Johannesburg,
23 December 1898 — 28 March 1899
‘He has lost all confidence in Kruger. . . . He said we must at first present our case to the world in a dignified & strong manner &
that if no attention is paid to it, the only way to work on is a kind of revolution. . .’
Georges Rouliot to Julius Wernher,
21 January 1899, describing a talk
that week with J.B. Robinson, one of
the Uitlander millionaires who had previously sided with Kruger
The news of the shooting of Tom Edgar had reached the leading Uitlanders few hours before it came to Smuts. This was the weekend before Christmas and a party had gathered at Hohenheim, the suburban villa of Percy Fitzpatrick, a Cape-born Uitlander who worked for the great mining house of Wernher-Beit. There was a heatwave that weekend — it was almost too hot for tennis. The guests played croquet, or they sat in the shade of the jacaranda trees. Perhaps they discussed that strangely conciliatory speech by Milner’s stand-in as High Commissioner at the Cape, General Sir William Butler; Butler, an Irishman must be a ‘Krugerite’. The burning topic was the great demonstration to be held that afternoon to protest at the killing of Edgar.(1)
Hohenheim might have belonged to a Surrey stockbroker. Built in ‘Rand-lords Gothic’, it commanded the hillside on which lay Johannesburg. In the old days no one had bothered about this brown, windy hillside. The place was not even close to the stage-coach route from the Cape to Pretoria. There was no village, just a couple of whitewashed farmhouses and a kraal for the Kaffirs. And there was nothing much to see from the ridge — a splash of mealies, perhaps, and an occasional clump of eucalyptus. Otherwise there was just the veld, the great inland sea, quiet, poetic, melancholy.(2)
That was before the discovery of the gold-fields. Today, people who came to Hohenheim saw one of the sights of Africa: an archipelago of townships, of red-brick slums and green suburbs; a line of mine-wheels, mine-batteries and mine-chimneys spouting smoke and steam across thirty miles of the Rand.(3)
It was a geological phenomenon — too good to be true, it seemed at first. The other great gold-fields so far discovered — in the Klondyke, in California, and in Australia — were notoriously fickle. The ore of the Rand conglomerate (nicknamed ‘bankét’ after a local sweet, a kind of almond rock) was not of a high grade, but its quality was uniquely uniform. And the sheer size of the ore body beggared belief. The main reefs stretched for thirty miles along the Rand; the outliers would be traced for 130 miles. But what was most extraordinary about the reefs was their depth. After a short interruption, the gold-bearing beds continued again downwards, 1,500 feet, 2,000 feet — and the mines followed them down.
The Rand seemed, almost literally, to be a bottomless pit. Although it was the outcrop mines that accounted for most of the marvellous increase in output (and the equally marvellous increase in dividends; from £2-5 million in 1897 to £4-8 million in 1898), it was becoming clear that the future lay with the deep-level mines. Already the gold mines of the Transvaal, producing £15 million worth in the current year, 1898, had left the diamond mines of the Cape far behind! Internationally, too, the Transvaal had broken every record at a time when monetary policies had transformed the world’s demand for gold. By 1898, the Transvaal had overtaken Russia, Australia and even America. Now it was the greatest gold power in the world, expected to produce over £20 million in 1899, with reserves conservatively estimated at £700 million — of which £200 million would be clear profit for someone.(4) It was, said a British minister, accurately enough, the ‘richest spot on earth.’(5)
And nature, so prodigal with her gold in the Transvaal, had added other largesse: a vast coalfield around Johannesburg, a vast pool of black and brown labourers all over South Africa.
If the Rand was a prodigy, so was Johannesburg — an infant prodigy of a city. After fifteen years its population exceeded fifty-thousand Europeans, and there were perhaps as many again living in the townships scattered over the Rand. It was the greatest concentration of Europeans in the whole sub-continent. The place had begun as a mining camp, a kind of Dodge City on the veld. White tents sprang up beside the diggings. The diggers looked as diggers should — big men in riding-boots and shirt-sleeves with wide-awake hats and revolvers in their belts. There were cheap hotels with pretty wooden balconies, and even prettier hostesses. But all that was soon changed once the mines became organized. The gold-rush died — to be replaced by an orderly stream of emigrants, pale-faced clerks and artisans from the depressed industrial towns of Britain, and Jewish shopkeepers from the ghettoes of Eastern Europe. Almost overnight the mining camp became an industrial centre, Dodge City became Salford.
