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Randlord
Randlords were the capitalists who controlled the diamond and gold mining industries in South Africa in its pioneer phase from the 1870s up to World War I. A small number of European financiers, largely of the same generation, gained control of the diamond mining industry at Kimberley, Northern Cape. They set up an infrastructure of financing and industrial consolidation which they then applied to exploit the discoveries of gold from 1886 in Transvaal at Witwatersrand — the "Rand". Once based in the Transvaal, many set up residence in the mansions of Parktown. Many of the Randlords received baronetcies in recognition of their contributions. Notable Randlords * Sir George Albu, 1st Bt (1857–1935)' * Leopold Albu (1861–1938) * Sir Abe Bailey, 1st Bt (1864–1940) * Barney Barnato (1852–1897) *Alfred Beit (1853–1906) * Sir Otto Beit, 1st Bt (1865–1930) *Hermann Ludwig Eckstein (1847–1893) * Sir George Herbert Farrar (1859–1915) *Adolf Goerz (1857–1900) *John Hays ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Sigismund Neumann
Sir Sigismund Neumann (Anglicized name Sigmund) (1857 1916) was a mining magnate (Randlord) and financier on the Witwatersrand. Early life and family Neumann was born in Fürth, Bavaria, on 25 May 1857 to Jewish parents, Gustav and Babette Neumann. In his late teens, he emigrated to South Africa to seek his fortune in the Kimberley diamond mines. His brother Ludwig moved to London, where he worked with the financiers Leopold Hirsch & Co., who went into the market for mining shares, and made his way in society. First years on the Rand Neumann began as a diamond buyer for the firm V.A. & E.M. Littkie, but then moved to the Barberton gold fields and founded his own company S. Neumann & Co. when gold was discovered in the Witwatersrand. His staff in Johannesburg included Charles Sydney Goldman, who had moved from agriculture into the mining industry. He became a partner in 1895. Carl Hanau from Freiburg im Breisgau worked on futures contracts. He was made a partner, but moved o ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Hermann Ludwig Eckstein
Hermann Ludwig Eckstein (3 August 1847 – 16 January 1893) was a German-born British mining magnate and banker. Life history Born in Hohenheim near Stuttgart, Germany to a Lutheran minister, he received an excellent education. He came to the South African diamond- and goldfields in 1882, and soon acquired a reputation as the resourceful manager of the Phoenix Diamond Mining Company at Du Toit's Pan near Kimberley. He attracted the attention of Julius Wernher and Alfred Beit and in 1884 joined them in the partnership of Jules Porgès & Co (later Wernher, Beit & Co). In 1885 Beit arranged for Hermann Eckstein and Jim Taylor, to report on the firm's interests in the Barberton and De Kaap goldfields, in which they had invested heavily. Taylor wrote a gloomy report on the extent and quality of the ore lode that brought Porgès hurrying back to South Africa. He and Beit decided to disinvest. The firm suffered a loss, which was trivial compared with what was to follow. The s ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Jim B Taylor
James Benjamin Taylor (December 1860 – 25 December 1944) was a South African Randlord. He followed a typical route to great wealth – diamonds in Kimberley, gold in Barberton and Pilgrim's Rest, and ending up on the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. His ability to speak Afrikaans was instrumental in his rise, and he became a confidant of President Paul Kruger of the Zuid-Afrikaansche Republiek. He acted as intermediary between the Government and the mining industry, and was privy to many of the political machinations leading to the Jameson Raid and the Anglo-Boer War. Life He was born the fifth of 8 children of Isaac Rowland Taylor (6 November 1826 Holborn – 22 August 1888 Kimberley) and Jane Dorothea Hellet (7 May 1827 – 27 November 1876). His first formal education was at Dalton School in Cape Town; he was present when in 1867 Prince Alfred, son of Queen Victoria, called at the Cape aboard the screw frigate on his voyage around the world. Taylor's father and brother mov ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Abe Bailey
