Johannesburg

17 November 2021 was the date for an unveiling event of note and grand party evening. We celebrated the 150th birthday anniversary of the Lithuanian born Hermann Kallenbach, celebrated architect and close friend of Mohandas Gandhi during Gandhi’s time in South Africa.

The event was the culmination of a partnership project of the Johannesburg Heritage Foundation and the Lithuanian Embassy in South Africa. The latter has sponsored research into the life of Hermann Kallenbach.

Hermann Kallenbach (Johannesburg Whose Who 1928-29)

The main event was the party and talks at The Tents in Grove Road, now the home of Mr and Mrs Ken Rayner who joined with the Embassy in playing host. Two blue plaques were unveiled, one at the top end of Kallenbach Drive just below the dry stone rock wall erected by Hermann Kallenbach in the early 1930s. The second was at 8 Grove Road where Kallenbach erected a simple rondavel home in vernacular style built of koppie stone and roofed with thatch (see main image).

The Tents Blue Plaque (Kathy Munro)

In his day Kallenbach planted a vegetable garden and an orchard on the rocky...

Dating from the early 20th century, the Workers Cottages in Newtown, Johannesburg, form part of the Workers Museum Complex. The Workers Museum is located in a former black migrant workers’ hostel, with the adjacent cottages built for white staff and supervisors. The museum speaks of the harsh segregated labour practices in the city with the relative comfort of the adjacent cottages further highlighting the segregation and prejudice that existed between workers of different races.

Location of the Workers' Cottages

Workers' Museum (The Heritage Portal)

The cottages, facing onto Mary Fitzgerald Square, had fallen into a state of disrepair and were left crumbling and unusable after a failed renovation project in the mid 2000s. The project aimed to bring the cottages back to a condition where they could be used for offices for the Museum as well as spaces for various tenants and NGO’s that support arts, culture and heritage. From the beginning the tight budget was used as a means to conceptually guide the project. Botched renovations and the stripping out of sections of the building were seen as an opportunity to reveal the underlying materiality of the building. The building was...

Here’s a true story, from when I was growing up. The year was 1969 and we had just moved into a glass and pine layered box pegged to the side of Linksfield Ridge. My father, Gerald Gordon, was the architect and the house was featured in various newspapers at the time, front page of the Sunday Times property section, and so on.

There was a housewarming, and among the guests, a great uncle and family showed up at the door, gift in hand. They ring the bell, and the housewarming gift is a pot-plant, all complete in a faux-classical white pot. You know its sort I’m sure, the kind of arriviste kitch you might find at Pond & Parlour. Whereupon Gerald said, “You, dears, are welcome. But the pot stays outside!”

Fast forward 52 years and this same house now bears a Johannesburg Architectural Legacy blue plaque, reflecting on both the house and its designer. And the story is worth its retelling because opening your eyes and pushing back against the derivative and the ersatz matters. Well, it mattered to Gerald.

Blue Plaque (Kathy Munro)

It was a different time, and objects of even acceptable imagination hardly existed in the South African shops of the era, so he made his own: light fittings...

It was always known just as ‘PTPS’ which stood for the words seldom spoken, saving people the trouble of the mouthful of ‘Parktown Preparatory School’. I arrived in 1946 aged eight. The foundation stone by the front door said ‘Acumen Est Dictum Nostrum’. None of us boys knew what that meant. The stone was laid by someone called Sir Lionel Phillips in 1913. None of us knew who he was. As a Roman writer observed ‘the times are bad and this is an ignorant generation’. We may have been ignorant but there was an expectation that after a period of immersion at PTPS we might come to know things. ‘Acumen’ might be a bridge of knowledge too far, but we would at least know some things. But what was a ‘Bart’, and what did ‘MLA’ mean?

Portrait of Lionel Phillips (Wikipedia)

My father, an engineer in the Johannesburg Municipality, had gone away to the War and not returned to us in Linden extension where, to my mother’s annoyance, we were governed by the Peri-Urban Areas Board in distant Pretoria. She nurtured other annoyances, among them my father becoming a Sapper and getting no further than the Cape where he met an English woman displaced from Egypt when Rommel swept across...

Johann Bruwer's contribution to heritage conservation in Johannesburg - and indeed elsewhere on the Witwatersrand and in Gauteng - cannot be overestimated; he was a friend as well as a colleague and his warmth and generosity will always be remembered. Johann suffered a massive heart attack on 9 September 2021 and despite bravely persevering passed away on 17 September 2021.

Johann was born on 21 June 1954 and attended school in Alberton, but matriculated in Windhoek after his parents relocated to Namibia. He served with the 3rd SA Infantry Battalion and the Johannesburg Regiment and then commenced studies at the Rand Afrikaans University, and was awarded his BA, BA Hons, MA and Doctoral degrees.

Johann's detailed research and documentation learnt during his years at university were to become his trademark. Very specific aspects of the Second World War were investigated for his Master's thesis. His subject (translated from the Afrikaans) was 'The Role of the Sixth South African Armoured Division in the Deployment of the Allied Offensive in Italy; The Battle of Monte Stanco, October 7-13, 1944'. The Master's degree was awarded with distinction.

