532
SIR ERNEST OPPENHEIMEP
the
drilling of the Aandenk borehole by Wit. Extensions, for instance, in
the absence of adequate transport and fuel facilities, cost as much as
855. per foot.48 But neither geophysical and magnetomctric
surveying nor the actual drilling of boreholes was possible without
access to the land, and such access was only possible by the
acquisition of option rights and/or the actual purchase of the mineral
rights. In the aggregate, very considerable sums of money were
involved. Many thousands of acres of land, and hundreds of boreholes
were involved; a rich harvest was therefore reaped by farmers
themselves, or by intermediaries who were speculating in option rights,
before a single shaft had been sunk or even before the payability of
the area had been established. There should also have been a favourable
repercussion on the local agricultural produce markets, but, in fact,
for various reasons the pattern of agricultural production was not
greatly affected then or subsequently.49 The activity on the
prospecting side—upon which, in the long run, everything depended—was
matched by activity on the financial side. Either by direct financial
expenditure by the parent house, or by the creation of special
subsidiaries, or by a combination of both methods, all the large mining
houses participated, and the movement into the Orange Free State was by
no means confined to the 'large' houses, or, indeed, to enterprises
properly to be called a mining house at all. Moreover, there were ad hoc creations
by individuals, of which Dr. Hans Merensky's African German Investments
Limited was perhaps the most important. Nor should the opening up of
the Free State gold-field be regarded, from the financial point of
view, as consisting of a series of parallel operations with no points
of contact between the participants. On the contrary: it is the
inter-penetration of financial relationships, which has its counterpart
on the technical side, in the shape of joint drilling and prospecting
ventures, which provides the key to an understanding of much of what
was happening in the formative years 1933 to 1940.
48 F.
A. Unger, consulting engineer to Anglo American Corporation, writing to
the general manager of the Transvaal Chamber of Mines on 20 December
1935, gave the aggregate expenditure of the Western Reefs company for
the period April 1933 to the end of 1935 on drilling, option moneys,
general expenses and prospecting, as .£266,000, of which £145,000 had
been spent in districts north of the Vaal. The largest item was
£150,000 spent on diamond drilling; option moneys amounted to £62,000.
In 1950, the consulting engineers of Anglo American Corporation stated
that 'at least £3,000,000 has been spent in diamond drill holes in
"proving" the new gold-field. No fewer than 466 different boreholes
have been drilled. The total footage drilled exceeds 1,900,000 feet,
equal to 360 miles', i.e. equivalent to the distance from Johannesburg
to Pieter-maritzburg.
49 National Resources Development Council: A regional survey of the Orange Free Stale gold-field, p. 15, 1954.
