Page 72 - Bulletin 9 2005

58

THE TILES OF OLIFANTSFONTEIN

Douglas van der Horst

Introduction

Many Capetonians and tourists will have noticed pictorial tile panels on the exterior walls of

some of the city's older suburban post offices and may have wondered about their origin. At
Groote Schuur Hospital countless patients and their visitors will have seen the tile panels

decorating the broad passageway on the ground floor of the new hospital. These and many

other tiles in the city were the products of an enterprise established in 1925 by a small group
of pioneering female ceramic artists at Olifantsfontein, then a remote industrial settlement

south of Pretoria at which Thomas Cullinan had established a brick and pipe works some two
decades earlier.

Cullinan was a builder by profession but also a diamond prospector, politician and the

founder of the Premier Diamond Mining Company on whose property the world's largest

diamond, the Cullinan, was discovered in 1905. (Fig. 2.9). Knighted in 1910, he had made a
fortune in the 1890s as a builder and speculator in Johannesburg during the boom that

followed the discovery of deep-level ore on the Witwatersrand goldfields. To ensure a
constant supply of quality bricks for his building activities he had formed the Rand Brick and

Tile Company, which owned a brick-making plant at Fordsburg in Johannesburg, and a brick
and pipe works at Boksburg on the East Rand, the raw materials for which came from a

relatively small deposit of fire-clay nearby.

Olifantsfontein and Conrand

The considerably larger deposit of fire-clay on the farm Olifantsfontein and adjoining
properties was discovered almost by accident while a survey was being conducted of the land

over which a new railway line to Pretoria was to be constructed, and for which