GOLDEN REEF

Greymouth Evening Star, 16 June 1936, Page 9

GOLDEN REEF

FOUNDATION OF JOHANNESBURG

In September South Africa will celeInate the golden jubilee of her city of gold with an Empire Exhibition at Johannesburg, on the site where 50 years ago Frederick Struben found on a barren, roadless veld, the first outcrop of the “Thousand Million Golden Rand,” destined to yield more than half the gold of the modern world.

No doubt Johannes Russik. surveyor-g’-meral of the Transvaal in 18SG, deserved that the new city should be named after him, but the solid syllables of “Johannesburg” do not suggest a fantastic city founded on GO miles of golden reef, a mile above the sea, and no oirc knows how many fathoms below. With the story of the Golden Rand will bo retold the biographies, stranger than fiction, of George Walker, who tripped over a ledge of gold and died a pauper; George Honeyball, who profited by his discoveries, and still lives, moderately rich, to tel! the tale in the discursive yarns of a pioneer; Cecil Rhodes, builder of fortunes and Empire; ami "Barney Damato” (Barnett Isaacs), whose wealth drove him to despair and suicide. Like a terrestrial infant prodigy. South Africa made one leap from the Stone Age to the Golden Era. Because of its prolonged prehistoric peHod, Darwin believed that Africa was tho cradle of the human race. In the early 17th century, the times of Cromwell and Richelieu. Africa south of the Zambesi was still in the Stone Age. No South African native had ever used a bronze or copper implement when the rest of tire world was entering the iron or steel age. Then, suddenly, just as the early European settlers were struggling to found an agricultural civilisation, and were building rumbling ox-wagons, a wealth of “white stones” poured from the diamond mines, and the infant prodigy came into its inheritance of endless Ingots. Frederick Pine Theophilus Struben. the son of a retired sea-captain lit ing in the. Transvaal, felt the weight of a new civilisation press upon him in the moment of his discovery of “Confidence Reef,” H miles from the site of the existing Johannesburg City Hall. He wrote later of this prophetic moment: “I stood at my tent door alone. There was no one to speak to in the vast solitude of the silent veld. Years of suffering, ridicule and disappointment came before me in a flash at the moment. I remembered that the only thing left to me through it all was the strange, unconquerable confidence that one day I would strike a rich goldfield. ’ Then, as I looked over the barren veld and desolate kopjes, I saw a vision of a vast goldfield that would bring millions of capita! into South Africa, and provide work for thousands.” He was not the first to see the vision. Karl Mauch had found a little gold in the Tati district in 18G7. Exaggerated reports of this ami other discoveries reached Australia and a paitj of expert miners from Victoria atrived in Natal shortly afterwaids. Dis appointed to find none of the rich field they had expected they scattered to prospect and not. one made bis fortune. . There is another story of a L.oei trekking across the Witwatarsrand—--in English the “Reefs of the Whit'c Waters” and in history “The Rand”— who used a rock as a brake under his wagon wheels and only realised that it had looked like a piece of gold-bear-ing quartz when it was too late to go back. Struber’s find, therefore, created no immediate sensation. The “ridicule and disappointment” were not over and people thought that his tale was similar to earlier exaggerations. Struber said later to Hedley A. Chilvers: “If my friends had not persisted in regarding me as a fool in the early SO’s we might have bought the whole of the gold-bearing farms for a song.” As it was, he began to mine “Confidence Reef” without capital and with primiive machinery. TALE OF STUBBED TOE. Because he could not afford to pat one of his miners, George Wtilkcr formerly of Lancashire, he dismissed him. Walker joined a friend, George Harrison, on one of the Rand farms, Langlaagte, and failing to persuade Harrison to set out at once on a prospecting journey, left in a bad temper. Walking moodily and aimlessly across the veld, Walker stumbled over rocks covered with long grass. He sat down to nurse his toe and remained to examine tlw rock. So the richest iee of the Rand was discovered on a Sunday morning in February, 18SG. Johannesburg was founded not three miles from where Walker stumbled, and its corrugated iron sheds on the most windswept, but wealthiest point of tire reef, settled miners from all parts of tho world and, soon, nimbleminded financiers. eiig.neeis. and traders. Cecil Rhodes and Barney Barnato. who had amalgamated their rival interests, turned their attention from diamond mining to absorb the new treasure-field. The Johannesburg Consolidated Investment Company, which they founded, still owns the chief gold interest in the Rand. Inder their direction machinery Io multiply the output of gold was shipped from England and Europe, and transported hundreds of miles over the veld to sink long shafts in the Rand. The miners’ camp of Johannesbtn g became a city of palatial buildings of marble and stucco. Farmers from hamlets isolated over hundreds of miles of pasturage flocked to share in a new standard of Jiving in the town. Universities were endowed. In a generation the European population of South Africa was multiplied lour times. Rhodes’s direction was pre-eminent, but there were many other virile personalities among those who created the world’s greatest goldfields and one of the Empire’s greatest cities in tlreir lifetime. Barnato. who always said that Alfred Beit was Ur? “mind” of Rhodes, said resentfully; "Rhodes looks down on me because 1 have no education and didn’t go to college like him. If I had received the ■education of Cecil Rhodes there would not have been a Cecil Rhodes.” HORRORS OF MIDAS. Barnato’s philosophy, however, was never academic. He said to a. newcomer to the goldfields; “If a man is going to hit you. hit him first and say. ‘lf you try that I’ll hit you again.’ It is no use your saying, ‘lf you hit me I'll hit you back.’ D'ye understand?”

Returning to England in 1897, Barnato suffered the horrors of Midas. He imagined that he was being pursued by threats of robbery and vengeance.

Ono day on board ship he- asked a companion the time, and without waiting for an answer lie jumped overboard.

Struben and Walker tyad no place among the new "Rand Idrds.” South Africa's greatest gift to Struben was gold, but health. His early hope fulness was the optimism of tuberculosis, and before he died in Devon in '931 he .said that all he really owed Africa, was the strength in her sun that enabled him in live to be older than S ! ). Walker, who received two clainr: for his discovery, gav-a one to George Harrison and sold the other for £360. Only a pension from the Chamber of Mines was saving him from penury when he died in 1924.