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.

I meet and talk to Frans Beleni, a senior official, his title is Production Pillarhead, with the National Union of Mineworkers. He works at Union headquarters, 7 Rissik St, an Art Deco building opposite the old SARS. His lifespan embraces the old South Africa becoming new. His forty five years have been packed with protest, change and emergence.

NUM Building Rissik Street (The Heritage Portal)

Blue plaque on the NUM building (The Heritage Portal)

Beleni, not a born Johannesburger enjoys and values its many amenities but is perturbed by the crime. He became a young activist at school, and later a fugitive from the police. This was followed by a period as a miner on the Free State Goldfields, which provided him with both ‘a convenient place to...

Marian Laserson (nee Spilkin) architect, town planner, champion of wetlands and heritage campaigner passed away on 10 July at the Morningside Clinic of the Covid-19 Virus.

Marian was born in 1936, the daughter of Joseph and Rachel Spilkin. Her father was a Johannesburg civil and structural engineer whose practice was very involved in many of the buildings in the city. He retired at age 85. He clearly sparked an interest in his daughter in engineering and building technology. From her mother, Marian drew her social activism, as Rachel was politically active in the Progressive Party.

At over the age of 80, Marian was still a practicing professional architect and activist. She was a person of considerable intellect but her human touch, her sense of humour and her service ethic were her outstanding traits. Marian was an active campaigner in town planning and urban regeneration across a wide swathe of the north east of Johannesburg.

Her interests were varied. She was someone who knew an enormous amount about city by laws, routes through the inner workings of the city, how to lodge objections (which she often did on behalf of public interest groups). Her advice was concise and practical and she always followed up with an email to explain exactly what we needed to do to fight a heritage case.

Marian was an authority on water matters and the conservation of wetlands. She supported David Bagg and the Huddle Park fight to save the golf course and its subsequent development into a...

In July 1964 an International Congress of Surgeons was held at the Wits Medical School in Johannesburg. It was well attended by Surgeons from all over the world including South Africa.

At the time, I was a Registrar (a Surgeon in training and studying for a higher qualification) working in the Professorial Unit of the Johannesburg General Hospital just across the road from the Conference. It was a late Friday afternoon – July 24th 1964.

As workers were making their way home at rush hour, a huge explosion occurred in the main concourse of the Johannesburg Railway Station. A large number of seriously injured people were rushed to the Trauma unit and I was called in to help.

The message quickly reached the Conference which was immediately suspended. Many of the Surgeons attending the Conference hurried across. We had the most unusual and fortunate experience of a plentiful supply of top Surgeons, some with war experience. They assisted us in the Emergency Room, doing Triage and some even pitched in, operating in theatre with us.

The unplanned arrival of large numbers of injured people (28 in this case) can overwhelm hospital staff and would have if not for the extra help. Disaster Plans and the Science of Triage (the selection and treating patients in order of urgency) were as yet not formalised but are vital for mass casualty management. Nevertheless, the team did well.

After helping with immediate resuscitation and stabilising the more seriously injured, I went to assist those...

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.  Please note that the Parktown and Westcliff Heritage Trust transformed into the Johannesburg Heritage Foundation in 2012.

On a Saturday afternoon, an earnest and expectant crowd surrounds a woman in old Brixton Cemetery. They mentally recoil from smashed and overturned memorials, headstones and grave markers in this no longer used, historic gathering place for Johannesburg’s dead. The late summer afternoon sky is piled with thunderheads, but for the moment it’s hot, sunny and still; the wind presaging a highveld storm has not yet stirred. This short, blonde woman, knowledgeable and energetic, stands talking before a family grave. But her audience does not comprise mourners, rather they are visitors enjoying a tour of the graveyard, organized by the Parktown & Westcliff Heritage Trust. [P&W H T] 

A scene from Brixton Cemetery (Kathy Munro)

Interred in this family plot are Randlord Lionel Phillips, his wife Florrie who founded the Johannesburg Art Gallery and their son Frank who managed the family farm in Magoebaskloof. Later she tells her listeners about Norman Anstey who ran his department store in the Art Deco building...

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...

Having graduated with the double Bachelor's degree MB Bch in 1959 after 6 years of study, I was now a brand-new Doctor.

The Medical training program at the time called for 2 more years of practical work under supervision, in a teaching hospital of one's choice before being officially qualified to practice. This was a bit like an Apprenticeship but called an Internship. Ironically we were not called Interns but Housemen or House Surgeons.

