THE police were out in force. Roadblocks were thrown up around the city. Residents were tittering with nervousness. Word spread: the gangsters had been traced to a hideout in a cave.

The police guard the entrance to the cave with the Foster Gang inside, in 1914

The crowd had to be held back behind a fence as the tension mounted. Then shots were heard from deep inside the cave, and it was all over. The Foster Gang, wanted for murder and robbery, had chosen to take their own lives rather than surrender to the police.

It was one of the most remarkable criminal sagas in early Johannesburg history. The gang, consisting of William Foster, John Maxim and Carl Mezar, had evaded police for months during the year 1914. They were wanted for a string of robberies across the Reef, and the murder of three policemen and a passerby. But nine other people also died because of the Foster Gang, among them a distinguished Boer war general.

Tracker dogs had led the police to the cave on Wednesday, 16 September, 1914, where they camped out … and waited. The next day the gang, literally cornered, took their own lives. Their leader, William Foster, was only 28.

From the age of 22 he'd slid down the criminal slope very quickly, unable to stop himself, taking others, including his younger brother, with him.

The entrance to the cave - a hole in the ground

The Foster cave still exists, on private residential property. It is visible as a two-metre-across hole in the ground, just below a very attractive rock garden and house. Two large pepper trees stand tall on either side of the hole, with green Wandering Jew groundcover tumbling down into the gap and a rusty ladder against one side. The hole goes down three metres and from there a 40-metre tunnel runs north into the koppie.

It's an unremarkable tunnel, about two metres high in the middle, damp and dark, and a little eery. Its entrance is almost completely covered by a large rock but it is possible to squeeze past it.

The tunnel was originally a shallow cave, but in the 1890s prospectors tunnelled through it into the koppie, but found no gold. Foster grew up in nearby Fairview and had discovered it as a schoolboy, and played there with his brother Jimmy.

William Foster

Foster was born in Griqualand East in 1886. His father was an Irishman, his mother an Englishwoman. Foster was the third of six children, and when he was 14 his parents moved to Johannesburg. His father was a builder who was often out of town on building sites. He left his wife with the children, and she didn't discipline Foster too strictly.

Henry May and Iain Hamilton describe him in The Foster Gang as "quick-tempered and obstinate and with a will of his own that sometimes amounted to rebelliousness . . ."

Foster was sent to the Catholic Marist Brothers school in the city centre. May and Hamilton paint a positive picture of him as a schoolboy: "William as a boy was lively and attractive, with strong features, bright grey eyes, and a ready smile. He held his head high and his shoulders straight, and when he walked he gave an extraordinary impression of electric energy, as if his body and limbs were tautened by some strange inner force."

Foster apparently "worked hard and played hard", and there were no signs of delinquency when he was growing up. His family was "a happy one". He showed particular talent for soccer and became known as "a wizard with the ball", and a minor celebrity. At 16 he was chosen to play in the senior Johannesburg city team in the annual match against Pretoria. His devotion to sport didn't mean he neglected his studies. He had "an agreeable personality", and it looked like he was headed for great things when he left school.