War, Strikes and Mechanisation, 1914–23

Abstract

The proliferation and diffusion of electrical equipment, which is far from exhausted, goes back to the decades before the First World War. There was now no activity which could not be mechanised and powered. This was the consummation of the Industrial Revolution.¹

During and after the Great War South Africa industrialised. Mining and agricultural production expanded, while simultaneously new industries developed. The new industries were mechanised, and increasingly, the machinery was electrically powered. Industrialisation was achieved against a background of war and strikes. In the words of Arthur Hadley of the VFTPC, in 1913 a ‘crisis arose between capital and labour’.² This crisis was temporarily settled, and war intervened, but the long-term settlement of relations between capital and labour was not to be achieved until after the general strike of 1922. The outcome of the 1922 strike was crucial to the fortunes of the VFTPC, because the strike was directly concerned with the mechanisation of gold-mining,³ using greatly increased amounts of energy from the VFTPC. Electricity consumption did not only grow in mining: other industrial power consumption also increased. During and immediately after the war a heavy industrial infrastructure was created under state ownership or stimulus, in the fields of metallurgy, transport and energy. Out of plans for the electrification of the South African Railways came the creation of the state-owned Electricity Supply Commission (Escom) in 1923.