4. Donors to an imperial project: Randlords as benefactors to the Royal School of Mines, Imperial College of Science and Technology

Jill Pellew

There is much discomfort today about and within institutions that benefited from profits made by exploiting human beings in the age of imperial aggression. Fortunes made in the glory days of British trade and colonial enterprise have been particularly attacked – famously by the ‘Rhodes Must Fall’ movement which has focused on the racist attitudes and overweening sense of British superiority displayed in South Africa after diamonds and gold were discovered there in the late nineteenth century. This movement’s name refers to its objective of pulling down statues erected in an earlier age to celebrate an individual now vilified. There may, therefore, be interest in the story of the major benefactions that derived from South African wealth at the turn of the twentieth century: those of Alfred Beit and Julius Wernher to the Royal School of Mines (R.S.M.), an important component of Imperial College of Science and Technology, founded in 1907.¹

The establishment of Imperial College on a grand site in South Kensington was partly the brainchild of the politician and educationalist R. B. (Viscount) Haldane who, despite his work as secretary of state for war and later lord chancellor in the Liberal governments of 1905 and 1908, was continuously interested and involved in the reform and progress of universities. Above all, he worked with social reformers, in particular Sidney Webb, to reform the University of London, which until the very end of the nineteenth century was effectively an examining board for other institutions, rather than an academic entity. ‘Higher education, Haldane believed, played a vital role in national efficiency because it was both the agent of progress – moral, scientific, and economic – and was the means of social development’.² One of his major roles in the development of the University of London was in the creation of a new British technical university ‘fit for the metropolis of Empire’. For this, his model, which he visited in 1901, was the great Prussian Technische Hochschule at Charlottenburg, founded in 1879.³

The origins of the project harked back to the 1851 Great Exhibition whose commissioners were encouraged to direct its considerable profits towards the prince consort’s dream of increasing the means of industrial education by extending the influence of science and art. This was subsequently given impetus by public concern about Britain’s lagging behind her Continental competitors in industrial output following the 1867 Paris International Exposition. In due course, development crystallized on the area in South Kensington, south of Hyde Park. From 1884 the City and Guilds Institute, founded by a group of City livery companies to provide a system of technical education, was housed in a grand Waterhouse building along the west side of Exhibition Road. Meanwhile, from 1881 the R.S.M. and the Royal College of Science (R.C.S.) – each of which had had its own separate historical development in central London – were housed together in the Huxley building, further down and on the other side of Exhibition Road. By the end of the century this accommodation had become inadequate and they were unable to realise their scientific and technical potential.⁴ The challenge involved bringing these three separate institutions together to form an Imperial Charlottenburg in South Kensington, hopefully as part of the University of London. It was a hugely ambitious project, which involved changing the constitutional status of the R.C.S. and R.S.M., the acquisition of additional real estate, and – above all – securing funding, both public and private. None of these things could be done without high-level support.

Haldane was a champion at making a cross-party case to leading politicians, including Lord Rosebery, patron of the Liberal imperialists, and Arthur Balfour, Conservative prime minister from 1902–5. He claimed even to have convinced Edward VII.⁵ As for real estate, the commissioners were well disposed to grant the project the last available parcel of land left from 1851 at the northern end of Exhibition Road. This was to become the new site of an enlarged R.S.M. Now major capital was required for suitable buildings to rehouse and extensively equip an ambitiously modernized R.C.S. and R.S.M. Both capital endowment and recurrent funding were needed for additional staff and student scholarships. There were three principal sources of finance: the tax-payer at both local and national level (through the London County Council (L.C.C.) and by treasury grant); the corporate world of the City of London; and private individuals. Haldane began working on the treasury to pledge £20,000 towards the projected institution. But the project was fragile. At that date, the total annual treasury contribution towards new English university colleges en route to becoming autonomous institutions was in its infancy, amounting to some £27,000.⁶ The founding of new civic universities had depended on the enterprise and finance of private individuals with modest support from local authorities; and the key to this whole enterprise was going to be the securing of major private financial commitment.