Streets were laid out — broad, dusty, colonial streets with sober British names like Anderson Street and Commissioner Street. The centre of the city became solid and respectable, a place of stone-faced commercial buildings in the classical style, and broad pavements lit by gaslights. Beautiful it was not. The Golden City was still too raw and drab and dirty for that. But it was a real city, no one could deny it, and a homely place in its fashion.(6)
There was, however, another Johannesburg, a city in itself — the African location where the ‘mine boys’ lived. The mines had an unquenchable appetite for cheap labour; eighty-eight thousand Africans were employed on the Rand during that year, 1898. This other Johannesburg was, by all accounts, an appalling place: full of typhoid, pneumonia and, what was nearly as bad, illegal Johannesburg-made liquor. Hundreds of miners would be found dead drunk every Monday morning and some would be actually dead, killed in drunken weekend rioting.
Nearby, in more comfortable circumstances, lived the mixed-race community, the Cape Coloured people, who straddled the social scale between the African labourers and the Europeans. They were the carpenters and the tram-car drivers, the carters and the craftsmen; their wives worked as servants and washerwomen. Finally, there were a couple of hundred Indians from Natal. They ran cheap shops and stalls in the market, and the poor whites depended on them.(7)
Yet, under these cosmopolitan layers, Boer and Jewish, black and brown, Johannesburg still felt British — more British than either Cape Town or Natal. In short, it felt like a British colonial city. It was this feeling that lay close to the heart of the grievances of the Uitlanders.
It was Fitzpatrick (‘Fitz’), the owner of Hohenheim, who constituted the leading political mind among the Uitlanders. Years later he was to be famous as the author of a sentimental children’s book, Jock of the Bushveld. At this time he was a fair-haired, thirty-six-year-old Irish Catholic from the Cape — a charmer. He had headed north during the gold rush and had knocked about the gold-fields, making and losing fortunes like other diggers, until he attracted the attention of Alfred Beit’s firm. Since then he had come to play a role for Wernher-Beit something like the one Jameson had originally played in Rhodesia. He became, here on the Rand, the firm’s political watchdog. He had the better half of Jameson’s gifts — that contagious enthusiasm and the political ambition — without the schoolboy heroics.
At present, however, he had one crippling (if temporary) disadvantage. Like other leading ‘Reformers’ — the Johannesburg revolutionaries — he had been gaoled for a couple of months after the Raid, and only released on condition that he kept out of politics for three years. The other leaders had chosen to leave the country. Fitzpatrick was back with Wernher-Beit, but under parole: no politics, not a whisper against the government until May 1899. That was the promise, but you could no more keep Fitzpatrick from politics than his dog, Jock, from a rat.(8)
All the grievances that had inspired the Raid remained; some had intensified. The overwhelming anxiety of Fitzpatrick’s employers, Wernher-Beit (acting through their South African subsidiary, Eckstein’s, which in turn controlled Rand Mines), was the high cost of mining. It was a paradox that this should be the concern of the men who had captured the richest slice of the Rand; their company, Rand Mines, had roughly a third of the total output (compared with the tenth that belonged to Rhodes’s company, Consolidated Goldfields). But Alfred Beit and Julius Wernher were the first financiers to recognize that the Rand’s future lay with the deep levels.
