Originally published on LinkedIn. This work is AI-assisted - read about how I work.

Today is the last in a short mini-series on sectors that share their early history with Southern African mining. Previously, I wrote about the law firms and the banks that arrived with the ore. Today I wanted to write about beer. Mainly because I was fascinated to discover that until its delisting, The South African Breweries was the second-oldest listed company on the JSE. DRDGOLD Limited, listed since 1895, is now unambiguously the oldest.

Charles Glass is a name many will remember. Many may have assumed it was invented. It was not. Glass was an English brewer who had supplied beer to British troops in India, who arrived in Johannesburg after the gold rush to brew. He saw what the reef had made: young men working hard shifts underground, with wages and nowhere “respectable” to spend them. There is an intriguing account by a UCT academic suggesting that Castle was actually the invention of Glass’ spouse, Lisa. Her history seems forgotten and really should not be.

By 1889, contemporary accounts in the Digger’s News were already describing his Castle Lager as a phenomenal success. Glass had taken the mine’s workforce and turned it into a customer base. Marshall and Welsh, a township developer and a Barberton coach operator, brought the capital, and the brewery occupied several stands in Marshall’s Township on the edge of the gold fields.

In 1892, Glass sold. The buyer was Frederick Mead, backed by a consortium that included Barney Barnato and interests associated with JCI. Mining capital bought the brewery that had grown up at the mine’s gate.

SAB was registered in 1895 and became the JSE’s first industrial listing in 1897 - an outlier on a market built for mining companies.

The relationship between beer and mining was not only commercial. By the mid-1890s, the Chamber of Mines had reversed its earlier tolerance of alcohol on the Rand. Like almost all other aspects of life in South Africa, beer was also segregated. Legislation barred Black workers from buying or drinking most liquor on the Witwatersrand. The exception was sorghum beer, which mine companies brewed inside closed compounds and sold back to the workforce at a profit.

Two beer economies. One for the white market, one Black market managed inside the compound fence.

In 2016, Anheuser-Busch InBev acquired SAB in a transaction valued at around 104 billion US dollars, and the company was delisted from the JSE.

My favorite bit of heritage, the bar counter of the Ferreirastown Hotel was later relocated to the Radium Beer Hall in Orange Grove when the old gold-rush building came down. Online accounts record that trade unionist Mary Fitzgerald is believed to have stood on that counter to address striking miners in the early twentieth century. The counter is said still to be there. I last saw it there myself 26 years ago.

A bar counter from a mine camp. Still in use.

Originally published on LinkedIn. This work is AI-assisted - read about how I work.

Today, another departure. Last week, I took a detour from hashtag#MiningIsHuman to talk a little about law firms and mining. This week, the banks of Johannesburg. This research is light, so reader insights are most welcome.

The gold arc does not end at the shaft collar. It ends at the vault.

Standard Bank opened its first Johannesburg branch on 11 October 1886. Not in a building. In a tent. Ferreira’s Camp. Canvas walls, £10 rent, and a ledger for a gold field that had been producing for less than three months.

The bank had done this before. It started in Port Elizabeth in 1862. It went to Kimberley when diamonds were found. It went to Johannesburg when gold was found. By the mid-1890s, the Transvaal was generating 40 percent of Standard Bank’s global profits.

The building that followed the tent tells you what those profits meant.

By 1908, the corner of Harrison and Commissioner Streets carried a six-storey neo-Baroque structure with a 15,000-square-foot banking hall, an oak counter 152 feet long, and a basement fitted out for assaying. Gold extracted underground came to the surface, crossed the street, and went underground again. Tested, weighed, valued. Dedicated bullion elevators. Adjacent strong rooms. The bank was not financing the gold economy. The bank was part of it.

The Natal Bank arrived in 1891. Its 1903 building on what is now Albertina Sisulu Road is Johannesburg’s oldest surviving bank building. Declared a Provincial Heritage Site. Privately acquired in 2011, it fell into disrepair, then was restored as a technology hub.

The National Bank of the ZAR arrived in 1891. Kruger created it because gold had made banking a political question. Its building at Simmonds and Commissioner Streets is a declared national monument.

A Dutch institution, the Nederlandsche Bank en Credietvereeniging, arrived in 1888 to give the Republic a non-British option. It avoided the mines entirely. It became Nedbank.

