Sammy Marks

Origins and early life

Samuel Marks, always called Sammy Marks, was born in 1844 at Neustadt-Sugind in Lithuania, then part of the Russian Empire, into a poor Jewish family, and he remained a practising Jew all his life.

Work and career

He left for England as a young man, peddled cheap jewellery in the north of England, and sailed for Cape Town in 1868, moving on to the newly opened diamond fields at Kimberley with his cousin Isaac Lewis. From diamond buying the partners turned to industry, and in the South African Republic of Paul Kruger they founded the coal mines of Vereeniging, a glass works, a brickworks, a distillery known as the Hatherley works, and one of the first factories in the Transvaal.

Marks became the closest business adviser of President Kruger, a Boer republic head of state who received him constantly, and he acted as an intermediary between Kruger and the British authorities before and during the South African War of 1899 to 1902, and again in the peace negotiations that ended it at Vereeniging on his own estate. He funded the Pretoria synagogue and Jewish charities, and he helped Jewish immigrants from the Russian Empire settle in the Transvaal.

Appointed to the Senate of the Union of South Africa in 1910, he sat until his death on 18 February 1920. His house at Zwartkoppies near Pretoria is preserved as the Sammy Marks Museum.