At the Fireside--Volume 1 (11 page)

Willem Prinsloo – the relctant farm seller

Willem Prinsloo – the relctant farm seller

Many stories can be told of people who came to the diamond and goldfields and never made a cent. It seems that the first people there almost all died poor. To quote the words of an early Kimberley pioneer, Henry David Kisch, ‘There is a curse on us very early comers', he said. ‘I was on the diamond fields before Cecil John Rhodes was even thought of – before there was even a Kimberley. None of us who were there has a penny. Perhaps it doesn't matter, but it's timing – if you came too early you got nothing.'

An exception to this rule was a man named Willem Prinsloo, a fascinating character with an incredible life story. Prinsloo was a typical old Boer – white beard, felt hat and well-worn clothes. He had trekked to the Transvaal and settled on a property on the West Rand, called Modderfontein, where he farmed. Then came the prospectors and old Willem said that he wanted nothing to do with them, he wished to be left alone.

One day a man came to see Prinsloo. His name was J P Taylor of the mining house, Hermann Eckstein & Company. Asked what he wanted, Taylor replied that he was just returning from a hunt. ‘You lie, Englishman', Prinsloo said, ‘you are looking for gold'. He then refused to talk any further. Taylor decided that the only way to get to Prinsloo was through his wife and one evening, at milking time, he walked into the dairy and asked, ‘What's that?'

‘It's milk', replied Mrs Prinsloo.

‘That's not milk – from how many cows did it come?'

‘Six', replied Mrs Prinsloo.

‘My poor woman, I have a cow in Johannesburg that will give you more than your six put together.' He then casually added that if he ever bought the farm, Mrs Prinsloo could have the cow and, if it did not fill that bucket twice a day, there would be no deal!

Late into the night Taylor could hear the old people discussing this wonder cow – whether she would have many calves and so on. The next morning Prinsloo said, ‘Taylor, my wife gave me no rest about this cow. What do you offer for Modderfontein?'

‘£30 000 cash and £40 000 in shares in the new gold Mining Company to be formed', Taylor replied.

Prinsloo left to speak to his wife. After the reassurance that the cow would fill the bucket twice a day, the deal was accepted and the cow delivered.

A few days later Taylor received a letter:

‘Come to Pretoria on the 30th to accept transfer. The cow fills the bucket twice a day.

With compliments,

Willem Prinsloo.'

So the Modderfontein Gold Mining Company, forerunner of the New Modder, the Modder East and the Modder Deep was formed and floated with £200 000 capital and a working capital of £40 000. Willem received his shares, which he sold for £70 000, and moved to another district where he bought the farm Kaalfontein. It wasn't long, however, before those damned prospectors were at him again, this time for diamonds.

He allowed himself to be persuaded to sell for more than £100 000 cash and then moved to where he was sure they would not bother him again – about 30 km east of Pretoria, where he bought a sheep farm. It was with a certain satisfaction that he learnt that the Kaalfontein deposit had not been payable and that the buyers had lost their money. However, the money they had paid him had been safely put away.

Soon after the Second Anglo-Boer War, Willem Prinsloo saw the unmistakable signs of doom. There were men with picks, shovels and sieves prowling around his fences. One day, a carpenter and builder came to see him. His name was Thomas Cullinan, and very tactfully he talked the old Boer into selling. ‘Very well', said Prinsloo angrily, ‘you can buy half the farm for £80 000. But you are not allowed to prospect on my half ever!'

With a face like thunder, Willem Prinsloo sold half his farm and the Premier Diamond Mine was floated. It became the greatest single man-made hole in existence – greater in area than the Kimberley hole. This was dug along his fence and yielded the biggest diamond in the history of the world, weighing over 3 000 carats. Willem Prinsloo, true to his word, sat tight on his half and there he died, as he had said he would.

If you ever drive out of Pretoria along the Witbank Highway, you will see the Willem Prinsloo Agricultural Museum on your left-hand side, a great reminder of a wonderful story.

Sekhukhune's Treasure

Sekhukhune's Treasure

There are still people around who remember the name of Ikey Sonneberg, that colourful character from the early days of Kimberley and Pilgrim's Rest. But of all the stories related about him, none was as fascinating as Ikey's search for the treasure of Sekhukhune.