The first of these deeps, Geldenhuis Deep, had come into production a few months before the raid; others had swiftly followed; they were profitable. But the deeps were especially vulnerable to increases of mining costs. Their ore was of low grade, like the ore of the upper-level mines. In addition, disproportionately more time and money were needed to bring them into production. It could take up to five years and millions of pounds before a mine produced a penny in return for the investment. Once in production, the deeps were more sensitive to increases in mining costs, as they needed disproportionately more dynamite and African labour. Both these vital commodities, according to Wernher-Beit and the Chamber of Mines which the firm dominated, were ruinously expensive in the Transvaal. Already the profit margin on good mines was slim enough: the Boers were now adding a five per cent profits tax.(9) Hence Wernher-Beit’s instructions to Percy Fitzpatrick: try to make a deal with liberal Afrikaners in the government, men like Jan Smuts.
Fitzpatrick’s response was complicated by the fact that he had his own political ambitions to reconcile with his work for Wernher-Beit. However, he believed there was no conflict of interest. His plan was to rebuild the old Reform Movement, to recreate that odd-looking alliance between international financiers and the British industrial proletariat on the Rand, by which Rhodes and Beit had planned to take over the Transvaal at the time of the Raid. In fact, the alliance was not so incongruous. Both mine owners and their white employees had a common interest in lowering the cost of living on the Rand. At present ‘cruelly high’ custom duties made it one of the most expensive countries in the world; ‘outrageous’ monopolies raised the costs still further. The price of lowering the cost of mining would be paid largely by Africans. For it was the ‘ridiculously’ high cost of African mining wages (though a fraction of white wages, man for man) that was the mine owners’ constant source of complaint. The direct cause was that Africans did not want to work underground, because of the dangerous conditions. According to a newspaper report, there was a twenty per cent. annual death rate, mainly due to disease, among black miners. But the employers blamed the Boers for their incompetent method of recruiting labour, and the corrupt way they let the niggers drink themselves to death on illicit liquor.(10)
The political grievance which added to the bitterness was the fact that very few British Uitlanders had even now, in 1898, been given the vote. Under the original Transvaal franchise law, they would have had this option after five years’ residence. By now the majority of the estimated sixty thousand male Uitlanders would have been able to exercise it, if they chose. This would have given them individual political equality with the thirty thousand Boer voters; and collectively they could have controlled the state. For obvious reasons, Kruger had changed the franchise law in 1888, raising the residence qualification, from five to fourteen years.
Hence Fitzpatrick now, like the Reformers in 1895, decided to put ‘franchise first’. It was the key to everything. But how could they force Kruger to disgorge the vote, and so let the control of the Transvaal pass to the British?(11)
Put your faith in the imperial government, was Fitzpatrick’s answer. The idea of an ‘Uitlander republic’ had died with the collapse of the Reform Movement at the time of the Raid. In fact, its collapse had proved how right were Rhodes and Beit to insist on the Union Jack and the imperial connection. Since then; that £1-2 million spent on Boer rearmament excluded any chance of an internal revolt. The Uitlanders must appeal to Caesar, in the shape of the British government, to intervene on their behalf, the ‘oppressed’ British subjects of the Rand.
But how was Fitzpatrick to start the Uitlander ball rolling, so to speak? As the croquet balls sped across the lawn at Hohenheim, a new strategy was taking shape in Fitzpatrick’s mind, that coincided with Sir Alfred Milner’s (though neither man was then aware of this). The South African League — a new pro-imperialist pressure group, started by British professional men — had recently been protesting about harassment of coloured British subjects on the Rand. The case against the Zarps for persecuting the Cape Coloureds was in fact legally (and morally) a strong one, and topical, too. Only that week, on 20 December, the Zarps had launched a new wave of raids on Coloured cabdrivers, in which not only Cape men, but a dozen from St Helena, not subject to the pass laws, had been thrown in the tronk (gaol).(12) Later they had been fined, in clear breach of the law. Hence the visit of Jan Smuts that day to talk things over with Fraser, the acting British Agent. Fitzpatrick, however, was unimpressed by the League’s tactics. The League would provide a convenient front behind which he could reconstitute the old Reform Movement. But the League must play down the grievances of coloured British subjects against the Zarps.(13) Britain will intervene, Fraser warned Smuts that day (presumably Fraser had been talking to Fitzpatrick) ‘about things that everyone can understand’. So they must play up the Uitlander’s own grievances for all they were worth — and more. Five days earlier the chance had come.(14)
The shooting of Tom Edgar, a boiler-maker from Bootle, Lancashire, might seem an odd choice to work into an international incident. In fact, he had been shot by a Zarp as a result of a drunken brawl between two Uitlanders. The brawl would not have been out of place in Bootle. But the real circumstances of Edgar’s life (like those of Jenkins’s ear in the eighteenth century) were hardly relevant. What mattered was the effect on the British community. To many Uitlanders his shooting seemed like murder after they heard the first reports. The real story, as it emerged later, was less clear-cut.
