27 Facts About Percy Molteno

Percy Alport Molteno was an Edinburgh-born South African lawyer, company director, politician and philanthropist who was a British Liberal Member of Parliament from 1906 to 1918.

Percy Molteno's father named him in honour of his old friend and business colleague, Percy John Alport.

Percy Molteno attended Diocesan College, took first place in the Cape matric examination and achieved academic honours at Trinity College, Cambridge, before being called to the bar as a barrister at the Inner Temple in London.

Percy Molteno's father had undertaken the first experimental export of fruit as a young man in 1841, loading a ship with dried fruit for the Australian market.

Percy Molteno however, was keenly interested in the possibility of using the new science of refrigeration to allow South African produce to be successfully shipped to the enormous European consumer markets, thereby opening them up for South African exports.

Percy Molteno is consequently regarded as the pioneer of the South African export fruit industry.

Percy Molteno was elected in 1906 as a Liberal Member of the UK Parliament for Dumfriesshire, where he came to represent a radical wing of the British Liberal Party.

Percy Molteno had originally needed to move to London to oversee his vast network of international shipping lines, but he remained deeply attached to southern Africa.

Percy Molteno remained closely involved in its politics, through his many influential family members, as well as through his friendship with nearly all of the most powerful South African politicians and businessmen.

Percy Molteno was a prolific letter-writer who corresponded with many of the leading political figures of the colony.

Those views made him a divisive figure both inside and outside the Liberal Party, of which he was a member: Winston Churchill once refused to attend a dinner if they were sitting together, and Henry Simpson Lunn reports fearing that his windows would be smashed if word got out that Percy Molteno was present at his club.

From very early on, Percy Molteno foresaw the nature of the upcoming conflict and, through his correspondence with the leading politicians of the day, sought to warn them, and attack "official ignorance in high places of the realities in South Africa".

Percy Molteno was a chairman of the South Africa Conciliation Committee.

Percy Molteno entered the British House of Commons as the Member for Dumfriesshire in 1906, and soon used his increased parliamentary influence in the direction of the granting of full Responsible Government to the "ex-Republics" in southern Africa.

Percy Molteno was deeply involved in the process leading up to the Union of South Africa in 1910.

Percy Molteno was the adviser and confidant of a number of leading South African statesmen during this process.

Percy Molteno saw the upcoming union as politically inevitable and not necessarily a bad thing.

Percy Molteno had, after all, been advocating the ending of animosities between British South Africans and Boers for years.

Percy Molteno had been acutely aware of the earliest beginnings of that tendency many years earlier, and it increasingly became his primary concern about the political future of South Africa.

Percy Molteno supported the extension of the Cape's multiracial "Cape Qualified Franchise" into a system of universal franchise across South Africa.

Percy Molteno was a rationalist and a great supporter of scientific endeavour.

Percy Molteno's scientific work was primarily with refrigeration and hydro-electricity, but he had a passion for Biology and was a keen student of Darwin, Huxley and Herbert Spencer.

Percy Molteno was a fellow of the Royal Horticultural Society, chairman of the South African Real Estate Corporation, and a founder of the Royal Institute of International Affairs, together with Otto Beit and Baron Rothschild.

Famously, when Prime Minister Botha initially refused to attend the 1907 Imperial Conference to discuss Union, it was a personal and undisclosed cable from Percy Molteno that brought Botha to London in a cooperative frame of mind.

Percy Molteno's family was originally Italian and, throughout his life, he visited Italy for extended periods.

Percy Molteno was, particularly, attached to the island of Sicily and, in his later life, he spent more time there.

Percy Molteno died in 1937 at the age of 76, on a trip to Zurich.