National Kimberly Day circulates on holiday-calendar sites and social media each 11 October, a date it shares with National Kim Day. No primary record identifies a founder, sponsoring organisation or establishing act for it.
CHAPTER 01
A city, an earl, and a war
The jump from a Norfolk field to a household name ran through southern Africa. In the early 1870s, a diamond rush threw up a boomtown in the Northern Cape. Officials named it Kimberley, after John Wodehouse, the first Earl of Kimberley, who was then Britain's secretary of state for the colonies.
The town made global headlines a generation later. British and Boer forces fought over it in the Second Boer War, and the British relief of the besieged city was front-page news around 1900. The coverage carried the name into homes across the English-speaking world, and parents began giving it to their children.
