Isaac Wiggill

Many of us have fascinating tales and wonderful pedigrees of our ancestors. Ancestry24 will give away a 1 year subscription to our entire database collection to the person that submits the most interesting story about their 1820 Settlers and a gedcom file.

This offer will be available until the 1st October when the competition ends. There is plenty of time to start writing and compiling your story of your 1820 Settler Ancestors.  Remember that photo’s will be an added bonus.

Images can br photos of original letters, bibles, graves, artefacts or family reunions.

For any more information please contact us on [email protected] or join us on Facebook or Twitter.

Our new Family Tree Builder will be available too so that you can share your Family Tree with other members and get connected with new relatives and friends. Our new Tree Builder also includes a “scrap book” for you to upload images and documents for each person in your tree as well as linking existing records to each person and smart matching too.

“Kyk gou op die rekenaar waar ons oorlede vriende se grafte is.”

Heather MacAlister (links), projekleier van die webwerf Ancestry24, en die vrywil­liger me. Helen Spangenberg naby die graf van die digter Ingrid Jonker. Foto: Lizané Louw

So ’n versoek klink dalk onsensitief, maar vir talle Suid-Afrikaners is dit al beskore om hul afgestorwe familielede of vriende se grafte op die internet op te spoor deur hul name op ’n Suid-Afrikaanse webwerf, Ancestry24, in te tik.

’n Foto van die graf, basiese inligting oor die afgestorwe persoon, asook die unieke wêreldligging van die graf, word só verkry.

Volgens die Ancestry24-projekleier, me. Heather MacAlister, is hul webtuiste die grootste in sy soort en die enigste waar die egtheid van elke inskrywing deur ’n bron ondersteun word.

Dorpe wat al aanlyn kan gaan, is Augrabies, Fraserburg, Kei-moes, die Moffat-sendingstasie op Kuruman, Postmasburg, Prieska en Riebeek-Wes.

Dorpe waarvan grafinligting opgeteken is, sluit in Wuppertal, Nieuwoudtville, Clanwilliam, Klawer, Vredendal (almal in die Wes-Kaap), asook Kokstad (KwaZulu-Natal), die Noord-Kaapse dor­pe Kakamas, Keimoes en Sutherland, asook Smithfield (Vrystaat) en ’n begraafplaas in Pretoria.

Opnames is ook in Kaapstad en omgewing afgehandel.

Woensdag het MacAlister en ’n groep vrywilligers met opnames in die Maitland-begraafplaas van 100?ha begin en behoort oor drie jaar klaar te kry.

Die grafregister is al oorgeskryf, met inligting soos naam, van, sterfdatum, hoe diep die graf is, wie die persoon begrawe het en aan wie die erf waarop die graf is, behoort het.

Maar, sê MacAlister, armer gemeenskappe se grafte moet eerste gedoen word aangesien grafte daar gouer tot niet gaan en inligting só verlore gaan.

“Grafprojekte is eenvoudig en leersaam, maar arbeidsintensief; daarom benodig ons vrywilligers. Ek noem hulle spottenderwys friends of the crypt .”

“Só kan ons dorpenaars betrokke kry en waar leerlinge betrek word, leer hulle meer van hul dorp se geskiedenis. Snaaks genoeg, op baie grafte staan geskryf: ‘Jy sal nooit vergeet word nie’; maar dis presies wat gebeur – mense vergeet hul mense, hul geskiedenis.”

“Munisipaliteite vind baat daarby. Wanneer grafopnames klaar is, is die grafte in ’n mate opgeknap, want toegegroeide grafte word oopgeknip en grafstene skoongevee.

Enigeen wat as vrywilliger ’n grafsteenprojek in hul dorp wil ondersteun, kan MacAlister by 0?021 468 8957 bel. Opleiding sal gereël word.

