Garden,
where diamond merchants congregate, and set to work learning his
business. Things don't change much in that world, and the training he
underwent was just about what an apprentice in the diamond trade would
undergo today. At Dunkels-buhler's in London rough stones came in from
South Africa, where they had been bought by the firm's representatives,
and were sorted and graded and sold. He enjoyed the work. He soon
became so proficient in judging diamonds that he gained a reputation
for it, even in that society of experts.
There
are dozens of stories current in Johannesburg and Kimberley about his
knowledge of stones. One is told in several versions, but the main
point of the tale is that during a recent meeting of De Beers directors
someone played a practical joke and slipped a phony in among a handful
of good stones that were being passed around from hand to hand, a piece
of bottle glass that closely resembled a rough diamond. It is said that
Oppenheimer spotted it even before it reached him. Certainly his Hatton
Garden training was intensive and arduous. During the six years he was
in London he found only one opportunity to pay a visit to his parents
in Germany, and it wasn't that he didn't want to go.
"Only
the other day when I was playing with my grandson, who is soon going
away to school, I thought what it must have meant to my parents to send
their children away from them into the world," he recently told a
colleague. In 1902, Dunkels-buhler's sent him to Kimberley, where they
needed experts of his caliber even more than they did in London.
Kimberley
wasn't quite the rough mining camp it had been twenty years earlier,
but it wasn't exactly a suave metropolis either. The tents and shacks
had mostly given way to solid
