Albert van der Sandt Centlivres
Chief Justice of South Africa (1887-1966)
Albert van der Sandt Centlivres (13 January 1887 – 19 September 1966), was the Chief Justice of South Africa from 1950 to 1957.
Biography
Centlivres was born in Newlands, Cape Town, the son of Frederick James Centlivres and Albertina de Villiers. He was educated at the South African College School, South African College (now the University of Cape Town), where he took honours in Classics, and New College, Oxford, where he was a Rhodes Scholar and read Law, graduating BA and BCL. He was called to the bar by the Middle Temple in 1910 and admitted as an advocate of the Cape provincial division in 1911. During the First World War, he served in South-West Africa as a private. He became a King's Counsel in 1927.
In 1935 he was appointed a judge of the Cape Provincial Division, and in 1939 he became a Judge of Appeal in the Appellate Division, South Africa's highest court. He was best known for his judgments during the Coloured vote constitutional crisis, in which he rebuffed the government's attempts at disenfranchising non-white voters in the Cape Province.
The painting Portrait of Albert van de Sandt Centlivres by Neville Lewis was burned by demonstrators during the Rhodes Must Fall upheaval at the University of Cape Town in February 2016.
Centlivres Building
Centlivres was Chancellor of the University of Cape Town from 1950 until his death in 1966. The Centlivres Building on the university's upper campus is named after him.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 4, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q4711550. VIAF identifies the subject as 287448067. 2 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1887, 1966, 1950 and 1957.
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This entry incorporates text from “Albert van der Sandt Centlivres” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.