Bu Julian Jansen http://www.rapport.co.za/Suid-Afrika/Nuus/Spoor-nou-grafte-op-met-die-internet-20100918

William Fynn’s 3x great grandfather of actor Hugh Grant was born in London, England on 21st July 1806 and died at King William’s Town on the 6th June 1853), adventurer and public servant, was the second son of Francis Fynn and his wife, Elizabeth Copestick.

In 1808 he came to Cape Town with his parents and was educated there. From 1822 to 1827 he worked for a Table Bay ship’s chandler but, seeking a more adventurous life, and accompanied by Captain R.S. Aitcheson of the Cape Mounted Riflemen, he undertook (1828) a journey overland to Natal to visit Shaka and also to search for the wrecked ship Buckbay Packet on the Portuguese coast. The expedition was under the patronage of Sir Lowry Cole.

His brother H.F. Fynn, and Nathaniel Isaacs were great friends and this resulted in his spending five years in Natal, trading and transporting hides and cattle from Zululand to Port Natal. Some of the deals he made were with Dingane in 1830 and 1831. He was also able to allay the sufferings of Whites in the Natal settlement to some extent by giving them medical help through his knowledge of herbs.

He severed his connections with Natal in 1833 when he was appointed to the commissariat of the British forces on the eastern frontier of the Cape Colony. During the Sixth Frontier War (1834-35) Col. H.G.W. Smith, to whom Fynn was virtually aide-de-camp, made him superintendent of the Mfengu clans on the eastern frontier and also interpreter at Alice. It was during this war that Fynn was held hostage for some time by the Chiefs Maqoma and Tyhali and at the end of the conflict he was sent as Diplomatic Agent to conciliate the Chief Mhala (Umhala). In 1838 he was nominated by Sir Andries Stockenström to be British Agent beyond the Great Fish River, and in this capacity he was successful in amicably settling disputes between Sarili, the Gcaleka chief, and Ncaphayi, the Bhaca chief. Three years later he accompanied an expedition to Pondoland to protect the tribes there from the Whites of Natal.

In the Seventh Frontier War (1846-47) William had to flee from Kaffraria and was fortunately rescued by Lieut.-Col. W. Eyre, after which (1847) he was appointed assistant commissioner to the Ndlambe tribe and in 1849 commissioner of Sarili’s tribe. During the regime of Lieutenant-Governor B.C.C. Pine in Natal, F., who was then British Resident at Faku’s headquarters, received orders to recruit Non-Whites for military service in Natal. There was, however, criticism of this plan and it is not known whether it ever materialized. Shortly before his death he was appointed assistant headquarters interpreter on the eastern frontier.

He was most knowledgeable about the Non-Whites of the Eastern Cape, and the government authorities in framing their policies for this region drew very largely upon his experience with them.

He married Margaret Johanna West in 1833 and had two daughters and three sons, one of them being William Rafferty Donald Fynn who became British Resident with Sarili.

This book by Ivan Mitford-Barberton and Violet White, is available under our book section on search. This valuable contribution to 1820 Settler Africana. It opens up a field in the recording of family life, adventure and romance. It contains records of 100 selected families that landed in this country in 1820. Many of these families settled throughout this country, and with their lives are wrapped much of our romantic and unrecorded history.

Have you added your 1820 Settler Families to our Free Tree Builder? This will help you find those missing links.
A majority of the 1820 Settlers remained on their original holdings in the Albany and Bathurst districts, but individual Settlers entered into and promoted every sphere of development in this country and became explorers and leaders in the establishment of townships and trade. Some qualified for important posts in administration and became High Commissioners, Judges, Members of Parliament, Magistrates, Doctors, Commandants and Field Cornets.

There were pioneers and traders whose names given to places mark their trail even in Rhodesia; two 1820 Settlers were chosen as candidates for Presidential elections in the Transvaal and O.F.S. They established schools and Mission Stations and built churches. Among their numbers were Ministers of Religion, Missionaries, Authors, Poets, Botanists, Historians, Editors, Architects, Engineers, Scientists and Geologists who left their mark and their records, but their experiences and achievements would be more inspirational if we could gather together, as this book does, more of the threads of their personal family lives, for this is the foundation on which history is built.

