The following fascinating article was written by a reader, Alwyn Evans, a keen Welsh historian. It was first published in ‘Wales Online’ The full story, as a book, with supporting references and illustrations, will be published in the next six months by Hesperian Press.
George William Hall was a pioneer of the fantastically rich Western Australian gold-mining industry
It’s astonishing how many people don’t remember Clive Sinclair. If they remember him at all, they remember only his one big white elephant in the 1980s, the C5 electric car. Yet this was the man produced the first electronic pocket calculator to be sold in Britain, and followed it up with the first mass market home computers, the ZX and Spectrum series. And Clive Sinclair’s still alive, and at the age of 75, still inventing!
George William Hall
It was the same with George William Hall in the 1890s. He was a pioneer of the fantastically rich Western Australian gold-mining industry, someone who mixed with the colony’s highest-ranking and most influential people, and a pioneer of manipulating the press to his own financial benefit. He made headline news in newspapers of the late 1890s and early 1900s in London, Wales and Australia—a shooting star for a few short years, yet then disappearing into obscurity.
Hall was brought up in Aberdare, spoke fluent Welsh and always identified himself as ‘Celtic’
He was described as ‘Welsh’, but in fact was born in 1855 just across the border, in Bredwardine near Hay–on-Wye, though he was brought up in Aberdare, spoke fluent Welsh and always identified himself as ‘Celtic’. His first known employment was as a young ship’s chandler’s clerk in Swansea, but he also wrote a column for a local weekly newspaper, the Swansea Herald as a ‘penny-a-liner’. These were the amateur correspondents paid small sums to pad out the papers of the day with local news. A fervent autodidact, Hall never stopped learning, reading widely late at night. He became an acknowledged expert in geology, lecturing regularly on the subject.
The Hall Family
He was taken on in 1883 by the Cambria Daily Leader, Wales’ oldest daily newspaper, and its sister paper, the weekly Herald of Wales and transferred his popular but often controversial ‘Rambler’ column to these titles.
By the end of his period in Swansea he was editor for both papers. He mixed with Swansea’s Liberal politicians such as Henry Hussey Vivian and Lewis Llewellyn Dillwyn, and was a prominent debater and public figure.
A turning point in his life was the Merthyr 1888 by-election where William Pritchard Morgan gained the seat as successor to the revered Henry Richard, the ‘Apostle of Peace’
Morgan, a chancer and speculator often known disparagingly as the ‘Welsh Gold King’ or ‘The Golden Calf’, had recently struck rich in Gwynfynydd gold-mine near Dolgellau, after returning with a reputed fortune from ownership of a newspaper and investments in the Queensland goldfields.
Representing himself as a ‘working man made good’, he defeated the official Liberal candidate.
He and Hall became close friends during their stay at the Castle Hotel, Merthyr; both were extroverts, who loved singing and good living.
Hall spent the entire three-month campaign writing front-page news reports in support of Morgan.
In April 1890 he put his geological knowledge to more practical use, becoming manager for Morgan’s gold-mining ventures.
Moving to London, he mixed with influential Liberal politicians, and eventually became company secretary for the Gwynfynydd company.
However in 1895, when Morgan was ousted from the Gwynfynydd board of directors, Hall had to go, too.
Morgan took up a total of 120 options, and then rapidly left Australia for his interests in China
They both set out for Australia, leading an experienced group of ex-Gwynfynydd workers and managers, with the aim of purchasing and exploiting gold-mining leases.
Morgan took up a total of 120 options, and then rapidly left Australia for his interests in China, leaving Hall to establish an office in Coolgardie, which was then the centre of the great gold rush that hit Western Australia two years before.
Driving a four-horse ‘buggy’, which carried all his equipment and food, and provided shelter at night and from daytime heat, he investigated the claims.
It is inconceivable what a change it must have meant to this 40-year-old city-dweller, since temperatures in the Great Victorian Desert (as it was then known) were often over 45˚C, as he traveled hundreds of miles through the spinifex and untracked bush.
All Morgan’s options proved worthless, though Hall purchased the North Star mine in Malcolm, 150 miles north of Kalgoorlie, the new gold mining centre.
This provided him with steady capital for further exploration.
While chatting with prospectors round the camp-fire one bitterly cold July night in 1896 he heard about a new strike called ‘The Sons of Gwalia’.
Intrigued by the Welsh name, he travelled there, taking samples of ore back to test at the North Star. Immediately convinced of its value, he travelled overnight to Menzies where he caught a coach to Coolgardie, to meet Welsh shopkeeper Thomas Tobias, who headed a Welsh syndicate set up at the previous year’s Llanelli Eisteddfod.
He bought the new claim for £8,000 for Morgan’s company, the London and Westralian Mines and Finance Agency. Hall funded all this personally, using his own money as deposit, and paid it off with profits from the first month’s crushing.
Hall used his journalistic experience to give interviews that ‘boosted’ the mine to the full
In the first eight months he and his faithful ex-Gwynfynydd manager, Alexander Castle, produced 11,000 ounces of gold, worth at today’s prices about £3 million.
