Page 14 - Bulletin 14 2010

10

mine was not in fact a fraudulent one, as has always been supposed, but perhaps the early
miners had genuinely believed that they had found bands of silver-bearing ore.

Note. In 1937 R. C. Wallace, a retired South African Railways engineer, claimed that “About 1840 there was an
attempt made to work the old silver mine.” [i.e. in the Silvermine valley] but I have not been able to find any
other reference which would back up this extraordinary claim. (R. C. Wallace, ‘Along the “Ou Pad” – Steenberg
to Simonstown,’ South African Railways and Harbours Magazine, August 1937, pp. 989-1000, especially pp.
994-95.)

The Vredehoek TinMine *

*This account of the Vredehoek Tin Mine draws heavily on the author’s previous paper on the mine, ‘The
Vredehoek Tin Mine, Cape Town,’ published in Quarterly Bulletin of the National Library of South Africa, Vol.
54 (1), September 1999, pp. 19-26. This material is used here by kind permission of the editor of the Quarterly
Bulletin.

The discovery of fairly appreciable quantities of tin on the farm Annex Langverwacht in the

Kuils River area, some 30 km east of Cape Town, around the time of the Anglo-Boer War,
may have been the stimulus for the well-known local prospector A. C. Ross to apply to the

Cape Town City Council on 17 September 1909 for permission to “prospect for, extract and
remove” all minerals which might be found on the ground immediately above the farm Vrede

Hoek, on the slopes of what Ross called ‘the Devil’s Peak.’

After much debate the City Council approved Ross’s application, at the same time adding a

number of terms and conditions “which have been carefully settled by the Committee.” 11
During the next few months similar applications from Chiappini Brothers, a local firm of

share, stock and real estate brokers, and a Mr. S. S. Keyzer, were both turned down by the
12
Council, Ross’s application being regarded as having precedence because of its prior date.

In spite of these protracted negotiations with the City Council, the great majority of the

citizens of Cape Town were doubtless astonished when they read in the Cape Argus of 10

June 1910 that tin had been discovered “on the land lying between the foot of Devil’s Peak
and Upper Buitenkant Street.” There was even a touch of human drama in the report, for it

recounted that the discovery had been made by Mr. Ross when he was sheltering under a
13
boulder during a heavy rain storm. A later report painted an even more dramatic picture of