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SIR ERNEST OPPENHEIMER
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London. 'Our aim must be January-June prices, otherwise it does not pay the conference producers to produce diamonds at all.'
It
was obviously necessary that an expert of the highest standing should
be chosen to supervise the work of arriving at a standard assortment
and at standard prices. The expert chosen was Louis Oppenheimer, who
was by that time in charge of the Diamond Corporation's selling
organization in London. A conference at Kim-berley, held on 28 November
1931, attended not only by Ernest Oppenheimer and his brother, but also
by Sir Frank Meyer and E. H. Farrer, who had become managing director
of the Diamond Corporation, as well as by P. Granger, who was diamond
valuator to the Union Government, could sum up the results attained:
The
standard assortment and standard prices have been fixed and are already
in operation in London; Mr. Louis Oppenheimer is at present in South
Africa and the work of establishing a standard assortment and prices in
South Africa is practically completed.
It was agreed that all price changes should only be applied 'after all selling
centres have been advised and will then become operative simultaneously
as at a given date'; and it was further agreed that 'all sales will be
conducted on the gold basis as at present'. (So far as South Africa was
concerned, it was still at that time on the gold standard, so that
prices expressed in South African pounds were not affected in the
slightest.)
♦ VIII ♦
It
very speedily became obvious that the conference producers would have
to revise their working programme for the first half of 1932, and as
early as December 1931 the secretary of De Beers was asking the
Minister of Mines to receive a deputation from the producers. After
some correspondence, the Minister agreed to meet such a deputation on 6
January 1932 at Cape Town. As Ernest Oppenheimer was to say later in
Parliament: 'It was a fully fledged conference, the most fully
representative conference that has taken place in the diamond trade.
Our position had become so serious that directors from overseas had
come over to explain to the Minister the financial position in which we
were.'13 Meanwhile, the basis of discussion had been agreed before
13 In
fact, the producers were represented by Ernest and Louis Oppenheimer,
by Sir Frank Meyer, the deputy chairman of De Beers, by Sir John Du
Cane and Sir Robert
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