The mine soon attracted the attention of big investors in London. By the time it was sold in November 1897 to London-based Bewick Moreing, the papers in both Britain and Australia were full of it.
Hall, a born raconteur, used his journalistic experience to give interviews that ‘boosted’ the mine to the full. The new Sons of Gwalia Company, Ltd. was launched on March 28, 1898 at a ‘Complimentary Dinner’ to George W. Hall at the Hotel Cécil, London’s biggest and newest hotel. Eight Liberal MPs attended, including the rapidly rising David Lloyd George, together with financial and mining interests.
Far more important, however, were journalists in attendance from newspapers like Mining News, the Sunday Times and the British Australasian.
This ensured that over the next few months, the Sons of Gwalia was rarely out of the London or Australian papers.
The launch was a spectacular success, and with the London and Westralian retaining one third of the 300,000 one pound shares, Hall’s portion made him a very rich man—a media star of his time.
By now appointed London and Westralian’s agent and Australian director, he loomed large over the Western Australian mining world over the next three years.
He was often quoted in papers as an authority on other people’s mines, as well as those in which he had interests.
He continued to inspect the Sons of Gwalia on behalf of his company, often criticising what he regarded as top-heavy management.
He was always referred to at this time as the pioneer of these new goldfields
A JP in Malcolm and a local lay preacher, his Welsh ‘glee party’ of singers was in great demand in the Northern Goldfields around Leonora/Gwalia.
He was always referred to at this time as the pioneer of these new goldfields, and was often referred to as ‘Daddy Gwalia’ or ‘the father of the Mount Margaret Goldfield’ in the press.
When the premier of Western Australia, Sir John Forrest, in 1899 made a return visit to the area he had pioneered thirty years before, it was at Hall’s Malcolm headquarters that he stayed. At the famous ‘Gold Bar’ dinner, where new Sons of Gwalia manager, Welshman Harry James, hosted Sir John and piled on the table all the 500 ounces of gold produced over the previous month, Hall was the main speaker.
He lobbied successfully for a railway to Leonora, and mixed with major politicians such as Forrest and fellow Welsh mine magnate and Legislative Assembly member Alfred Morgans.
Another visit to London in 1900 as one of the Queen’s Commissioners who collected Western Australian material for the International Exhibitions in Paris and Glasgow, saw him lionised at a series of banquets in London and one in Swansea, which he described as ‘his home town’.
This visit also helped him gather more capital for his massive new mine at Wiluna, 200 miles further north of the Sons of Gwalia.
Back in Australia, he was persuaded to stand for the newly created Mount Margaret Goldfield seat, as an independent Labour candidate.
This proved his first failure, narrowly defeated by the official Labour candidate, George Taylor. Worse was to follow.
The spectacular crash of Whitaker Wright’s companies in 1900-01 led to severe depression of the market
The euphoria of the first wave of gold-mining had passed, and there was far more speculation than real investment in the ventures.
Investors distrusted London financial managers who manipulated stocks, and the spectacular crash of Whitaker Wright’s companies in 1900-01 led to severe depression of the market.
Also, major water problems at the other large Gwalia Consolidated leases that Hall and Morgan had retained around the Sons of Gwalia saw these closed down, and they were eventually sold to the Sons of Gwalia Company. Between 1900 and 1902, though on the surface, Hall appeared so successful in public life, his private situation was deteriorating.
Always a big spender, and ridiculously generous, his palatial family home in Adelaide, South Australia and his wife Martha Mary’s expensive tastes were a drain on his resources.
Then came the major blow. For a month in July and August 1902, the Adelaide newspapers headlined Hall’s divorce action against his wife on the grounds of her infidelity with the local Unitarian minister.
The case was complicated by Martha Mary Hall’s allegations of blackmail by her servants, and damning evidence against her by her own niece.
After the case, Hall, to avoid the Adelaide scandal-mongers, decamped again for London with his daughter and her companion, leaving his manager Castle to run the new mine in Wiluna.
He stayed for no less than fourteen months in London, in a lavish suite in the Hotel Cécil, on the pretext of drumming up new mining finance.
His extravagance during this time included regular singing lessons for his daughter Violet by Welsh diva Dame Clara Novello Davies.
Wiluna’s Gwalia Consols mines were always a problem.
The experienced manager Castle was always struggling for lack of investment capital
They were far from anywhere, on the edge of the desert, workers were scarce and costly to attract, and the supply route costly.
Though there was plenty of gold in a vast open pit, with a lode a chain (22 yards) wide, the experienced manager Castle was always struggling for lack of investment capital and had to reinvest any profits in new equipment.
Also the complex arsenopyritic ores did not respond well to current cyanide treatments, making gold extraction very difficult.
Castle was left with little support even after Hall’s return from London, with his boss spending time far away in Adelaide looking to his four children’s welfare.
Hall’s credibility with investors, and even with his own directors, was dropping, and British and Australian newspapers were becoming sceptical of his unfailing optimism.
The final straw came when Castle, on whom any chance of the success of Wiluna depended, died of a haemorrhaging ulcer after an arduous coach trip to Coolgardie and back.
Hall was forced to return to the goldfields to supervise a succession of incompetent managers, the enterprise limping along until 1909.
