William George Holford died in Johannesburg, Transvaal, on April 26th, 1927.
On leaving school he was apprenticed to Messrs. Samuel Parker & Sons, mechanical engineers, of Leeds, and on completing his articles he went to South Africa, where for some months in 1886-7 he was engaged on bridge construction on the Cape Government Railways. Leaving Cape Colony in 1887, he was for about a year engaged on construction and survey work under Mr. Alexander Bailie, Government land surveyor, and afterwards as chief assistant to Messrs. Beynon & Godfrey also Government surveyors, in Johannesburg. In 1895 he was appointed manager of exploratory and mining work for the Anglo-French Matabeleland Exploration Co., Ltd., and the Streathem Prospecting Syndicate, Manicaland, Rhodesia.
For eight years from 1897 he was superintending engineer to the Anglo-French Exploration Co., and Messrs. Farrar Brothers, acting as consulting engineer to a number of mines in the Transvaal. From 1905 to 1908 he was consulting engineer for the Anglo-French Co., and from 1909 to 1912 he was manager of the gold-mining section of the Apex Mines, Ltd. In 1913 he started to practise as a consulting engineer in Johannesburg and acted in that capacity for a number of well-known mines. In 1914 he contributed a paper to the Transactions of the Institution (vol. xxiv) on ‘Features in the Mining Problems of the Eastern Witwatersrand Area’ which provoked considerable discussion.
Mr. Holford was elected a Member of the Institution in 1914.
Vol. 37, Trans IMM 1927-8, p.575
