Barney Barnato

Origins and early life

Barney Barnato was born Barnett Isaacs in the Jewish East End of London — in 1851 or 1852, the sources differ — the son of a second-hand clothes dealer, and educated at the Jews' Free School; he figures in this directory by that Jewish birth, and he never pretended otherwise.

Work and career

A music-hall comic and boxer, he sailed for South Africa in 1873 with a few pounds and forty boxes of cigars to sell to the diamond diggers of Kimberley, and within a decade the buyer of scraps had become one of the great magnates of the diamond fields, the Barnato Diamond Mining Company holding the richest claims of the Kimberley mine. His rivalry with Cecil Rhodes for control of the industry ended in 1888 in the merger that created De Beers Consolidated Mines, the cartel that ruled the world's diamonds for a century — Barnato a life governor, and a member of the Cape parliament for Kimberley.

He turned next to the gold of the Witwatersrand, founding Johannesburg Consolidated Investment and building the city's first great buildings. On 14 June 1897, sailing home to England for the Diamond Jubilee, he went over the side of the ship off Madeira and drowned; whether he jumped or fell was never settled. He was forty-five.