Sir Lionel Phillips, 1st Baronet

Sir Lionel Phillips, 1st Baronet (6 August 1855 – 2 July 1936) was a British-born South African financier, mining magnate and politician.

Phillips, who was Jewish, was born in London on 6 August 1855 to Phillip Phillips, a trader, and his wife Jane Lazerus. He was one of three sons and the family was lower middle-class, thus his early formal education was very limited. He commenced working for his father as a bookkeeper at the age of 14 but soon left the business and ventured out on his own, joining a firm of London diamond-sorters. Hearing of the discovery of large diamond deposits in Kimberley, he decided to seek his fortune and emigrate to South Africa. He arrived at the Kimberley diamond fields in 1875, having walked most of the way there from Cape Town, and worked for Joseph Benjamin Robinson as a diamond sorter, fleetingly ran a newspaper, The Independent, and later became a mine manager. He soon went into partnership with fellow Jew Alfred Beit and made and lost his first fortune in Kimberley with investments in the diamond industry.

Cecil John Rhodes and Alfred Beit befriended him and, in 1889, he became a mining consultant at the gold mining concern Corner House to Hermann Eckstein & Co., in which Beit, a fellow Jew, was the majority shareholder. Phillips was described as "wiry" and having "immense energy and tenacity of purpose" – he had hoped once to be the manager of De Beers, but Beit offered £2,500 a year, expenses paid and 10 per cent of the profits from managing the firm's interests in the Nellmapius Syndicate. Phillips arrived in Johannesburg at a chaotic time, with Jules Porgès (ne Yehuda Porges a Jewish financier from Vienna) on the verge of retiring and the Johannesburg share market in turmoil after a potential disaster had been discovered in the mines.

Within a short while, Phillips became a leading player in the mining industry, as well as an active supporter of the Uitlander movement against the Transvaal Republic government. In 1885, he married Florence Ortlepp. He succeeded Eckstein as chairman of the Chamber of Mines in 1892. The Phillips' house, Hohenheim, was built where the Johannesburg General Hospital presently stands, after Florence had suggested the laying out of the suburb Parktown, to escape the dust problem created by the ever-growing mine dumps south of the city. Hohenheim was the first mansion built in Parktown, designed by Frank Emley in 1892, and later became the home of Sir Percy FitzPatrick, author and mining financier. In 1909, the family moved to Villa Arcadia.

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