THE
NORTHWARD EXPANSION
417
period
8 December 1928 to 31 March 1930, a second managing director had been
appointed in London—Mr. S. S. Taylor. Carl Davis also became a
director. The new company took over from Anglo American Corporation its
Rhodesian assets, including the various consulting engineering and
managerial contracts with Rhodesian companies. Anglo American
Corporation, in its turn, was appointed managers and secretaries. The
Newmont Corporation seconded a leading member of its staff, Mr. H. S.
Munroe, to be the consulting engineer and head of the teclmical
organization at Broken Hill.
At
the twelfth ordinary general meeting of Anglo American Corporation on
18 May 1929, Ernest Oppenheimer devoted a good deal of attention to the
new company—not unnaturally so, since it was the first of the
subsidiaries which were created in the course of time. His remarks on
the group system on that occasion have already been quoted.19 For the rest, after going into the details of participation and organization, he summed up:
Besides
the companies in which the Rhodesian Anglo American is directly
interested, other concerns are doing a tremendous amount of work, and
although we are now only watching the preliminaries and the opening
moves, we have already sufficient information to predict with the
greatest confidence that in Northern Rhodesia a mining field has been
discovered which bids fair to become of greater importance than any
other in the British Empire with the possible exception of the Rand,
and even of this I am not sure. . . .
Some
months before, just after the formation of Rhodesian Anglo American he
had written a long personal letter to Edmund Davis, dated 29 December
1928, suggesting an arrangement by which the leadership of Rhodesian
Anglo American could be assured for the future:
Pollak
will have shown you the cable I dispatched to him yesterday suggesting
it would be very desirable (if possible) for the Rhodesian Anglo
American Limited to purchase from the 'Chartered' company its royalties
in the N'Kana Concession. If such a transaction does not appeal to you
or the 'Chartered' company, you will all the same appreciate that my
suggestion is only dictated by my desire to place our new company in a
very strong position in Northern Rhodesia. You also know that I view
the question not only from rhe point of view of our company but also
from the imperial aspect, i.e. the desire of all those connected with
the new company of keeping the Northern Rhodesian copper-field an
imperial copper-field. The importance of the proposal is such that I
should like to explain to you
19 Supra, p. 98.
