CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Regaining Caste
JOHANNESBURG RISING
— 1892–1893 —
On no account brood over your wrongdoing.
Rolling in the muck is not the best way of getting clean.
When the prison authorities removed McLoughlin from Johannesburg, in 1891, it was a rapidly emptying frontier settlement with an uncertain future, mired in economic recession. The state had unintentionally helped see him through the worst personal and professional times of his career. By the time that he returned to the Rand, nine months later, at age 33, it was a more established mining town with the potential of becoming the capital city of the world’s gold mining industry. The return of buoyant economic times unleashed the uninhibited social spirit of the frontier as never before, while the government and mine owners struggled valiantly to evoke the discipline and order necessary for a civilised urban environment. The result was a profound disjuncture between the quotidian realities of a frontier-like existence on the one hand and the supposed control that characterised an established state on the other. The interstices of that unstable dispensation provided Jack McLoughlin with a milieu that he was very comfortable in, and, in order to understand fully how his life unfolded between 1892 and 1895, the year that was to determine his fate, it needs somehow to be recaptured.
For the privileged few in search of long-term profit, those with capital and insight, even the bad times are good. For the most financially adroit of the Rand’s emerging capitalists, the economic downturn of 1889–92 presented precisely such an opportunity. The MacArthur-Forrest process promised huge profits. Poorly performing mining operations were sold and only the best retained to provide a revenue stream for even more ambitious projects. Extensive blocks of mining rights were bought up to the south of the town where richer and more tractable parts of the reef were intercepted at greater depths. The consolidation of mineral-rich properties allowed for economies of scale in ore-crushing and gold-recovery processes at a time when the industry was setting up a central refinery. Other benefits came from pooling human resources and sharing accountants, geologists, engineers and skilled mine managers.1
These advances facilitated the emergence of a new type of financial giant. From 1890, a few of the largest corporations, such as Wernher, Beit and Co, not only rationalised their assets but developed large ‘finance houses’ to back longer-term developments. Highly diversified portfolios allowed former outcrop mines with proven revenue streams to cross-subsidise deep-level mines where extensive preliminary underground workings militated against instant profitability. Rand Mines Limited, launched in 1893, was the prototype of the ‘group scheme’ and was soon followed by Consolidated Goldfields of South Africa Ltd and a half-dozen others. These financial and technical initiatives helped stabilise the new mining operations, and despite the persistence of a significant element of pure market manipulation, the stage was set for a recovery of the industry in 1892–94 that eventually peaked in the famous ‘Kaffir Boom’ of 1895.2
Early in 1891, a horse-drawn tramway running close on five miles from Jeppe in the east to Fordsburg in the west was opened and, in September 1892, Johannesburg was at last linked to the Cape by rail. In the grid of dusty streets around Market Square, low-slung whitewashed bars, canteens and shops made way for modern businesses housed in buildings two and three storeys high, some sporting iron-hemmed balconies.3 The horse-dominated economy slowly retreated in the face of coal, steam-power and modern industry. By 1895, the town boasted close on 100 000 residents, but comparatively few citizens.
As a male-dominated town Johannesburg, by definition, lacked women. A census taken in 1896 revealed that within a three-mile radius of Market Square, white males outnumbered white females by two to one, while black males outnumbered black females by 10 to one. With the notable exception of some wealthy and a few middle-class elements, it was a town almost without wives. A nagging uncertainty about the long-term future of the goldfields and a shortage of houses at affordable rents ensured that most white working-class immigrants, including miners, were seen as being ‘single’ even when they were married. Better-paid workers lived in boarding-houses or rented rooms in a few large houses.
