ALFRED BEIT was a German-British financier instrumental in the development of the diamond and gold industries in South Africa and in the foundation of Rhodesia.
Background
Beit was born to a Portuguese Jewish family of gold and silver refiners that settled in Hamburg in the 16th century, his parents were both baptized a year after their marriage and brought up their children as Lutherans. The Beit family established copper and metallurgical smelting companies and were the owners of shipyards in Hamburg, but Alfred’s father, an importer of silk goods from France, was considered the “poor relation.”
Education
A quiet and self-effacing boy, Alfred Beit was educated at a private school in Hamburg, and at the age of seventeen was sent to work with a firm of wool importers and diamonds from South Africa.
Career
In 1871 he went to Holland to learn diamond cutting and in 1875 joined a relative’s firm in South Africa as a diamond buyer. At first Beit went from dig to dig buying rough stones, but once he had become popular with the miners he set up office in a corrugated iron shanty and they brought their discoveries to him. He soon revealed his integrity, his instantaneous grasp of complicated detail, and his power of rapid calculation and range of financial imagination.
In 1890 he established the firm of Wernher, "Beit and Company", which, in addition to the Kimberley diamond mines, developed the Witwatersrand goldfields, meeting with success through the evolution of deep-level mining. Beit soon became chairman of a number of gold-mining companies. He also set up and controlled the Pretoria Waterworks, the Pretoria Electric Lighting Company, and the National Bank of South Africa.
Alfred Beit’s meeting with Cecil Rhodes in 1879 was the beginning of a long friendship leading to his loyal support of Rhodes’s political, financial, and educational schemes. Beit gave financial backing to the British South Africa Company, when it was established in 1889 and became a director of the Chartered Company.
He was a director of the De Beers Consolidated Mining Company, founded together with Rhodes. Beit wholeheartedly supported Rhodes’s aims and was involved with Rhodes in a conspiracy to overthrow the government of Transvaal that culminated in the 1895 Jameson raid. As a result, he was forced, together with Rhodes, to resign from the board of the Chartered Company.
After the death of Rhodes in 1902, Beit devoted himself to opening up Rhodesia, and especially to Rhodes’s scheme of a Cape-to-Cairo railway. That same year he was reelected to the board of the Chartered Company and in 1904 became its vice president.
During his last years, despite his failing health, Beit visited Germany and France, being received by the heads of state. Under the guidance of the curator of the Kaiser Friedrich Museum in Berlin, Wilhelm Bode, he began to collect works of art, placing them in his London home. He endowed a chair of colonial history at Oxford University and also provided for assistant lecturers and an annual prize for an essay on imperial citizenship. Beit died a bachelor, on his estate in Hertfordshire, England.
In his will, Alfred Beit created the Railway Trust Fund, with the purpose of developing communicaions in Rhodesia and adjacent lands. As a result, five major bridges were built between 1929 and 1949, the First being the Beit Bridge across the Limpopo River uniting South Africa and Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). A bronze plaque of Alfred Beit was placed on a tower on the center pier of this bridge and a nearby town is called Beitbridge. The trustees formed a company in 1933 to develop civil aviation in Rhodesia and after World War II it became Central African Airways. Beit also specified that moneys should be provided for educational purposes, and scholarships were set up to enable promising pupils to have a university education.
Personality
He never appeared in public, but the parliamentary committee of inquiry called him one of the “promoters and moving spirits” of the raid.