The 1820 Settlers brought a way of life and inspiration for human betterment to this country. They were not a force like the ocean which is spent on our beaches; for they came and enshrined themselves as a fundamental part of our population. Their descendants should furnish all possible information to facilitate the building of family trees extending back at least to the time of the arrival of the 1820 Settlers.
As we are in the process of building a nation, it is more necessary than ever before that we should record the annals of human endeavour that are the basic foundations of our nationhood and chronicle the character of the people that made up what today we know as South Africans.

Which party did your family belong to?

Wedderburn Family

Bailie’s Party
Biggar’s Party
Bowker’s Party
Bradshaw’s Party
Butler’s Party
Calton’s Party
Charles Campbell’s Party
Duncan Campbell’s Party
Carlisle’s Party
Clark’s Party
Cock’s Party
Crause’s Party
Dalgairns’ Party
Damant’s Party
Daniell’s Party
Dixon’s Party
Dyason’s Party
Erith’s Party
Ford’s Party
Gardner’s Party
Greathead’s Party
Griffith’s Party
Gurney’s Party
Hayhurst’s Party
Holder’s Party
Howard’s Party
Hyman’s Party
Ingram’s Party
James’ Party
Liversage’s Party
Mahony’s Party
Mandy’s Party
Menezes’ Party
Mills’ Party
Morgan’s Party
Mouncey’s Party
Neave’s Party
Osler’s Party
Owen’s Party
Parker’s Party
Parkin’s Party
Philipps’ Party
Pigot’s Party
Pringle’s Party
Richardson’s Party
Rowles’ Party
Russell’s Party
Scott’s Party
Sephton’s Party
George Smith’s Party
William Smith’s Party
Southey’s Party
Stanley’s Party
Synnot’s Party
Thornhill’s Party
Turvey’s Party
Wainwright’s Party
Wait’s Party
White’s Party
Wilkinson’s Party
Willson’s Party

James Bourhill brings to life the personal and day – to – day life of the South African troops in Italy during the 2nd World War. His book has been meticulously researched from the War Diaries and Divisional Documents from the National Archives, personal diaries, private letters and memoirs as well.

Browse through the list of casualties

This impressive book on the South African Division in Italy is a first to provide such a level of intimacy among soldiers in a war where the human friendship and camaraderie are held together by victory and the losses of these indomitable soldiers who gave up their lives to fight for their country.

For any South African whose family was engaged in Italy during the 2nd World War. Come back to Portorfino is a part of your family history and will remain a legacy and treasure for generations to come.

Over 900 men who lost their lives in this operation are honoured in this publication. My father served in this campaign and I am more than delighted to have this book in my collection.

“We watched the South African Bombardiers, stripped to the waist, bronzed and sweltering in the blazing sun, as they loaded their 25-pounders, fired  reloaded and fired again. Immediately behind us, the medium guns fired away, their five inch missiles screaming low over our heads, the blast from their barrels swaying the vehicles in which we worked on their springs. A noisy dusty, broiling life.”

by Heather MacAlister

Sarah Millin

Sarah Gertrude Millin was born in Zagar, Lithuania circa  March 1888 and died in Johannesburg on the 6th July 1968, authoress, was the eldest child and only daughter of Isaiah Liebson, a Jewish merchant, and his wife, Olga Friedmann. According to Sarah M. her birth was not registered: calculations indicate that she must have been born about March 1888. Her maternal grandfather had been a Kimberley pioneer and while visiting Europe persuaded Isaiah and Olga to join the Litvak immigration to South Africa during the 1880s.

