Rand Club of Johannesburg

Rand Club
Rand Club, 33 Loveday St, Marshalltown Johannesburg
General information
Status	Complete
Type	Business-use
Location	Johannesburg, South Africa
Completed	1904
Height
Roof	34 m (111 ft)
Technical details
Floor count	5
Design and construction
Architect	Leck & Emley

The Rand Club is the oldest private members' club in Johannesburg, South Africa, founded in October 1887. The plan for the current, third, clubhouse was put on paper in 1902 and its construction was finished in 1904 on the design by architects Leck & Emley. Cecil John Rhodes was instrumental in deciding the Rand Club's location.

The club was founded only a year after the city of Johannesburg itself was formed. The need for such an establishment was felt as, in the burgeoning gold rush tent town of the time, there was little infrastructure and no suitable locale for distinguished visitors or pioneers to call in or be received at. It is said that Cecil John Rhodes was walking along the newly laid-out Marshall’s Township together with Dr Hans Sauer, the first District Surgeon of the Transvaal Republic; both of them stopped at the intersection of what is now Commissioner and Loveday streets, with Rhodes proclaiming that “this place will do for a club.”

The first subscribers, who became the founding members, received two plots as a voluntary contribution and purchased two additional ones in order to ensure that the future building provided spacious facilities. The construction of the first clubhouse promptly began with the erection of a simple single-story structure, housing a bar, a billiards room, four conference rooms, and offices for the chairman and the secretary. This quickly proved inadequate and this structure was demolished to make way for a double-story Victorian building, then deemed the finest in Johannesburg, with colonnaded verandas, trelliswork, French windows, and Corinthian pillars. By 1902, this too proved inadequate and was replaced with the current, third, clubhouse.

The club and its members have played important parts and have held notable positions in South African history. Mining magnates such as Sir Jilius Jeppe, Sir Hermann Eckstein and Sir Lionel Phillips were instrumental in turning the Witwatersrand into the largest goldfield in the world, as well as for sponsoring the construction of the Johannesburg Art Gallery and donating important pieces of art to it. Rhodes’s associate, Dr Leander Starr Jameson, together with his fellow plotters from the Transvaal Reform Committee plotted the overthrow of the government of the Transvaal from the club’s Main Bar. The club was one of the targets of the striking miners during the Rand Rebellion of 1922 and was briefly barricaded during the disturbances.