The lineages compress a century. Standard Bank tent to Standard Bank Group. The Natal Bank passed through the National Bank of South Africa, then into Barclays. Barclays sold its South African shareholding in 1986 under disinvestment pressure. A South African consortium acquired the operations. In 1987 it re-emerged as First National Bank. Barclays later returned through Absa, then exited again. The Natal Bank’s building outlasted them all. Its lineage now sits inside FirstRand as FNB South Africa. The Dutch bank became Nedbank.

When Standard Bank built its current head office at 5 Simmonds Street, excavation uncovered a stope from Ferreira’s Mine. The mine that drew the first miners in 1886. They preserved it. The mine was underneath the bank the whole time.

This version includes additional information about firms not mentioned in the original LinkedIn publication, where you can also read the comments. This work is AI-assisted—read about how I work.

Fairbridges opened in Cape Town on 6 November 1812. John Merrington founded it. At that time, the Cape Colony had no significant mining industry. It had shipping, conveyancing, estates, and the Eastern Cape settler world. That was enough to build the oldest law firm in Africa. And to train some of the men who would build much of what followed.

Thomas Scanlen served at Fairbridges. He became Prime Minister of the Cape Colony in 1881, then departed for Salisbury in 1894 and founded Scanlen and Holderness Legal Practitioners. William Bell served articles at Fairbridges. He moved to Kimberley in 1887 to examine mining claims, then to Johannesburg in 1889, and founded what became Fasken (incorporated in South Africa as Bell Dewar Inc).

The firm trained many of the lawyers who built the bar that followed the ore.

Syfret Godlonton and Low came in 1887, anchored in the same Eastern Cape settler world. The Godlonton name traced to Robert Godlonton, the 1820 Settler, journalist and activist. Three names on one letterhead. Each would carry a thread north on its own account. More on that later.

Both firms worked Kimberley. Fairbridges had copper exposure at Springbok. These were not Cape Town firms that watched the mineral rush from a distance. They colonised it.

Kimberley already had its own bar, though. Duncan and Rothman had opened there in 1881, five years before the rush reached the Witwatersrand. When Bell arrived in 1887, they were already established.

But, the Transvaal was a different matter.

When gold was found on the Witwatersrand in 1886, Kruger’s government enacted a mineral code on a different foundation. Roman-Dutch law vested precious metals in the state. The mynpacht system required licences from the government to mine.

That gap was an advantage to whoever closed it first.

Douglas Gilfillan arrived in Johannesburg in 1893 from the Cape and founded what became Bowmans (Law Firm). Webber Wentzel, Fort Beaufort-founded in 1868, followed. These firms mastered Kruger’s code on the ground. Command of it made them indispensable to the uitlander mining industry and impenetrable to the Cape legal establishment.

A third Johannesburg firm took shape alongside them. Harold Blore opened independently in 1895. Blore and Cliffe by 1902. Cliffe Dekker and Todd by 1926. One of the few firms that could trace its roots to before the Boer War.

Van Hulsteyns had been practising since 1872, before Johannesburg existed. Lewis Peter Ford and Carl Jeppe were partners there. Fordsburg and Jeppestown carry their names today. Johann Rissik’s sons became senior partners; Rissik Street carries his. The legal profession is written into the map of Johannesburg, not just its company registers.

The Jameson Raid of 1895 crystallised what was at stake. Gilfillan participated, was convicted, jailed, and released. Bell was among the accused at the 1896 treason trial in the Pretoria Market Hall. The grievance had a legal core: Kruger’s state-grant system blocked the consolidation of mining claims through private property rights.

The Boer War ended the code.

Deneys Reitz fought in that war, on commando under Smuts. He went on to serve in Smuts’s cabinet and founded a law firm that carried his name for more than a century. It became Norton Rose Fulbright’s South African practice in 2011. In 2026, it returned to independence, and the name returned with it: Deneys.

Union in 1910 created one legal market. Edward Nathan and Friedland had opened in Johannesburg in 1905. Werksmans followed in 1917, the year Nathan Werksman founded it on his twenty-first birthday. A second generation, building on ground the first had already taken.

