Reminiscences of a Rand pioneer

This absorbing book is the autobiography of a member of an old Natal family. Born in 1876, Renault Acutt spent his early years in Verulam on the North Coast, went to school at the Berea Academy in Durban and, in 1891, at the age of fifteen, started work as an office boy for a firm in Commissioner Street, Johannesburg, then barely in its second year. He spent the better part of the next thirty years on the Rand, witnessing its growth and contributing to it as a contractor to the mines and later as a cinema entrepreneur (he was the first general manager of Africa's Amalgamated Theatres). It is his adventures in the 1980's and in the early part of this century that give the book its absorbing interest. There were, for example, his brushes with the Zarps (South African Republic Police) and his cycle ride from Johannesburg to Durban on the 'roads' of 1897, to attend a cousin's twenty-first birthday party. He remembers the legendary figures of Johannesburg's entertainment world in those early days (Leonard Rayne and Jimmy Hyde among them). He also describes his boyhood friendhip with the first great Springbok cricketer, Jimmy Sinclair.