Some independent-minded white women with domestic skills found positions as cooks, housekeepers or servants in the homes of the rich.4 Most others entered the entertainment or service sectors where their duties revolved around amusing or caring for tens of thousands of working men without wives. A disproportionately large number of music halls and theatres provided a stream of itinerant actresses, dancers and singers with work where they often had to contend with audiences that were drunk, rude or violent. In the early 1890s, ‘chorus girls’ were so prone to deserting the show for a husband or lover that the impresario, Luscombe Searelle, demanded a deposit of £250 before agreeing to take them on inland tours to mining towns.5 Barmaids and prostitutes – categories that could and frequently did overlap – were in the front rank of those women expected to cater for the emotional and physical needs of young, white, working-class males.6
The town had more than 500 bars and beer halls, many with names reflecting the city, county or country of origin of the proprietor in a town filled with nostalgic Anglophone immigrants. But beyond a certain sameness on the outside, inside, the pubs catered for a score or more overt or covert functionalities and specialisations, legal and illegal. Barmaids served aficionados from all walks of life in search of company that appreciated athletics, billiards, boxing, burglary, cards, cricket, clan loyalties, darts, dice, deserters, dogs, footpads, Friendly Societies, hunting, hometown boys, horses, kinsmen, music, pigeons, pickpockets, rat-killing, safe-cracking, theatres, whores and a dozen other interests.7
Most barmaids were locked into settings designed to ease cash out of male pockets by encouraging libidinous thoughts among drunken bachelors and supposedly single men, and trouble swirled in their footsteps. They fought with the proprietors, their wives, other barmaids and clients importuning them for sex. When they did chance to enter into serious relationships, they frequently found themselves at odds with other lovers, absent or present, known or unknown, and, less frequently, with irate spouses. Some barmaids stole cash or alcohol from the bar, while those who engaged in casual prostitution fleeced unwary customers. One enterprising husband-and-wife team set up an elaborate blackmail operation to entrap a visiting British Member of Parliament.8
Even as a tent town, in the 1880s, Johannesburg had its fair share of prostitutes. Predictably, early arrivals included impoverished white women from port cities in the south. They were soon followed, albeit in lesser numbers, by black women from the coastal colonies who may have been even more impecunious. But as with the barmaids – indeed, many of them were barmaids by day and prostitutes by night – women of ‘mixed race’ soon dominated the sector. The largest influx of ‘coloured’ prostitutes occurred in the early 1890s, when Cape Town and Port Elizabeth were declared ‘scheduled towns’ in terms of the Contagious Diseases Act.9 It was only after 1894–95, once most of the southern African rail network had been completed, that the provision of sexual services by coloured women was eclipsed by ‘organised vice’ on a grand scale. American gangsters and east European prostitutes, along with Belgian, French and German pimps and women, came to dominate large brothels run along business lines as dedicated mass sexual outlets.10
Not all coloured women, however, were either full or part-time prostitutes, and there were several other ‘respectable’ venues where they met and interacted with immigrant white workers from the northern hemisphere. Coloured women were in demand as chars, general servants and cooks in boarding houses, rented houses, or hotels at a time when few black women, but some black men, were employed as domestic workers. Here, in spaces that lent themselves to greater privacy, they caught the eye of men without women. Chief Detective Robert Ferguson, it will be recalled, was one of those married to an ‘off-coloured’ Cape woman.
Barmaid-prostitutes, however, remained at the centre of much casual or fully commercialised sex. But, even for them, the distinction between domestic work and prostitution could often become blurred. Some, while working in a bar or beer hall, took on client-lovers who lived in the rooms behind the premises, and then provided them with the full range of home comforts including cooking, laundry and sewing services. Others, operating out of hired rooms, ventured out after dark to cheap working-class outfits – such as the Garrick or Nabob bars – notorious for staging ‘low dances’ over weekends. At the apex of the trade in commercial sex, however, stood several ‘houses of ill-fame’‒ brothels overseen by ‘madams’ supervising several younger coloured females.11
After 1892 the return of regular and better-waged employment for immigrant miners allowed many workers to engage more freely in other aspects of working-class culture, some of them less female-centred. Much of this involved a frenzied chase after money, made all the more urgent because, even after it had been integrated into the subcontinent’s railway network, Johannesburg remained a notoriously expensive place in which to live. Moreover, at a time when mine owners and speculators were becoming millionaires, ordinary folk often fell prey to the feeling that they were losing out on the ‘good times’ that everybody else was secretly benefiting from.12 It gave rise to a psychological climate in which everyday gambling and frenetic speculation could go beyond the need for cash or the search for recreation.
