James Molteno (5 January 1865 – 16 September 1936), was a South African politician and Speaker of Parliament.
The son of Prime Minister Sir John Molteno, James was born on 5 January 1865 at his family's Claremont estate. He matriculated with honours from Diocesan College and read law at Trinity College, Cambridge,[1] where he was noted not just for his academic achievements but for his unusual strength and physical fitness (An extremely athletic man, he excelled in sports from horseracing and boxing to tennis and shooting). He divided his time at university between frenzied study, and backpacking around Europe attending drunken parties with student friends. When he graduated with honours he was called to the Inner Temple in London, before returning to Cape Town to become an Advocate of the Supreme Court in 1889.[2] [3]
Molteno entered the Cape Parliament in 1890, at the age of 25, and became Speaker of Parliament in 1908. He was in fact to be the last speaker before the Cape Parliament dissolved itself on the act of Union. He was an outspoken opponent of the Boer War - branding it a "disgrace" and a "ruinous enterprise", and calling the Jameson Raid "a fool's expedition" - and although he was initially a friend of the Cape Prime Minister Cecil John Rhodes, he later came to condemn the policies of both Rhodes and Sir Alfred Milner, whose determination to end the independence of the Boer republics he took great lengths to reveal in the English press.[4] He was an ally and friend of the liberal premier J.X.Merriman, and a fierce critic of the malpractices that took place in the Cape under martial law, even acting as legal adviser to the so-called Cape rebels who were accused of treason.[5] [6] [7]
Nevertheless, when the new Union House of Assembly was created, Molteno, now representing the constituency of Ceres, was asked to take up his office again. He thus became the first Speaker of the South African Parliament. In 1911, he led the South African parliamentary delegation to London for the coronation of King George V. He was knighted in the same year.[8] [9]
He retired from Parliament in 1915 and moved to Elgin, outside Cape Town, where much of his extended family lived. Here we he settled down to write two racy volumes on the political life of the Cape, a collection of rather random trivia and recollections, and a protracted denouncement of Rhodes and other imperial figures which he claimed was a warning to South Africa of its future direction. Known as an eccentric (never seen without his umbrella), he spent his last years on his farm and died on 16 September 1936 while on a visit to Europe. He was survived by his wife, Clare (Clarissa Celia Holland-Pryor), and his four children.