Sonneberg was not the first white man to hear the story about this treasure in the northern Transvaal and Sekhukhune's method of levying tribute from his subjects. It dated back to the 1870s when the original ‘New Rush' was developing into the city of Kimberley. Thousands of black people from every part of South Africa found work on the diamond fields and Sekhukhune's Pedi people provided a substantial portion of that labour.

Before white men entered Griqualand West, Sekhukhune did not know of man's greed for diamonds, but once he did he resolved to profit from them. It was well known that no Pedi man was allowed to seek work on the diggings unless he brought back a diamond or a gold pound. The Chief knew that his men, eager to acquire the wherewithal to buy rifles, would not fail him. Nor did they.

In the late 1870s it became known that Sekhukhune possessed ‘two blesbok skins of sovereigns and a gallon pot filled with diamonds'. Even if we discount the claim that the diamonds varied in size from pigeon's eggs upward, there is no doubt that the Chief had accumulated fantastic wealth. However, only he himself and a few handpicked indunas knew where the wealth was kept. At Pilgrim's Rest, it was the ambition of every digger – South African, Englishman, Scot, Australian and American – to find this treasure. They all tried to wheedle the secret from the wily old Chief.

The only man vaguely successful was a storekeeper named Dick Silk, who was told by Sekhukhune that one day perhaps he would be prepared to sell the gallon pot of diamonds. Silk told Ikey Sonneberg that he would need at least 1 000 gold sovereigns and Ikey raised the money. Together they went to Sekhukhune's kraal, high up in the mountains north-west of Lydenburg, where there was a natural fortress amongst the kloofs. They were led up a narrow footpath, past cattle kraals and huts, until they reached a flat space of ground that had been stamped hard. Here they were told to sit down.

After a suitable wait, Sekhukhune emerged. He proved to be a little man, with a shrewd look and very cautious in speech. The Chief eventually agreed to let them see the diamonds. ‘Many of them were 30 to 40 carats in size', said Sonneberg, and the sight took his breath away. Ikey laid out the envelopes containing the 1 000 gold sovereigns, but their hearts sank when the Chief said, ‘Yes, this is genuine gold, but I have no use for gold. I would rather keep the diamonds. The Boers are troubling me and I believe that they will soon wipe me out. If you can bring me a cannon, not only will I let you have the diamonds, but I will send a thousand labourers to your diamond fields to find more stones for you!'

The argument that gold could buy anything, even a cannon, did not impress the Chief and, with heavy hearts, they bade him goodbye and left.

As you may know, Sir Garnet Wolseley later defeated Sekhukhune and his lands were overrun. The treasure, according to one source, was hidden under Sekhukhune's hut. The British soldiers dug up the floor, but found nothing. Another story was that it was hidden in one of the innumerable caves nearby. During the 1880s, various syndicates were formed to hunt for Sekhukhune's millions, without success.

Sekhukhune's practice of demanding payment from his labourers was continued by Chief Magoto, who lived deep in the recesses of the Soutpansberg. During 1908 both the Transvaal Treasury and the Department of Mines officially confirmed the existence of his huge hoard. It is believed that upon his death, the treasure passed to the famous Rain Queen, Modjadji of the BaLobedu or Lovedu. During the Boer War, Modjadji foresaw trouble and sent the diamonds down to the low country, to a place of greater safety. She chose a country of deadly malaria to which the messengers themselves fell victim.

It is said that when they felt the sickness coming, they hid the treasure near the wayside. And there it remains, its location unknown, to this very day.

The quiet recluse

The quiet recluse

In the pleasant Surrey town of Red Hill, just outside of London, a discrete and quiet old man named Maurice Marcus lived in retirement. He had been a part of this small community for so long that most had forgotten his arrival almost half a century before. Very little was ever known about him, other than his polite greetings when taking a stroll down the avenue, or playing his daily game of golf His splendid residence was named Hightrees, situated behind a tall stone wall, well screened from passers-by. The very size of the house indicated that its owner was a man of substance, yet he led an exceedingly quiet and retiring life, preferring to do most of his negotiations through his lawyer, Mr Brown, or his housekeeper, Mrs McIntosh. Once in a while Mr Marcus would go to London to visit his nieces and an old cousin, but the visits were never reciprocated, and of his immediate family nothing was known. All that was known was that in his younger days, he had been in South Africa.

After the end of World War I he gave up his golf and it was noticed that on his daily walk down the avenue, his gait had become a little unsteady. On 14 September 1924, at the age of eighty-one, and almost unknown to his neighbours, Maurice Marcus slipped the mortal bonds of this earth.