Gambling and horse-racing appealed to Lancastrians in general and the Manchester-Irish in particular. These pastimes taking root in the frontier settlement earned the instant disapproval of the State President and his God-fearing government.13 In 1889, legislation outlawing gambling – but not sweepstakes – was passed in Pretoria. But then, just as the infant gold mining industry dipped into a recession, the republic, along with the rest of southern Africa, was swept up in ‘a sweepstake craze’.14 North of the Vaal, the madness refused to lift despite the prevailing bad times and – perhaps because of this – betting and horse-racing on Sundays were prohibited by law in 1891.15 Games of chance, too, proved remarkably enduring and positively thrived once the good times returned. By January 1893, police were having to stage regular raids on clandestine ‘gambling hells’, most of which were within easy walking distance of the Market Square.16 For much of the period leading up to the Jameson Raid, in 1895, the Kruger government found itself pursuing policies that were poorly aligned, if not in open conflict, with elements of male white working-class culture on the Witwatersrand.
At the height of a betting mania, in late 1893, the tenuous links between chance, spectator sport and wagering took on forms that left most supposedly ‘backward’ Boers bemused or horrified. It was another of history’s ironies that, just as the Kruger government set about attempting to control or eliminate those sports it considered to be undesirable because they were driven only by the need for financial gain, reformers in Britain, including Henry Salt – whose Animals’ Rights: Considered in Relation to Social Progress was published in 1894 – were seeking to eradicate ‘blood sports’. It was a rare moment, one to be savoured, when Old Testament precepts and modern views briefly overlapped.
On the Rand, promoters and publicans, such as Tommy Harris or Henry Croon at the Stockwell Arms, who ran a weekly ‘ratting sweepstake’, constructed large indoor pits that their sport depended on. Much loved in Lancashire and Staffordshire, ‘ratting’ was a popular working-class pastime and, by 1893, it succeeded in attracting a significant local following. Rodents – of which there were any number in town – were cast into pits where Manchester or Staffordshire terriers, or dogs of various other breeds were set loose on them. Wagers were taken as to which of the dogs could bite most rats to death within a set time, or how many rats could be killed by a single dog in a period agreed upon.17
The Pelican Bar, featuring well-organised dog-fighting, attracted many of the meanest characters in town and soon became notorious. ‘That such pitiful scenes are allowed to be enacted in civilized Johannesburg,’ the evening paper complained, in 1891, ‘surpasses one’s comprehension.’ Moving along the lines being advocated by Henry Salt, a disapproving reporter suggested that: ‘there is no sport in an event which is at once so brutal, bloody and degrading’. But progressive views about animal rights struggled to take root on the Witwatersrand. Reports on upcoming dog-fights were routinely carried in the newspapers well into the mid-1890s.18
The Kruger government’s attention was focused elsewhere. It had long since decided that there were things more degrading than dog-fighting, among them grown men battering each other to a pulp for money in ‘prize-fights’ or boxing contests. In this, as with gambling, Pretoria’s view was out of line with those in Britain and its evolving male sub-cultures.
Organised fights, with backers putting up the funds for a winner-take-all purse, dated back to earliest times on the goldfields. But contests – held under London Prize Ring Rules, which allowed for a bare-knuckled or thin-skin gloved combination of boxing and wrestling – first attracted the attention of the government when the world heavyweight championship was staged in Johannesburg, in July 1889. Barney Barnato, the diamond magnate, promoted a contest between the ‘local’ JR Couper, the son of a Scottish minister, and Woolf Bendoff, who, like Barnato, hailed from London’s East End, for a purse of £4 500. The fight brought the town to a standstill, attracted international attention, and was won by Couper, who triumphed in a contest lasting 26 rounds.19
Back in Pretoria, the fight was considered to be demeaning and morally indefensible. Within days the Volksraad legislated against all fighting for financial gain. Law No 2 of 1889 was endorsed by Kruger’s Executive Committee on 2 December 1889.20 But, by prohibiting all contests for financial reward, the state set its face against the winds of change blowing through a sport that was set on becoming better regulated and more ‘scientific’. By adopting padded gloves and casting off any residual elements of wrestling, old-style ‘prize-fighting’ was making way for modern ‘boxing’.21 The Revised London Prize Ring Rules of 1853 were already making way for the new Marquess of Queensberry Rules. In the year that Law No 2 was passed the Queensberry Rules were adopted in both Canada and the United States.
