Sammy Marks: The Uncrowned King Of The Transvaal
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Sammy Marks, a Russian Jewish immigrant to South Africa, landed in Cape Town in the mid-nineteenth century. Within a decade he had made a fortune on the Kimberley diamond fields. A legendary figure in the history of modern South Africa, Marks went on to make a second fortune in the Transvaal as the founder of the great Highveld coal industry, as the creator of the South African steel industry, as a landowner on a magnificent scale, and as the proprietor of a notorious liquor distillery near Pretoria.
The biography is based on an extraordinary cache of tens of thousands of personal and business letters, hidden till a few years ago in a strongroom at Marks’s country house outside Pretoria. These letters reveal a Victorian husband who dominated his wife, yet allowed her an unusual degree of responsibility for family matters, an immigrant father who sent his children to public school in England to be transformed into gentlemen and then agonised at long distance about their health and moral well-being, a Jew who, unlike many of his wealthy Jewish compatriots, proudly acknowledged his Jewishness yet practised a very pale Judaism, and a political eminence grise who spun a web of influence around Paul Kruger, the president of the Transvaal, yet helped to persuade the Boers to abandon their struggle against Britain in 1902.
| Author | Richard Mendelsohn |
|---|---|
| Publisher | Creda Press |
| Place | Cape Town |
| Year | 1991 |
| ISBN | 9780864861887 |
| Binding | Paperback |
| Condition | Good |
| Comments | Fold at top right corner of front cover and next two pages; front cover bottom corner has minor bump; minor handling mark along vertical edge of front cover; page edges slightly yellowed. |
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