refugees,
and generally encouraging rehabilitation measures, was made a baronet,
and Sir Ernest must have felt, with all this British recognition, that
the mob scene in Kimberley not so long before had been adequately wiped
off the record. Certainly he bore no malice. A few years later he was
elected Member of Parliament for Kimberley, and he continued to
represent the town at the House of Assembly for eleven years.
Anglo
American was a great success from the first. J. P. Morgan and other
American bankers invested something over five million dollars in the
corporation. The gold fields were so productive that Oppenheimer, who
had become chairman of Anglo American, began casting his eye about for
further opportunities. He didn't have far to look. One of the
consequences of the war was that Germany's holdings in South-West
Africa were thrown open to development by British capital; the German
mining firms there were, in fact, going broke. So Oppen-heimer stepped
in and bought out the German firms, merging them into a single company
called Consolidated Diamond Mines of South-West Africa, Ltd., in which
Anglo American held a controlling interest. This act made him an
important figure in the diamond-producing world—within a year
Consolidated Diamond Mines was accounting for a fifth of all the
diamonds mined in Africa—and he determined to use his newly acquired
power to influence the other large producers, notably De Beers, in the
direction of a more rigid marketing arrangement than the old Diamond
Syndicate and stricter control of production. He had a poor opinion of
the De Beers directors' breadth of vision. His breadth of vision, on
the other hand, scared them to death.
Meanwhile, the diamond business had its ups and downs.
