The Southern African Mineral Revolution and the College of Banditry
— c 1886 —
’Tis Ireland gives England her soldiers, her generals too.
Like many others who had turned their backs on the industrialising north and headed south to try their luck in British colonies that commanded huge swathes of the Atlantic, Indian and Pacific Oceans, Jack McLoughlin knew little about his chosen new field of operations.
By the mid-nineteenth century most of land-gorged, rain-scarce southern Africa had languished in an agricultural torpor induced by weak domestic and modest international demand for its products for more than 200 years. Then, in an unguarded moment in the late 1860s, at the centre of an unpromising inland area, nature left one of its most sought-after treasures lying around after a bout of careless play. The discovery of the world’s greatest diamond fields aroused the subcontinent from its slumber. It transformed a previously thinly populated plateau exploited only seasonally by many black and a few white nomadic tribesmen of European origin, into a burgeoning market centred on Kimberley. The city harvested excellent gemstones for which there was infinite demand.
But fate, not content with an initial round of mischief-making, went on to ensure that the remote interior was doubly blessed, or twice cursed. Barely two decades later, in the early 1880s, it became known that within a few hundred miles of the new diamond city, gold – in significant quantities – was to be found in the eastern parts of the sprawling region beyond the Vaal River. The new discovery lay in the modestly endowed Zuid-Afrikaansche Republiek (ZAR), whose origins dated back to the last of the deep sleep of the 1830s, when thousands of Boers, frustrated by the abolition of slavery in the Cape, had trekked north to escape their overbearing British rulers. But the eastern Transvaal goldfields had barely had time to draw the attention of adventurers and the investing public north, when, in 1886, the biggest goldfields ever were discovered along the Witwatersrand.
The Southern African Interior c 1880‒1895
With industrial Britain approaching the apex of its geopolitical powers, the hitherto neglected southern African interior and its coastal hinterland became the site of armed eruptions between blacks, Boers and Brits and combinations thereof. These would take 50 years to subside to manageable proportions and a century to reach anything approaching a sustainable solution. Imperialism, predicated on expanding trade backed by significant reserves of gold, may not have been driven solely by economics but Britain was never averse to employing its military might. The armed forces secured the island kingdom’s incoming supplies of food and raw materials and guaranteed that increasing quantities of finished goods reached distant markets where they enforced ‘free trade’.
In southern Africa sustained conflict marked huge expanses of territory underpinned by mineral wealth said to be of staggering proportions. Estimates of reserves were adjusted upwards constantly in places where boundaries had always been semi-permeable and poorly defined. Scores of chieftainships and kingdoms, along with established colonial states and independent republics, new and old, emerged and were incorporated, or mutated and fell, with bewildering rapidity. Borders, frontiers and property, already the subject of deep-seated disputes between indigenous inhabitants of colour and the growing stream of incoming whites, acquired a new and often unenforceable importance.
Boers, long-established or recently-arrived colonists, shopkeepers and white labourers activated by the prospect of profit spread out over the plateau to become commercial farmers, diggers, mine owners, prospectors or traders. By virtue of the colour of their skin, whites competed on privileged or wholly unfair terms with Africans and other cattle owners, hunter-gatherers or subsistence farmers of a darker hue. Indigenous peoples ever more confined to ‘locations’ or ‘reserves’ were transformed into peasants, migrant labourers or workers increasingly dependent on wages earned in the new mines or at other places of employment in the mushrooming small towns and cities of the far-off interior.
In the twinkling of an historical eye, over enormous tracts of land stretching tens of thousands of square miles, emerged a would-be country sitting on a cornucopia of mineral wealth. It was a sprawling place that had no convincing natural boundaries to separate it from the rest of the continent. It lacked any over-arching political authority enjoying widespread legitimacy. And it could only aspire to developing the few cultural bonds that came from shared ethnicities, language or religion that hinted at a larger, integrated society. The gods, having left their valuables lying about amidst great natural beauty, condemned the finders to the labour of Sisyphus. They were doomed to perpetual ‘nation-building’, to a never-ending search for social harmony. It was to be a country without a distinctive name, a place best found by following a direction; it was the southern part of something else, something bigger.
