RANDLORDS, unionists and strike leaders lie shoulder to shoulder - well, almost - in Brixton Cemetery, the final resting place of engineers, editors, soldiers, professors, mayors, geologists, architects, prospectors, miners ...

Brixton Cemetery is the final resting place of engineers, editors, soldiers, professors, mayors, geologists, architects, prospectors, miners ...

The cemetery has an old world feel to it with its elegant headstones, numerous carved angels and even a stone church organ above a grave, complemented by gracious old trees like oaks, cork oaks, pines and blue gums.

Brixton Cemetery was laid out in 1912 and has an historic Hindu crematorium on land organised by Mahatma Gandhi shortly before he left South Africa in 1914. The wood-burning crematorium was built in 1918, and it still stands in the north-west corner of the cemetery. A brick, gas-fired crematorium was built in 1956, and is still used.

In 1922 the cemetery hosted 10 000 people at the funeral of miner Samuel "Taffy" Long, widely believed to have been wrongly executed in the aftermath of the 1922 Miners' Strike. Taffy's grave is now clearly demarcated with a granite stone stating that he was executed "for a crime he did not commit".

That year was important for another Johannesburger, Mary "Pickhandle" Fitzgerald, who stepped down as a city councillor in 1922, after having been an active trade unionist for a decade before she represented the city. She died in 1960 and is buried in the cemetery alongside her second husband, Archie Crawford. She is honoured in the city with the naming of Mary Fitzgerald Square in Newtown.

Two wealthy Randlords are buried, with their wives, in Brixton Cemetery. Sir George Albu established the mining house that eventually became Billiton, one of the biggest mining houses in the world. He bought Northwards in Parktown from José Dale Lace and restored it after the west wing was destroyed by a fire. Unlike other Randlords, Albu stayed out of politics. His grave is clearly visible in the cemetery - it is marked by two large palms on either side.

Brixton Cemetery has an old world feel with elegant headstones and gracious trees

Randlord Lionel Phillips was the leader of the Reform Committee, a 56-member committee representing the grievances of Johannesburgers to the Paul Kruger government, which led to the revolutionary but abortive Jameson Raid. Many other Reform Committee members are buried at Brixton, including John Mortimer Buckland, William Shiry Marshall, Aubrey Woolls Sampson and John Carrey-Davis.

Phillips was one of the most prominent Randlords, a colonial and very pro-British. He built his house, Hohenheim, where the Johannesburg General Hospital now stands. His wife, Florence, suggested the laying out of the township Parktown, to get away from the dust created by the rapidly growing mine dumps south of the city.

A persistent character of early Johannesburg, also buried in the cemetery, was George Sheffield. He started The Star newspaper, which is still sold on the streets of Johannesburg. In the early years he was forced to change its name several times because President Paul Kruger banned it for being too pro-British. Other names it took on were The Evening Star and The Comet.

Brixton Cemetery can boast one of Johannesburg's early entrepreneurs - Herbert Evans, who opened the Herbert Evans Art Shop which still exists in the city. He bought up all the glass in the town after the dynamite explosion of 1896. A train of trucks with 55 tons of dynamite exploded, flattening four suburbs in its immediate vicinity and many windows in the town. Everyone bought new glass from Evans.

Rose McEwan, another Brixton Cemetery inmate, together with a group of concerned women, marked graves in the veld after the Anglo Boer War, when many fallen British soldiers were buried. The group went back to the graves, photographed them and sent the pictures to the appreciative wives and mothers of the fallen soldiers.