banket, noun

/baŋˈket//ˈbæŋkət/
Forms:
Also banquette.
Origin:
DutchShow more Dutch, see quotation 1937.
Mining
A name given by early gold-prospectors to gold-bearing conglomerates of quartz pebbles bound by siliceous cement. Also attributive.
1886 Diamond Fields Advertiser in J. Crwys-Williams S. Afr. Despatches (1989) 81Banket or Almond reef, the same as Witwatersrand, has been discovered in large quantities at Schoonspruit.
1887 Chambers’s Jrnl (U.K.) Apr. 284The conglomerate..is a peculiar formation of almond-shaped pebbles, pressed into a solid mass in a bed of rock of an igneous nature, and is called ‘Banket’ on account of its resemblance to a favourite Dutch sweetmeat known in England as almond rock. The ‘Banket’ is also rich in gold.
1897 H. Raymond B.I. Barnato 121The first mines were worked literally from the outcrops of the reefs in the open, and the conglomerate rock or banket which contained the gold was crushed in small batteries with light stamps.
1913 V.R. Markham S. Afr. Scene 44The unique gold deposits of the Rand are to be found in conglomerate pebble beds called banket, tipped at an angle of between 30 and 70 degrees.
1933 W.H.S. Bell Bygone Days 131The banket reef was quite new to geologists and they could not bring themselves to believe that it was anything more than a surface deposit.
1937 H. Sauer Ex Afr. 145‘Banket’..should probably be spelt banquette, a term commonly used by the Dutch South Africans to distinguish a certain class of sweets — nuts, almonds, cloves, etc. — coated with sugar and variously coloured and all separate. The Boers applied the word to the conglomerate reefs of the Rand, because the conglomerate, on the outcrop, disintegrates into a mass of smooth quartz pebbles..resembling the sweets.
1946 S. Cloete Afr. Portraits 183The formation in which gold is found on the Rand is called ‘banket’...The gold is mixed up in conglomerate beds, composed of quartz pebbles bound together by siliceous cement containing iron pyrites, in reefs which dip down to tremendous depths.
1951 Off. Yr Bk of Union No. 25, 1949 (Union Office of Census & Statistics) 938The name ‘banket’..refers specially to the ore taken from the oxidized zone.
1969 A.A. Telford Jhb.: Some Sketches 6On the Reef [gold] was first found in the conglomerate or ‘banket’.
1979 J. Gratus Jo’burgers 19They had already beaten him to some fine property with plenty of gold-bearing banket ore just beneath the surface and therefore cheap to mine.
1984 A. Wannenburgh Natural Wonder of Sn Afr. 24The real wealth of the Witwatersrand lay in the conglomerates, which locally were called ‘banket’.
A name given by early gold-prospectors to gold-bearing conglomerates of quartz pebbles bound by siliceous cement. Also attributive.
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bangie, nounn.bankie, nounn.
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