Sir David Graaff, 1st Baronet
| Sir David Graaff, Bt | |
|---|---|
Sir David Graaff as mayor of Cape Town
|
|
| Born |
30 March 1859 Villiersdorp, Cape Colony |
| Died | 13 April 1931 (aged 72) Cape Town, Union of South Africa |
| Occupation | Businessman, Politician |
| Nationality | South African |
|
|
|
| Signature |  |
Sir David Pieter de Villiers Graaff, 1st Baronet (30 March 1859 – 13 April 1931) was a South African cold storage magnate and politician. Graaff revolutionized the cold storage industry in Africa. He founded the Imperial Cold Storage and Supply Company in 1899, and aggressively ran it until he left to serve in government. Graaff grew the company into one of the largest in Africa. Graaff's wealth soared, at the turn of the century. During World War I he personally part financed the South African war effort and for this he was knighted as well as for services at the Paris Peace Conference 1919. He was known as "The Octopus" as he had a hand in so many businesses.
David Graaff was the fourth child of Petrus Novbertus Graaff and Anna Elisabeth. He was born in the small town of Villiersdorp, named after his maternal grandfather, Pieter Hendrik de Villiers, who founded the town in 1841. Little is known of his early childhood other than that his family was very poor. In 1870, at the age of eleven, he went to work in his great-uncle's butchery, Combrinck & CO., in Cape Town, while being privately educated. His great-uncle, Jacobus Arnoldus Combrinck, hoped that Graaff would take over his successful butchery so that he could enter colony politics.
Graaff arrived in Cape Town during a time of rapid economic and population growth. Three years earlier one of the largest deposits of diamonds in history had been discovered in the interior of the county. By the time the Cullinan Diamond was discovered in 1869 the city was flooded with prospectors and investors hoping to capitalise on the discovery. At the time Cape Town was the largest and best developed settlement in southern Africa and served as a major logistics center for prospectors.
In 1881, eleven years after arriving in Cape Town, he and his younger brother Jacobus Arnoldus Graaff took over the business. At the time the business was worth GB£47,000 (£24,300,000 in 2010 pounds). One year later, in 1882, the first commercially successful shipment of refrigerated meat arrived in London from Australia on board the Dunedin. Graaff, realizing the importance of this technological innovation for his butchery business, spent much of the 1880s extensively traveling around the world. Learning all he could about the meat markets and abattoirs of the United Kingdom as well as the meat packing plants of Chicago and the rest of United States. He spent much of the rest of the 1880s and 1890s implementing the techniques and technologies he learned from these trips in his businesses in addition to serving in government.
...
Wikipedia