Johannesburg. Barnato Building

Johannesburg. Barnato Building. Published by Braune & Levy, Johannesburg.

The Barnato Building or, to give it its correct name: the Consolidated Building, also known as “Johnnies” (think: Johannesburg Consolidated Investment Corporation Ltd.), is located in Marshalltown on the southwestern corner of Fox and Harrison Streets. It first opened its doors in 1906. In 1935, the dome had to give way to allow for two further poorly matched storeys to be added to the original six. By the time construction work on the building began in 1904, the corporation’s founder Barney Isaac Barnato (Barnett Isaacs, 1852–1897) had already been dead for seven years. Born into a Jewish family that operated a small shop in London’s East End, Barnato moved to South Africa in 1872 to join relatives there, initially in the hope of furthering his vaudeville career. Latching onto the diamond rush, he made his way to Du Toit’s Pan (Kimberley) where successful speculation allowed him to emerge as Cecil Rhodes’s principal rival. Eventually Rhodes bought him out, and Barnato amassed a second fortune speculating with gold. Although they were technically partners, Barnato lamented the disdain with which Rhodes treated him. The unrelenting pace and stress of his business activities eventually caught up with him and he seems to have suffered some sort of breakdown. Reading his obituary in the Jewish Chronicle, one wonders whether he may have been bipolar. On his way to England, where he intended to take part in the celebration of Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee, he threw himself off the boat and drowned. East End lore had it that Polly Nathan, who ran a fried fish shop at 62 Middlesex Street, was Barnato’s aunt—and that she stubbornly refused all his offers to lead a life of comfort at his expense because she much preferred to go on running her shop.