each
other throughout 1941, and it is clear that though the personal
relations between them were not unfriendly, Ernest Oppenheimer was
suffering from a sense of grievance: he suspected the intentions of
Government so far as the future of the Diamond Producers' Association
was concerned; the industry was being subjected to what he regarded as
unfair pressure, and his own position (as already set out in a previous
section) was misunderstood or misinterpreted. General Smuts, in the
interview23 which he had given Ernest Oppenheimer, had attempted to pour oil on troubled waters:
At
the outset, General Smuts expressed his regret that he could not see me
before I went to Cape Town, but that he had since had a talk with
Colonel Stallard, and that I really took the matter too tragically.
Colonel Stallard had no intention of doing away with the Diamond
Producers' Association and that his only reason for giving notice was
that he, Stallard, felt that the outside producers enjoyed too large a
part of the trade, and he hoped that this could be adjusted.
In
general, General Smuts tried to minimize the whole incident. I told him
that, in view of our experience with Colonel Stallard during the last
twelve months, I could not look upon it in the light he did. I referred
back to the interview I had with him, General Smuts, when I returned
from America last October, at which interview he had asked me to avoid
friction with the Minister of Mines. I explained that in order to meet
his wishes I had gone out of my way ... to fall in with Colonel
Stallard's demands. I had put up with all sorts of annoyances and even
put up with our losing the Akim contract,24 on which we
would have made -£100,000 and which, moreover, would have made
available for us industrial diamonds which were so urgently required
for Great Britain, the United States and Russia. I explained further
that during the whole of the time Colonel Stallard had put forward
continuous demands for concessions, and that we had always gone out of
our way to meet him, even to the detriment of the De Beers company, and
that finally he wrote me a personal letter on 30 September asking me to
obtain the formal consent of the various companies to the arrangements
come to, but he did not disclose in that letter that he had, on the
self-same day written a letter to Kimberley giving a year's notice of
the termination of the diamond producers' agreement. I told General
Smuts that if it had not been for the promise which I had made to him
last year, the correct answer would undoubtedly have been that in view
of the fact that Stallard had given notice we were not prepared to make
any concessions under the contract, but would adhere to our rights. We
all felt, however, that we did
23 Vide supra, section VIII, and footnote 15, p. 333.
21
This has a reference to a proposed purchase of the output of the Akim
Diamond Fields Limited (founded in 1920), situated in the then Gold
Coast Colony.