Ironically, twenty years later, with improved cyanide treatments available, the reopened Wiluna mines made a massive fortune for another entrepreneur, Claude de Bernales.
Before this, in 1907, Hall had had enough. His old partner Morgan sent him as a trouble-shooter for his Unsan gold-mine in Northern Korea, but there, as in several China ventures, more of both men’s fortunes was lost.
Though all the rest of his family remained in Australia, Hall was next to be found back at Gwynfynydd gold-mine in 1911.
In the turmoil of the First World War, his death went virtually un-noticed by the newspapers
Morgan had attempted to reopen this mine, which had been in difficulties since he left it, and created a job for his old partner as manager of Gwynfynydd.
It was here, in January 1915, after dining with Morgan in nearby Dolgellau, that Hall met his death.
He was returning late at night to his Gwynfynydd manager’s bungalow when he toppled 45 feet off the rocky path into the ravine of the river Mawddach and cracked open his skull.
He was not yet 60, but looked years older. In the turmoil of the First World War, his death went virtually un-noticed by the newspapers that had previously laid so much store by his words.
Ironically, back in 1898, it had been a young American engineer, Herbert Hoover, later president of the USA, who became Bewick Moreing’s first manager of the Sons of Gwalia.
Hoover’s stayed there only six months, spent mainly in reorganising what eventually became Western Australia’s longest-lasting, and second most productive, gold-mine.
As Hall became forgotten, so rising politician Hoover’s name was more linked to the mine that he had managed for so short a period.
He compounded this in his 1951 biography, claiming sole credit for Bewick Moreing’s decision to purchase.
So today, the restored mine manager’s house, now run as ‘The Gwalia Museum’, is known as Hoover House, and it is Hoover who is regarded across Australia as the ‘discoverer’ of the Sons of Gwalia.
Indeed, a recent documentary on the mine is entitled ‘Hoover’s Gold’. They say history is written by the victors; it’s also written by those who live longest (Hoover was 90 when he died in 1964), and those who have the greatest financial and political resources to be able to influence the way their stories are represented.
Hall’s role in the historiography of Welsh politics, journalism and mining finally needs to be acknowledged
The Hoover Foundation endowed at Stanford University in the USA ensures that it is still Hoover’s side of the story that is told.
And Hall? A prominent Liberal and a significant contributor to the journalistic history of the Cambria Daily Leader, the oldest daily newspaper in Wales, yet he has been ignored by Welsh historians.
He was a key player in Morgan’s unexpected 1888 election victory and played a significant part in the development of Morgan’s North Wales gold-mine.
His role in the historiography of Welsh politics, journalism and mining finally needs to be acknowledged.
However, Hall’s key importance is in Australia. Several studies, notably by Professor Bill Jones of Cardiff University, have examined the social aspects of the Welsh immigrants in the USA and Australia.
Most of these studies have concentrated on them as workers, and their role in developing Welsh communities in those countries.
The impact overseas of entrepreneurs from Wales in general has been neglected by historians; their view of entrepreneurs in Welsh industrial history often typifies them only as capitalist exploiters of Welsh mineral resources, frequently from outside Wales.
In Australia also, historical records that lump the Welsh, Irish and Scottish under a ‘white Anglo-Saxon’ label often blur the identification of the Welsh contribution to that country’s past.
With the exception of Australian premier Billy Hughes, who, along with Lloyd George was the other Welshman at the Treaty of Versailles, there have been few treatments of Welsh individuals’ contribution to Australian history and Western Australia in particular.
Hall is a representative of a number of significant Welshmen in Western Australia at the turn of the 19th and 20th century.
His, and their, contribution to the development of gold mining in that state deserve wider examination.
Moya Sharp
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This is fascinating. I lived in Gwalia as a kid (1971-1979) and during that time only knew the standard “Hoover connection” to the SoG mine. Over the course of time, as I’ve come to read more and more about the mine’s history, Hoover’s time and involvement in the mine has decreased. I think it’s fair to say Hoover’s name can be associated with the mine and future involvements (BHP, for example), however he should be a subhead to those who really made the mine happen — specifically, Hall. I look forward to reading the book.
Vincent
Many thanks for the comment Vincent. Peter Bell has reviewed the book in the latest edition of the Australian Mining History Association Journal and he agrees that Hoover’s role in the early stages has been overstated. However, he considers that Hall was just a ‘puffer’ a ‘front man’ for the developing company, and that his right hand man, Alexander Wilson Castle, a Scottish engineer widely experienced in Wales and the USA should get more credit. I thought I’d made clear in the book that this was my view too, but Hall’s role in opening up the entire Mount Margaret region, his political influence on behalf of the goldfield area and his legendary generosity to people and organisations around Leonora, Malcolm and up to Laverton, also deserves suitable recognition.
Certainly, Hoover’s six months managership planned many of the steps that set out the future development of the mine, but his short period in charge there was singularly unsuccessful in actually making any profit, and he had far less auccess than he afterwards claimed.
When he returned to Western Australia in 1901-2 ( over the New Year) he made much more of a mark and fully deserves the credit for his activities over that period. His earlier period at SoG, however, was significantly over-hyped.