THE NORTHWARD EXPANSION 421
aluminium
for copper and the Continent began to place its hopes on vigorous
competition from Rhodesia: '. . . In two or three years the American
copper situation will find itself threatened from the English side, and
only then may the Continent begin to expect some relief from the
present American squeezing of the market.'23 Since the
copper cartel would not lower prices, it could have recourse only to
restriction of output, but the progressive deterioration of the world
situation proved too strong; copper price-pegging had to be abandoned
in April 1930. By the end of the year the United States price of copper
had fallen to 10-3 cents per pound, and world stocks had risen to
600,000 tons.24
♦ XIII ♦
It
is against the background of this deteriorating world situation that
the events of Northern Rhodesia must be viewed. No one, at the time,
could foresee how long the depression was going to last, or forecast
its magnitude. What was evident was that a great deal of money and
effort had been put into proving the existence of the mining field; if
all this effort and expenditure were not to be wasted, the mines would
have to be further financed up to the stage of actual production. And
the expenditure involved was not a mere matter of prospecting, of shaft
sinking and underground work in the mines themselves. It was necessary
to make provision for communications, for the metallurgical plants, for
power installations, for housing for both Native and white workers, and
for administrative offices, for hospitals, for recreational facilities:
in other words, to create teclinical units and the apparatus of
civilization in an area that only a few years before had been primitive
bush.
By
the time Rhodesian Anglo American had got into its stride, the shape of
things to come was already very manifest. Speaking to the shareholders
at the first ordinary general meeting in London on 3 June 1930, Edmund
Davis told them that
taking
the copper position in Northern Rhodesia as a whole, we estimate that
by the end of the current year, drilling will have established the
existence of a total of 585,000,000 tons of 4-1/2 per cent ore. The
richness of these Northern Rhodesia deposits will be the better
realized by noting that in
23 Quoted from the Metalborse in 3 8 Mineral Industry in a review of the world situation, pp. 116-20.
24 39 Mineral Industry, pp. 116-17.
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