TO THE FORMATION OF THE NEW SYNDICATE 111
helping in every way and we can do no more. We are foolish to get so worried.
Twenty
years of endeavour lay between these two utterances of his: they form
the subject-matter of this and the following chapters.
♦ II ♦
Important
changes took place in the diamond world during the period of World War
I. On 31 December 1911, a circular letter announced the voluntary
liquidation of the great firm of Wernher, Beit and Company; its diamond
business was taken over by a new firm L. Breitmeyer and Company, in
which firm Ernest Oppenheimer's cousin, F. Hirschhorn, remained a
partner. Alfred Beit had died in July 1906, Julius Wernher died in May
1912, and though the new firm took over the 30 per cent quota (which,
with the addition of the 15 per cent held by the Central Mining and
Investment Corporation, one of the Wernher, Beit Group, gave it a 45
per cent total interest in the Syndicate) under the heads of the 1910
agreement, it became evident in subsequent years that, for the time
being, the dynamic factor in the diamond world was to be the firm of
Barnato Brothers, which, already powerful in Kimberley and at
Jagersfontein, secured control over the Premier Mine at Pretoria in
1911, and thus brought that producer into closer relation with De Beers
than had been the case before, when the two companies were at daggers
drawn. In 1916, at the annual meeting of De Beers, on 30 November, S.
B.Joel pointed out:
I
am now speaking as the largest individual shareholder in this company:
I am the largest holder in Jagersfontein and likewise in the Premier;
they are the three largest companies. Through my having joined the
board of the Premier, I have brought those gentlemen into line with us
to know, and to say, that there is only one thing, and that one thing
is reduced production and higher prices.
In
the following year, however, S. B. Joel disposed of the holdings of his
firm in the Premier Mine to De Beers; Francis Oats, addressing the
annual general meeting on what proved to be the last occasion of his
doing so (he died on 1 September 1918) told the De Beers shareholders
that