But the Johannesburg firms had 15 years of embedded mining house relationships and JSE-listed company work.

A note on those three founding names from 1887, because each carried its own thread north.

The Godlonton thread went to Salisbury. A later Godlonton, a son or nephew of Robert Godlonton, the 1820 Settler, became a partner in Gill, Godlonton and Gerrans in 1931. The firm is Band 1 ranked in Zimbabwe today.

The Low thread went to Bulawayo. In 1897, Rhodesia Railways asked a Cape Town lawyer named Webb to open the town’s first legal practice. Webb invited Henry Low to join him. Low was later knighted for his service to the city; a Bulawayo primary school still carries his name. Webb, Low and Barry remains one of the oldest practices in Bulawayo.

The Syfret thread never left Cape Town, and it ran deeper than a law firm. Edward Ridge Syfret took over his late father’s estate and trust practice in 1885. An early client was Cecil Rhodes, and for years the practice looked after the South African side of Rhodes’s affairs: the fruit farms, the cold storage interests, the dynamite subsidiaries, Groote Schuur itself. When Rhodes died in 1902, Syfret’s practice administered the South African portion of the estate. The man on the ground, not a formally appointed trustee.

In 1954, the Syfret trust business reached north into the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland through an association with Gill, Godlonton and Gerrans. Sixty-seven years after Syfret, Godlonton and Low had first shared a Cape Town letterhead, two of those three names touched again.

The law firm itself kept merging in Cape Town. Syfret Godlonton and Low became Syfret Godlonton-Fuller Moore in 1979, after absorbing two more old Cape practices. In 1998 it merged with the Johannesburg firm carrying Harold Blore’s lineage, Cliffe Dekker and Todd, to form Cliffe Dekker Fuller Moore. A further merger in 2008 made it Cliffe Dekker Hofmeyr. Three founding names from 1887, scattered across two countries and more than one industry, folded back into a single firm 121 years later. Every Big 5 law firm absorbed a slice of Cape Town.

Fairbridges remained in Cape Town. Africa’s oldest law firm. Still standing.

The same Eastern Cape settler families simultaneously built many of the banks, the insurers, the asset managers and the great businesses of the region. And gold and Johannesburg was central to that evolution.

Originally published on LinkedIn. This work is AI-assisted - read about how I work.

In 1685, Simon van der Stel led a hundred men from the colony into the Namaqualand. He found the Koperberge and high-quality copper at depth. But without a harbour or road, the discovery had no value. It took almost 200 years for people to learn this lesson.

In 1869, the Cape Government approved a narrow-gauge railway from Port Nolloth. By 1876 it reached O’kiep, crossing the arid landscape Van der Stel explored. The same deposits were now within reach. For a while, distance was no longer an impossible barrier.

The line closed in the early 1940s and the tracks were removed. The Northern Cape’s first corridor was left behind. Once again, distance became a problem.
When the Port Nolloth line reached Okiep, the corridor became more than a mineral export route. For communities along the route — Springbok, Steinkopf, Kamiesberg — it meant connection: supplies, knowledge, business, and jobs without leaving home. A corridor benefits everyone it touches. That lesson from the 1870s is still true today.

The Sishen–Saldanha line is 861 km long and has capacity to move 67 million tons of iron ore each year. Manganese routes from the Kalahari are built for another 16 million. Transnet operates some of the world’s longest trains: iron ore trains of 342 wagons, manganese up to 375, both nearly four kilometres long. In 2019, a 33-year-old woman from the West Coast fishing village of Paternoster — a village deeply connected to the region's indigenous heritage — was the driver of the world's longest production train. That achievement was 334 years in the making.

But both corridors have underperformed for years. In 2022 and 2023, volumes dropped below capacity and only recovered to 56 million tons, still far from the 67 million target. Tens of millions of tons were mined and then stockpiled, unable to move. Cable theft, delayed maintenance, and derailments made things worse. The distance is the same, but our ability to bridge it has declined.