In Johannesburg, where unwritten codes of masculinity packed a bigger punch than the Ten Commandments, Law No 2 was greeted with anger and disbelief. Opposition to the new law was muted during the recession but picked up when money started flowing back into the goldfields in 1893. The town’s under-educated, under-trained and under-paid police, the Zarps, had to enforce an all-embracing prohibition on a sport undergoing rapid change and that was well embedded in white popular culture.
The sport was forced underground. On the Market Square news of bouts to be held in the back of the Newcastle Bar, or in private rooms, was spread by word of mouth and details of any purse kept secret.22 Plans and venues for contests in which local fighters took on visiting pugilists from Britain or Australia and which were likely to attract a larger number of gamblers and spectators were adapted so as to better conceal them from the police. Some fights – reported on after the event by newspapers at odds with the government – were staged either on the outskirts of the town itself, or on a farm hired for the occasion from some understanding local Boer with a preference for pounds over patriotism.23
The fraught transition from prize-fighting to boxing took place from late 1892 and on through the winter of 1893. After a round of high-profile arrests an unofficial understanding eventually developed between boxing promoters and the state; there would be no further prosecutions under the provisions of Law No 2 provided that all bouts were governed by the Queensberry Rules. As with gambling by cards or dice, or horse-racing and sweepstakes, the upswing in the economy in 1893 marked a high point in the masculine sub-culture of the Witwatersrand. The testosterone frenzy, however, went well beyond professional circles.
Drunken or spontaneous fights inside bars, where they were enjoyed by fellow-carousers, were commonplace. Taken outside, into the streets, they were watched by cheering clients and passers-by who spontaneously formed themselves into the traditional ‘square’. Primitive encounters, rough-and-tumble affairs incorporating punching, kicking and wrestling moves, never disappeared from the repertoire of street-fighting in the town, and it was athleticism, fitness or brute strength that determined the outcome of most such bouts. But, after 1892, everyday conflicts and serious questions of honour alike were more likely to be settled by fights that were partly informed by the Queensberry Rules.24
Old-world Pretoria itself was not fully immune to the fever of honour and masculinity sweeping across the Highveld. In January 1893, the continentally educated Editor of the Volksstem, Dr FV Engelenburg, angered by disparaging remarks made about Kruger in private during the presidential election campaign, repeatedly challenged his adversary, a Mr Lofthouse, to ‘a duel’. But duelling, with pistols or swords, harked back to an earlier era and had been prohibited by legislation passed in 1865. Lofthouse laid a charge against the Editor for encouraging him to engage in a criminal act. Engelenburg, however, continued to lay down challenges until he was arrested. The impasse was eventually overcome by way of a discreet intervention by the State President.25
Back in Johannesburg, where revolvers were only a little more likely to remain holstered during disputes, fist-fever raged on unabated well into the mid-1890s. Under-educated ‘hard men’ without family obligations or the funds to go to law, bashed and smashed away at each other, allowing blood and bruises to decide what reasoned argument could not achieve, while the police looked on.26 While much of this street-scrapping could be attributed to the dominant English working-class elements drawn from Lancashire, Warwickshire and Yorkshire, there was, however, a minor but identifiably Mancunian component to it that could be traced all the way back to nineteenth-century Ireland.27 This wafer-thin Celtic streak in local popular culture was further bolstered when ‘Marvellous Melbourne’ and the Victorian economy went into decline in 1891–93; that is, at the same moment that the Rand was hauling itself out of its own recession.28
* * *
From 1891 to 1895, when the first stream of Celts to the Rand had more or less dried up, the Witwatersrand experienced a modest inflow of Australians and Irish-Australians.29 Among them were a fair number of miners and mechanics seeking work on the new deeper-level mines. Yet again, 1893 formed the high-water mark for such immigrants; by September that year, the possibility of founding an Australian association was being publicly mooted.30 The influx was accompanied by a sharp rise in the number of professional sportsmen from urban New South Wales and Victoria. Among the latter were several bookmakers, billiard players and Irish-Australian boxers.31 And, bringing up the rear of all of this were a few criminals who joined the ranks of the earlier arrivals such as Jack McLoughlin and WJ Kelly.