The timing was propitious. There was an obvious source of wealth that related particularly to the R.S.M. aspect of the project. The successful exploitation of diamond and gold mines in southern Africa in the last quarter of the nineteenth century had led to unprecedented fortunes among the so-called ‘Randlords’, some of whom had settled with their fortunes in London and become part of the Establishment. Mining engineering was, of course, the essential means by which these millionaires had made their fortunes and they well understood the urgent need for a stream of experts in mining techniques as mine managers. Imperial College had just the right tone, not least with its royal connections going back to Prince Albert’s promotion of the 1851 Exhibition. Who could be a more obvious source of funding? In May 1901 Haldane called on the London partners of the firm Wernher, Beit & Co. in order to interest them in his project.

The key partners, Julius Wernher (1850–1912) and Alfred Beit (1853–1906), were of German origin. Wernher, son of a distinguished railway engineer from an old protestant family in Hesse, had a commercial education and worked in a Frankfurt bank before going to Paris to work for ‘the greatest and wealthiest’ diamond merchant, Théodore Porgès, who sent Wernher out into the field in 1872. Highly successful, he became a partner in Porgès’s firm in Kimberley in the Orange Free State in 1873, and later head of a powerful mining consortium. Personally attributing his success to a steady approach to the rackety, crisis-ridden business of diamond mining, he became ‘trusted and acknowledged as a leader, as much for his integrity of character as for his intellectual power’.⁷ Alfred Beit, son of a Hamburg merchant from a Portuguese Sephardic Jewish family that had converted to Lutheranism, entered the diamond trade in Amsterdam as a young man before being sent out to South Africa in 1875. Beit possessed remarkable qualities that soon marked him out in the diamond business: a prodigious memory, sound judgement about the quality of diamonds, and ‘the ability to solve financial questions swiftly and soundly … [knowing] how to reduce the most tangled and complicated matters to their essentials and to express them in the simplest formula’.⁸ By the early 1880s he was associated with Wernher in Kimberley. The European base for these business activities was London where, during the 1880s, Wernher began to direct the operations of Jules Porgès & Co. He was involved in establishing the London Diamond Syndicate to stabilize the price of diamonds. On the retirement of Porgès, Beit joined Wernher and in early 1890 Wernher, Beit & Co. of London was incorporated. The relationship between Wernher and Beit was ‘deep, based originally on their common nationality and appreciation of each other’s business abilities’.⁹

Meanwhile, Beit’s attention was drawn to gold-mining activity in the Transvaal where he established his own firm, in which his younger brother Otto also became involved, successfully pioneering new techniques of deep-shaft mining. He was the first to recognize the value of first-class mining engineers.¹⁰ As part of his activity on the Rand he became a close friend and business partner of Cecil Rhodes to whom, in 1888, he lent a substantial amount of money for the formation of De Beers Consolidated Mines. It was a complementary partnership. Rhodes, ‘the intellectual posturer’, admired the mental agility of the shy, gauche Beit who ‘envied and loved’ Rhodes’s ‘commanding and leonine personality’.¹¹ Beit, Wernher and Rhodes were the leaders of a complex of men that controlled half the deep-level mining operations by 1895. These men depended on an African workforce; and by that time diamond and gold-mining had become an underground (rather than an open-cast) activity, involving a highly exploitative, closed compound system of controlling and cheaply paying African labourers. Health conditions in those mines were horrendous enough to have caused Wernher – much later, in 1909 – to bring in a leading British bacteriologist to advise on improvements which eventually led to a mass inoculation scheme between 1914 and 1918.¹²

Legendary wealth was accumulated through this activity. In the mid 1890s Beit was alleged to be the richest man in the world with shareholdings of some £10 million.¹³ The power that such wealth bestowed became closely linked to aggressive imperial ambition. In 1890 Rhodes became prime minister of the Cape. Beit became a director of the British South Africa Company, whose aim was British colonial expansion in southern Africa, and he was notoriously involved in the unsuccessful Jameson Raid in 1895–6. His role in setting up Dr. Starr Jameson with an armed force, in order to stimulate insurrection and the overthrow of the [Boer] South African Republic in the Transvaal, was publicly exposed by a house of commons committee of inquiry by which he was censured. Rhodes was forced to resign as prime minister of the Cape. Beit – deeply antipathetic to publicity – suffered a nervous breakdown and was forced to resign his directorship of the British South Africa Company.¹⁴

