I reckon it's a pretty fair bet that the miner overseeing the indigenous miners going underground in this photo is a Cornish miner. The mine is one of the gold mines owned by a company, Consolidated Goldfields, established by Cecil Rhodes.

Miners Going underground at the Robinson Deep Gold Mine, Witwatersrand, So Africa, circa 1900.
🔗Robinson-Deep-Gold-Mine-Archive-Album-Image-42442[linkphoto]Robinson-Deep-Gold-Mine-Archive-Album-Image-42442[/linkphoto][/link]

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25 per cent of the white labour force on the Rand before the Boer War was Cornish and Robinson Deep had a large Cornish staff. In fact transnational networks of migration (migration chains) meant that some mines were staffed almost entirely by men from particular mines in Cornwall such as Dolcoath. If you look around Camborne and district you can still see a few of the once numerous house names that linked this town to the Rand: Robinson Deep, Crown Reef Villa etc.

Most Cornish mining families had men working on the Rand. All of my Gran's uncles and her father worked there in the early C19th; 2 of her uncles died within a month of one another in 1907: one of enteric fever in Randfontein Hospital and another blown up in a mine explosion at the Dreifontein Mine E. Transvaal.

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As a matter of interest what does the 25 per cent translate too in actual figures? I ask because the speed of growth in the area is quite astonishing. It seems that by 1899 (start of the War) there were over 100 hundred mines in the area mainly owned by about nine companies.

Equally the growth of Johannesburg. In 1886 it was a few shacks and tents known as Ferreira's Camp ( I'll come back to that) with a population of 3000. If the figures I quote are correct in 1890 it had risen to 30,000, in 1894 to 80,000 and an official census figure of 102,078 in 1896. Astonishing and coinciding with the rapid decline of the mining industry in Cornwall.

Regarding the very successful Ferreira Mine I believe that also employed a high percentantage of Cornish miners. Anyway I came across an interesting snippet regarding the mine on the web the other day.

"The mine is abandoned for a long time now, and was completely forgotten. In the mid 1980s the Standard Bank built its head office on this place. During excavation of the basement they found an old stope or access tunnel. It once led to the Ferreira's Mine and is of great historic importance. The bank has preserved the stope and its surrounding area and created a museum open to the public. To solve the problem of subsidence the developed a new technique that involved caulking the top of the stopes to stabilise the ground. Some of the underground tunnels were filled with concrete and cement grout."http://www.showcaves.com/english/za/mines/Ferreira.html 

It took me a bit of time on GE to find the Standard Bank for accurate co-ordinates. 🙂

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