After 1891, there was a greater likelihood of meeting an Australian in the bars or on the streets of Johannesburg than there had been in the late 1880s. This is worth noting because, once he reached the zenith of his notoriety in the mid-1890s, McLoughlin was, on more than one occasion, described as being an ‘Australian’ of the ‘larrikin-type’.32 The outline of his ethnic identity, as perceived by the press and reported to members of the public, portrayed more than just his own preferences; it reflected some of the eddies in the wider currents of white male immigration. Gangsters actively construct their ethnic identities – but, for such identities to be plausible, they have to be rooted in the social realities of the day.
Who exactly he was, how to reinsert himself into the underworld and make ends meet were questions that required urgent attention once McLoughlin returned to Johannesburg in June 1892. Of his old Singaporean friend, Jack McCann, there was still no sign, but it was not all bad news. JW Brown, son of the Ancoats pharmacist, calling himself ‘Jack the Ripper’, had at last found his way north after sitting out most of the recession in the Kimberley gaol for his exploits as a highwayman.33 McLoughlin, Brown and others took in a 14-year-old pickpocket, James Field, known on the street as ‘Scotty Newberry’, and set up a gang that appears to have specialised in house, office and shop break-ins. It was the first recorded instance of McLoughlin taking an interest in the criminal careers of, if not teenage boys, then those of much younger men.34
The gang was reasonably successful in and around the town centre and left no archival paper trail to indicate that the police were on to it. McLoughlin, whose drinking had moderated after the trauma of Potchefstroom and his recent spell in prison, seems to have settled down reasonably well and then looked around for new targets along the length of the Witwatersrand. These more ambitious projects were in line with his changing personal priorities and the strengthening economy, and showed sufficient political consciousness for them to gain a measure of popular support. It was noticeable how, during 1892–93, he frequently singled out the assets of the Boer state that had cost him an arm, or the mine owners who dispossessed the diggers of their claims, for criminal attention. It was during this same 24-month period in the resurgent ‘good times’ that his reputation for buying miners drinks and meals or helping cash-strapped workers with financial assistance grew.35
In 1892 there were a half-dozen big jobs which, while impossible to link conclusively to McLoughlin, nevertheless hinted strongly at his gang’s involvement. Amongst them were a few under-reported safe robberies at the Johannesburg Turf Club, which, for reasons that will become clear shortly, pointed in his direction. In mid-June, in a move reminiscent of Charlie Harding’s earlier arson attack on the Johannesburg Landdrost’s offices, an unsuccessful attempt was made to remove the safe and set fire to the Mining Commissioner’s office in Boksburg. Eight weeks later over £1 000 in cash was lost to robbers when a large safe in the government offices at Florida, on the west Rand, was dynamited.36
Whatever the new source of funding was, it was around this time that Jack McLoughlin appears to have taken greater personal care of himself, dressed more fashionably and, as we noted above, entertained more frequently.37 He was not alone in his quest for a touch of sartorial elegance. His friend, JW Brown, was said to dress ‘flashily’ and William Cooper, the highwayman, wore a Mexican-style sombrero and a bright, flaring necktie while holding up migrant workers. McLoughlin’s most notable acquisition, however, was his extraordinary prosthesis.
