164 SIR ERNEST OPPENHEIMER
Uitgevonden—had
greatly increased. In February 1926 alluvial output in the Lichtenburg
district was only 567 carats—from April to September the monthly
output rose from 2,888 carats to 96,000 carats. It attained 229,000
carats in April 1927 and, though a fall occurred thereafter, it again
attained 223,000 carats in September of that year. While average output
from the alluvial fields for the ten years ended 31 December 1926 was
some £1,854,000 per annum, the value of the output for the single
twelve months ended 30 September 1926 was £6,258,000.
In
the light of these occurrences it is not difficult to understand that
both within and without diamond circles there should have been serious
apprehensions as to the future of the diamond industry. It is true that
there had been similar periods of new discoveries in the past, and, as
Ernest Oppcnheimer was to point out to the shareholders of Anglo
American Corporation in 1929—at a time, it is true, when the legal
position was different from what it had been in 1926 and when alluvial
production in Lichtenburg was declining and the worst of the panic was
over—taking a long view, the situation was far from being catastrophic.
It was the case that production in Southern Africa as a whole
in 1926, 1927 and 1928, the true crisis years, was far below the
production of 1913 when it had attained 6,870,000 metric carats, while
even if World production were taken as a basis of calculation,
output in 1926 was below that of 1913 and the output of 1928 (1928
being the year of greatest output when it reached 7,754,000 metric
carats) was not greater than the 1913 production by more than some
three-quarters of a million carats. In the fifteen-year interval the
world's purchasing power, of course, had greatly expanded, so that a
secular increase in output was not necessarily an evil at all. Still
the actual production figures do not tell the whole story—potential production had also to be taken into account. De facto production
measured not only the absorptive capacity of the market—in effect this
was at times seriously below actual production—but also the success of
the efforts made through the traditional measures of limitation of
output and
valued
at £154,000, giving an average of over £12 per carat. The biggest
stone, a silvery cape of hexoctahedral habit, weighed 85 carats, and
was worth £60 per carat. The most valuable, a perfect blue-white
distorted octahedron, weighing 71-5 carats, was sold for £8,000, which
makes it the most valuable diamond so far found in any of our South
African detrital deposits. The parcel also contained quite a number of
smaller blue-white stones of the first water. Very slightly yellow
stones or silvery capes, pale yellow stones, and faintly spotted
diamonds (pique), however, predominate.' Further: 'Another very unusual
feature, to which Mr. Arend Brink, the eminent expert, drew the
writers' attention, is, to use his own words "the . . . wide range of
coloured and yellow diamonds".'
