Kenneth Birch

I am delighted that one of the Johannesburg Glimpses interviews conducted in the early 2000s by Mike Alfred was with Kenneth S Birch a giant of a mining man (click here to read). I have been aware of the work of Kenneth Birch for some time. Unfortunately I never met him. I know that the Birch archive was deposited with the University of Pretoria.

There are a number of framed, named, dated and signed paintings hanging on walls in the Academic Information Service, Special Collections Unit at the University of Pretoria. These are all originals.

There are more pictorial records in Birch's sketch books which are housed in the Archives at the main Library at Unisa. The K S Birch collection consist of 93 water-colour sketch books, folios, 19 family and personal photograph albums and what was called his 'Civilizations Book', comprising approximately 400 scholarly publications dealing with the great civilizations of the last 4 500 years.

Birch was a benefactor of his high school (Jeppe Boys and the Birch Block at Jeppe Boys High School) commemorates him.

Birch was an architecture graduate of the University of the Witwatersrand in 1936 and was a junior student to some of the Transvaal Group. Birch was a benefactor of Wits and supported the Barnato Hall of Residences on the West Campus and the Faculty of Engineering. He donated a piano to the School of Music. Following fund raising efforts in 1976, the Kenneth Birch Chair of Family Health was established at the University of the Witwatersrand.

Birch paintings of Johannesburg...

The article below forms part of Mike Alfred's series on Joburg personalities from the first decade of the 21st century. Click here to view Kathy Munro's fantastic introduction and here to view the series index. The stories were written in 2005/6.

It took some hunting to find Kenneth Stanley Birch or KSB as he is sometimes called. With no telephone entry I began to feel like a private eye. I had incorrectly assumed him dead, because the dates on the prints of his memory provoking watercolours of Witwatersrand gold mines went back many years. My wife had found some of those prints buried in a charity shop. Knowing they would interest me, she bought some. They were more than interesting, providing as they did, a pictorial reminiscence of our economic heritage; the basic, golden reason for our existence in this great, forested metropolis on the highveld. I then made a few fruitless enquiries about the artist. Months later, Geoffrey Klass, of the Collectors Treasury (click here to read the essay on the Klass brothers), told me that he’d spoken to Ken Birch who sounded very much alive. But Klass could supply no contact details. After several other queries, someone confirmed that Birch had once been Group Architect for Anglo American Corp. So my quest moved to that company’s administration. Quite by accident, because Birch had taken a lump sum pension and was no longer on the books, a helpful woman ‘found’ the 90 year old. When contacted, he agreed to...