The tremors of imperial expansion set loose the corrosive forces that herald the coming of industrial capitalism everywhere. There were frantic attempts to acquire new territory, to defend the status quo ante, secure independence, or seal the best deal in a world turning upside down. Predictably, the area of greatest turbulence lay within the semi-circle that defined the northern limits of the recently discovered diamond and goldfields. Like a rainbow, the appearance of this new multi-textured arc promised that no more disasters were to follow, but the unsettling man-made military and political realities that preceded the outbreak of the South African War of 1899–1902 were all ominous in their own right.
The demise of ‘Griqualand West’ (1873–1880) and emergence of the Bechuanaland Protectorate (1885) prevented further unwanted squalls from howling in through the back door of the diamond industry. In 1881, conservative and deeply religious Boers living beyond the Vaal River had to defeat the British in the First War of Independence so as to regain, and then attempt to seal off, their slow-rooting republic from the harshest forces of modernisation. But the sealant applied from within, let alone beyond, left much to be desired.
To the south-west of their country, half-way between the Witwatersrand goldfields and diamond mines controlled by an imperialistic Cecil Rhodes, the monopolistic De Beers Company and British colonial authorities, a new and wholly unexpected problem emerged. In 1882, Boer freebooter-mercenaries recruited by chiefly African principals who rewarded them with land-grants carved out the Republic of Stellaland and, almost immediately thereafter, the Republic of Goshen. Then in a potentially menacing move which to British ears briefly offered faint echoes of the American War of Independence, the upstart Boer-bandit republics joined forces to form the short-lived ‘United States of Stellaland and Goshen’ (1882–1885). Elsewhere, within its own expansive northern and eastern regions, an overstretched ZAR administration faced constant challenges from powerful African chieftains. In 1890, Rhodes, in an attempt designed to outflank and seal off yet more of the ZAR, recruited a ‘pioneer column’ to occupy and settle land north of the Limpopo in what was to become Rhodesia.
Yet, despite all the geopolitical positioning and land-grabbing by the dominant British and Boer forces, there was one intractable ‘foreign’ anomaly that lay to the east. In the neighbouring Portuguese territory of Mozambique, a fine natural harbour at Lourenço Marques occupied a site of considerable strategic importance. Fever-ridden Delagoa Bay soon became the object of envious British and Boer eyes. The proximity of the port to the eastern Transvaal goldfields, the Witwatersrand and the diamond mines of the south pointed to the need for a rail link to steamships that serviced the new oceanic pathways to globalising trade.
Well before the man-made corridor between Delagoa Bay and the Witwatersrand had the railroad imprinted on it in the early 1890s, Lourenço Marques serviced far more than the orthodox, legal import-export trade of the region. As part of a remote colony governed by an opaque legal system, it was without formal extradition treaties binding it to the British colonies to the south or the independent Boer states of the interior. Delagoa Bay occupied an unusual liminal status amidst all the armed conflicts and industrialisation of the continent’s troubled interior.1
Under the nominal control of notoriously corrupt bureaucrats and port officials, Lourenço Marques boasted the usual array of seedy waterside establishments. It was the entry point of choice for smuggled arms as well as illegal immigrants, pimps, prostitutes and spies – and for the trans-shipment of huge supplies of cheap alcohol destined for black and white consumption in the new mining towns.2
In return for an unwritten contract that allowed for the taxable import of questionable substances used in the social control of workers on the Highveld, Lourenço Marques took in, and housed, antisocial elements and white fugitives fleeing law-enforcement agencies throughout southern Africa. Throughout the 1880s and 1890s it was the favoured exit point of bandits, bank robbers, confidence tricksters, fraudsters, diamond and gold smugglers, highwaymen, murderers, rapists, thieves and white slave traffickers waiting to escape into the expanding world.3
Thus, long before the destruction and slaughter of the notorious turn-of-the-century conflict between Boer and Briton that further promoted the name of a country-in-the-making, many peoples in the northern reaches of southern Africa were either preparing for war, in the throes of one, or recovering from one barely past. Profoundly unsettled political and socio-economic conditions on either side of the borders of states and smaller polities that appeared or disappeared within a matter of months, were an essential part of the preconditions necessary for the emergence of the organised brigandage and other crimes manifesting themselves among the thousands of adventurers, deserters, navvies or otherwise alienated and rootless whites destined for the Highveld. And attached to this feverish body, always feeding into as well as off the pathologies of industrialisation, was the emerging port on Delagoa Bay.
