Julius Charles Wernher died at his residence, Bath House, Piccadilly, on May 21st, 1912, aged 62.
He was born at Darmstadt, in the Grand Duchy of Hesse, in 1850, and was educated at Frankfort-on-the-Main, where he began his commercial career in a banking house. Early in 1870 he came to London as clerk in an Anglo-German firm, but on the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian war he returned to his native country and served as a trooper in a Prussian dragoon regiment, with which he was present at the fall of Paris. For a brief period after the war he was in a business house in Paris, but before the end of 1870 he went to South Africa on behalf of Mr. Jules Porges, of London and Paris, to buy and export stones from the newly-discovered diamond mines at Kimberley. For nearly ten years he remained in Kimberley, during the latter part of the period as South African representative of the Compagnie Française des Mines de Diamante, du Cap, formed by his employer. In 1880 he returned to London as the English partner in the firm of Porges and Wernher.
On the occasion of paying a year’s visit to Kimberley in 1884 he encountered the late Alfred Beit, and the result of that meeting was the formation of that close union between two remarkable men which has exercised a predominant influence on the South African mining industry during upwards of a quarter of a century. When Julius Wernher returned to London, Alfred Beit remained in Kimberley as the representative of the firm. He had previously despatched to South Africa another notable man; the late Hermann Eckstein, who founded the firm of H. Eckstein & Co., the Johannesburg agents of Wernher’s London firm, after the discovery of the Witwatersrand gold field. On the amalgamation of the Kimberley diamond mines in 1888 through the instrumentality of Cecil Rhodes and Alfred Beit, Mr. Wernher was elected a life governor of the newly-formed De Beers Corporation. On the retirement of Mr. Porges in 1889, the firm assumed the style of Wernher, Beit & Co., the two principal partners forming a combination of qualities that were complementary to the highest degree. They exercised a predominant influence in the De Beers Co. and the Diamond Syndicate, and ultimately controlled 70 different mining interests in South Africa, the Rand outcrop claims in which they were interested being subsequently merged in the huge corporation known as the Rand Mines, Ltd., to which with the Central Mining and Investment Corporation, the bulk of the business of Wernher, Beit & Co. was transferred in 1911. Mr. Wernher was created a baronet in 1905.
His public spirit was shown by his magnificent donations to various causes rather than by words. Education was one of his chief interests. He was a member of Lord Haldane’s Committee on the Royal College of Science and Royal School of Mines, whose Report, issued in 1905, led to the establishment by Royal Charter of the Imperial College of Science and Technology. Sir Julius Werner gave and bequeathed to the Imperial College £250,000, and his late partner, Mr. Alfred Beit, also bequeathed a large sum to its funds.
Among objects of his active sympathy and support were the extension of the metallurgical department of the National Physical Laboratory, the foundation of a university for the whole of South Africa, for which he gave a very large sum of money, and the provision of a suitable stipend for the Taylorian Professor of German at Oxford. Sir Julius Wernher for many years took a close and active interest in the work of the Institution, of which he was elected an Honorary Member in 1911, and in February of that year was awarded the Gold Medal of the Institution “in recognition of your great personal services in the advancement of technological education and in the promotion of the highest interests of the mining and metallurgical professions.”
Vol. 21, Trans IMM 1911-12, pp.732-4
