a dam site (will the dam ever fill completely?), the openings beneath a

bridge (will they be big enough to pass the flood?) and the extent of the floodplain (where

can we place buildings so that they won’t be in danger of being flooded?). Before the era of
electronics this entailed some rather tedious mathematical calculations which today are

carried out by sophisticated computer programs. But whether done by hand or by machine,
maths calculations should be checked against a rough estimate. In 1906 a young engineer

working for the City of Birmingham devised a simple and logical way of making such

estimates. The “Lloyd-Davies Rational Method” of calculating stormwater quantity is still
used as a rough check for the sophisticated electronic calculations of today.

David Ernest Lloyd-Davies was born in Liverpool in 1875 and was educated at Bewdley

School and the University of Birmingham. (Fig. 3.31.) After a pupilage at Wolverhampton he
was employed by the Birmingham City Council where he soon made name for himself, both