agreement
with the two companies. Sir David Harris, giving evidence before the
(Senate) Select Committee on the Diamond Cutting Industry in South
Africa in 1913, stated that 'when the crash came several firms
connected with the Syndicate at the time withdrew. They thought the
bottom was knocked out of the diamond trade and that the risk was too
great. The Syndicate was then carried on by the present firms in the
Syndicate and those who became nervous and were afraid to carry on,
retired.' In 1909, at the annual general meeting on 11 December,
Francis Oats was able to report that:
Since
the end of the financial year [i.e. 30 June 1909], the Syndicate have
taken from us—or will take before the end of December—diamonds to the
amount of at least £2-1/2 million. In addition the Syndicate
have reduced very considerably the stocks which had accumulated in the
two years of bad times we have passed through. In effect, we may reckon
that the world has taken during the past six months over three million
pounds worth of our goods as against only five million for the
preceding two years.
The
facts show that in the second half of 1909 the Syndicate had reverted
to the purchase terms of the 1906 agreement, i.e. £450,000 a month.
The
crisis was over. During the course of it the Syndicate had been shaken:
the companies and the Syndicate had all lost money on the sales of
diamonds: world confidence in the future of the diamond market had been
seriously undermined. The Transvaal Government had had to come to the
assistance of the Premier by forgoing £250,000 due to them. Dutoitspan
Mine had had to be closed. The lessons to be learnt were that, in the
absence of clear-cut principles, generally accepted and understood,
emergency measures were not likely to succeed in the face of individual
differences of opinion, and that the industry needed some dominating
personality to guide and to inspire it.
♦ X ♦
The
discovery of diamonds in German South West Africa in April 1908 was as
fortuitous as had been the earliest discoveries in Griqualand West: the
first stone of \ carat was found by a Cape boy, Zacharias
Lewala, working for Herr Stauch ('Oberbahn-meister'), a railway
official of the South West African Railway, on the section of the line
between Liideritzbucht and Keetmanshoop. Stauch took out prospecting
licences and he and two other officials, who originally financed the