It was after midnight, said his widow, Bessie Edgar, when she had heard her husband coming back up the alley-way. He had been out for a drink with his mates. He seems to have been a typical British Uitlander, except for his size; he was six foot six in his boots. He worked at Tarry’s, the big engineering works in Harrison Street. Bessie said he was a quiet, respectable working man. He earned £26 a week, four times what he would get in good old England. They lived at Florrie’s Chambers: a collection of tin-roofed bungalows down a little alleyway near the Salisbury Mine.
As Edgar walked home there was the flump-flump from the mine battery and the crash of stones being unloaded from a skip. When he reached the end of the alley-way, he met two of his neighbours, one of them stripped to his underclothes because of the unusual heat. ‘Voetsak,’ said Foster, a little grasshopper of a man. ‘Who did you say Voetsak to?’ asked Edgar. ‘Voetsak’ is a rude word in Afrikaans which you use if you want to drive away a dog.
It was too dark to see very much, but if Edgar had himself had less to drink he might have noticed that Foster was tipsily talking to his dog, while relieving himself against the wall of his house. Edgar did not enquire further. With a single blow, he knocked Foster to the ground. The other neighbour, thinking Foster dead, ran off to get help. His cries of ‘Police! Police!’ echoed down Harrison Street.(15)
Edgar sat on his bed in his shirt-sleeves, waiting for the police to arrive. ‘Impudent’ was what he called Foster.(16) Perhaps he also gave Bessie his views on the Zarps. In that English-looking town they stuck out like a sore thumb. It was one of his workmates’ main grievances. That and the high cost of living caused by the high taxes. ‘Vampires’ was the only word to describe the Boers.(17)
At that moment, Bessie heard shouts: ‘Oopen op, police.’ Someone rattled on the lock. Outside the door, in the darkness, stood four Boer policemen. To add to the Englishness — and incongruity — one of them was called Jones. Jones was distinguished by a moustache and a black macintosh. He drew his revolver, then threw himself against the door, which burst open.
According to Jones, Edgar then struck at him twice with an iron-shod stick. This was probably true, as a stick of this sort was later found in the doorway. But Jones was hardly grazed by the blows, if touched at all. He made no attempt to arrest Edgar, not an impossible job for four stout policemen. Instead, he raised his revolver at point-blank range. A bystander saw the flash of the gun and heard a woman scream. For a moment Edgar stood silhouetted against the lighted doorway. He reeled backwards and forwards. Then, his blood pouring on to the black macintosh of PC Jones, Edgar pitched forward into the arms of the second policeman.(18)
Such was the lurid story of the shooting of Edgar that was to emerge from evidence at court hearings. It differed in several ways from the account that had so far reached Fitzpatrick and his friends at Hohenheim. They did not yet know these mitigating facts: that Jones had been led to believe that Edgar had killed Foster, and that Edgar had probably struck Jones with a stick. To Fitzpatrick it seemed a clear-cut case of murder — and a chance not to be missed. The morning after the shooting, his friend William Hoskens, a close colleague from the old Reform Movement, took statements from Bessie Edgar and her friends. (Fitzpatrick himself could not play a direct part.) The statements were printed in The Star, the Rand newspaper subsidized by Wernher-Beit. An ‘Edgar Relief Committee’ was formed with the help of the League.(19)
And now luck sent the croquet ball rolling straight through Fitzpatrick’s hoop. Jones was at first sent to gaol on a murder charge. The public prosecutor, a German immigrant called Dr Krause, then reduced the charge to manslaughter and released Jones on bail of only £200, less than the figure often levied on Uitlanders for trifling offences. The news reached Smuts too late. He ordered his colleagues to rearrest Jones.(20) But Fitzpatrick’s friends had stirred to fever pitch the feelings of the British community. The shooting touched on a specially raw nerve, the belief that an Englishman’s home was his castle — even in Johannesburg. Since Jones’s release from gaol, it seemed to expose the rottenness of the whole Transvaal legal system.