The Liebsons, with their five-month-old daughter, arrived in Cape Town in August 1888 and went on to Beaconsfield, near the Kimberley diamond-fields, where Isaiah opened a trading store. In 1894 the family settled at Waldeck’s Plant, a section of the Vaal River alluvial diggings in the Barkly West district. Sarah M.’s father, never a good businessman, managed to make a fairly comfortable living among the European diggers, Black labourers, and Coloureds by exercising trading, water, and ferry rights and by running a small cattle farm that showed no profit.

Sarah Millin and her six brothers (one died at the age of three) appear to have been the only White children at Waldeck’s Plant, a circumstance of decisive influence on her later views regarding South Africa’s multi-racial society. She began to write poetry when she was six, taught herself German with her mother’s encouragement and the aid of a school primer, and developed the voracious reading habit that was to damage her eyesight permanently. She first attended school at Beaconsfield, staying with relatives there, then continued in Kimberley, living in boarding houses until the outbreak of the Second Anglo-Boer War in 1899. From this period dates her life-long insomnia, the outcome of unfamiliar bedrooms, absence from her family, and fear of the dark.

At the end of the war Sarah. became a pupil at the Kimberley High School for Girls, where she achieved a first-class Matriculation pass in 1904. Her marks were the highest for girls in the Cape Colony and brought her a special citation for distinction in mathematics. She also won the Victoria Memorial Exhibition, the University Bursary, and was awarded a Barnato Scholarship. Eyestrain and physical debilitation prevented her from pursuing a university education at the South African College, Cape Town. Instead, she studied music in Kimberley, receiving her teaching certificate in 1906. But she never taught, preferring to devote her talents to literature.

When she was eighteen Sarah M. had a short story, ‘A feeder on husks’, printed in the Johannesburg Sunday Times; several of her essays, sketches, and articles appeared in the Zionist Record and The State during 1910-12. While visiting Cape Town she met and became engaged to Philip Millin, a local part-time journalist studying for the Bar. After their marriage in Kimberley on 1.12.1912 they moved to Johannesburg where Sarah M. did book reviewing for the Rand Daily Mail, wrote an occasional column under the pseudonym of ‘The Johannesburg Girl’, and had four short stories published in Truth (October-November 1915). Miscegenation is a recurring theme in Sarah M.’s fiction; it provided the motif for her first novel The dark river (1919), which drew upon childhood experiences of the diggings at Waldeck’s Plant. Middle class (1921) and Adam’s rest (1922), the latter book also dealing with the Coloured problem on the diggings, increased her overseas readership – but, as with her first novel, neither of these works aroused much interest in South African literary circles. Meanwhile she had been corresponding with the New Zealand writer Katherine Mansfield, then living in England, who during 1921 arranged for the publication of several of Sarah M.’s short stories in the London Athenaeum and Adelphi. These tales were subsequently included in Sarah M.’s collection Two bucks without hair (1957). Other short stories from her pen were collected in a volume called Men on a voyage (1930). The Rand miners’ strike of 1922 saw Sarah M.’s husband and one of her brothers join the volunteer militia; she witnessed the shelling of Fordsburg from her house on Parktown ridge. The literary outcome of her experiences was The Jordans (1923), a novel strongly anti-socialistic that she dedicated to General J.C. Smuts*. Sarah M. then wrote God’s stepchildren (1924), the book that established her literary reputation overseas and brought financial success. Although her abhorrence of miscegenation at times overshadowed her sympathies for the Coloured outcast, she achieved in this novel a realism previously absent from South African fiction dealing with racial questions.

During 1924-6 she and her husband travelled to Europe on two occasions. In England Sarah M. met various celebrities, among whom were D.H. Lawrence, G.B. Shaw, Storm Jameson, Rebecca West, and the now deceased Katherine Mansfield’s husband Middleton Murray. These encounters, though brief, confirmed her standing with the overseas literary establishment and were some consolation for the continuing neglect of her in South Africa. Mary Glenn (1925), a novel dealing with the psychology of mother-child relationships, was favourably received by English and American critics; subsequently, encouraged by John Galsworthy, Sarah M. adapted this book for the stage and it was produced as ‘No longer mourn’ at the Gate Theatre, London, in November 1935.