Johann's doctoral thesis was titled (again translated from the Afrikaans): 'The role of the Sixth South African Armoured Division in Italy: 27 May to 8 August 1944'. The degree was awarded in April 1991. Much of the original research for both higher degrees was conducted through interviews with veterans of the Italian campaign.

Johann had joined the S.A. National Museum of Military History in Saxonwold as...

In the article below, gold expert Neil Phillips surveys global mining stats and asks the question 'Where can I find gold?'. The piece was first published in the Sep / Oct 2021 edition of Exceed (The Magazine of the Pajero 4WD Club of Victoria, Australia).

It was a surprise to many when it was announced in September that Australia was now the world’s leading gold producer as of the first half of 2021. One needs to go back to 1903 for the last time Australia was in this position and that year was a combination of Kalgoorlie, Bendigo and many other mines actively producing and the Boer War in South Africa briefly but dramatically curtailing that country’s production. Before 1903, it was the 1850s when Victoria was the world’s greatest source of gold for a few years.

An early stamp battery on the Rand (Mining Survey 1986)

So where is all this Australian gold coming from? The total mined in Australia for the first half of 2021 was 157 tonnes of gold which was enough to overtake China’s reported 153 tonnes; for each country this equated to about 10 million ounces per year. That Australian gold is coming from over 100 mining operations with some being open pits and many being underground mines with declines starting from...

I recently read an article by Professor Kathy Munro about Clarendon Circle, East Avenue and Clarendon Place in Hillbrow, Johannesburg (click here to read). Readers may be interested to know how the name of Clarendon Place came about.

In 1959 the City of Johannesburg had taken a decision to remove Clarendon Circle, and replace it with robots. East Avenue, which then ran around the Circle, was a major road connecting the end of Louis Botha Avenue and on into the city, from Pretoria. There were no freeways at that time.

Before and after shots (sourced by Marc Latilla)

The government had during that period been intent on changing anything English-sounding – FC Erasmus the Minister of Defence had been embarking on names of military units and rank structures, so it appeared to an organisation I belonged to at the time, UNESSA (United English-speaking South Africans), that the government would be quite happy to see the name of a previous Governor-General, the Earl of Clarendon, disappear from Johannesburg.

George...

The now celebrated English architect James Alfred Cope-Christie (1870-1953) was active in Johannesburg between 1902 and approximately 1908. He was in the city for a relatively short time but made and left a legacy of three houses that have survived to the present. The three homes are in Parktown, Waverley and Yeoville.

House Hains in Yeoville was the earliest with the plans dated 1903. House Page in Waverley followed a year later and in 1905-6 Cope-Christie designed Dolobran which still stands at the corner of Oxford and Victoria Avenue in Parktown.

House Page (William Martinson)

Dolobran (Lucille Davie)

Today House Hains shows all the signs of Yeoville decay and neglect over a 25 year period. It is a substantial detached house. Its history reveals that it was a house of far greater substance and importance than its current position, somewhat cramped on a single stand. It deserves a second glance and a documentation of its architectural history.

Cope-Christie was the subject of a pamphlet by Dennis Radford and Peter Jackson in the 1990 series The Architects of Parktown (part of the Parktown Collection); there is coverage of his work on the Artefacts website (click here...

The recent article by Kathy Munro on Liliesleaf farm and Rivonia (click here to read) had me digging out and reviewing some notes I made a while back.

This Robinson family, like many at that time, came to South Africa when then family head, Peter Robinson was sent out from England to take charge of the local branch of the large company he was employed by in London. Scaffolding Great Britain (SGB) promoted Peter Robinson to Managing Director of SGB South Africa and he arrived in the country in mid-1959, to be followed by the rest of his family and his own, by now widowed, mother. Eldest son Howard, then aged 14, convinced the family to let him fly out by BOAC Bristol Britannia while the rest of the family sailed from Southampton in December 1959 on the Union Castle Lines ship Stirling Castle. Those who enjoyed the sea trip were Grandma Robinson, Mary (wife of Peter), Mark (12 yearold second son), Angela (8)* and the family cat Midge! ** First landfall in South Africa was at Cape Town on New Year’s Day 1960 and the Coon Carnival was a colourful if slightly bewildering introduction to the country. We weren't sure if this was what we would see every day!

Old...

In the article below, gold expert Neil Phillips looks at the origins, growth & decline of the greatest goldfield on earth. He also hints at hopes of new discoveries. The article was first published in the The Australian Geologist, issue 200, page 21.

One quarter of the World’s gold has been mined from the Witwatersrand goldfields around Johannesburg in South Africa. At its peak in 1970, gold was the mainstay of the South African economy, the dominant export, and source of employment for 500,000 underground miners every day. Anecdotally, those miners supported an average of ten others in extended families in South Africa and surrounding countries. Unfortunately, the last fifty years have been one of constant decline in annual Witwatersrand gold production to now be under 10 percent of its peak.

History of Witwatersrand Basin gold production rate (Christopher J. H. Hartnady)

Much has been written about the discovery of the Witwatersrand and its national and global impact. The discovery itself was early in 1886 by George Harrison, and likely in February of that year. In mid-1886 just months after his discovery, Harrison described himself to the State Secretary as having long experience as an Australian gold digger and added his opinion...