Page:Dictionary of National Biography, Third Supplement.djvu/591

 1843 to Lady Anne Frederica Anson (died 1896), second daughter of Thomas William, first Earl of Lichfield; and secondly, in 1900 to Grace, daughter of Major James Blackburn, 85th regiment, and niece of Colin, Baron Blackburn [q.v.]. By his first wife he had six sons and three daughters, and he was succeeded as eleventh earl by his fourth and eldest surviving son, Hugo Richard (born 1857).

A charcoal-drawing of Lord Wemyss is in the possession of the Hon. Evan Charteris, K.C.

 WERNHER, 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 565