After the usual valuations and will registration at Somerset House, the state inventory was made public. The figures were of such a scale that people could not associate them with the old man, who had lived in obscurity among them for so long. Maurice Marcus had a net worth of £3 145 751. The death duties alone came to more than £1 300 000. Then came the bequests:

£10 000 each to the Reigate and Red Hill hospitals

£5 000 to Guy's Hospital

£1 000 to a London hospital

£2 000 to the Jewish Board of Guardians; and

£1 000 each to his lawyer, his engineer and his housekeeper.

The rest went to his relations:

£50 000 to his sister Isabella Marcus

£100 000 to each of his nieces, Priscilla Joseph and Cecile Proctor and £50 000 each to Edward Marcus and Gwendolyn Thornton.

The residue was to be split amongst his five nieces.

The heirs were thunderstruck. They had known he had a bit of money, but they had not imagined this kind of wealth. Where did all the money come from? They decided to go to South Africa and try to find out. They spoke to many ageing pioneers and finally managed to piece together the story of this most unusual man.

Maurice Marcus came to South Africa in 1862 to seek his fortune. He had just turned twenty when he arrived in Grahamstown and found a job, at £15 per month, with Mr Gowie, a grocer. He wrote to his uncle, John Marcus, who lived in the frontier town of Burgersdorp asking whether he could offer anything better. John Marcus was a friend of J B Robinson, then a trader at Bethulie in the southern Free State, as yet unconnected with any mining operations. He had the finest trading store in all the platteland and traded largely with the Boers. In 1863 he hired Maurice as a bookkeeper. Maurice was a pleasant, honest young man and he worked hard for five years at Bethulie. Just prior to the discovery of diamonds, J B Robinson made Maurice his partner.

Robinson set off to buy farms in the area where diamonds had been discovered and sent back instructions to Maurice: ‘Follow me, bring all the natives you can find, buy all the oxen, cattle and wagons you can and come quickly.' Maurice carried out his instructions to the letter. He found twelve ox-wagons, bought 500 head of cattle and, with all the labour he could muster, he set off for the ‘New Rush' area.

In those days the tribal people knew nothing about the value of diamonds, big or small, and would trade them for oxen. J B and Maurice were among the few who had cattle to trade and, besides the oxen, Maurice had also managed to bring 170 milk cows. The milk was as precious as the diamonds themselves.

Very soon J B Robinson sent Maurice to England with the first parcel of diamonds ever exported from South Africa, while Robinson carried on buying up more stones. ‘We saw men making £5 000 per day for weeks on end', it was recorded, and on one occasion, J B did one million pounds worth of business in just two days. For a time six to ten carats per 100 loads was considered fair!

The two men stayed together for several years at Kimberley. Then in the 1880s, with the discovery of gold, J B Robinson proceeded to the Witwatersrand to set up his gold mining companies, the Robinson Deep mine and Randfontein Estates, which are still well known to this day.

Maurice preferred to supervise the London end of the business, and very soon they separated by mutual consent. ‘I visited him again in 1888', said Robinson. ‘He was already living at Hightrees, but I found him quiet and very retiring.'

Maurice Marcus never married and for the rest of his life he remained in Red Hill, Surrey, quietly drawing income from his millions and completely forgotten in the town and country where he had originally made his fortune – Kimberley, South Africa.

Tembe – the dry-land steamer

Tembe
– the dry-land steamer

I believe that within the gene pool of the people of our magnificent country, lie strains of perseverance and tenacity of unbelievable proportions. The story that follows will, I hope, illustrate my point.

John Thorburn, born in England, went across to America at an early age. There he was, among other things, a planter and slave trader and he survived the Civil War. The discovery of diamonds attracted him to South Africa and, after a spell of working both the wet and dry diggings, he left the fields and became a storekeeper on the banks of the Lekoa or Vaal River. Business was good until the floods came and swept the lot downstream.

Undaunted, borrowing clothes from neighbours, he started again. Then he hit on the idea of a better way of making money. He wanted to ship goods down the Vaal to Kimberley. After securing the promise of supplies from neighbouring farmers and the necessary permissions from landowners, he wrote to Edwards and Symes in England to order a steam launch.

