Barney Barnato

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Barney Barnato

Barney Barnato (born Barnett Isaacs) (5 July 1852 – 14 June 1897) was a South African Randlord, one of the entrepreneurs who gained control of diamond mining, and later gold mining, in South Africa from the 1870s.

He was born in 1852 in a slum in Whitechapel in the East End of London, and was educated by Moses Angel at the Jews' Free School. It was a hard life, and a young Barnato is reputed to have begged pass outs from theatre leavers at the Garrick Theatre in Leman Street, to sell them on to others for a halfpenny.^[1] He joined his brother Harry in the Cape Colony in 1873 during the "diamond rush" which accompanied the discovery of diamonds at Kimberley. His brother had gone out in 1871 and had been working as a comedian and conjurer, and his younger brother wanted to join in, calling out, "And Barnett, too!" The oft repeated phrase evolved, to the point which Isaacs changed his name to Barney Barnato.

He formed the Barnato Diamond Mining Company and within ten years he had become a millionaire, primarily by buying worked-out diamond mines area and mining the abandoned blue ground heaps.

He competed with Cecil John Rhodes in taking over the diamond mining industry in Cape Colony by aggressive buying out of competitors, although in the end Rhodes succeeded in buying him and his brother out for around four million pounds, writing the single largest check in history at that point. Barnato subsequently became Kimberley's member of parliament in the Cape Parliament from 1889 until his death.

He reportedly committed suicide by jumping into the ocean and drowning from a ship taking him to England in 1897. However, his family vigorously rejected that theory, as it was so completely against the character of a man who had been a pioneer in the rough and ready days of emerging Southern Africa. His body was recovered and buried in Willesden Jewish Cemetery, near London.

His son, Woolf Barnato, became a racing driver in the 1920s, one of the "Bentley Boys".