Important as these developments were, however, there were other factors at work in the South African Republic and the neighbouring Orange Free State that contributed to the emerging patterns of European criminality in the northern region. Principal among these was the remoteness of the new industries. The diamond and gold mines lay hundreds of miles inland, on an extended plateau, without rail connections to the cities and ports of the coastal colonies. Capitalists and governments hoping for an import‒export bonanza were, for a decade and more, locked into a transport system that depended on horse- or ox-drawn coaches and wagons traversing makeshift roads.
This primitive ‘horse-economy’ – without a meaningful parallel anywhere in the developing world at the time – lingered until the mid-1890s when the last major link in an integrated railway system reached Johannesburg. It added some meaning to the words ‘South Africa’, which gained full political purchase in 1910. But, until 1895, the mineral industries in the developing north remained locked into a startling contradiction as the largest supplies of diamonds and gold the world had ever known had to be transported over huge distances, leaving them vulnerable to the predations of gangs of coach robbers or highwaymen.
The distance separating the mines from the more densely settled areas of African labour along the coastal areas and at the far north-eastern reaches of the South African Republic further complicated the situation. The absence of secure rail transport provided Boer farmers and cash-strapped newly arrived white criminals and workers drawn from the wider Anglophone world with the opportunity to engage in organised theft and robbery. Black workers making their way across the interior to find work on the mines, so as to meet escalating tax demands, were left at risk. In the north and the east, armed Boers intercepted and diverted Africans into ultra-cheap or unpaid seasonal work on farms that were increasingly market-orientated. On the way back black migrants were no less vulnerable. African workers carrying illegally acquired gemstones from Kimberley or wages in cash or gold specie earned on the Witwatersrand, were stripped of their possessions by bogus white policemen demanding ‘passes’ or by armed and mounted highwaymen.
* * *
These, then, were the regional economic dynamics that Jack McLoughlin encountered upon his arrival on the east coast of ‘South Africa’ at the beginning of 1886. The country, but more especially the diamond and gold mining hinterland of the Highveld, was ready to receive him and thousands like him. Many of them were young men in their twenties with changing class and ethnic identities, raised in the mid-Victorian slums of the Industrial Revolution and exposed to a cult of hyper-masculinity born of an earlier era. Subsidised passages provided by the British Army and the Merchant or Royal Navies enabled them to reach the outer fringes of the empire, where they entered the socio-economic circuits of the English-speaking world, wary of settling into domesticity or paid labour, and furthered careers in organised crime.
But, as McLoughlin soon realised, Durban was not Melbourne. Nor did coastal Natal provide him with the network of Irish or Mancunian contacts that he hoped would get him to the new mining frontiers. Without any real alternative, he decided to do as he had done when he abandoned London and get the taxpayer to support him until such time as he was ready to move inland. The British Army, based in the nearby garrison town of Pietermaritzburg, was unlikely to usher him directly into the emerging centres of Johannesburg or Kimberley, but it would give him the chance to work out the lie of the land and meet a few kindred spirits. The Australian police, too, were unlikely to look for him in the ranks of the army.
