Peter Spargo

Few visitors driving through Hout Bay on the way to Chapman’s Peak Drive will have failed to notice in the sea below the road a curious concrete and steel jetty - usually the resting place of a number of cormorants drying themselves in the sun! This marks the most immediately visible remnant of one of the Cape’s most remarkable early mining ventures, the Hout Bay manganese mine.

The curious jetty (The Heritage Portal)

Although the dense forests surrounding Hout Bay – hence its name - had been noted by Jan Van Riebeeck and the settlement there had grown slowly but steadily it is astonishing that a further two centuries were to elapse until, in 1873, we find the first written account of the existence in the mountains above Hout Bay of the valuable metal manganese:

“On the 19th November [1873] I went to inspect another manganese mine in the vicinity of Hout Bay. Leaving our horses beyond the block-house in charge of a herd, we ascended the Noordhoek mountain by a very precipitous route, and after an hour’s stiff climb reached a rough track formed by a winter torrent, along which we stumbled over several specimens of the ore; these had been washed down no great distance. Guided by Capt. E., I came to the...

[Published on The Heritage Portal in June 2015] The Spargo's are an ancient and, according to the available historical record anyway, honourable Cornish family. However, they have been more notable for their commitment to the arts of peace than those of war and it therefore came as a surprise to me to discover many years later that as a young man my father had served as a volunteer in No. 2 Company, South African Medical Corps. This unit formed part of the Active Citizen Force (ACF), a form of volunteer peacetime army established by the South African Defence Act of 1912. Further enquiries, however, revealed that in those years the family, like numerous others, was so impoverished by the economic problems of the times that the lure of several weeks of free 'holiday' per year at Potchefstroom Military Camp as a member of the ACF was a major factor in his enlistment!

Alfred Hugh Spargo July 1943

However, the outbreak of war in September 1939 brought a sudden change in attitude and, like tens of thousands of other South Africans, he volunteered for full-time military service. As he suffered severely from a duodenal ulcer he was to his great chagrin rejected by the Union Defence Force (UDF), in spite of his pre-war membership of the ACF. However, a break in the dark cloud of rejection soon appeared. At...

We are incredibly excited to publish this superb article on a little known piece of Cape Town and South African Mining History. In the paragraphs below Professor Peter Spargo traces the rise and fall of a gold mining venture on Lion's Head. The article was originally published in the June 2015 edition of the Bulletin of the National Library of South Africa.

The discovery in March 1886 of the Witwatersrand Main Reef by the Australian prospector George Harrison did not come as a complete surprise as a number of promising gold deposits had already been discovered in the Transvaal some time before.1  However there can be little doubt that, in spite of what Andrew Geddes Bain called “the golden mania” that was sweeping the Colony at the time,2  most readers of the Cape Times of Thursday 9 September 1886 would have been astonished to find there a letter from one ‘HOPEFUL’ - under the eye-catching heading THE LATEST GOLD FIELD - announcing that “there is one energetic fellow working a claim on the hill under the Lion’s Head, and … he has obtained gold in small quantities, a sample of which I have seen myself” 3 

The Letter that appeared in the Cape Times

Precisely when and by whom gold was first discovered on Lion’s Head will probably never be known, although a report of 4 May 1887 by P D Hahn...

Seldom in life does one get an opportunity to take decisive action in what appears to be a major emergency. But let me recount one very small such moment in my own life. When I was a youngster growing up in Johannesburg a notable feature of life in the city was the weekly street collection, run by the City Council in order to assist worthy causes in raising funds. (The citizens of the city were astonishingly generous in aid of good causes but it was interesting to note that I, along with many other collectors, commonly observed that the least well-dressed donors were frequently the most generous – and the reverse.)

In the mid-50’s, when I was an engineering student at WITS, each year I volunteered to do a two-hour stint for that year’s collection in aid of the Epworth Children’s Home, run by the Methodist Church and situated on the Kensington-Germiston border. I therefore collected my ‘tin’ box (securely sealed with a steel wire crimped with a piece of lead to ensure that the money went into the box but couldn’t come out again!) from a side office in the City Hall and found that I had been assigned a point immediately in front of the main entrance to the Rissik Street Post Office – a most excellent position, especially as my two hours included the busy lunch hour when one could be sure that the post office would be very busy.

All went extremely well and my box –...