Over all that time … hung an ever present threat. In winter it was pneumonia caused by the dust; in summer typhoid caused by the filthy conditions under which the inhabitants had to live.
No schools existed before the conclusion of the South African War (1899–1902), previously referred to as the Anglo-Boer War.50
Benoni was only properly laid out after that conflict had ended, in an era which has aptly been called reconstruction, because of the need to repair damage caused by the war. In the interim the vast bulk of the black and white population had fled Ekurhuleni and the Rand, and the mines had come to a halt. Much plant and machinery was destroyed along with wood-and-iron buildings and accommodation. In the case of Benoni, plans which had been approved for the building of a new township by the Kleinfontein Estates Company, a leading shareholder of which was George Farrar, stalled until after the war. This extended pause was to change the course of Benoni’s history decisively. After the war, Sir George Farrar returned to set his mining ventures into motion once again. Heavy rains had fallen in the last summer of the war, creating an artificial lake at Kleinfontein Dam and transforming a barren valley and naked earthwork into a grassy natural beauty spot. Farrar set about persuading the Kleinfontein Estates and Township Company to relocate the township to the north-facing slopes of the valley. They agreed and appointed him to design the new town, the centre of which was modelled on Farrar’s native Bedford in England. Many of the streets were given names associating them with Bedford. Later in 1903 the new township was pegged out, 200 stands being bought in the first auction in March 1904.51 Part of the new influx of residents was drawn from British soldiers who took their discharges in Benoni and other Ekurhuleni towns at the end of the South African War (1902). These imparted to the white community the ‘Britishness’ it would retain until well into the century.52 In common with Germiston and Boksburg, Benoni was also granted municipal status, and municipal self-government (for whites) in 1903, which unequivocally opened a new era in the history of Ekurhuleni.53
Springs grew up on the back of coal rather than gold which had been discovered in 1887. In 1888 the Nederlandsche Zuid-Afrikaansche Spoorweg-Maatschapij (NZASM) was authorised by the South African government to mine coal at Springs, and a railway line was built to connect Springs to Johannesburg in 1898. After the war Springs/ Brakpan was the most productive coal mining region in the country, although it was shortly to lose out comprehensively to Middelburg/Witbank when the Apex-Witbank railway line was opened in 1910, and the Ekurhuleni coal mines immediately found that they could not compete. As late as 1901 no Springs town existed. Corrugated iron cottages clustered round the collieries, with a few general stores and small hotels dotted around them, and Springs only attained full municipal status in 1912. Brakpan languished in a more or less identical position. The population of Springs comprised coal-mining immigrants from Scotland and Wales in the eastern part of the area, and from Holland and Germany in the west. Almost no Afrikaners were to be found among them. Managed by a Health Committee from 1902, a Town Council was only constituted and a township proclaimed in 1904, boasting no residential area in the decade 1900–1909.54 Brakpan’s first residential township was only established in 1911. Brakpan would only separate from Benoni and acquire independent status in 1919, at more or less the same time as Alberton. Nigel’s early start, following the discovery of gold at Sub Nigel – allegedly the richest gold mine in existence – was not sustained. In 1902 a Health Committee was established, but prior to 1923 the town consisted of little more than a mining camp under the supervision of the Commissioner of Mines. Only in 1930 was it granted a town council.55
In the 1904 census the white population of Boksburg totalled 1 217 (750 males, 467 females), that of Benoni and Brakpan (then grouped in one single municipality) 1 000, and that of Germiston and Springs.56 All retained an air of impermanence, reflected in the cheap and movable wood-and-iron houses that were built, which only began to be replaced by brick built structures during World War I. All were conscious of depending on dwindling assets, either gold or coal, especially the colliery towns of Brakpan and Springs, most of whose coal mines had ceased producing by 1910, and which in the view of at least one writer, were built as potential ‘ghost towns’ from the start.57
Social life in these settlements initially revolved around their economic mainstay – the mines. The early sports clubs which provided facilities for cricket, football, swimming, athletics and tennis were all centred on the mines. A recreation hall was built in Benoni in 1905 offering a town-based social facility, but it was not until economic recovery unambiguously set in in 1909, after a series of economic slumps, that the first sports club was established in Benoni town for townspeople proper. Social life generally centred on New Kleinfontein mine as late as 1912. The chief sources of recreation among the white townspeople of Ekurhuleni at this time were the silent cinema, starting in Benoni in 1903 and becoming a regular feature by 1911, picnicking, and, for men, massive bouts of drinking, and billiard-and-card playing in the town’s many saloons, the latter leaving Ekurhuleni’s streets and workplaces empty and sombre places on Monday mornings. Various forms of vaudeville and travelling shows accompanied or complemented silent films. In February 1909, for example, the Hoodenni Variety Company carried acts from ‘James Hoodenni the handcuff king, Pharos the Ancient magician, and Miss Lily Bateman, Chic Comedienne’, besides Professor Harvey ‘Europe’s Great Hypnotic Entertainer and Magnetic Healer’.58
Shimwell Brothers, Germiston CBD, 1899
Basic services in the towns were rudimentary, verging on primitive. By 1913–1914 most were securing steady and cheap supplies of water from the recently formed Rand Water Board, but none boasted water-borne sewage and they were reliant instead on the ‘bucket’ system, in which pails full of faeces were removed three times a week and replaced with clean, empty buckets. Only in 1935 was Benoni provided with a water-borne sewage system and flush toilets, while a similar service came on stream in Germiston two years later in 1937, and in Boksburg and Springs at more or less the same time.59 Reasonably cheap bulk electricity likewise came on line from Victoria Falls Power Station in World War I, but it was not until the early 1930s, when Benoni and other towns inaugurated new electricity schemes, that it became a realistic option to purchase a variety of electrical appliances. At that point electrical refrigerators and stoves began to appear for the first time in Ekurhuleni stores. As Benoni City Times editorialised in April 1933, ‘Everybody is talking electricity’.60
Springs, 1909
Motor cars also made their first significant appearance on Ekurhuleni streets after the end of the recession of 1908. The first two motor licences were issued by Benoni municipality in March 1910. By 1911 the scale of motoring had grown to such an extent that the town imposed a speed limit of 12 miles (19 km) an hour which was raised to 15 miles (24 km) per hour in 1915. Macadamised roads were first laid down only in 1924. Ekurhuleni’s white population responded with vigour to the new facilities they enjoyed. Cars allowed people to live further from work and the first of a new series of middle-class suburbs were built. By 1934, in addition, Benoni boasted the highest recorded motor car accident rate in the world. In 1924, 527 cars were registered in Benoni (climbing to 3 495 in 1934). In 1925 Ford Motor Company