COLOURFUL FIGURE.

Auckland Star, Volume LXVII, Issue 193, 15 August 1936, Page 9

COLOURFUL FIGURE.

; MINING MAGNATE PASSES. i ONCE SENTENCED TO DIE. ; CAPETOWN, July 3. There has just died here one of the * most colourful figures of the early ' history of South Africa, lie was Sir | Lionel Phillips, Bart., one of the j pioneers of the Kimberlcy diamond : fields in the 'eighties and among the last of the' great early leaders of the Rand gold mining industry. He was nearly SI when his end came, but lie had a life brimful of adventure. Of these the most notable was the part he played in the Reform movement. With three other noted reformers, Colonel Frank Rhodes (brother of Cecil Rhodes), Sir George l-'arrar and John Hays Hammond—all now dead —he was arrested after the failure of the Jameson Raid and tried in Pretoria. The four were sentenced to death, despite world protests, for treason against President Paul Kruger's Republican Government. This crime was never intended, Phillips wrote later. Jameson's invasion, however, put them in the wrong and the cry arose "that we were trying to steal the country." After they had passed some weeks in the condemned cell the death sen- ' fences were commuted to fines of £25,000 1 each with banishment from the Republic. Sir Lionel . was one of the prime leaders of the gold industry in South Africa with deep and lasting interest iii the country in which he made his fortune. —South African Morning Newspapers.