People: Reaching for the skies

Jeremy Metcalfe, the twinkle-eyed veteran mining entrepreneur now striving to steer Eastern Cape-focused Strategic Natural Resources (SNR) into a key role supplying coal to South Africa’s hard-pressed power industry, says he hopes the venture will ‘take me out on a high’. At 70, he is pleased the company has already established resources of almost 100 million tonnes of coal, confident that figure could be increased many times and delighted with the support of pink-suited and crocodile skin-shod Mazizi Msutu as local black economic empowerment spokesman.

Metcalfe reckons AIM-quoted SNR could be a profitable corporate swansong for him and his investors. Deals now under way, including a promise by old friend Peter Earl, the one-time maverick financier now heading independent South African power generator and SNR investor IPSA, should stand the company in good stead.

Metcalfe suggests that he could have oblique family links with the Eastern Cape going back to the late 19th century. Sir Charles Theophilus Metcalfe, a friend of Cecil Rhodes, built the railway from the district where one of SNR’s prospects is located to the port of East London.

When not preoccupied with underground prospects, the mellifluous Metcalfe, former boss of volatile mining play Minmet, is building himself a private aeroplane, a yellow and black ‘Skyranger Swift’. A qualified pilot since 1967, he is also a keen participant in soapbox racing from his home in Aldington, Kent, where he competes in ‘a converted coffin’.