Empire Cricket Booklet

•

BRUCE MURRAY

to Cape Town with a view to emigrating to Australia, played a game of cricket just before his ship was due to leave and was rewarded with £100 by a delighted punter for 'pulling the match out of the fire' with a sparkling 114 runs. Bailey proceeded to invest the £100 in some land on the Rand, soon sold it for a substantial profit, and began the process of amassing his fortune: 'Sir Abe Bailey never forgot that amazing turn of fortune, whereby a century scored in a chance match in Cape Town set his feet on the royal road to millionairedom.' 5 On 6 March 1887, Bailey arrived in Johannesburg, set ting himself up as a stockbroker and financial agent. In his own estimate, Bailey was a 'self made self-made man', and he certainly impressed contemporaries in early Johannesburg as a shrewd, assertive, and ruthless young man on the make. After amassing his first £30 000 as a stockbroker, he switched to speculating and acquiring properties, especially land, on his own account. The manager of the Johannesburg branch of the Standard Bank, in his assessment in 1891 of Bailey's credit worthiness as a 'Speculator and Broker', appraised him as 'a shrewd man who is reported to be very "keen" in looking after his own interests'. The manager added: 'Has done well here. He is on the Board of several local gold Companies and has considerable influence with a certain class.'6 In his pen picture of Bailey, L. E. Neame, editor of the Rand Daily Mail in the early 1920s, commented: 'The cosmopolitan financial pioneers of Johannesburg's early days were full of guile and had their own standards - which were sometimes peculiar. The youthful Bailey pitted his brains against theirs and often came off best'. Some of those who did business with him, disliked him, but only because he 'did unto others what they were trying to do to him - and he did it first'. 7 One of those who did business with Bailey in those early days, Louis Cohen, cousin of Barney Barnato, was distinctly less flattering. In the estimate of the often scurrilous Cohen, 'it can be truly said that there never was a Christian who deserved to be an Israelite more than the Queenstown lad, whose snub nose should have been a hooked one of alarming proportions'. 8 Arthur Barlow, a later political associate of Bailey's, invoked a different parallel: 'He was as "slim" as a Boer "dorp" attorney ... combative, dear-headed, snobbish.9,

Paul Emden places the Bailey group in 'The Big Ten' of the Rand's mining houses of the 1890s, but the_ historian Robert Kubicek ranks Bailey rather among the 'fringe operators' who 'were pure and simple speculators with actual gold production playing little part in their financial plans'. 10 Indeed, H. Long dale's Golden Transvaal, published in London in 1893, described Bailey as 'the most daring speculator of the Golden City'. He evidently made spectacular profits by opening up new areas, then handing them on to others to bring into production. With a skilled eye for acquiring strategic shares and claims cheaply, Bailey had accumulated by the boom of 1895 stock and claim holdings that entitled him to seats on the boards of nine mining companies. In 1897, he embarked on a corporate venture, forming

Abe Bailey

South African Gold Mines, and although its capital was relatively small it had managed to acquire sub stantial holdings by 1904. Parallel with his mining interests in the 1890s, Bailey built up an extensive real estate operation in Johannesburg and the Trans vaal, forming the Witwatersrand Estate and Finance Corporation in 1896, and working in tandem with Julius Jeppe's estate company, the biggest developer of the Johannesburg inner city.11 In 1905, the two companies merged, and in 1919, the various enter-