With The South Africans (1926), a sensitive and stylistically elegant account of the peoples, history, and customs of the sub-continent, Sarah M. found her local public. Enlarged to include her assessment of the spread of pre-World War II (1939-45) Nazi ideals among certain sections of the community, and re-entitled The people of South Africa (1951), this popular book takes its place among Sarah M.’s non-fiction with two other important works: the biographies Rhodes (1933) and General Smuts (1936).

Sarah M. was able to consult Sir Patrick Duncan* and General Smuts about the accuracy of events described in Rhodes before its publication; her treatment of the subject was notably impartial and perceptive and the biography became a Book Society choice in England. While visiting that country in 1933 Sarah M. sold the film rights to Gaumont British Films, for whom she wrote a scenario. Much to her chagrin, a romanticised version of her work entitled ‘Rhodes of Africa’ was screened in 1936.

While working on General Smuts she had access to hitherto unavailable family papers and to government documents and letters covering the period from Smuts’s early life to the years after the First World War (1914-18). In the course of accumulating factual information, she stayed for some time with Smuts and his family at Doornkloof, their home outside Pretoria. The resultant two-volume work was of historical importance for future researchers yet patently flattering of a statesman, if not a politician, for whom M. had the greatest admiration.

Not surprisingly, several of her novels touch on the problem of artistic frustration. An artist in the family (1927) and The fiddler (1929), the film rights of which Sarah M. sold to an American company, exemplify this aspect of self-projection in her characters. Another novel, The coming of the Lord (1928), is typical of her concern for minority groups since it records the Bulhoek massacre of 1921 in the Cape Colony where members of the Black Israelite sect were killed by government forces when resisting forced removal.

After Galsworthy had persuaded her to start a branch of the PEN Club in South Africa, Sarah M. attended the Oslo international congress of this organization in June 1928, as a representative of her country. She resigned from the Club in 1960 after being accused of supporting apartheid. In September 1929 she agreed to undertake a lecture tour of America. Although ill health forced the cancellation of lecturing engagements, she spent two months in the States treated as a literary celebrity and meeting F.D. and Eleanor Roosevelt, President Hoover, and, of more importance to her, the writer Theodore Dreiser. Her novel The sons of Mrs Aab (1931), a well-written domestic tragedy, was dedicated to Dreiser.

Seeking clearance for the use of British government papers in her General Smuts, Sarah M. went to London in 1936. While there she agreed to accompany Lady Muriel Paget, a relief worker among displaced British subjects, on a visit to Russia. After leaving her companion at Leningrad, she went on to Moscow alone to be introduced to the Soviet Commissar for Foreign Affairs as well as the Lithuanian Prime Minister. Back in London, she discussed the fate of European Jewry with Stanley Baldwin, Anthony Eden, Winston Churchill, Austin Chamberlain and other politicians. She was committed to the cause of Zionism, having accommodated Chaim Weizmann and his wife on their fund-raising trip to South Africa in 1932 and, in turn, stayed with them when visiting Palestine in 1933. On the first anniversary of Israel’s independence in 1949, she attended the celebrations as Smuts’s personal emissary to Ben-Gurion, the Prime Minister.

Politics and the imminent outbreak of the Second World War in 1939 occupied the major share of her attention after returning from England in 1938. Frustrated by what she saw as Smuts’s expediency and procrastination at a time of internal crisis, she turned to J.H. Hofmeyr* as the saviour of South Africa. Her incessant counselling of Hofmeyr by an extensive correspondence was politically fruitless yet significant in the context of her shifting preoccupations, What hath a man? (1938) and The Herr Witchdoctor (1941), because of their strong anti-German propaganda, were basically flawed novels.