The huge wounds inflicted by soft bullets fired from Colt- and Springfield-manufactured weapons during the American Civil War of 1861–65 had induced the greatest number of amputations ever witnessed in modern times. In the wake of the war, entrepreneurs designed and developed a growing range of artificial limbs, including some with moving parts.38 A mining town like Johannesburg offered American exporters a ready peace-time market. McLoughlin, still set on reinventing himself, found what he was looking for at a leading pharmacy on the Market Square – an artificial arm with a socket that slipped over his stump. But the real appeal of the thing lay at its extremity. Attached to the lower arm was a hand, replete with movable fingers that could be adjusted so as to clasp a knife, fork or other small instrument. It wasn’t cheap: the accessory as a whole cost him £12 10s – fully a month’s wages for an unskilled white miner.39
He soon mastered the artificial hand, using it when eating or manipulating the small tools necessary for any after-dark work. In underworld circles and sensationalist sections of the Johannesburg press, the prosthesis eventually acquired mythological proportions. McLoughlin’s hand, it was rumoured, had concealed within it a dagger that could be activated mechanically and used to deadly effect.40 This fiction overlapped, in part, with a contemporary English working-class urban legend associated with garrison towns. ‘Spring Heeled Jack’, it was said, was a robber with ‘iron claws’ who, as his name suggested, was capable of prodigious jumping and leaping when fleeing from the police or young women he had molested and left in a dishevelled state.41
With JW Brown passing himself off as ‘Jack the Ripper’ and Jack McLoughlin being seen as a sort of ‘Spring Heeled Jack’ character, the two men reached a high point in careers marked by a propensity to drift in and out of the real and imagined worlds. Both their ghost-like alter-egos conjured up images of misogyny, if not terror.42 McLoughlin, who already carried a weapon, used the prosthesis in ways calculated to discomfort people. He added to the air of mystery that surrounded him by removing the limb and placing it on a nearby chair or table when engaging in conversation.43 For the most part, however, he was interested in the prosthesis as a cosmetic aid that helped provide his vulnerable underlying self-image with a veneer of normality. Dismayed by the obvious difference in colour between the prosthesis and his own complexion, he took to slipping a cotton glove over the artificial hand.44
Boasting some of his new-found confidence and cash, McLoughlin set about his 1892 end-of-year campaign with gusto. The gang was so active over late November and early December that not even the Zarps could help noticing a spike in the number of burglaries and thefts leading up to the festive season. On Christmas Eve, McLoughlin, Brown, six other men and the boy-apprentice, Scotty Newberry, appeared before Landdrost van den Bergh charged with theft. The prosecutor was not unduly put out when all of the accused, bar the mastermind, were acquitted for want of any corroborating evidence. McLoughlin’s case, however, was different.
First, he had been found to be in possession of ‘burglarious implements’ and skeleton keys. Secondly, flush with cash, he had hired lawyer AB van Os to defend him as soon as it became clear that the state was far more interested in him than in the other gang members. Asked by the prosecutor what a tool designed for inserting into keyholes and disabling locks was used for, McLoughlin claimed, mischievously, that the instrument was used to curl the ends of his moustache! That suggestion was swiftly refuted by a locksmith who stated that it was known to be a tool used by burglars. Nevertheless Van Os did not labour entirely in vain: instead of being sent to prison, his client was sentenced to three months’ hard labour or a fine of £25. It was a snip at the price, the fine was paid and then, just to add insult to prosecutorial injury, an appeal was noted.45
The unfortunate Christmas Eve court appearance, reminiscent of what had happened back in 1879, did nothing to deter McLoughlin’s on-going scheming for a huge end-of-season haul. The omens were good and the planning far advanced. The last day of the year fell on a Saturday and would coincide with a race-day at Turffontein. The meeting was bound to be followed by a great deal of late-night revelry and noise of the sort one might expect of a mining town. He put a great deal of thought into selecting a team that relied on Ancoats men who would be supported by a few Manchester-Irish who had good reasons to be involved in the job.
Drawing Mike Hart, the jewel thief and a close friend of Ferguson’s, into the plot was a stroke of genius. The fishmonger’s son provided the ringleaders – McLoughlin and Brown – with excellent insurance. If things did go wrong, the Chief Detective could be relied upon to try to bail out his gambling partner, Hart. The two other members of the gang, Bucklow and Jones, were punters who, like many miners, did not often come off best at the races and had no love of bookmakers. If successful, the robbers could rely on a good deal of working-class sympathy.
The object of their attention was a free-standing safe in the ground-floor offices of the Royal Chambers Building in the town’s centre. It belonged to the man who operated the totalisator at Turffontein, William Grey Rattray. There was, however, a good deal more to Rattray than caught the eye. The fellow kept one foot in the Kimberley diamond fields and the other in the goldfields at Johannesburg. He was a financial Jack of all Trades, a ‘speculator’, at a time when the term covered legal as well as illegal trading. Besides having an interest in betting and horses, which may have helped him launder money, Rattray also dealt in jewellery and scrip. On the Rand, where gold amalgam, gemstones or share certificates were never in short supply, it is possible that McLoughlin and the others had all had other business dealings with him.
