By Maeder Osler
As recorded previously (A rich seam of Colesberg history), Toverview has been gifted with valuable archival material about the extensive earlier land holdings in the Colesberg district by the mining tycoon and politician Sir Abe Bailey.
The donor is Peter Barnes-Webb, grandson of M.W. Barnes-Webb, the first manager of the Rhodes Beit Bailey (RBB) and later Bailey farms, who eventually retired to Kirkwood in the Eastern Cape.
M.W. and Madeleine Barnes-Webb, circa 1950. Undated newspaper clipping in the New Hantam Collection. The caption reads: ‘GOLDEN WEDDING: Morton Willliam Barnes-Webb and Madeleine Rose Rushton. Married by the Rev J. Weaver on 20th April 1900 at St. Barnabas Church, Stutterheim. Presently residing at Kirkwood, Cape.’
Peter has also retired after managing farms east of Colesberg, including the former Bailey farm of Grootfontein, seat of the Hantam Community Education Trust. Until recently, William Bailey, a grandson of Sir Abe Bailey, also farmed in the area, on land descended from the Bailey holdings.
Peter Barnes-Webb (left) with Will Bailey at a recent tea for retired Nuwe Hantam farmers.
We aim to put some of this valuable material on public record. The first item is a handwritten note about the origins of Abe Bailey’s ‘Nuwe Hantam’ land investments, written by WW Barnes-Webb at ‘Leeuhurst’ in Kirkwood in 1952. It reads:
‘Hantam Notes. General, About 1900 Rhodes had a brain wave to introduce British Settlers, and in partnership with Alfred Beit and Abe Bailey sent round a Colesberg farmer named Fourie to buy a large area in the Hantam: it being pointed out to him (Rhodes) that a large acerage could be placed under irrigation in a dam built at Oorlogspoort: the catchment area being 175 square miles.
‘Probably owing to “John Bull” being portrayed as a “hungry rampant lion”! the farmers panicked and sold out readily 45 000 morgan being secured. Willcox, the famous Nile River engineer was introduced from Egypt but nothing definite materialised and shortly afterwards Rhodes died and was followed by Beit, and his trustees especially Jameson, bring so concerned with development in the North, urged to let Abe Bailey take everything, “lock stock and barrel”.
‘This was the end of the R.B.B. (Rhodes, Beit, Bailey) Syndicate, as the concern was known, Combined with other properties purchased , and his own private farms, the area was extended to about 200 square miles.’
The start of the ‘Hantam Notes’, written by MW Barnes-Webb.
Featured image: Sir Abe Bailey with fellow directors of Rhodes’s Consolidated Gold Field mining company, 1895. Back row, from left: John Hays Hammond, unknown servant, George Farrar. Front from left: Alfred Beit, Lionel Phillips, Frank Rhodes (brother of Cecil), and Abe Bailey. Source: Abe Bailey Collection.