Sarah M. wrote The night is long, the first part of her autobiography, in 1939; then, at Smuts’s suggestion, she began her War diary. This work, an incidental record rather than the envisaged historical account of the Second World War, was of current interest yet had poor sales; six volumes were published: World blackout (1944); The reeling earth (1945); The pit of the abyss (1946); The sound of the trumpet (1947); Fire out of heaven (1947); The seven thunders (1948). In 1943 she sent Smuts the manuscript of ‘The glass house’, an allegory about the punishment of German war criminals. He advised, and she reluctantly agreed, that this work should not be published.

Sarah M.’s husband Philip, who had become prominent in legal circles since his appointment in 1937 as a judge of the supreme court, accompanied her on a visit to America, Canada, and Britain in 1946; at the invitation of the American prosecutors they were able to attend the Nuremberg war trials. On returning to South Africa Sarah M. resumed the writing of fiction without, however, regaining her former excellence. King of the bastards (1949), with Coenraad de Buys* as the principal character, was an exception and proved something of a local best-seller. The University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, awarded her an honorary doctorate of literature in March 1952; a month later Philip Millin collapsed and died of a heart attack in the Johannesburg law courts. Sarah M. was inconsolable. She adored her husband, who had been of inestimable value to her as a critic of her writing. The measure of my days (1955), the concluding section of her autobiography, paid tribute to him. With much of her energy and inspiration gone, she withdrew from the social life she had shared with her husband for forty years and occupied herself with sporadic bursts of writing of a sociopolitical nature. Among these were White Africans are also people (1966), which she compiled and to which he contributed. It contains a collection of articles presenting the case for the survival of the European. From 1962 onwards she corresponded regularly with Sir Roy Welensky, Prime Minister of the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland; after Rhodesia’s unilateral declaration of independence in 1965 she sent R1 000 every two months to Rhodesia in support of the Smith government.

Sarah M.’s last published novel was Goodbye, dear England (1965), an historical narrative of the two world wars, to which she wrote a sequel first called ‘Goodbye, dear world’ and later changed to ‘Time no longer’. She was not able to find a publisher for the sequel or for her history of the Jews, ‘A certain people’. Embittered and lonely, she died childless at eighty of a massive thrombosis, and was buried beside her husband in Westpark Jewish Cemetery. She left an estate valued at R550 000.

With an abrasive personality and domineering attitude, Sarah M. made enemies easily. Yet she could be most generous to those who gained her sympathy – especially to young, struggling authors. Her growing acceptance, in principle, of separate development for the Black and the White races in Africa alienated her from the liberal Left and resulted in many adverse estimations of her work. In her historical writings she was largely impressionistic and lacked the necessary measure of scholarly objectivity; as a novelist she was the foremost writer of her generation. Her realistic portrayal of regional character and scene, notable for lucidity and precision of expression, remains of germinal importance to the development of South African English fiction. Photographs of her are to be found in Rubin (infra).

Barney Barnato

Barney Barnato was born at Aldgate, London, England on the 5th July 1852  and died at sea, off Madeira on the 14th June 1897), financier, was the second son of Isaac Isaacs, a general dealer, and his wife Leah. After receiving a rudimentary education, he left the Spitalfields Jews’ Free School when he was fourteen to earn his living in his father’s shop. He also worked behind, and occasionally on, the music-hall stage.

British TV announcer Esther Rantzen found she was related to Barney Barnato Part 2, 3, 4, of Who do you think you are.

Shortly after assuming the additional name of Barnato in his teens, as his elder brother Henry Barnato had done, he followed Henry to Kimberley, arriving at the Cape in 1873, not in legendary poverty, but with fifty pounds.
B. and his brother in’1874 established ‘Barnato Brothers, dealers in diamonds and brokers in mining property’, and B. soon became the dominant force in the firm. Two years later he had accumulated £3 000 and bought his first claims in the Kimberley mine.

