Lionel Phillips

Origins and early life

Lionel Phillips was born in London on 6 August 1855 to a Jewish family of modest means, the son of Philip Phillips, a shopkeeper; he was born a Jew and remained one, one of the group of British and German Jewish immigrants whom South Africa called the Randlords.

Work and career

He arrived in Kimberley at nineteen with almost nothing, worked as a diamond sorter, learned the trade underground, and moved in 1889 to the new gold field of the Witwatersrand, where he became a partner in Hermann Eckstein and Company, the local arm of the Wernher-Beit group, and later chairman of the Corner House, one of the great mining houses. He was president of the Chamber of Mines and its principal technical voice: he pressed for the deep-level mining and the cyanide process that made the low-grade Rand ore payable and thereby created the industry that built Johannesburg.

Politics ruined and remade him. As a leader of the uitlanders, the foreign miners denied the vote in Paul Kruger's South African Republic, he was one of the organizers of the Johannesburg rising meant to coincide with the Jameson Raid of 1895-1896; the raid failed, and Phillips was tried for treason, sentenced to death in April 1896, and released after payment of an immense fine and an undertaking to leave the country.

He returned after the Boer War, sat in the first House of Assembly of the Union of South Africa in 1910, and was made a baronet. With his wife Florence he built a great collection of European art and gave Johannesburg its art gallery, designed by Edwin Lutyens and opened in 1915. He was shot and wounded by an assailant in 1913, and died at Somerset West on 2 July 1936.