The trouble spread. Mine after mine was thrown idle. The mine-owners replied by importing strike-breakers, or blacklegs as the miners called them. This infuriated the workers, and for two or three days over the week-end Johannesburg was given up to something very like civil war. To venture into the streets was to gamble with death. The theatres and music-halls were closed; the newspapers suspended publication. The railway station and the offices of the Star newspaper were set on fire by the rioters, and burned to the ground, and many other buildings were either partially or wholly destroyed. Eventually the soldiers got the upper hand, but not before about a score of rioters had been killed, and some two hundred wounded.
Jo’burg, as the inhabitants affectionately term it, is a gay place, but expensive. When I opened at the Empire Music-hall there, I asked half a dozen or so men down to the bar for drinks round. I put down a sovereign to pay for them.
Barman: “Another twelve shillings, please.”
I should have taken no notice in these days, for they would now cost almost as much at home.
I gave my show at a great many small towns, and back-veldt settlements where one would hardly have imagined that an audience could be scraped together; but the returns were invariably satisfactory, the reason being that prices rule high out there. The cheapest seat at most of the halls and theatres cost four shillings; a stall is a guinea.
One little mining town we were warned against quite solemnly.
“Don’t go there,” I was told. “They’re a rough crowd. They’ll throw eggs at you.”
“I don’t care,” I replied. “It won’t be the first time I’ve had eggs thrown at me.”
“Ah! But these are ostrich eggs.”
At Pretoria we were shown Kruger’s tomb; and we were also conducted over his house. It is quite an unpretentious building, and plainly furnished. Everything in it is supposed to have been left exactly as it was during his life, and the visitor is invited by the caretaker to sit in the late president’s favourite chair. The tomb was decorated with many faded wreaths, some of them from English Socialist and Trade Union leaders.