Jim B. Taylor

Who was Jim B. Taylor?

James Benjamin Taylor aka Jim B. Taylor, was a South African Randlord and the fifth of 8 children of Isaac Rowland Taylor and Jane Dorothea Hellet. He was married in Johannesburg on 10 March 1891 to Mary "Mollie" Gordon, daughter of a Pietermaritzburg physician. They produced a family of 4 children:

⁕Alfred Gordon Taylor

⁕Frances Daphne Taylor

⁕Iris Dorothea Taylor x Lt.-Col. Harold Boyd-Rochfort

⁕Lance Taylor

Jim Taylor followed the normal route to great wealth – diamonds in Kimberley, gold in Barberton and Pilgrim's Rest and ending up on the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. His ability to speak Afrikaans was instrumental in his rise to wealth and power, and he became a confidant of President Paul Kruger of the Zuid-Afrikaansche Republiek. He acted as intermediary between the Government and the mining industry, and was privy to many of the political machinations leading to the Jameson Raid and the Anglo-Boer War.

His first formal education was at Dalton School in Cape Town. Taylor was present when in 1867 Prince Alfred, son of Queen Victoria, called at the Cape aboard the screw frigate HMS Galatea on his voyage around the world. Taylor's father and brother moved to Du Toits Pan, later called Kimberley in 1870 when news of the diamond find spread, and the following year the family joined them, travelling from Cape Town on a mule wagon, a journey that took a month. Taylor and his brother Bill spent the next few years labouring with their parents while they worked the claim. It was during this period that he first met Rhodes, who had contracted to pump water from Baxter's Gully close to the Taylor diggings.