Word: barnato
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Dates: during 1926-1926
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Piteous Plight. The answer came from Cape Town, South Africa, where there arrived last week from London three potent officials of the Diamond Trust: Lieutenant Colonel Solomon Barnato Joel, Sir Ernest Oppenheimer and Sir Abe Bailey. Proceeding to the Ministry of Mines and Industries these gentlemen figuratively rent their garments. Cried millionaire Solomon B. Joel piteously: "Diamonds will become as common as artificial pearls if the present unrestricted output from 'independent' alluvial diggings continues. . . . Something must be done to alter the present situation. Why, the alluvial diggers are now actually selling more diamonds than the great producers...
...Barney Barnato. Solomon ("Solly") Joel's re-emergence into the news revived interest in his dare-devil uncle, the late famed Barney Barnato, ne Isaacs, one-time Jewish peddler and contortionist on the streets of London, founder of the fabulous diamond fortune of the Joel and Barnato families which now totals at least $100,000,000. Young Barney drifted out to South Africa in the '70s when individual diggers spaded the surface soil and "panned" it for diamonds, each man with his own teetering sieve. Since "diamond earth" occurs in huge cones pointing downward, the diggers soon found...
Paradoxically Barney Barnato, who feared neither man nor the wild beasts of Africa, was bedeviled by two maladies: 1) a fantastic psychic dread that he might lose his millions and have to peddle in the streets again; 2) an incurable eczema which prickled him unbearably in warm weather. One day, as he was journeying from Africa to England, he leaped from the ship, drowned...
...most of these men are not merely lent as they might be to a worthy charity; they are men in whose lives he has played a part: Hadley at whose Alma Mater he got his education, Hearst whose father gave him his first job, Joel whose uncle (Barney Barnato) took him to South Africa, Sir Lionel Phillips who was condemned to death with him, the Guggenheims who employed him at a fabulous salary, Taft who offered him an embassy, Coolidge who today consults him on the coal situation...