By 3.30 p.m. that same afternoon, Christmas Eve, a crowd of nearly five thousand Uitlanders packed into the upper end of Market Square, the chequered straw hats of the artisans standing out among the bowler hats of the professional men. They had come to assert their rights as British subjects; they had been treated ‘like helots’ long enough.
Half an hour later, the procession reached the Standard Buildings in the heart of the city’s business quarter, where the British vice-consul had his office. It was a large, grey stucco pile in the classical manner, flanked by a barber’s shop and a billiard saloon. On the balcony, the members of the Edgar Relief Committee, Reformers and Leaguers, stood bare-headed to hear the reading of the petition. Below, the streets were sealed off by the immense throng of straw-hatted demonstrators.
The secretary of the South African League, an engineer called Dodd, began to read from the crumpled piece of paper on which someone had scribbled the Humble Petition to Her Britannic Majesty, Queen Victoria, from her loyal subjects resident on the Witwatersrand Goldfields. It begged her to instruct her representative to secure a ‘full and impartial trial’ of PC Jones, to extend her protection to their own lives and liberties and to take such other steps ‘as might be necessary’ to terminate the present ‘intolerable state of affairs....’(21)
It was a melodramatic new beginning, this appeal to Caesar from the British subjects in the Transvaal. But at first it seemed to have ended in farce. Caesar, in the shape of Milner’s stand-in, General Sir William Butler, sympathized with the Boers. He flatly refused to accept the petition. Privately he informed Chamberlain that it was ‘all a prepared business’ worked up by the South African League, who were the ‘direct descendants’ of the Reformers. He warned his chief, equally correctly, that the Raiders were once again on the warpath. What he had not grasped was that it was Beit’s man, Fitzpatrick, who was the moving spirit behind the Reformers reformed. He blamed Rhodes. At any rate, despite the efforts of Fraser, the acting British Agent, to help the Leaguers, Butler refused to transmit the petition to London.(22)
Characteristically, it was the Transvaal authorities who now saved the situation for Fitzpatrick. First, they arrested his friends who had organized the Edgar demonstration on Christmas Eve on a technical charge, and assessed their bail at £1,000, five times that of PC Jones. The case against them fizzled out. But the Uitlanders were furious. They poured out for a second protest demonstration. This time they took care to get permission from the authorities. The demonstration took place on 14 January in an amphitheatre outside the city — a large wood-and-iron building normally used for circuses. Once again Fitzpatrick could only be grateful for the reaction of the Boer authorities. Six or seven hundred Boers from a road-mending gang at the Main Reef — described even by a pro-Boer newspaper as ‘whipped up’ for the occasion — broke up the peaceful meeting, and beat up the Uitlanders with chair legs. The Zarps simply stood by. People claimed later that two Zarp lieutenants had been carried in triumph by the Boer mob and these two commended them for ‘doing their duty’.(23)
Finally, when the trial of PC Jones at last took place in Johannesburg, the Boer judge had gone out of his way to help the League. He was a callow youth of twenty-five called Judge Kock; his father was a member of Kruger’s Executive. He virtually directed the jury to acquit, after a long, rambling summary of the case. He added a phrase that was uncannily like the words the Zarps were said to have used at the amphitheatre meeting. After thanking the jury, he commended the police; he hoped that ‘under difficult circumstances, they would always know how to do their duty’.
