Others in the Series: Vol 1: Old Transport Road Vol 2: Passing of Black Kings

This reprint of George Pauling's Chronicles of a Contractor heralds the centenary of the arrival at Bulawayo, on 4th November 1897, of Rhodes's ambitious Cape-to-Cairo trunk railway. George Craig Saunders Pauling was born at St. Ive's, England, on 6th September 1854, son of Richard Clark Pauling, a railway engineer, as were his grandfather and grand uncle before him. George's link with contracting reached back to an ancestor, another George Pauling, who was a builder in London, in Queen Elizabeth I time (1558- I 603). His great-grandfather was a partner in the firm which built Somerset House and a part of the British Museum. George Pauling, destined to win international repute for his engineering accomplishments, came to South Africa from Britain when he was 20, and he was followed by his brother, Harry; and cousin, Harold. The firm of Pauling & Co. Ltd. was formed in 1877 and, in 188 I, they completed their first railway construction job the 65-mile Port Alfred Railway in the Eastern Cape. The Sterkstroom to Aliwal North, Orange River to Kimberley, Springs to Krugersdorp, and the Crocodile Poort Railway numbered among the major contracts completed in the next decade. By 1892, with the financial backing of the house of D'Erlangers, the Paulings had already extended their activities simultaneously to railway work in Britain, the building of the Johannesburg to Pretoria Railway, the Haifa to' Damascus Railway, and to the construction of the first stage of the line between Beira and Umtali (Mutare). In 1893, George Pauling was invited by Rhodes to build the Vryburg-Mafeking (Mafikeng) line, the first section of the ambitious Cape-to-Cairo Railway of which, over the next 17 years, his Company was to construct I 53 I miles through Bechuanaland (Botswana) and the Rhodesias (Zimbabwe and Zambia) to ElisabethviIle (Lubumbashi) in the Congo (Zaire) which was reached in 1910. Bulawayo was the first Rhodesian center reached by the railway. This event, and the official opening of the line by His Excellency Sir Alfred Milner, High Commissioner at the Cape, drew the largest crowd ever assembled in the town, swelled by four special trains with important guests from South Africa and England for the ten days of festivities.

 

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