Fort Napier already housed a fair number of native-born Irishmen or Anglo-Irish males raised in industrial Glasgow, Liverpool or Manchester. It was easy to understand why that should be so. Ireland was England’s first colony. Without significant mineral deposits of the type most in demand by the factories of the nineteenth century and an agricultural potential that was as misunderstood as it was overestimated, much of Catholic Ireland was doomed to live in the shadows of the Industrial Revolution. As with the ‘native reserves’ of southern Africa, population pressure and restricted access to farming land of good quality combined with natural disasters, such as the Great Famine of 1847–52, to ensure that Ireland’s greatest export remained men, women and children.4
Economically marginalised and educationally underprivileged, first in rural Ireland and then to a lesser extent in the ethnic neighbourhoods of cities in north-western England and Scotland, young Irishmen flocked to the banner of the employer of the last resort – the army. The alluring tales of the regimental sergeant-major, recounted over beer in the public house and backed by the promise of the King or Queen’s shilling a day, ensured that the Irish were disproportionately well represented in the armed forces throughout the nineteenth century. In 1831, without the Napoleonic Wars to stimulate industrial output, an extraordinary 42 per cent of all the men in the British Army were Irish-born. By 1861, before the impact of the American Cotton Famine was fully felt in Lancashire, this figure still stood at 28 per cent. As late as 1871, with gradual assimilation and fuller employment in England being partially offset by the radicalisation of Irish politics at home and abroad, fully 25 per cent, or one in four, of all those serving in the British Army were still Irish.5
Fort Napier commanded southern Africa’s north-east. It was located just below the arc of turbulence that stretched from the recently belligerent and victorious South African Republic in the west, to the seemingly dormant Zulu kingdom, recently crushed in the Anglo-Zulu War of 1879, in the east. It left the army well situated to respond to regional conflicts stemming from imperial consolidation or expansion. The army was in reasonable shape.
The Cardwell Reforms of 1870 had effectively halved the periods of enlistment in the artillery, cavalry, engineers and infantry to six years, to be followed by six years in the reserves. The reforms did much to shore up the declining appeal of a career in the army for unemployable males and had been followed by further radical re-organisation. Among the regiments affected by the resulting rationalisation, there were two with a significant Irish presence that were destined to be based at Pietermaritzburg – the 2nd South Lancashire Regiment (1884–87) and the Royal Inniskillings (1886–88). In 1887, these ‘Irish’ regiments were joined by the ‘English’ 64th Regiment – the North Staffordshires.6
Both the Inniskillings, based in north-western Ireland, and the South Lancashires, from Werrington, in Cheshire, had Irishmen of different political persuasions within their ranks. Some, Catholic-Green, were nationalist sympathisers; others, Orange-Protestant, were loyal to the Crown. Private misgivings about serving in the empire’s armed forces heightened tensions amongst troops drawn from different backgrounds.7 Moreover, both ‘Irish’ regiments had, as part of the post-Cardwell innovations, been forced to amalgamate with older Regiments of Foot. All of this meant that, by the time that the ‘Irish’ contingents reached Pietermaritzburg, their commanding officers had to work especially hard to develop new regimental loyalties and maintain esprit de corps. Most of this was done within Fort Napier itself through familiar, repetitive, means – endless drills, inspections, armed manoeuvres and parades.
This psycho-physical drive to shape a collective identity had, however, to be offset against other countervailing pressures that could promote fissiparous tendencies and divide loyalties. The army was consistently troubled by the prospect of the Zulus remobilising to mount a new challenge to regain their recently lost kingdom. This meant that parts of the regiments were deployed at strategic sites in the Natal countryside.
McLoughlin, who had probably enlisted under his own name in the South Lancashire Regiment and undergone basic training at Fort Napier, was just one of many hundreds despatched to serve in an outlying rural area. For several months he was based at Helpmekaar – a remote outpost less than 20 miles from Rorke’s Drift, where, in 1879, a small British garrison had held out against the Zulu army in an epic battle.8 From Helpmekaar he and others undertook highly unpopular bush patrols to investigate and report on any ‘threatening’ developments among the nearby Zulu.
Soldiers working in small units under demanding conditions encouraged close, occasionally even intimate friendships. Patrolling the forests, fields and scrubby wastes of Zululand also provided them with excellent supplementary training. It allowed them to develop as bush fighters and enhanced survival skills. As McLoughlin and others were quick to appreciate, however, the same skills could easily be turned to other ends. For antisocial elements intent on furthering their careers as bandits, coach-robbers or highwaymen, Fort Napier was not only a formidable frontier military stronghold but a virtual College of Banditry.