The line passes depots between Sishen and Saldanha — Groblershoop, Kenhardt, Loeriesfontein, Vredendal — each a workplace. When underperformance forced cutbacks in 2023 and 2024, consequences spread: depot crews lost shifts, port workers faced reduced throughput, supplier contracts were cut, and families in a province with 39.7% unemployment were hit. The corridor is a single system. When rail weakens, pain spreads to every depot, supplier, and household whose income traces back to a loaded wagon.
Van der Stel’s expedition failed for lack of a road. Today, the road, trains, and ore remain, but the system connecting them has weakened. Distance still decides what is possible. In 1685, geography was the problem. Now it is underinvestment.

This is a problem we can solve, which makes resolution more urgent.

Originally published on LinkedIn. This work is AI-assisted - read about how I work.

This is Paardevlei, near the Strand — a key site in the industrial supply chain that enabled mining across Southern Africa. For generations, explosives were manufactured here, linking this place to the region’s mining economy.

In 1898, the Cape Explosives Works built a dynamite factory on the edge of town. Production began in 1903. By 1907, this single site ranked among the world’s largest producers of commercial explosives. Its output fed mines across Southern Africa and placed Paardevlei inside the global mining economy that followed the discoveries of diamonds and gold.

By 1910, nearly 1,000 people worked here. Some lived in men’s-only compounds on site. Others lived nearby. Many were migrant workers, drawn from communities far beyond here by the same rail networks that moved ore, equipment, and explosives across the subcontinent. Their labour sat at the most hazardous end of the industrial supply chain, mixing nitroglycerine and handling detonators.

Danger was a background condition. When the ground shuddered, silence fell. From some silences, men did not return — to homes nearby, or to families waiting far from here. In newspapers, it appeared as statistics. In workers’ homes, it became permanence.

Paardevlei was not unique within the industrial supply chain. It was one of countless intertwined mining, manufacturing, and logistics sites at the core of the regional economy. What matters is the system and its systemic impact.

Today, almost nothing remains. The factory closed in 1996 and the site is now a mixed use business and residential estate. The past sits beneath the tarmac. Yet some things endure. The old hostels, protected by heritage law, still stand. The administration building, designed by Herbert Baker and Masey, remains. The blast grounds are paved over. But the labour, danger, and restless energy remain embedded in the vast mining industry this place once enabled.

The post-apartheid period marked a decisive structural break. The Mine Health and Safety Act (1996), together with sustained tripartite collaboration between industry, government, and organised labour, reshaped safety governance and accountability. The Mining Charter ended the single-sex hostel system that had defined twentieth-century migrant labour. South African mining now operates within regulatory and operational frameworks comparable to international jurisdictions.

I honour the factory workers who mixed and handled volatile materials where danger was routine, and some lost their lives.

I acknowledge the chemists, engineers, and decision-makers who built the industrial force that drove a mining economy across the subcontinent.

The factory is gone. The memory of endeavour, labour, danger, resilience, and loss remains. Far from the mines this place supplied, yet bound to them.

A different version of the same story was originally published on LinkedIn. This work is AI-assisted - read about how I work.

I have paused #MiningIsHuman for one week. More than one person has asked how I actually find these stories.

I am not a mining historian. I am a lawyer who has always been more interested in people and their stories than in the law itself. These stories start with fragments, not knowledge. I find facts that do not connect, and I chase them, obsessively, until they snap or lead somewhere.

This is one that led somewhere.

It is also, underneath the detective work, a story about how businesses grow up in small mining towns. They start small, built to serve whatever is directly in front of them. Most never go further than that. A few travel an enormous distance from where they started, and the lines connecting them back to mining capital turn out to run further, and stranger, than anyone setting up shop in a copper town could have guessed.

I will write about Springbok later this month, so I went looking for the lawyers who licensed those copper mines. I found almost nothing online and flagged it for further research. One name surfaced anyway, sideways: Joe Jowell, Springbok’s best-known lawyer. He arrives after copper mining was already established there, so he falls outside the search I was actually running. But I have known that name since childhood. My grandfather did business up and down the N7 and spoke of Jowell often.

Namaqualand had been a copper district since 1852, when the Blue Mine opened on the edge of Springbok, the first commercial mine in the country. By the 1920s, ownership had already passed through the Cape Copper Company and the Namaqua Copper Company. Both were gone within a decade of each other, the Cape Copper Company in 1919, the Namaqua Copper Company in 1931. The copper that did come out left on a narrow-gauge line the Cape Copper Company had built decades earlier between Port Nolloth and O’okiep, for that single purpose.