This was enough to keep the Uitlanders in uproar. By the end of February Fitzpatrick judged it time to circulate, privately, a second petition for imperial intervention. But Jan Smuts, the State Attorney, chose this moment for a dramatic strike. To forestall imperial intervention, Smuts made a dazzling offer, with Kruger’s authority behind him: a general settlement with the mining companies that came to be called the ‘Great Deal’. To show his personal confidence in Fitzpatrick, he was prepared to waive Fitzpatrick’s parole and let him act as principal negotiator. It was a difficult stroke to counter. For three weeks Fitzpatrick played a double game in every sense, trying to get a deal for both mining companies and the Uitlanders, and determined to fail. On 28 March he leaked the confidential terms of the Great Deal to The Star and negotiations collapsed. Then Fitzpatrick took a train to Cape Town. In the same train travelled a large cardboard box containing the petition, signed by twenty-one thousand British subjects of the Rand, calling on the British government to intervene. Milner, now back in Cape Town, was being asked to forward this second petition to London.(24)
As the train clanked over the Orange River Bridge into British territory next day, Fitzpatrick crossed his Rubicon. The Raiders and Reformers had failed because they were divided and isolated. What Fitzpatrick could offer Milner was a powerful triple alliance: Britain, the mass of the Uitlanders and Wernher-Beit, the giant of the Rand.
Head of chapter G. Rouliot-J. Wernher 21 Jan 1899, Eck HE 175
1. Cape Times, Star 21, 23 Dec 1899. Standard & Diggers News 24 Dec 1899. Wallis Fitz passim esp 78. L. Phillips Reminiscences 101
2. Buchan’s African Colony 77-83. Cartright Corner House 39-40, 72-3
3. Bryce 296-308. Buchan op cit 311-13
4. Star 21 Dec 1899 (quoting Mining Journal). Standard & Diggers News 14 Jan 1899 (weekly edit). Bryce 301-2. Younghusband South Africa of Today 9-11
5. Selborne’s memo for Salisbury 26 Mar 1896
6. Younghusband 3-4, 42-5. Hobson War in South Africa 10-14. Cartright Corner House 50-1
7. Marais 1, 26-7, 180-1. Hobson 287-8
8. Fitzpatrick Transvaal 275-81, Memories 159-60. DSAB I 292-3
9. Fitzpatrick Transvaal 105-6. Hobson 286. Marais 27-33, 228. Info R. Mendelsohn
10. S. Evans-M 12 Jun 1897. Mil 66: Native labour should be halved in cost per ton. Standard & Diggers News (weekly edit) 10 Jun 1899. See letter from Uitlander, Star 30 Dec 1898. Bryce 303-4. Marais 187-8
11. Fitzpatrick Transvaal 96-103, 327. Marais 25-7. MP II 308. C 9345/10
12. Fitzpatrick Transvaal 73-7. Marais 53
13. C 9345/83 Marais 235-7
14. SP I, 213
15. Bessie Edgar ev C 9345/110-11, 122-3, 150. See her £4,ooo compensation claim 10 Jun 1899, CO 879/59/19
16. A Shepherd, A Sylvester, M McKenzie, C 9345/118, 119, 121, 149
17. Bessie Edgar ev C 9345/122-3
18. See note 9
19. Bessie Edgar, D. Bowker, J. Friedman, I. Kantorowitz, M. McKenzie, A. Shepherd, A. Sylvester, Constables Muller, Roux, Rood, Dr Lillpop C 9345/110-53
20. Star 21-22 Dec 1898
21. Marais 238
22. Evans’s report and a photo in CO 417/259/456-464. Cape Times 28 Dec 1898. Marais 237-8
23. Butler-C 18 Jan, 25 Jan 1899, CO 879/56/3, 7
24. C 9345/131, 136-8,144-7
25. Ibid 159-75. Marais 239-40
26. Greene-M 3 Mar (enc Fitzpatrick 3 Mar), 10, 13, 15, 17, 18, 21 Mar 1899, Mil 13 (SA 27). MP I 318-31. Fitzpatrick Memories 164-5. Wallis 74. Marais 247-9