Barney Barnato

Barney Barnato was a financier, diamond magnate, and gold baron who first rivaled and then later allied with Cecil Rhodes in struggling for control in the development of the Southern African mining industry.

Barnett Isaacs was the son of a Jewish shopkeeper, Isaac Isaacs, in the East End of London. In 1873 he followed his brother Henry to Kimberley, Cape Colony, to seek his fortune in the diamond rush. Adopting the name Barnato Brothers, which he and his brother had used in London as vaudeville entertainers, they first made money by selling cigars to the miners. They formed a diamond brokerage firm in 1874. Two years later “Barney” Barnato began the bold speculation in mining claims that led to the formation of the Barnato Diamond Mining Company in 1880. It later merged with other companies to form the Kimberley Central Diamond Mining Company, which, along with the Compagnie Française des Mines de Diamant du Cap, seriously challenged Cecil Rhodes’s De Beers Mining Company (see De Beers S.A.).

In 1888 the Kimberley Central Diamond Mining Company was bought out by De Beers. Barnato held a large share in the monopolistic De Beers Consolidated Mines that emerged, and he was made life governor of the company. That same year he became a member of the Cape Colony parliament, and he would remain so until his death. A few years after the 1886 discovery of gold on the Witwatersrand in the Transvaal, Barnato resumed speculating, buying up mining claims and real estate and floating Barnato Consolidated Mines and Barnato Bank. By the mid-1890s Barnato’s Witwatersrand interests had been amalgamated into the Johannesburg Consolidated Investment Company. In June 1897 he jumped or fell from a ship while on his way to England to attend Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee. The reasons for this accident or suicide are still mysterious.