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September that the area was declared a goldfield. A tent village sprang up and spread along the
outcrop, and a site for a town was chosen nearby. It was named Johannesburg, after the two
commissioners, both called Johannes, who had confirmed Harrison's discovery. His name is
commemorated by a city street and a park.
President Kruger visited the township in February 1887. It was then run by a Diggers'
Committee, who raised a triumphal arch for the occasion, sent a troop of horsemen to meet and
greet him and accompany him into the ramshackle hamlet, where he was hailed in a series of
formal speeches. By this time Harrison had sold his claim, for a mere 20 rand, and moved on,
leaving others to reap what became the richest harvest in the world. Within four years the field
had produced 650,000 ounces of gold, worth over 90 million rand at today's values, and
Johannesburg had become the biggest, brashest and wealthiest town in South Africa. It is still
the biggest today, its built-up area now spreading for 100 km east and west.
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The coming of the railways speeded up the already prodigious development of the town: the first
train from Cape Town arrived in Johannesburg on 15 September 1892. The line to Natal and
Durban was completed in 1895.
Although thousands of gold-miners continued to exist in tents, shacks and squalid conditions
among the hundreds of holes being dug into the Witwatersrand - and although their activities and
the non-stop movement of wagons laden with mining equipment, food supplies and people
continued to raise clouds of all-enveloping dust - a host of gamblers, con-men, entertainers,
prostitutes and businessmen lived very well, eating and drinking to excess, in the ever-altering,
noisy main thoroughfares, where buildings were erected, demolished and erected anew with
astonishing rapidity. By the end of 1889, churches, stores, bars, businesses and homes stood
where nothing had existed at the start of 1886. There was also a park, a market, a hospital, a
stock exchange, and a Sanitary Board; and the first strike, in favour of a 48-hour week and pay
increases, had occurred. Water was still scarce, however, as a private company controlled
supplies, and hordes of horses, goats and oxen turned the surrounding countryside into a
wasteland devoid of grass, whereon some starved and died.
Into this wildest of Wild West type towns, where men lit cigars with banknotes and women
bathed in champagne, came Tom Honeycombe in or about 1891. What he did, or where and
how he worked and lived we do not know. Presumably, like thousands of others, he staked a
claim of his own, or tried to. It seems he abandoned his stonecutter's trade and was employed
in a gold-mine, in diggings underground. For he contracted the miners' disease, phthisis, a kind
of TB, and died of it within ten years.
In 1892 the town's population numbered some 15,000 whites and 6,700 natives, while 2,700
whites and nearly 26,000 natives worked on the adjacent goldfields. The following year three-
storey buildings were being erected, tramways laid, roads macadamized and streets lit by
electricity as well as by gas. By the middle of the 1890's 200 mining companies had offices in
the town, the biggest and richest of these being Crown Mines and Rand Mines, and
Consolidated Goldfields of South Africa, which was run by Charles Rudd and Cecil Rhodes.
Rhodes, the fifth son of an English clergyman, had come to South Africa, to Natal in 1870 aged
17, to build up his health: he had TB. He built a business empire instead, forming the De Beers
Mining Company, dealing in diamonds, first of all. Other companies followed, influencing many
aspects of South Africa's (and Rhodesia's) economy and growth. He became an MP and then
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