made
a baronet and was evidently generous enough in the right quarter when
there was something to be got out of it, was scheduled to receive a
peerage. It was to be bestowed "in recognition of his services": the
usual formula. Lloyd George who was Prime Minister at the time, had
never been to South Africa, and evidently had no idea of Robinson's
reputation there. However, the London Morning Post, a paper which was later to merge with the Telegraph, was
edited by a man who had. This editor started a campaign of indignation
against the award and succeeded in raising such an outcry that the
promised peerage was actually revoked, an act of Indian giving that has
never, before or since in all Great Britain's history, been equaled.
Definitely, Robinson wasn't popular.
He
may have taken comfort in the fact that, anyway, he was rich. When he
died, in 1929, he left a collection of paintings worth three million
dollars. Yet other South Africans outdid even that. Sir Julius Wernher
was one, with his collection, and Sir Alfred Beit was another.
Incidentally there is a story about Sir Alfred that in my opinion
surpasses any Robinson anecdote. It is in the private records of
Walter Stanley Whitworth, who came out to South Africa in 1893 and went
to work in the Koffeyfontein (or Coffeyfontein, or Kaffyfonteyn)
diamond mine near Jagersfontein, a place that was to become one of the
most important of the Fields. Koffeyfontein was not yet a De Beers
mine, for though Rhodes's idea of amalgamation continued to march, the
company was slow and deliberate in its swallowing. The men who owned
Koffeyfontein were nearly broke and for some time had been asking De
Beers either to buy them out or extend a helping hand with a loan in
it. Whitworth wrote, "On one occasion Mr. Hirschhorn wrote to say he was