Bush patrols exposed the urban ‘Irish’ to guns and horses as they learnt how to mount attacks or secure defensive positions. Camping taught them how to ‘read’ the local topography, find fresh water or hunt for game. For those with a facility for languages, circuit-work enabled them to acquire a smattering of the vernacular that helped grease social relations when dealing with friendly locals or giving instructions to those less inclined to assist the redcoats. As importantly, bush patrols provided an opportunity to learn how the local mounted police moved through remote rural areas by day or by night while tracking gun-runners, cattle-rustlers or horse thieves.9
Far from the city and women, bush patrols allowed for the more fulsome expression of the cult of masculinity that dominated nineteenth-century Britain. But the cult sometimes encouraged ambiguities and contradictions that were difficult to control or eliminate. The army viewed most females, other than prostitutes, with suspicion precisely because they threatened to dissolve part of the social glue that held the lower ranks together. The army, or so it claimed, provided troops with an extended ‘male family’.
Any formal caring on the part of the army, however, was supplemented through more ambiguous informal roles when soldiers were called upon to undertake chores such as cleaning, cooking, ironing or washing; Victorian work that was quintessentially ‘female’. The army, and even more so the navy, allowed men to develop various identities and to express a range of sexual preferences in private. Camaraderie and relationships cultivated on bush patrol could make their way back into the barracks where, left unchecked or engaged in indiscreetly, manifested themselves in the ‘problems’ of masturbation or homosexuality. Officers also had to deal with complaints about soldiers raping young African males while out on patrol in isolated locations.10
After a spell in the navy and a criminal apprenticeship served in the shadows of Ned Kelly, entry into the ranks of the South Lancashire Regiment came at a good time for 27-year-old McLoughlin. The army provided him with the opportunity to acquire the skills necessary to further his long-term frontier ambitions. As importantly, the two ‘Irish’ and other regiments – including the 6th Dragoons and the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders – contained a significant number of bold malcontents with criminal records who, like him, envisaged their futures elsewhere. All that was needed to trigger their desertion was one or two promising new mineral discoveries in the more remote interior.
But the first half of 1886 was perhaps not the moment to turn one’s back on the barracks, the mess, or the Queen’s shilling. The diamond-field frontiers were closing rapidly. Kimberley was set to become a tightly controlled mining town run by Rhodes and De Beers with the support of police provided by the Cape government. The eastern Transvaal fields along the De Kaap Valley were only slightly more promising. In 1885, a discovery had been made at the ‘Golden Quarry’ near Barberton that promised much. But, even there, where the ramshackle South African Republican Police were thin on the ground, the most recent figures suggested that production at the older workings may already have peaked. For some months the bold and restless hesitated until it seemed that they might have missed their moment altogether.
* * *
The leader of the hard-drinking, rebellious set that emerged in the mess at Fort Napier and congregated around the low-class watering-holes in Pietermaritzburg during early 1886 was John Hutchings. Charismatic, Irish-born and an admirer of the agrarian secret societies that challenged the English establishment, Hutchings with his family had emigrated to Lancashire when he was a child. His background as a mill-town lad was presumably not very different from that of Jack McLoughlin and others in the South Lancashire Regiment. Recruited in Devonport, in 1883, Hutchings found army discipline difficult, if not impossible, to cope with. In addition to being made to forfeit his pay and being placed on special rations for weeks on end, he once spent a week in military prison.11 In South Africa, he became proficient in Isizulu and Siswati and, at various moments later in his career – like McLoughlin – was frequently comfortable in African company. Indeed, Hutchings eventually married a black woman and his descendants are still to be found in Swaziland.12
John O’Brien, another recruited in Devonport, was a close friend of Hutchings and the two had been shipmates on the voyage out to Natal in the mid-1880s. A Lancastrian, O’Brien hailed from Manchester, if not from Ancoats itself. A criminal-dreamer with a pronounced anti-clerical streak, O’Brien had strong Irish nationalist sympathies. He often claimed – falsely – that his brother had been one of the Manchester Martyrs. O’Brien was as adept at changing his name or assuming a false identity as were many others in a growing group of malcontents.13
James Williams was another fugitive from the hard school of poverty in Liverpool or Manchester and an early entrant into the criminal dream-world that tempted the first generation of Anglo-Irish. He and his older brother, a habitual offender with a lengthy criminal record, were already in Australia in the late 1870s; in 1884 both were active as thieves in the Melbourne suburb of Fitzroy. It may well have been there that he and Jack McLoughlin first met; in fact, it is possible that they travelled to Natal together.
