William Hills part 21: How “Coffee Jacobs” drove South Africa’s first motor car

Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee was the most notable event of his time in Krugersdorp in 1897, wrote William Hills.

“Bunting flew everywhere, for many of the older inhabitants cherished a real liking for the homely virtues of the Queen, even if they disliked her ministers,” he wrote.

The chief feature of the Jubilee procession was “Coffee Jacobs’” motor car, ‘a quaint little contrivance, painted a dark red’.

“It went occasionally, but when I saw it, it was being pushed, with Coffee Jacobs proudly enthroned on a very high seat, clutching the steering wheel.”

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There was no doubt that AH Jacobs, a coffee importer, was great a man of ‘great enterprise’ but whether he bought the car “to achieve fame or to advertise the coffee in which he dealt, I don’t know,” Hills wrote.

Jacobs allowed anyone who bought 500g of his coffee to see the Benz Velo.

He had bought it from John Percy Hess, who imported it from Germany in 1896 and demonstrated it a month later, in January 1897, for President Paul Kruger. It ran on benzene.
South Africa’s first “horseless carriage” was destroyed in a fire a few months after the sale.

“No one at that time even visualised the mighty army of motor cars of which this was the forerunner,” Hills wrote.

A practical joker made sure there was a throne of a different kind on display outside the Krugersdorp Times when its proprietor, Charlie Deecker, arrived to hoist the Union Jack the day of the jubilee.

He heard an extraordinary sound, looked up and, to his horror, saw waving in the wind ‘a portion of a toilet set which need not be specified’, with broken fragments of others strewn at his feet.

“His indignation may be imagined.”

Other great events in Krugersdorp’s social life were the Nachtmaals attended by farmers, from far and wide, who arrived in ox-wagons, set up tents in The Market Square (now Church Square) and sat around campfires cooking their evening meals in small family groups.

And then there was the laying of the foundation stone for the new church ‘for did it not bring Oom Paul himself to perform the ceremony’.

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Kruger was always met by a procession of burghers at the outskirts of the town or at the railway station.

“He was generally accompanied by other members of the Volksraad, including two rivals for the presidency in the persons of General (Piet) Joubert and Mr Schalk Burger.

“On this occasion, as on all formal occasions, the president wore his top hat, frock coat and sash of office.” (Article: Carol Stier).

Next time: When fortunes were made in a day