Major Charles Sydney Goldman (28 April 1868 – 7 April 1958) was a British businessman, author, and journalist who served as a Member of Parliament (MP) from 1910 until 1918.
Background
In early life, he used the family name in the spelling Goldmann. Born in Cape Colony, he was of German Jewish ancestry. His father Bernard Nahum Goldmann had left eastern Germany after the German revolutions of 1848–1849, because of his political involvements. It was reported in 1939 that his family name was originally Monck.
Bernard Goldmann ran a shop at Burgersdorp for the Mosenthal brothers, and prospered; he was appointed Justice of the Peace for the Albert district of Cape Colony in 1869. He was a director of the Albert Bank, with his brother Louis Goldmann, who had arrived in Cape Town in 1845 with his family from Breslau, had gone into business with the Mosenthals and moved to Burgersdorp. The surgeon and medical researcher Edwin Goldmann was Sydney's elder brother.
In 1876 Bernard Goldmann and his family migrated to Europe, by a sea voyage on SS Nyanza to Southampton. After a period in London, they moved on to Breslau. As tutor in German, and to help with college preparation, the children had an uncle, Dr. Monck. The boys also attended the gymnasium school, where Adolf Anderssen taught. From there, Sydney and his brother Alfred moved back to South Africa; while Edwin and Richard, the other brothers, with their sister Alice, remained in Germany.
In business
Goldman and his elder brother Alfred returned to South Africa around 1882. Alfred settled at Graaff-Reinet as a dealer. Sydney Goldman went into agriculture. He was in business at Reddersburg, in the Orange Free State, around 1887.
Gold mines and their finance earned Goldman a fortune. He moved to the goldfields after the Witwatersrand Gold Rush, and was taken on by a mining company. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society in 1891, as Sydney Goldmann. From age 26, or 1895, he was a partner in S. Neumann & Co., Sigismund Neumann's holding company, at least to 1905; later (by 1913) Neumann was the sole partner. As the other partners moved to London, Goldman was for a time the only partner resident in Johannesburg.
Goldman purchased an extensive estate known as Schoongezicht (later known as Lanzerac) in the Middelburg district. By 1900 it was owned by John X. Merriman. Bernard Goldmann having died (by 1894), the family moved by stages to London, with Edwin remaining in Freiburg, Germany; and Sydney left Johannesburg. In 1899 in England he married a granddaughter of Sir Robert Peel.
Boer War
During the Second Anglo-Boer War, Goldman was a war correspondent for The Standard and was a major in the British forces. Initially attached to Sir Redvers Buller's relief force, he travelled with them as far as Ladysmith after which he transferred to the cavalry advancing north in order to report on their endeavours. At this period, Goldman worked as a cameraman for the Warwick Trading Company, taking over when Joseph Rosenthal left in the middle of 1900. He is recorded as filming a ceremony on 25 October 1900 in Pretoria, in which Lord Roberts marked the annexation of the Transvaal. After that Goldman returned to Johannesburg, which had been captured by British forces.
Imperialism and politics
In the 1890s Goldman was involved in the Eighty Club. His brother Richard dined there while Lord Rosebery, the Liberal Imperialist, was Prime Minister (i.e. 1894–5). Clinton Edward Dawkins described Goldman to Leo Maxse in 1904 as:
...full of S. African shares, also of public spirit and of imperial devotion...[who] desires to excel as a writer or pamphleteer. Nature—or his education—have deprived him of the least glimmering of literary skill.
Goldman joined the Compatriots Club formed that year. To gain influence, he purchased a struggling weekly journal, The Outlook, at the end of 1904. It had been founded by George Wyndham, and was then edited by Percy Hurd. In order to develop it as an organ of the tariff reformers, Goldman hired the journalist J. L. Garvin as its editor. Garvin quickly transformed the journal into a publication of note, but the paper failed to turn a profit. After a series of disagreements between the two men over business matters, Goldman sold the paper to Lord Iveagh in October 1906. On the tone of Edwardian period imperialist writers, contrasted with Leonard Woolf, Simon Glassock writes:
Garvin, Goldman and St Loe Strachey demonstrate how writers at the turn of the twentieth century might have allied economics, politics and history with appeals for the reader to take modest but deserved pride in the imperial achievements of the British.