Williams may have enlisted in the South Lancashires under an assumed name, and later preferred to call himself ‘William James Kelly’. Like Ned Kelly, albeit for different reasons, he developed an interest in banks and any form of portable wealth. There was also something of the confidence-trickster about Williams, who had an eye for the ladies, with whom he enjoyed considerable success. Along with other graduates from the College of Banditry, WJ Kelly became an extraordinarily mobile criminal and moved about southern Africa – as well as in and out of Lourenço Marques – with ease during the early 1890s.14
It could have been shared Australian experiences that cemented the friendship between WJ Kelly and McLoughlin during the earliest days of their underworld collaboration in southern Africa. The bond was further strengthened when the two of them and John O’Brien shared a life-changing moment five years later, long after they had all turned their backs on army life. But WJ was not McLoughlin’s closest friend; that distinction fell to John McCann.
Better known as Jack – to rhyme with ‘Mac’, as with his friend, McCann was Irish-born, from Dungannon in County Tyrone. As an illiterate 19-year-old labourer, McCann had joined the Inniskillings in 1881, shortly before the regiment set sail for the Straits Settlements. Like Kelly, he may have met McLoughlin when they were much younger and more likely to form lasting friendships. The paths of the Inniskillings and the Albatross crossed in Singapore, where the Irishmen could have shared the demi-monde delights of Malay Street. McCann contracted syphilis while in the Straits. Then poorly understood, the disease undermined his health and may have helped shape his personality as something of a loner.15
A short fellow of restless temperament, McCann was happiest on horseback, crossing borders and covering the huge distances of southern Africa as if they were mere parish boundaries back in rural Ulster. Like most of his Fort Napier cohort, McCann never hesitated to take an alias but, lacking a basic education, was frequently less successful in avoiding the police than many of his underworld associates. His inability to read and write may also have made him more reliant on McLoughlin than he might otherwise have been. Whatever the reason, the two Jacks knew they could rely on each other. 16
Hutchings, McLoughlin, McCann, Kelly and O’Brien became leaders of those Anglo-Irish and Irish malcontents in the garrison who had difficulty in adjusting to army life. Quintessentially ‘hard men’ of the type so admired in certain circles of Victorian society, the five renegades soon had a sizeable following in the South Lancashire Regiment. Their followers were drawn largely from the cities at the core of northern, industrialising society. If the events of late 1886 are anything to go by – and they seem to be – the five could ‘command’ 50 or more disgruntled men. The anger, disillusionment and frustrations of those scarred by the Industrial Revolution were coming to the boil, far away, in the southern hemisphere.
If the primary concern of many in the South Lancashire Regiment could be traced back to the material, as opposed to political, circumstances in which they found themselves, there were others – in the Inniskillings – drawn from rural Ireland, whose grievances were more political than economic. Indeed, just 12 months later, in 1887, tensions between Orange and Green elements within the Inniskillings contributed to a drunken brawl that ended in a mutiny. This low point in regimental discipline culminated in the execution of a soldier, Joseph McCrea.17
In 1886–87, Fort Napier was the site of much grumbling by scores of Irishmen of various stripes waiting on the coming of some unknown but better dispensation. In the South Lancashires many of the Anglo-Irish, once removed from Ireland and raised in an acquisitive society, waited for a new economic star to appear in the night sky. For them, it would light the way through the South African bush to the adventurous life and wealth they longed for. Others, accustomed to rural life and contemplating a longer march to happiness, placed their trust in Westminster and dreamt that Charles Parnell and the new Irish National League would produce the change in political fortunes they longed for back in their motherland.
