CAPE ARGUS - 1886, June 3 & June 19
Diamond deposits found in 1871 on a farm led to the Kimberley Big Hole/ Kimberley Mine. In 1872, more than 50 000 diggers were living in New Rush, the mining town surrounding the Colesberg Kopje on the farm Vooruitzicht, owned by the De Beers brothers. In 1873 bigger houses were built and the town was renamed KIMBERLEY. By 1900 the town, named after the Earl of Kimberley (British Secretary of State for the Colonies), was a prosperous town. Kimberley is well-known as South Africa’s most innovative town as it had the first Flying School, first Stock Exchange and first Electric Street-Lights in the Southern Hemisphere.
The first Dutch Reformed Church was built in 1871, but in 1885 a very substantial and handsome Dutch Reformed Church was erected in Kimberley at the cost of £5 000. It could no longer be said that there were no Dutch in Kimberley. The “Central Centre” of the colony had always prided itself upon its cosmopolitanism, but singularly enough its cosmopolitan sympathies had tended to exclude the one non-English race in which English colonists there were most intensively interested – with which they had to mingle completely in time. Kimberley then fell completely into rank with other colonial towns. Judging from the opening proceedings, the members of the church had shown a self-reliant and progressive spirit worthy of the place in which they had now made their home. In front of this building the Concentration Camp Memorial was built to honour those who died in the Newton Concentration Camp during the Anglo-Boer War.
On June 9, 1886, The Standard Diamond Mining Company of the Kimberley Mine (Ltd) gave notice to shareholders that Mr. S Marcus had been appointed as the London Agent of the Company for the purpose of opening a London Share Register, Transferring Shares and Paying Dividents. All Shares registered in London would be stamped “Dividends on these Shares payable only in London.
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