Jowell did not arrive as a lawyer with a transport sideline. He arrived as a Chevrolet sub-agent, taking over the Namaqualand dealership in 1929. In 1930, the South African Railways withdrew its unprofitable road motor service to the district, leaving the town without its supply line. Jowell converted an old Buick into a lorry to fill the gap. He traded as Jowells Garage and Transport.

The lorries found the railway’s weak point almost immediately, and the weak point was already there before Jowell arrived. By 1927 the South African Railways’ own mainline had reached Bitterfontein, a far shorter route to Cape Town than the old Port Nolloth line. Copper traffic on the Port Nolloth line had already stalled by 1928. Jowell’s lorries carried copper quartz the short distance to the new railhead at Bitterfontein instead, and two trucks could move what once took an entire train. Through the early 1930s, road haulage to Bitterfontein finished the job the new mainline had already started.

In 1937, the district changed hands again. Newmont, the American mining house, and American Metal Company acquired the mineral rights and assets of the old, by-then-defunct Cape and Namaqua concerns and incorporated the O’okiep Copper Company to develop them. Newmont held the controlling two-thirds interest. Production started in 1939, in time to make O’okiep a significant copper supplier to the Allied war effort. Newmont held the district until 1984, when it sold O’okiep to Gold Fields of South Africa.

Whether Jowells Transport hauled directly for Newmont’s new operation, I have not nailed down. The line of business and the decades of overlap in the same small town make it likely. I am treating it as an open question, not a settled fact. Despite his prominence in the town, Jowell himself was not the mines’ lawyer. There was another attorney who handled that work. I have his name. He is coming, in a later post.

What is not in question is what the transport business became. It listed on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange in 1955, while still trading under the Jowell name. Neil and Cecil, Joe’s sons, joined in 1956 and 1958. In 1967 the company took the name it is still known by: Transport and Engineering Investment Corporation, Trencor.

The diversification came in stages. Trailer manufacturing in 1969 and 1970, through the acquisition of Henred Trailer Manufacturing, later merged with Fruehauf South Africa to form Henred-Fruehauf. Marine cargo containers from the late 1970s, built mainly for the export market, then folding flat-rack containers and stainless steel tank containers. In 1979, Trencor took its most consequential step: it began financing the sale of containers on long-term credit. That financing arm became Textainer.

Textainer grew into one of the world’s largest container leasing companies, eventually trading on the New York Stock Exchange with a secondary listing on the JSE. Springbok to New York, in under a century.

It did not last. In March 2024, the private equity firm Stonepeak bought Textainer outright for $50 a share, roughly $7.4 billion in enterprise value, and delisted it from both the NYSE and the JSE. Trencor, which still held a 47.78% stake by then, was cashed out along with every other shareholder. Trencor itself followed it down. It spent the next year as a cash shell, paid out a final special dividend, and was delisted from the JSE on 5 August 2025. It entered voluntary liquidation the following day. The company that began as a Chevrolet sub-agency filling a gap left by a withdrawn railway service no longer exists in any form. What it built still does: Textainer’s fleet, more than four million containers, is still moving freight around the world, under new owners.

There is a second thread here I have not pulled yet. Newmont took a 25% founding stake in the Anglo American Corporation of South Africa in 1917, four years before Newmont itself was formally incorporated, placing it near the centre of early Witwatersrand gold capital. Decades later, the same company controlled the Springbok copper mines for almost half a century. Two unlikely lines, Newmont and Textainer, both pass through the same small Namaqualand district in the middle of the twentieth century. Both ended up listed in New York. I did not expect that when I started.

This is how these stories get built. A narrow question about who licensed Namaqualand’s mines opens onto a far wider circuit of capital: Namaqualand, the Witwatersrand, London, New York. I do not start with knowledge. I start with curiosity, and I connect dots that often feel tenuous, even to me, and follow them anyway. Sometimes they reveal something. More often they leave me with more questions. Either way, the search feels like working an ore body: following traces that may or may not lead anywhere.

Next week, 6 January, #MiningIsHuman moves to a Tuesday slot. We take a hard look at the emergence of an industrial supply chain to power mining. We go looking at dynamite factories.