A diamond necklace of stories
After 1820 I am turning to my old discipline, the mining business, and the rush of discoveries in the late nineteenth century. One mineral which has romantic overtones is diamonds and the records of the early days in the Kimberley area are full of anecdote and reminiscences packed with story lines and character sketches. Of course, it starts with an Irishman, O’Reilly, who brought the first stone out into the world. It’s probably only an Irishman, brought up among fairies and leprechaun, who would have believed, against all the mineralogical opinion of the time, that there could be diamonds in the South African Karoo. The stone was met with disbelief but when a second forced its way on to the market, it started a rush. Initially, the prospectors worked the banks of the Vaal River but when the banks were saturated, they spread out into the countryside. One farmer woke to find people chipping away at his house. When he opened the door, claims were staked in his kitchen. A servant, being disciplined for some misdemeanour was sent up a hill and told not to come back until he had found a diamond. His successful return started a new rush up the sides of a koppie. I have attached an old image of the Koppie because it has been worked down until it became the Big Hole. Those who had money, or pretended they had, became Koppie Wallopers and bought from the miners and sold on, buying up claims when they could, making fortunes and going broke in the way Mark Twain describes his Nevada experiences in Roughing It.
Of course, everyone wanted to claim the area, the Transvaal republic, the Free State and Britain’s Cape Colony. The Transvaal Republic even sent an armed commando to reinforce their claim but the miners rejected that. In the end it was agreed that a British (English) gentleman, with a solid background in ‘fair play’, should send a surveyor to check in what area the diamond fields lay. Unfortunately, an earlier survey had positioned one of the boundary markers, the grave of an old chief, in the wrong place and, to the disappointment of everyone but the Great White Queen, the piece of dry scrub was found to lie in Britain’s Cape Colony.