status in 1919, at more or less the same time as Alberton. Nigel’s early start, following the discovery of gold at Sub Nigel – allegedly the richest gold mine in existence – was not sustained. In 1902 a Health Committee was established, but prior to 1923 the town consisted of little more than a mining camp under the supervision of the Commissioner of Mines. Only in 1930 was it granted a town council.55
In the 1904 census the white population of Boksburg totalled 1 217 (750 males, 467 females), that of Benoni and Brakpan (then grouped in one single municipality) 1 000, and that of Germiston and Springs.56 All retained an air of impermanence, reflected in the cheap and movable wood-and-iron houses that were built, which only began to be replaced by brick built structures during World War I. All were conscious of depending on dwindling assets, either gold or coal, especially the colliery towns of Brakpan and Springs, most of whose coal mines had ceased producing by 1910, and which in the view of at least one writer, were built as potential ‘ghost towns’ from the start.57
Social life in these settlements initially revolved around their economic mainstay – the mines. The early sports clubs which provided facilities for cricket, football, swimming, athletics and tennis were all centred on the mines. A recreation hall was built in Benoni in 1905 offering a town-based social facility, but it was not until economic recovery unambiguously set in in 1909, after a series of economic slumps, that the first sports club was established in Benoni town for townspeople proper. Social life generally centred on New Kleinfontein mine as late as 1912. The chief sources of recreation among the white townspeople of Ekurhuleni at this time were the silent cinema, starting in Benoni in 1903 and becoming a regular feature by 1911, picnicking, and, for men, massive bouts of drinking, and billiard-and-card playing in the town’s many saloons, the latter leaving Ekurhuleni’s streets and workplaces empty and sombre places on Monday mornings. Various forms of vaudeville and travelling shows accompanied or complemented silent films. In February 1909, for example, the Hoodenni Variety Company carried acts from ‘James Hoodenni the handcuff king, Pharos the Ancient magician, and Miss Lily Bateman, Chic Comedienne’, besides Professor Harvey ‘Europe’s Great Hypnotic Entertainer and Magnetic Healer’.58
Shimwell Brothers, Germiston CBD, 1899
Basic services in the towns were rudimentary, verging on primitive. By 1913–1914 most were securing steady and cheap supplies of water from the recently formed Rand Water Board, but none boasted water-borne sewage and they were reliant instead on the ‘bucket’ system, in which pails full of faeces were removed three times a week and replaced with clean, empty buckets. Only in 1935 was Benoni provided with a water-borne sewage system and flush toilets, while a similar service came on stream in Germiston two years later in 1937, and in Boksburg and Springs at more or less the same time.59 Reasonably cheap bulk electricity likewise came on line from Victoria Falls Power Station in World War I, but it was not until the early 1930s, when Benoni and other towns inaugurated new electricity schemes, that it became a realistic option to purchase a variety of electrical appliances. At that point electrical refrigerators and stoves began to appear for the first time in Ekurhuleni stores. As Benoni City Times editorialised in April 1933, ‘Everybody is talking electricity’.60
Springs, 1909
Motor cars also made their first significant appearance on Ekurhuleni streets after the end of the recession of 1908. The first two motor licences were issued by Benoni municipality in March 1910. By 1911 the scale of motoring had grown to such an extent that the town imposed a speed limit of 12 miles (19 km) an hour which was raised to 15 miles (24 km) per hour in 1915. Macadamised roads were first laid down only in 1924. Ekurhuleni’s white population responded with vigour to the new facilities they enjoyed. Cars allowed people to live further from work and the first of a new series of middle-class suburbs were built. By 1934, in addition, Benoni boasted the highest recorded motor car accident rate in the world. In 1924, 527 cars were registered in Benoni (climbing to 3 495 in 1934). In 1925 Ford Motor Company proclaimed in bold letters in newspaper advertisements to an agog public, ‘And now colours!’ New purchases were no longer restricted to the single colour – black.61
Ekurhuleni was settling down. As the new suburbs were laid out, the new houses were built more solidly and permanently of stone and brick. The year 1917 was the first time, for example, that Benoni’s Town Council received no planning applications to build structures of wood and iron.62 Ekurhuleni’s towns and their populations were also becoming increasingly anchored by new industrial development and were not entirely dependent for their life blood on the wasting assets of the mines. In 1917 Germiston became the first municipality in South Africa to lay out its own industrial townships. In 1921 the Rand Gold Refinery set up home there and was soon producing three-quarters of the refined gold in the world. Before long, clothing and other factories mushroomed in the town’s industrial quarter.63 In Benoni, iron and steel and other industries also took root in World War I, after the Benoni Council had adopted the policy of actively courting industrial development in 1917.64 This, however, would never really take off there and in the other Far East Rand towns until the outbreak of World War II.
Lifestyle changes of all sorts also occurred in the 1910s and 1920s. In the course of World War I a fresh surge of Afrikaner immigration swept into Ekurhuleni (see next section). Many of these were poor whites. This was accompanied by a major shift in the patterns of whites’ worship and church-going. Up until that point churches had been upper and middle class in character. Now Pentecostal churches made their first appearances and then made major inroads into the old churches’ congregations, appealing especially to poor whites. By 1929, 25 such churches existed in Benoni alone.
In the mid-1920s gramophones became popular while vaudeville disappeared as the ‘talkies’ replaced silent films. In a partly unobserved and certainly unobtrusive manner, entertainment became more private, moving out of the public domain and into the home. For reasons which remain unclear dress patterns also became more liberal and liberated. Skirts became shorter, and men’s shorts became fashionable for the first time in the late 1920s, copied, it was said, from the Rhodesians. Lastly Benoni acquired (why Benoni one must ask?) the first of two screen goddesses to grace the Hollywood stage, in this case Molly Lamont, who hit the big time in the early 1930s (after winning a competition run by Outspan oranges).65 The better-known and more recent celebrity of this kind that hailed from Benoni, is of course, Charlize Theron, subsequently upstaged by another interloper from Benoni, Charlene Wittstock, who married Prince Albert of Monaco in 2011.
CHAPTER 2
WHITE WORKERS AND THEIR STRUGGLES 1907-1924
Cornish miners
In the 1910s and 1920s Ekurhuleni, and more specifically the Far East Rand, was the fulcrum of white working-class politics in South Africa. It was home to more white mine workers than any other part of the Rand; it was the first site of a remarkable synthesis of white immigrant and white Afrikaner working-class cultures which blossomed briefly in the 1922 white workers’ rebellion on the Rand; it provided the impetus for the first two major white workers’ strikes in 1907 and 1913; it was the major centre of the 1922 Rand rebellion; it was the principal and most durable stronghold of the South African Labour Party and to the now largely forgotten but then immensely important political tradition that it represented; and within that it was the principal focus of the two major competing, ideological and political orientations among white workers in South Africa. In short, it condensed the politics of white labour.
