The Golden Crown of Johannesburg

Willsan Mining Publishers, 2007, softcover, illustrated, 150 pages, condition: as new.

This is an authentic quirky small book of memoirs of an immigrant miner from Germany who worked underground as a miner at the best known of the Witwatersrand mines, Crown Mines, for some twenty years from the mid 1950s to the 1970s. He sets his own story against the backdrop of the early mining origins of Johannesburg. The most fascinating parts of the book relate to Von Ketellhodt's (a German immigrant of Noble birth and a qualified Ruhr coal miner) highlights and experiences working as a miner for the Rand Mines group. The author highlights his adventures as a fire fighter and shift boss or mine overseer. Life as a professional miner was dangerous and required considerable personal courage even in the latter decades of the 20th century. The book offers an odd mix of reminiscences and a compilation of interesting snippets of information about mine capitalists, pioneers, African mine dances, statistics on mining and facts about mine systems and technical methods. This mixture is the essence of the book's charm and authenticity, although the author takes as a given the socioeconomic and political framework of the high apartheid decades.