It was late afternoon on April 9, 1960. Two of us - my fellow House Surgeon Willy Krom and I - were working in the Trauma Unit. This is a specialised unit that deals purely with injuries, accidents, and assaults of whatever kind.  Until that moment all had been peaceful and quiet. The Rand Easter Show was about to start and Johannesburg was in a festive mood.

A scene from the Rand Show

A bizarre call came through that a white male had been admitted to one of the Medical Wards with injuries sustained at the Show. Medical Ward? Injuries? Medical Wards deal with the discipline of Internal Medicine, which is the management of general diseases such as Hypertension, Diabetes, Heart Failure, Diagnostic conundrums etc. NEVER physical Injury. Besides, WE were the Trauma unit.

Our superior, the Registrar, told us we had better go and...

Which of our city’s architectural treasures don’t receive the credit they deserve? During lockdown we explored Joburg’s most underrated historic buildings on our Instagram and Facebook pages, and we’re happy to share them here too! 

Our first nomination is the Lion Match Factory in Industria. Designed in 1936 by Richard Day, the monumental Lion Match Factory is an Art Deco palace of industry. The facade is delineated by a series of simplified columns, decorated with three matches on their capitals. The columns are framed by a cornice of crisp parallel lines that emphasise the building’s horizontality. The architect clearly defines three entrances - two on either end in monumental projecting wings, and the main entrance framed by elegant Art Deco waterfalls and topped with a clock and flagpoles.

Lion Match Factory, Industria (Johannesburg Heritage Foundation)

Our second nomination for Joburg’s most underrated historic buildings is House Hains in Yeoville. Almost everyone knows Dolobran in Parktown, the most whimsical and romantic of Parktown’s mansions. Its architect, Cope-Christie, designed precious few buildings in Johannesburg, but...

EBay has on sale a medal to commemorate the declaration of Johannesburg as a city in 1928. I was immediately intrigued. I have never seen one of these medals but I am not a collector of such items. An internet search reveals that this medal is not regarded as rare but that prices fluctuate from as little as R45 to about $10 to as much as £18. It is a bronze medal.

Commemorative Medal

A medal opens a window on a bit of local history. It raised my curiosity. What makes a city a city or a town transition to a city? Is it the population of a city, the governance and administration, the capacity to run a comprehensive range of essential services. Or is it the presence of a cathedral and that tie between the civic and religious establishment. It would seem it could be any of these things.

John Shorten’s book, The Johannesburg Saga, (published in 1970) commissioned by the City of Johannesburg and meant to mark the city’s 80th birthday, in a chapter called City Status covers the interwar period of the 20th century. The chapter virtually opens with the essential fact that in 1922 (apart from the General strike of that year) the first Anglican bishop was installed in Johannesburg, a Dr ABL Karney. In May 1926 the foundation stone of St Mary’s Anglican Cathedral in Plein Street was laid. It was not consecrated until...

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...

In 1920, St John’s College was still in its infancy. The school had been established in 1898 as a parish school of St Mary’s Anglican Church in downtown Johannesburg. Soon afterwards, the social upheaval caused by the Anglo-Boer South African War (1899-1902) – including the evacuation of many civilians from Johannesburg and the deportation of the school’s headmaster by the Boer authorities – had necessitated the closure of the school for some eighteen months.

After the War, enrolment figures had initially recovered quickly. However, the subsequent advent of the ‘Milner schools’ posed a mortal threat to private church schools such as St John’s. The ‘Milner schools’, heavily subsidised by the colonial government, offered better facilities and lower fees than St John’s. At the time, St John’s was located in the unassuming ‘Tin Temple’, constructed of wood and corrugated iron, in the vicinity of the present-day Noord Street taxi rank. The school had no playing fields.

Unable to compete with the better-resourced government schools in difficult economic times, St John’s College’s enrolment figures declined rapidly. By 1905, only forty-odd boys remained in the school, which was soon in substantial debt. The parish church, unable to sustain the school, handed it over to the Anglican diocese. Thus, St John’s became a diocesan school. But the general consensus was that the school was a ‘sinking ship’. Closure seemed imminent and inevitable.

As a measure of last resort, Archdeacon Michael Furse, who was the chairman of the College Council, requested the Community of the Resurrection to take charge of the school. The Community of...