Dictionary of National Biography, 1927 supplement/Wernher, Julius Charles
WERNHER, Sir JULIUS CHARLES, first baronet (1850–1912), financier and philanthropist, was born at Darmstadt in the grand duchy of Hesse 9 April 1850 of an old and reputable Protestant family. His grandfather, Wilhelm Wernher, had been privy councillor and president of the court of appeal in his native state; his father, Friedrich August, was an eminent railway engineer, a friend of Robert Stephenson and of Isambard Kingdom Brunel. His mother was Elise Weidenbusch. Julius was the second child and eldest son of a family of four. His father's duties took him to Mainz and, when the boy was in his ninth year, to Frankfort. There Julius was educated and, although he hankered after his father's profession, decided upon a business career. After a commercial education, and some experience in a banking house at Frankfort, an aptitude for languages secured him an appointment in Paris. On the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War in 1870 he served as a cadet in the 4th cavalry division and in the army of occupation, without being in the least touched, as appears from his letters, by the wave of military and imperial sentiment then sweeping over Germany. His term of service over, he went to London, and then came a notable stroke of fortune. His employer in Paris had given him a warm letter of recommendation to Jules Porges, a diamond merchant of Paris and London, who, on news coming to Europe of remarkable finds in South Africa, offered young Wernher a two years' engagement as assistant to his partner, Charles Mège, then setting out to buy diamonds in the fields.
Mège and Wernher arrived at Port Elizabeth on 4 January 1871, and took over a week to get to the Vaal river, ‘packed like herrings, galloping with six horses over utterly impossible roads’ through country almost stripped of its inhabitants by the great diamond rush. They found the river diggings almost deserted for the ‘dry diggings’ at Du Toit's Pan, twenty-six miles from the river, and there the new comers set up their canvas house, opening an office a little later in the neighbouring camp of New Rush, afterwards to become Kimberley. Wernher made himself master of the infinitely difficult and delicate business of diamond buying, and by the spring of 1872 was able to write home, ‘I am already indispensable to my Frenchman,’ and again, ‘I am proud to say that my voice has its full weight.’
It was a rough life. ‘A great wide plain,’ Wernher wrote, ‘bounded in the far distance by hills of baroque … without any grass and hardly any trees; … now and again a little green, and the yellow sand broken by muddy water … That is everything that can be said of the place where we live.’ Wernher, a giant in physical strength, living a wise and temperate life, outlasted most of his competitors. Mège returned to Paris in the autumn of 1873, and from that time Wernher was partner in the firm and its sole representative at the fields. Porges came to trust him absolutely. ‘I am not’, Wernher wrote modestly, ‘one of those people who create new fortunes by genius or new combinations, and lose them again and win them again. I only walk well-known paths, but I walk steadily and only act out of conviction, without, indeed, paying too much attention to my own point of view.’ Such a character was well suited to win its way through the long series of crises caused by over-production, indiscriminate selling, prolonged droughts, wars, and falls of reef, which form the chequered history of the diamond mines of Kimberley. By 1876 Wernher had persuaded Porges to visit the fields and purchase claims in the Kimberley mine, and Wernher was soon the head of one of the most important diamond producing companies in the fields. ‘I have put a little order’, he wrote in 1878, ‘into the mining board (of which he was a director), and I am teaching them’, he added significantly, ‘to provide for the time when the mines are worked in common.’ In the busy mining camp he was already trusted and acknowledged as a leader, as much for his integrity of character as for his intellectual power. The Kimberley mine, originally divided into surface claims thirty feet square, had gone down into great depths; claims, sometimes subdivided, had crumbled one upon another; surrounding reef had fallen in upon the whole; the mining board, with little capital or influence, was unequal to the task of control, which ever grew more complicated, and Wernher was one of the first to see that consolidation was the only solution. His company (usually called the French Company) gradually and constantly enlarged its holdings and bought up strategical points, but was unable to come to terms with the powerful Central Company, of which Barnett Isaacs, known as Barney Barnato [q.v.], was the presiding genius; and it carried on with this and other companies a wasteful war in production and underground workings.
As the work of the mine became more absorbing Wernher was forced to neglect the diamond buying business, hitherto the mainstay of the firm, and arranged with several younger men to operate on joint account, the firm supplying the capital for shipment. Thus began his partnership with Alfred Beit [q.v.]. ‘I am living’, he wrote in 1879, ‘with Rube and Van Beek and Beit. With the last, the nicest of all, I lived for a long time in Old De Beers. He is a cheery, optimistic fellow of extraordinary goodness of heart and of very great business ability.’ Now Beit had invested on his own account in the De Beers mine and was thereby brought into intimate contact with Cecil John Rhodes [q.v.]. Rhodes and his friends in De Beers were thus able to come to a firm understanding with Wernher and the French group in the Kimberley mine in the task of bringing Barnato to terms and of consolidating the whole industry. It was by the aid of Wernher that Rhodes, in a flying visit to Europe (1887), bought the French Company and so faced Barnato as an equal in his own mine. In the meantime Wernher and Beit had been quietly buying large holdings in Du Toit's Pan and elsewhere in complete understanding with Rhodes, and the result of all these combinations was that the rival holders were ultimately forced to agree to the amalgamation of the chief diamond mines of Kimberley as the De Beers Consolidated Mines (1888).