Sir Abraham Bailey, 1st Baronet (6 November 1864 – 10 August 1940), known as Abe Bailey, was a South African gold tycoon, politician, financier and cricketer. Early years Bailey's mother, Ann Drummond McEwan, was Scottish by birth while his father, Thomas Bailey, was from Yorkshire, England. Married in 1860 in South Africa, Thomas and Ann Bailey had four children, Mary, Abraham, Susannah and Alice, before Ann Bailey's premature death in 1872, when young Abe was only seven years old. Abe Bailey was sent to England to be educated, first at Keighley and later at Clewer House. After the outbreak of the Second Boer War in October 1899, a corps of imperial volunteers from London was formed in late December 1899. The corps included infantry, mounted infantry and artillery divisions and was authorized with the name City of London Imperial Volunteers. It proceeded to South Africa in January 1900, returned in October the same year, and was disbanded in December 1900. Bailey was appo ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Jules Porgès
Jules Porgès (25 May 1839 – 20 September 1921) was a Paris-based financier who played a central role in the rise of the Randlords who controlled the diamond and gold mining industries in South Africa. He was born Yehuda Porges in Vienna and raised in Prague, where his father was a jeweller. He settled in Paris in the early 1860s and established himself as a diamond trader, through his company Jules Porgès & Cie. He recognized early the significance of the diamond finds in South Africa and, in 1873, sent two of his younger staff, Alfred Beit and Julius Wernher, to South Africa as his firm's representatives. He arrived in Kimberley himself in 1876 and continued their work in consolidating claims, financing deals and marketing stones, so that his firm Compagnie Française de Diamant du Cap de Bonne Espérance gained a significant portion of the Kimberley mine. He saw the benefit of Cecil Rhodes's attempt to consolidate the disparate mining holdings, and sold the Compagnie Fr ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
George Albu
Sir George Albu, 1st Baronet (26 October 1857 – 27 December 1935) was a mining magnate in the diamond and gold industries of South Africa. Biography Lady Albu at wheel of CGV, London April 1905 Northwards, Johannesburg 26.17720S, 28.03650E George Albu was born in Berlin, Germany in 1857. The son of Simon Albu (26 February 1830 – 26 February 1911) and Fanny Sternberg (d. 24 October 1912), George and his brother Leopold were German Jews who emigrated to South Africa in 1876. On arrival in Cape Town, George became an assistant at the haberdashery counter in Stuttafords. After some time in Cape Town, they moved to the diamond-fields of Kimberley, accumulated financial interests, and sold out to De Beers at a substantial profit, before settling on the Witwatersrand and becoming a naturalized Transvaal citizen in 1887. George Albu purchased the ailing Meyer and Charlton Mine, restructured it, and on 30 December 1895 he and his brother established General Mining and Finance ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Joseph Benjamin Robinson
Sir Joseph Benjamin Robinson, 1st Baronet (3 August 1840 – 30 October 1929) was a South African gold and diamond mining magnate and Randlord. Mayor of Kimberley, Northern Cape in 1880, which he represented in the Cape parliament for four years, chairman of the Robinson South African Banking Corporation Co , Ltd and of numeral gold mines in the Transvaal Colony, he was convicted in 1921 of fraud and fined half a million pounds. He is best remembered as having paid political fixer Maundy Gregory £30,000, towards Prime Minister Lloyd George’s political fund, in exchange for a peerage. After the King personally complained and under public pressure, the government forced Robinson to reject the appointment. What became known as the ''Honours Scandal'' was one of the reason for the passing of the British Honours (Prevention of Abuses) Act 1925. Life Joseph Benjamin Robinson was born in Cradock, Eastern Cape, the youngest son of Robert John Robinson and Martha. Robinson fought ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Max Michaelis
Sir Maximillian Michaelis, (11 May 1852 Eisfeld, Germany – 26 January 1932, Zurich) was a South African financier, mining magnate, benefactor and patron of the arts. Early life and education Michaelis received his early schooling in Nuremberg where he is said to have developed his love of old masters. Mining career Michaelis first arrived in South Africa in 1876 when he landed at Port Elizabeth. Two years later he had moved to Kimberley, drawn by the 1871 discovery of diamonds and the prospect of wealth. Here he became a close business associate of Julius Wernher and Alfred Beit and got to know Hermann Eckstein and Jim B. Taylor - friendships that were to last a lifetime. He was co-opted by Wernher to deal in diamonds for Porges and Wernher, and in the 1880s restructured the Cape Diamond Company. He was a founding partner of Wernher, Beit & Co. Within some years he had become manager of the Central Mining and Investment Corporation in Johannesburg. From 1896 he w ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
