Monday 25th Movember: South African Goldfields

I went to the Jubilee Market today at Covent Garden to see Bella and Jules, wonderful purveyors of the antique, and ended up buying rather a lot of moustaches and a wonderful Welsh photograph album with a carved wooden cover from a new man from Dorset. Anyway, one of the photographs I purchased was of an entirely unprepossessing man with piggy eyes and a clipped brush of a moustache but he still makes it into today's blog because of his location - sometimes location is key. Although I have a few photographs from Johannesburg I have never had something marked the South African Goldfields. It's truly like something out of Rider Haggard.

The poor Transvaal area of South Africa was transformed in 1886 when two lucky prospectors discovered it was possibly the richest gold mining area in the world. Only two years later the Goch studio where this portrait was taken was opened in Johannesburg, remaining open for the next thirteen years, presumably fuelled by a never-ending stream of hopeful young miners.

I was also charmed when I discovered that the Jubilee Market plastic bag Jules gave me to put my photographs in features a market trader with a moustache.

Cabinet photograph, by Horace W Nicholls of the Goch Studio, Johannesburg, South African Goldfields. c. 1899.

Plastic bag, c. 2013. (Ne absiste means 'never give up' or 'do not stop'.)