Beers
Consolidated Mining Company after an all-night sitting, during which he
and his nephew Woolf Joel talked it over with Rhodes and Beit.
Surrendering, he said, "Some people have a fancy for one thing, some
another. You want the means to go north, if possible, and I suppose we
must give it to you." That was how the push northward began; it was the
beginning of the Jameson Raid, too, though Barney had no way of knowing
that. He consented, but at his insistence Rhodes and Beit in their turn
consented to the creation of new posts in the company: four life
governorships, these governors to keep an eye on company policy and
restrain the others, if they thought necessary, from too much
enthusiastic use of their powers. Barney was one.
The
suddenly friendly relationship between Cecil Rhodes and Barney Barnato
was a spectacle that fascinated Kimber-ley. Of it were born two
anecdotes that have carried down through the years. One has to do with
the Kimberley Club, an institution which is still the center of the
town's socio-busi-ness life. Of course, wherever Englishman meets
Englishman they start a club, and this one, unlovely shack on the veld
that it then was, followed the usual tradition of its kind; it
represented social success and exclusion. Rhodes belonged to it in the
natural course, and in the same natural course of events Barnato did
not. Barnato was exactly what most horrified Rhodes's clubfellows, or
at least what they professed horrified them—noisy, volatile, and
talkative. His father was a shopkeeper, and the glorified diggers,
however lately, had learned to look down on shopkeepers. "You couldn't
help loving him," an elderly Kimberley lady once told me, but the
members of the Kimberley Club seem to have resisted his charm. It was a
fact
