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Crown Mines. It was one of the biggest gold-mines in those days, and the richest. It was vast.
My Dad used to work in one of the workshops, on the surface. The only time he'd go
underground would be to put brake blocks in the horse wagons, big wooden blocks. There'd
be about 20,000 blacks working there; the whites had the overseeing jobs and were the
craftsmen and technicians. They had their
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own reduction plants, and the mine dumps were huge. The children used to play on these
dumps, in the sand and rock. That was when I was young, in the 1930's.1
The story of the South African Honeycombes, Jack's descendants, will have to be told
elsewhere. Suffice it now to say that his two sons and two daughters married, and that all had
children of their own. Although young Jack (John Albert, born 1892) had three sons, two died
young and the third never married. So it was Fred's only child, called Cyril Norman (born
1916) who carried on the Honeycombe name. Cyril in turn had only one son, Bill (born 1939),
and so had Bill. His son, Warren, born in 1965 in Johannesburg also has one son, Ryan, born in
1995.
There are a few Honeycombs (without the 'e') in South Africa, in Cape Town and around
Johannesburg. But they are not of Cornish origin and have nothing to do with us.
On a visit to South Africa in 1982 to find and meet the descendants of Jack, I came across
several Honeycombs in the Cape and Johannesburg telephone directories. This was a surprise,
as I thought my researches had accounted for all the Honeycombes and their whereabouts in the
world. Somewhat reluctantly I made contact with them and discovered first of all that the
Honeycomb listed in the Cape Town directory lived in a poor area, Heideveld, out on The
Flats, where I was told, Cape Coloureds lived. Gosh! Could I have found a family of coloured
Honeycombes? Could they even be blackT?
Much intrigued, I telephoned; a man answered. But he was very wary, and showed no interest
or inclination to talk. Nor would he say who he was or anything about his family. When I visited
the address by taxi - though advised not to do so - no one answered the door. I stood in a
scruffy deserted street of low prefabricated homes and ramshackle huts, with a barking dog and
a crying baby the only sounds to be heard. Conscious of unseen eyes inspecting me I soon
returned to the taxi and was driven away.
Much later, a paid researcher established that this Honeycomb was in fact Cape Coloured, that
his father, William, had died when the Heideveld Honeycomb was six years old, in the 1940's,
and that he had been born in Cape Town. When asked if he knew anything about his unusual
name and its possible origin, he replied: 'Try Hanekom'.
Of this I knew nothing at the time, and telephoned the Johannesburg Honeycombs fully
expecting them to be coloured or black. Far from it. They were Afrikaners, in accent and
attitude, and turned out to be whiter than white. One of the wives, who looked and sounded like
Bette Davis and was called Lulu Honeycomb was a lulu in more ways than one and immensely
outspoken. I liked her. But sitting among these Afrikaners in a Germiston home, I felt like an
Alien, and their overexcited reaction to me and their eagerness to please, was such
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that I might have been a Creature from Outer Space. They didn't seem like 'family' to me - not
like all the other Honeycombes I'd met.
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