John Dale Lace
Colonel John Dale Lace (27 November 1859 – 5 June 1937) was a South African gold and diamond mining magnate and Randlord. He was born in Port St Mary on the Isle of Man. Career Dale Lace came to South Africa as an employee of the Bank of Africa. Dale Lace built a fortune in the diamond industry. He would depart Kimberley for the Witwatersrand Goldfields. During 1895 until 1896, he was a member of the Johannesburg Reform Committee agitating for better rights for Uitlanders in the South African Republic. A consequence of this action resulted in the Jameson Raid and would accompany a British Agent with a message to the raiders expressing the Colonial Secretary's disapproval of the raid. When the raid failed, he was one of many of the Committee arrested, tried and found guilty but escaped jail with the payment of a £2,000 fine. After the British victory in the Second Boer War, he was appointed as a Councillor on the first Johannesburg Town Council and he was among the founde ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Gustav Imroth
Gustav Imroth (29 June 1862 – 10 October 1946) was a minor Randlord who played a role in the development of the South African diamond-mining industry and sports. He was born in Friedberg, Germany in 1862 into a Jewish banking family, travelled first to London in 1880, where he was naturalised British, and then to Kimberley, South Africa in 1884 to work in the diamond industry for Dunkelsbuhler and Company alongside his cousins Louis Oppenheimer and Fredrich Hirschhorn. Gustav Imroth later represented Barnato Brothers in their dealings with the diamond syndicate (later De Beers), working closely with Solomon Joel and Ernest Oppenheimer (also a first cousin). He helped found the Johannesburg Consolidated Investment Company Limited (“Johnnies”) and was its managing director from 1911 to 1920, when he retired to London. An amateur boxer, keen supporter of South African sports and founder member of the Wanderers Club, Gustav Imroth was a boxing umpire in the 1908 London ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Alfred Beit
Alfred Beit (15 February 1853 – 16 July 1906) was a Anglo-German gold and diamond magnate in South Africa, and a major donor and profiteer of infrastructure development on the African continent. He also donated much money to university education and research in several countries, and was the "silent partner" who structured the capital flight from post-Boer War South Africa to Rhodesia, and the Rhodes Scholarship, named after his employee, Cecil Rhodes. Beit's assets were structured around the so-called Corner House Group, which through its holdings in various companies controlled 37 per cent of the gold produced at the Witwatersrand's goldfields in Johannesburg in 1913.See chapter 12 in Rönnbäck & Broberg (2019) Capital and Colonialism. The Return on British Investments in Africa 1869-1969 (Palgrave Studies in Economic History) Life and career Born and brought up in |
George Herbert Farrar
Sir George Herbert Farrar, 1st Baronet, (17 June 1859 – 20 May 1915) was a South African mining magnate, politician and soldier – Colonel and assistant Quartermaster General – Central Force, Union Defence Force, Hon. Colonel South African Light Horse. Early life and career Farrar was born in 1859 in Chatteris, Cambridgeshire, the son of Charles Farrar, a Chatteris medical doctor, and Helen Howard, the daughter of John Howard of Cauldwell House Bedford and sister of Sir Frederick Howard of Bedford and James Howard MP of Bedford. George Herbert Farrar was educated at Bedford Modern School after which he joined Howard, Farrar & Co., the engineering business of his uncle, Sir Frederick Howard, travelling to South Africa in 1879 to work at the firm's branches in Port Elizabeth and East London. He was the brother of John Percy Farrar, soldier and mountaineer. Later life In 1887, shortly after the discovery of gold on the Reef, he and his brothers established themselves i ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