With a steel hull 11 m in length, a beam of 2,5 m, drawing 55 ems of water and powered by a 4 kW engine driving twin screws, the steam launch was soon under construction. In the meantime, Thorburn busied himself, for three years, clearing obstacles and even islands out of the way. He also constructed a large barge that could hold 300 tons, suitable for shipping coal from Vereeniging to Kimberley.

In 1883 the steamer was shipped to Cape Town and railed to the Beaufort West railhead, from where it was packed on ox-wagons and carted in pieces up to the river. The experiment had thus far cost him over £4 000. But alas, once the launch, which was christened the
Tembe
, was assembled and put in the river, it was found that it drew too much water. So began a series of marches with the largest parcel ever conveyed across the South African veld. With local assistance the boat was lifted out of the water and lashed onto two wagons chained end to end and drawn by a quadruple span of oxen. Thus the trip to Potchefstroom began. Upon arrival Thorbum heard that Colonel Charles Warren was leading the British troops up to Bechuanaland to annex it. The Tembe was taken out of the water, again lashed onto wagons and trekked downstream to Warrenton, a distance of some 350 lu-n. Upon arrival there was another surprise – Colonel Warren had already crossed the Vaal. Undaunted, Thorburn turned around and trekked back to the highveld, where he cleaned and repainted the boat. Now convinced that the Vaal River was not navigable, he invited tenders to take the Tembe to Delagoa Bay. The prices were too high and nobody would guarantee delivery, so he decided to do it himself.

The Landdrost of Potchefstroom, one John Kock, was very sceptical about this, but John Thorburn said to him, ‘I will start with her on two wagons, and as long as the wheels go round, I will continue. When the wheels stop going round, I will see what the cause is and fix it until they go around again.' Kock patted him on the shoulder and said, ‘I think you will reach the .coast after all!'

In May 1884 this strange caravan, with John Thorburn Snr, John Jnr, George Grey and Bill Davies, along with many labourers, left Potchefstroom on the journey eastwards and its arrival in the small towns along the route caused quite a stir. The journey took fourteen months, first across the Witwatersrand – there was no Johannesburg then – then turning eastwards. At Bronkhorstspruit, at the drift where Colonel Anstruther and the 94th Regiment of Foot had been ambushed some four years earlier, a bad veld fire nearly stopped them, but they pushed on. At one stage the road was so bad that they could manage only two kilometres in four days!

On entering the eastern Transvaal, the road became unbelievably bad and they had to lay stone pathways – ‘Ready... Go!' – and the whip would crack – ‘Keep it in the middle!' Away went the front wheel, burying itself deep into the mud, leaving the wagon and its cargo half-suspended in mid-air. Out would come the ropes and the screw jacks and, eventually, after a couple of hours' hard work, the journey would continue. Somewhere near the headwaters of the Vaal River, some 2 000 metres above sea-level, progress was made by laying six-metre planks in front of the wheels and using crowbars to lever the wagons forward. John and his son went ahead to find a way through Buffels Heights and eventually, somewhere in Swaziland, the wagons lurched badly and overturned, smashing the Tembe's cabin and fittings into matchwood. Luckily nobody was killed, but the one side of the Tembe was knocked flat, six steel plates ripped open, the rivets were drawn and the iron bulkhead doubled up.

Faced with the situation of his launch lying 2 000 metres up in the Swaziland mountains, and all his savings invested in the wreck, Thorburn remained optimistic. Somehow he managed to repair the damage and pressed on. Eventually, leaving the craft with some traders, he walked on to Mozambique. But the trip was not over. A road had to be built to get the ship from the mountains to the coast and, to cap it all, he had to return to Potchefstroom as his youngest son had died. It was only in 1886 that he returned to his beloved steamer, this time bringing his wife with him. Eventually the boat was safely launched on the Thembe River, its boilers fired up, and away downstream sailed the
Tembe
. Not many days later, the startled Portuguese saw her heave to at the mouth of the Rio Espirito Santo. So ended the strange and fascinating boat trip of over 2 000 km on dry land.

John Thorburn made another attempt at a shipping enterprise. He led the team that brought the first steamer from the coast to Lake Tanganyika, but this also yielded him no profit, and so he returned to the Transvaal. His daughter married the well-known aviation pioneer, Allister M Miller, and another of his family, AR Thorburn, later became the mayor of Johannesburg.

Certainly, the genes of guts and determination I spoke of earlier must still be around to this day.