Locally, things were – on the face of it – becoming more promising. Rumours circulated about yet further mineral discoveries in the South African Republic. Few were believable and they needed verification – a time-consuming business not easily effected within the garrison. In the eastern Transvaal, enticing quantities of gold had been uncovered in the De Kaap Valley as far back as the 1870s, but it took more than a decade for sustainable payloads to be uncovered at Barberton. Likewise, talk of economically viable gold deposits along the Witwatersrand had been around since the 1870s but since then nothing substantial had emerged.
The ‘Irish’ malcontents were unwilling to wait another 10 years. Kelly and McCann were the first to break ranks. In April 1886, tired of watching for the sign of an economic miracle to appear, Kelly deserted and made his way to Barberton, on the escarpment, 300 miles away.18 Jack McCann undertook the even longer haul to the badlands around the diamond fields. There, George Lennox, a serial deserter from the armed forces, was forging his reputation as South Africa’s ‘Robin Hood’ under the alias ‘Scotty Smith’.
Of Scottish descent, as his moniker proclaimed, Lennox had, as a young man, undergone some training as a veterinary surgeon. He had then made his way to Australia where Ned Kelly and his gang had mastered the dark arts of horse-theft. In South Africa, Smith became the prince of horse-thieves in a horse economy – and, it was said, a good friend to many a lonely widow.19 While several of McLoughlin’s companions were later rumoured to have honed their skills in Smith’s company, McCann was certainly not one of them. After deserting, he spent nearly two years working as a winding-engine driver on various Kimberley mines when not engaged in criminal activities.20
McCann and Kelly may, however, have bolted in the wrong directions at the wrong time. If they had waited a few weeks, they could have been among the starters for the long-awaited Big Rush. In mid-1886, George Harrison discovered a substantial gold reef on the farm Langlaagte on the Witwatersrand. Harrison’s claim was registered in October and, by early December, the township of Johannesburg had been proclaimed and the first plots were being sold to the first of the invading hopefuls. By the end of the year there were 3 000 diggers on what were, after many twists and turns, to become the world’s greatest deep-level gold mines.
The explosion of good news about the Rand rocked the barracks in Fort Napier 400 miles away – and the impact was felt most intensely in the rank and file of the South Lancashire Regiment. Men from all the regiments in the garrison deserted their posts to join in the rush, but it was the first-generation Anglo-Irish – those raised in the mills and slums of Manchester – who were most taken with the idea of finding gold, literally or metaphorically. Between September and December 1886, close on 50 men deserted the South Lancashires. Among the roughest of these former ‘scuttlers’ were P Carroll (1 December), J Dwyer (14 September), John Hutchings (6 November), J McLoughlin (exact date unknown, but likely to have left at round about the same time as Hutchings), John O’Brien (16 October) and J Wiggins (28 October).21
The emergence of Johannesburg as the centre of opportunity in the interior – a development without parallel since the discovery of diamonds two decades earlier – breathed new life into the entire region. With Barberton reviving briefly as the Golden Quarry metamorphosed into the booming Sheba Mine, Kimberley the well-established centre of the world diamond industry and Johannesburg mushrooming, new coach routes were introduced linking the three outer points of an enormous triangle demarcating the presence of fabulous wealth. Within a matter of months the amounts of cash, diamonds or gold bullion moving overland, between the centres and the coastal ports, increased dramatically.22
Neither the table-top-smooth diamond fields nor the modest rocky ridges of the Witwatersrand offered would-be coach-robbers or highwaymen the classic densely forested or mountainous redoubts preferred by bandits. With the old tracks from Pietermaritzburg to Pretoria having acquired new significance as they looped through Johannesburg, the ‘road’ – busier than ever – came under closer scrutiny from the authorities.23 The core of the Irish deserters, thinking better of it, decided to ignore the obvious and, instead of making their way directly to the Witwatersrand, worked their way along the hilly escarpment until they reached the hills around Barberton and the floor of the De Kaap Valley – places that had the added virtue of having a back door that led directly to Mozambique, Delagoa Bay and Lourenço Marques. By December 1886, the Manchester-Irish and others were digging in for a bonanza.