B.’s dazzling career was based on a shrewd suspicion that diamonds were not a surface deposit but a volcanic extrusion; thus he was able to buy many ‘exhausted’ claims, whose real value became apparent once the blue sub-surface soil began to be worked. He was also among the first to appreciate that amalgamation would facilitate control of diamond production and thus price maintenance, by reducing the number of producers.

So in 1881, having opened a branch of Barnato Brothers in London the previous year, he floated the Barnato Diamond Mining Company in Kimberley, and set out to be the dominant financial magnate in the diamond industry. C. J. Rhodes,* of the De Beers Company, had similar plans. The resulting struggle for supremacy passed through two main stages: firstly, for the control of the Compagnie Française des Mines de Diamant du Cap, of Paris (better known in Kimberley as ‘the French company’), the only major firm still not controlled by either of the rivals in 1887, and, secondly, to buy up any shares remaining on the open market. The first stage ended with B. (who had merged all his diamond interests in the Kimberley Central Diamond Mining Company) as the owner of the French company, but with Rhodes, backed by the Rothschilds and assisted by Alfred Beit,* in possession, through a successful stratagem, of one fifth of the Kimberley Central itself.

B.’s capitulation and agreement to amalgamate with De Beers ended the second stage. Despite his originally superior resources, he had been handicapped because his shareholders, less reliable than his opponent’s, and unable to resist the lure of soaring prices, had persisted in selling, inevitably, to Rhodes or his agents. A new company, De Beers Consolidated Mines Ltd., controlling by far the greater part of South African diamond production, was formed on 13.3.1888, but only after B., an orthodox businessman, had reluctantly agreed On the face of Rhodes’s threats to resume buying) that the new company’s profits should be used to further imperialistic expansion.

Fearful of losing all his influence, B. insisted that he should be one of the four ‘life governors’ who would direct the firm. Thanks to Rhodes he also entered the Kimberley Club, and, in 1889, the Cape Legislative Assembly. Despite having been in the Kimberley divisional council since 1880, B. was no politician and was rightly regarded as the parliamentary representative of De Beers rather than of Kimberley. None the less and despite the unpopularity of the company’s policy of restricting the production of diamonds, he survived the election of 1894 and remained a member of Parliament until his death.

During late 1888 and early 1889 B., having changed his mind about the prospects of the Witwatersrand, began buying shares and property there on a scale which, though it eventually did much to inspire confidence in the area and promote its development, cost him dear in the setback of 1889, when the old extraction methods proved inadequate in a pyritic zone. He floated and controlled the New Primrose, the New Croesus, the Roodepoort and Glencairn and the Main Reef gold-mining companies, and he had an interest in most of the others.

During 1888 he acquired a majority holding in the Johannesburg Exchange and Chambers Company, which erected a new and larger stock exchange during 1889-90. The Johannesburg Consolidated Investment Company was founded by B. in 1889, with a capital of £175 000. Originally it had been a land company, and through it B. had bought the whole of old Doornfontein, but it soon became one of South Africa’s major mining and financial houses. B. also established the Johannesburg Waterworks, Estate and Exploration Company in 1889. The Barnato Bank, Mining and Estates Company, started in London in 1894, was his least successful venture; it was really nothing more than a repository for B.’s unsaleable stocks. Such a device, only possible in a time of over-speculation such as the ‘Kaffir boom’ of the mid-nineties, marred his reputation and, in 1896, without having ever published a report or an account, he discreetly merged the company with the Johannesburg Consolidated Investment Company. B. was one of the principal manipulators of the boom; his loss of £3 000 000 when it collapsed in October 1895, owing, he later suspected, to preparation for the Jameson Raid, is a clear indication of his lack of complicity, even though his nephew, S. B. Joel,* was deeply involved in the Reform Movement. B.’s attempts to set an example and bolster the market were appreciated in London; later, in 1895, he was entertained at the Mansion House and admitted to the Carlton Club.

