Sir Julius Wernher

Diamonds and gold mining
Wealth: £11.5m
Net National Income: £2.181 bn
% of NNI: 0.527%
£5.902 billion

The son of a leading railway engineer from Hesse in Germany (who was a friend of Brunei and Robert Stephenson), Julius Wernher was educated in Frankfurt. While he had a life-long interest in engineering, he opted for a career in business, serving an apprenticeship in a bank. On the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War in 1870, Wernher served as a cadet in the dragoons of the 4th Cavalry division and in the Army of Occupation, without being in the least bit touched by the wave of military and imperial sentiment then sweeping over Germany.

After the war he went to London, where he first worked as a bookkeeper in a firm of German druggists and then in a bank. He had the luck to secure an introduction to Jules Porges, a leading diamond merchant in Paris and London. Diamonds were just being discovered in South Africa and the young Wernher was sent there to open an office with his boss. Wernher made himself master of the delicate business of diamond buying. When his boss returned home in 1873, Wernher was its sole representative in Kimberley, the centre of the diamond trade. Porges came to trust him absolutely.

By 1875, Wernher, still just 25, was a member of the Kimberley mining board. In that same year, Alfred Beit joined him in Kimberley, and a lifelong business partnership was born. They both became partners in Jules Porges and in 1884, Wernher returned to London and traded in diamond shares, while Beit remained in Kimberley to look after their interests.

Wernher moved back and forth between London and Kimberley in the early to mid 1880s while he helped establish the London Diamond Syndicate in 1886, which stabilised the price of diamonds. Skilful manoeuvring by Wernher and Beit, aided by Cecil Rhodes, meant that they were ultimately able to merge the various diamond operations in Kimberley into a new company De Beers Consolidated Mines in 1888.

After Porges retired at the end of 1889, the firm was reconstituted, in January 1890, as Wernher, Beit & Co. of London. Wernher, the hard-headed practical businessman, and Beit, the financial genius, formed a most successful partnership which was only terminated by Beit's untimely death in 1906.

The discovery of the Witwatersrand goldfields in 1886 brought the firm into a new arena. Deep-level mining properties were established by Beit and Wernher and in 1893, they formed the company Rand Mines to develop their sites. By the end of the century, the group's mines accounted for nearly 50% of the value of the Witwatersrand's total gold production.

Still based in London, Wernher's career reached its pinnacle in 1905 when he was created a baronet. He was managing over seventy South African companies from his London office, and formed a huge new company - Central Mining and Investment Corporation - to buy gold shares and steady the volatile markets.

With his health failing, Wernher merged his various interests in 1911. A year later, at the time of his death, the gold mines under the control of his group produced 3.5m ounces of fine gold and earned over half of the profits of the whole of the Witwatersrand. He did not have it all his way though. His reputation for prudence did not prevent Wernher being swindled out of £64,000 in 1906 by a Frenchman called Henri Lemoine, who claimed he could make synthetic diamonds. Wernher left an estate of around £11.5m and bequeathed huge amounts of his wealth to charities and education both in Britain and South Africa. In today's money his fortune would have been around £5.9bn.