There is an argument to be made that the single most important economic event in the Helderberg’s modern history was not the founding of Somerset West in 1822 or the opening of Sir Lowry’s Pass in 1830 or even the arrival of the railway. It was the day in July 1899 when an American explosives engineer named Colonel William Russell Quinan stepped off a ship at Cape Town docks and drove east toward Somerset West with a brief from Cecil Rhodes to build the biggest dynamite factory in the southern hemisphere.
It began, as so many things in South Africa’s industrial history do, with gold and diamonds and the fury of a man who hated being overcharged.
The board of De Beers Consolidated Mines, under Cecil John Rhodes, met in November 1898 and decided to build their own explosives factory in the Cape Colony. Until then, all explosives for the diamond and gold mines had been imported or bought from the Modderfontein factory in the Transvaal at monopoly prices. Rhodes was characteristically blunt about it. He sent word to the Nobel Dynamite Trust: unless De Beers could source dynamite at thirty shillings free on board from London, they would join forces with other consumers to establish their own factory. The Nobel Trust called his bluff. Rhodes built the factory.
Cecil John Rhodes himself chose the site, Paardevlei at Somerset West, 11,600 hectares of coastal land sandwiched between what would become the N2, the R44 and False Bay. The coastal location was considered strategically safe, meaning that if something went wrong, the blasts would go toward the sea and not toward the town. Rhodes also commissioned Herbert Baker, the same architect responsible for the Union Buildings in Pretoria, St George’s Cathedral and the Mount Nelson Hotel, to design the administrative buildings and workers’ accommodation on the site. Nine Herbert Baker buildings still stand at the entrance to what is now the Paardevlei precinct, all declared national monuments. Most people drive past them without a second glance.
De Beers’ general manager was charged with finding the right man, someone with qualifications and expertise not only in explosives but in building a plant from scratch in difficult conditions. This is how he came upon Colonel William Russell Quinan of Pinole, from the California powder works, with a background in explosives manufacture and the kind of practical drive that Cecil Rhodes instinctively recognised and trusted.
Quinan arrived at the Cape in July 1899. The application for a factory licence went to Prime Minister W. Schreiner, brother of the novelist Olive Schreiner. Local residents protested. There was a public outcry and many objections. Nobody particularly wanted a dynamite factory as a neighbour. But the application had influential local backers. The Hon John Faure and Sir Peter Faure, prominent local brothers, owners of Vergenoegd, the farm that bears the family name to this day, publicly supported the scheme, seeing the commercial benefit of having De Beers, then the most powerful company in southern Africa, establishing itself in the Helderberg. Without the Faure family’s backing, the factory might never have been built in Somerset West at all.
The licence was granted in 1900. By that point Quinan had already proceeded with characteristic American disregard for paperwork preceding construction. There was already a branch railway line from the site to the Helderberg’s siding at Firgrove, three smaller branch lines, roads, storehouses, a foundry, a brickmaking plant and two nitroglycerin systems under construction, despite the Anglo-Boer War having drained most of the available skilled labour from the region. Quinan did not wait for permission before laying track. Cecil Rhodes had hired the right man.
Cecil never saw it finished. He very rarely did. Rhodes died in 1902.
Production began in 1903, with 72,022 fifty-pound cases of dynamite produced in the first year. By the second year the number had risen to 175,281 cases. On 7 August 1903 the first trainload of explosives left Somerset West for the Kimberley diamond mines. By 1909 the Cape Explosives Works was the second biggest explosives factory in the world. In Somerset West. Between a retirement town and a beach resort.
The factory grew steadily, changing names as it changed ownership and scale. De Beers Explosive Works became Cape Explosives Works, then Capex, then eventually merged into African Explosives and Chemical Industries, AECI, the name that most Helderberg residents knew it by through most of the twentieth century.
Quinan died in 1910. His cousin Kenneth Bingham Quinan took over as General Manager and continued expanding the operation. When the First World War broke out in 1914, Kenneth was called to England by cable, the British government needed him urgently to design and build munitions factories for the war effort. Within a hundred days of arriving in England, a major TNT plant had been built and operating. He went on to design the two great wartime munitions factories at Queensferry and Gretna, critical to Britain’s ability to keep fighting. The man who had been running a dynamite factory in Somerset West became one of Britain’s most important wartime industrial engineers.
The site was a town within a town. It had its own railway network, its own vessel, the SS South Africa, of 1,980 gross tons, purchased in 1906 to improve delivery of imported raw materials, its own housing, its own community. Generations of Helderberg families worked there. Fathers brought sons. Cousins followed cousins.
For several decades from the 1940s, the biggest producer of dynamite in the world was South Africa and the factory was right here. My uncle, who worked as a production planner, still recalls the monthly figures that passed across his desk, amounts that at times reached an astonishing 30,000 tons per month. Much of this output left the factory by rail. I can still remember the sight of the white-painted wooden railway wagons being shunted from the factory siding toward Firgrove Station, stencilled in bold black letters on their sides with a single word that commanded respect: EXPLOSIVES. One after another they formed long trains destined for mines and industrial centres across southern Africa, dynamite bound for the great copper mines of Zambia and destinations even further north. To a young observer, the endless procession of white wagons seemed almost ordinary at the time. Looking back, they were carrying the products of one of the region’s most important industries to some of the largest mining operations on the continent.
Colonel Quinan arrived with a brief to break a monopoly and build a factory. What he actually built was the economic engine of the Helderberg for a hundred years, the single employer that brought infrastructure, jobs, roads, railway lines and families to three towns simultaneously. You drive through his legacy every time you take the R44 between Somerset West and Strand. At least his name is preserved in one of the roads at Paardevlei.
He never became famous here. He never even became well-known.
He just changed everything.
Between You and Me:
Cecil Rhodes commissioned Herbert Baker to design the administrative buildings of a dynamite factory. The same architect who gave South Africa the Union Buildings, St George’s Cathedral and the Mount Nelson Hotel. I have been thinking about what it says about a man and about an era, that you commission your best architect for a factory that makes explosives, as a matter of course, without apparently considering this unusual. The nine Baker buildings that still stand at Paardevlei are, by any measure, beautiful. They are also national monuments. The factory that surrounded them was, for a period, the second biggest explosives manufacturer in the world. South Africa has always had a gift for combining the magnificent with the alarming.
Historian – Harmen Bockelenberg
Next week: the fireless locomotives kept the peace for decades, until one June morning in 1962 when peace at the factory ran out altogether.
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