Jim B. Taylor

James Benjamin Taylor (December 1860 – 25 December 1944) was a South African Randlord. He followed a typical route to great wealth – diamonds in Kimberley, gold in Barberton and Pilgrim's Rest, and ending up on the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. His ability to speak Afrikaans was instrumental in his rise, and he became a confidant of President Paul Kruger of the Zuid-Afrikaansche Republiek. He acted as intermediary between the Government and the mining industry, and was privy to many of the political machinations leading to the Jameson Raid and the Anglo-Boer War. Life He was born the fifth of 8 children of Isaac Rowland Taylor (6 November 1826 Holborn – 22 August 1888 Kimberley) and Jane Dorothea Hellet (7 May 1827 – 27 November 1876). His first formal education was at Dalton School in Cape Town; he was present when in 1867 Prince Alfred, son of Queen Victoria, called at the Cape aboard the screw frigate on his voyage around the world. Taylor's father and brother moved to Du Toits Pan, later called Kimberley in 1870 when news of the diamond find spread, and the following year the family joined them, travelling from Cape Town on a mule wagon, a journey that took a month. Taylor and his brother Bill spent the next few years labouring with their parents while they worked the claim. It was during this period that he first met Rhodes, who had contracted to pump water from Baxter's Gully close to the Taylor diggings. The increasing depth of the diggings coupled with the hard blue layers encountered in the kimberlite pipes, discouraged many miners from continuing. This together with the falling price of diamonds, led to extensive selling of the claims to the larger syndicates. This consolidation gave rise to the growth in power and wealth of Rhodes, Barnato and Alfred Beit.