Uninterested in politics and utterly unwilling to gain the vote in the Transvaal Republic at the expense of his British citizenship, yet able to see the Transvaal Afrikaners’ point of view, B. got on fairly well with Pres. S. J. P. Kruger.* Rather than co-operate with other ‘Randlords’, he preferred to go personally to the head of state, a procedure which Kruger appreciated and understood. B.’s representations helped to bring about the admission of the Cape railway to the Witwatersrand and, though he was unable to obtain the withdrawal of support from the Netherlands Company (N.Z.A.S.M.) or the granting of municipal government to Johannesburg, he regarded the general situation in the Transvaal as reasonably satisfactory and likely to improve.

To a limited extent the leading Reformers owed the commutation of their sentences to B.’s vehement threats to close his mines and so cause large-scale unemployment and loss of revenue. No sooner had their release been effected (11.6.1896) than B. presented Kruger with the pair of marble lions still to be seen at the Church Street entrance to the old Pretoria Presidency, and denounced the Raid as a stupid crime by people who, heedless of the Transvaal Afrikaners’ natural feelings, had diminished the chances of improved political and economic conditions.

Despite outward appearances, Barnato was a sensitive, even a neurotic man, subject to fits of acute depression and troubled by the responsibilities of his position. By 1897 overwork, strain and worry had reduced him to a nervous condition in which he threw himself overboard while on a voyage to England for his health’s sake. At Southampton the coroner’s jury found that he had died ‘by drowning while temporarily insane’ and the body, which had been recovered, was buried on 20.6.1897 in Willesden cemetery, London. The manner of Banarto.’s death caused alarm in financial circles, which subsided when his affairs were found to be in order, though he left less than had been expected: £1 000 000 (in contrast to his brother, Henry Barnato’s, £5 800 000 in 1908).

His main interests, apart from his work, were popular drama, in which he often took part, horse-racing and boxing. Lacking dignity and self-restraint, and being a powerful and aggressive man, he was often willing to settle differences with his fists, especially in his younger days, while his ignorance, rooted in an aversion to reading (though he was a member of the committee of 1889 which founded what became the Johannesburg Public Library) was extraordinary, as he hardly even glanced at newspapers.

There is, however, no doubt that his reputation has suffered as a result of his unwise practice of never contradicting rumours about himself, however malicious, and there are no valid grounds for regarding him as either a fool, or, worse, a criminal whose financial success was founded upon illicit diamond-buying.

He was, rather, a generous, public-spirited man, whose industry and financial acumen benefited South Africa in general and Johannesburg in particular, at a time of enormous economic development.

Barney and Fanny Bees, the daughter of A. Bees of Kimberley, went through a ceremony of marriage at the Chelsea registry office, London, on 19.11.1892. Three children were born of the marriage. Barney was a deeply affectionate family man, his wife and children always accompanying him during his frequent business travels. Barnato and his wife had a daughter, Leah Primrose Barnato, and two sons, Isaac Henry Barnato (who became an airforce pilot and was killed during the First World War) and Wolf Barnato.

B., who did not live to see the completion of his Johannesburg and London mansions, has no actual monument, though Barnato Street in Berea, Johannesburg, is named after him. He paid for the construction of the Barnato Wing at the Johannesburg General Hospital but the name was dropped in the course of extensive rebuilding operations in later years. There is, however, a portrait in oils in the possession of the Johannesburg Consolidated Investment Company, and the National Portrait Gallery, London, has a pen-and-ink drawing of him by Harry Furniss. There are further portraits in the McGregor Memorial Museum, and the De Beers boardroom and library, Kimberley. A well-known cartoon of  Barnato. appeared in Vanity Fair. In addition, the following books and periodicals (infra) contain portraits of B.: Raymond, Lewisohn, Emden, Joel, Marsh, The Graphic (19.6.1897) and The Illustrated London News (19.6.1897).