Meanwhile, in order to stop the wasteful competition and reckless selling of diamonds, Wernher set about the creation of a diamond syndicate in London. From 1880 to 1882 he directed the London office of his firm, Porges residing in Paris. He then returned to the fields, but in 1884 he was back in London and from that time controlled from Europe an immensely important business. In 1886 the London Diamond Syndicate was established, with the result that the price of diamonds became stable. In January 1890, when Porges retired, the firm of Wernher, Beit, & Co. came into being. The partnership merely confirmed the combination which had produced such important results. The junior partner was a financial genius of the first rank, and although it was a favourite joke with the senior that he was known only as the Christian name of Beit, yet Wernher supplied strength and solidity of character and wise judgement as well as a foresight which came of profound knowledge and long experience. Wernher thus stands out as one of the pioneers of Kimberley who cherished the design, and carried through the great task, of consolidation.
The discovery of the Witwatersrand gold deposits in 1887 brought the firm into the field as gold miners. Alfred Beit bought large and valuable properties on the advice of such expert prospectors as James Benjamin Taylor and (Sir) Joseph Benjamin Robinson. Wernher, however, did not visit the gold fields until many years later, but by a remarkable combination of judgement and imagination mastered from London the problems of the Rand and organized the industry on a stable and scientific basis. He showed himself, indeed, an expert in the science of mining. He put his faith in the deep levels, employed the best engineering skill to be found in the world, and developed the properties of his firm to such good purpose that in 1912, the year of his death, the gold mines under the control of his group produced 3,500,000 ounces of fine gold and paid in dividends no less than £4,250,000, that is, 51 per cent of the profits of the whole of the Witwatersrand. In 1911 he was awarded the gold medal of the Institution of Mining and Metallurgy.
Although Wernher came to live in London owing to the necessities of business, he made his choice of British nationality with deliberation. ‘Undoubtedly’, he wrote in December 1879, ‘I shall live in London. The trend of things in Germany now and the manner in which liberal development is fettered in every conceivable way is intolerable to anybody who knows English life.’ His family earnestly, even angrily, protested, and, in deference to their feelings, he did not become a naturalized British subject until 1898. But he made his home where he had not only made his fortune but his friends and his life. In 1888 he married Alice Sedgwick, daughter of James Mankievicz, of London. He bought an estate in Bedfordshire, Luton Hoo, and at his London residence, Bath House, indulged a lifelong taste in art and formed a fine collection of pictures, principally of the Renaissance period. One of the best pictures in his collection, Watteau's ‘La Gage d'Amour’, he left by his will to the National Gallery. He was a man of deep culture and he read widely, even during his Kimberley days.
With strength of character was joined a tenderness which runs through all his letters, and possibly had its source in his deep affection for his mother. ‘I am your declared lover’, he told her in one of the first letters of a never-failing correspondence. When he became rich his philanthropy took the form of great and well-considered benefactions. To King Edward's hospital fund he made enormous gifts, and by his will it benefited to the extent of some £400,000, including a twelfth part of his residuary estate; he left a further £100,000 to be distributed among charities. He was deeply concerned at the backwardness of his adopted country in practical science, and he was a member of Lord Haldane's departmental committee (1904–1907) which recommended the establishment by royal charter of the Imperial College of Science and Technology in London; this institution Wernher endowed with £250,000, and by his will with a further sum of £150,000. Like Rhodes and Beit he was deeply interested in education, and he gave £250,000 towards the scheme for a university at Groote Schuur, the home of Cecil Rhodes. He took the reform side in the Transvaal, and when the South African War broke out his firm equipped the regiment of Imperial Light Horse. He declared himself in favour of tariff reform, but never threw himself into the politics of his adopted land or accepted any office of honour in his county. His self-effacement, indeed, amounted almost to a passion; with it went a notable loyalty to old friends and to the people who worked for him; his chief pride lay in the fact that he had made his wealth honestly, and that he had earned the complete and profound trust of the industry which he had done so much to establish. He was created a baronet in 1905. On his death, which took place in London 21 May 1912, the eldest of his three sons, Derrick Julius (born 1889), succeeded to the title.
A portrait of Wernher was painted by Sir Hubert von Herkomer in 1910; the original is at Luton Hoo, and there are replicas in the possession of his son, Major H. A. Wernher, and at the Johannesburg Art Gallery.
[Letters (unpublished) of Sir Julius Wernher; family papers; private information.]