Late on the sunny afternoon of 31 December, Rattray left the track with the ‘day’s profit from the machine’ as well as the ‘totalisator money not paid out on the last race’, made his way back to his deserted office in town and stuffed the cash into an already full safe. Next door, the Royal Bar, which catered for the day-trade, closed shortly before 9.00 pm.
Between three and four in the morning, a barrow was wheeled in through the Fox Street entrance to the building and a specialist screwdriver used to gain entry via an office window. The safe was tipped over onto a bed of unused tote tickets to deaden the sound, then lifted onto the barrow and taken into the veld at the Wemmer Mine only a few miles away. The safe door was split ‘clean in two’ with a well-placed charge of dynamite. Over £2 300 in notes and gold, cheques worth £500 (which were promptly abandoned), a ‘handsome parcel of diamonds’ and diamond jewellery worth £1 500 as well as some easily negotiable share certificates were removed. All in all, valuables conservatively estimated to have been worth more than £4 000 were stolen. It was a sum that would have taken five miners four years each to earn.46
Brown, recently of Kimberley, took most of his share in gemstones; Hart, with experience of cross-border fencing, may have settled for diamond jewellery, while McLoughlin seems to have taken most of his share in cash. There may have been other Lancastrian friends eligible for a cut because it was claimed that it would have taken more than a half-dozen men to move the safe.
It was thought that the thieves would make for the train and flee south and so it was suggested that the station be watched. But this was unnecessary. Somewhere along the line things had gone wrong, and by Sunday night the main suspects were all in custody. The arrest of a close friend of the Chief Detective’s was so unexpected that it occasioned press comment.47 McLoughlin’s team was in trouble – but so too, perhaps, were Ferguson and a few of his friends.
The Chief Detective was already the subject of suspicion in official quarters of being involved in the booming trade in illicitly acquired gold amalgam. It had been a bad year for Ferguson. In 1892, there had been only eight successful convictions for gold law contraventions. The Chamber of Mines was so frustrated by amalgam theft that it was already drafting legislation for the Volksraad in Pretoria that eventually proved so invasive of personal liberties that it threatened to bring the Witwatersrand to a standstill.48 If Hart, Brown or McLoughlin had known about Ferguson’s underworld dealings, as they probably did, his career would have been at stake.
Ferguson, 24 months later, feigned knowing so little about McLoughlin that he could not spell his name correctly or issue a description of the one-armed man. But he could not have failed to notice who the principal suspect in the Rattray case was – coming, as it did, in the wake of McLoughlin’s appearance in court only days earlier. The latter, already unhappy with Ferguson for having put away Jack McCann, now had the opportunity to study his adversary at closer quarters and quickly concluded that he had the measure of the man.
It took Ferguson and the state more than a week to arraign the prisoners for a preliminary examination. It was a curious business from the outset. The Public Prosecutor, for reasons he chose not to disclose, asked that Hart and Bucklow be released immediately. Bail for the three other suspects was set at a staggering £1 000, and the case set down to be heard in the Police Court a week later. When McLoughlin, Brown and Jones next appeared before the Police Court, they were represented by counsel who asked that the amount set for their bail be reduced. The Magistrate refused and then recused himself on the grounds that he could not hear the case because he had signed the warrants for the arrest of the suspects. Mystery upon mystery followed.
When McLoughlin next appeared, on 19 January 1893, the prosecutor who had previously asked for bail to be set at £1 000 because the case against the accused was so ‘strong’, asked that he too be released for want of evidence against him, leaving only Brown and ‘Deaf Peter’ Jones to face trial. But, hours later, Jones, too, was released and after a further three days, it was reported in the press that: ‘John Brown, the last of the accused to be discharged, had the diamonds found in his possession returned to Mr Rattray’. It was ‘the last that was likely to be heard about the matter’.49 McLoughlin, six months out of prison, was off the hook for a major safe-cracking job, very confident and well placed to benefit from the growing economic upswing.