Interestingly, this episode did not destroy his metropolitan social standing.¹⁵ By the 1890s both Wernher and Beit had established themselves in London and eventually, in 1898, they both became British citizens. As members of the new plutocracy, known disparagingly as ‘Randlords’, they were subject to ‘political malice and religious, racial and social prejudice’.¹⁶ Part of this was due to their German and (in Beit’s case) Jewish origins and links. The association with the Jameson Raid was dimly regarded. But, as David Cannadine points out, the major aspect of suspicion derived from the fact that these newcomers to an established society possessed wealth that enabled them to imitate the lifestyle and mores of the former leaders of society – the landed aristocracy, now severely weakened by the decline in the value of land and rents. They selected the smart West End of London for their homes – Wernher in Piccadilly and Beit in Park Lane – where they developed a passion for collecting pictures and other works of art. Wernher also purchased a country seat at Luton Hoo in Bedfordshire. Beit remained a bachelor and is described by his biographer as ‘shy and retiring to excess ... devoid of social ambition and ... little known beyond a small circle of intimates who included Rosebery and Haldane’.¹⁷ Nevertheless, his lifestyle marked him out as one of the ‘Randlords’. Key to becoming part of the smart set was proximity to the royal world of Edward VII, since their wealth enabled them to join a circle of donors to the king’s favourite causes, often medical.¹⁸ Their philanthropic activity earned them public honours: in the case of Wernher and Otto Beit, baronetcies.

The outcome of Haldane’s visit to Wernher, Beit & Co. in 1901 proved to be a linchpin of the developing ‘Charlottenburg’ scheme. Afterwards, he reported to Webb that he had effectively diverted a prospective pledge of £100,000 being discussed for University College (clearly of less interest in his University of London plans) to his own project:

I have undertaken to prepare a scheme for a Committee or body of Trustees to begin our big scheme. They will give us £100,000 to start it, and help us to get more … I believe W.B. & Co. will give much more than £100,000 really.¹⁹

Haldane not only secured a major financial pledge but also the active involvement of the donors – particularly Wernher – in the scheme as it developed. Two significant events moved it forward. In June 1903 Rosebery wrote a letter to The Times proposing the creation of a ‘metallurgical college’, on the same day that a public fund, the Bessemer Memorial Fund, was launched in high style at the Mansion House in order to raise £20,000 for a laboratory to equip a new building for the R.S.M. This appeal became a grand and public affair (with a lead donation from Andrew Carnegie) to which many firms whose business related to the mining industry responded.²⁰ Meanwhile, Rosebery’s public letter yielded the required response. Partly through pressure from Haldane’s fervent ally, Sidney Webb, both the L.C.C. and the board of education agreed to commit to major public funding for the new institution on condition that private funding was secured.²¹ At this point Haldane and Webb publicly announced the magnificent pledge of £100,000 cash from Wernher, Beit & Co. towards the new technical college.²² This involved establishing a trust to oversee the disbursement of the donation, chaired by Lord Rosebery and including Wernher, Haldane, Balfour, Sir Francis Mowatt (joint permanent secretary to the treasury) and the duke of Devonshire.

This was still four years before the establishment of Imperial College – a period during which leading individuals involved with relevant institutions, including Mowatt from the treasury (who suggested including ‘Imperial’ in the name) and Sir Robert Morant, permanent secretary at the board of education, mooted the idea of a merger between the City and Guilds College, the R.C.S. and the R.S.M., poring over the nature of these three component parts, their relationship with the developing University of London, and the acquisition of real estate and money. Haldane was able to play a pivotal role in the discussion and negotiation, being appointed in 1904 chairman of an official departmental committee on the Royal College of Science, whose members included Webb and Wernher, and whose remit included investigation of the whole South Kensington complex (including the R.S.M.).²³ The ‘Minutes of Evidence’ provide a very full background to the whole history of the three bodies that came to form the new collegiate institution, besides an analysis of technical education in competitor countries, and throw particular light on problems in the education and training of those in the mining industry. Reporting in 1906, the committee endorsed annual central and local government support of £40,000 (half each from the treasury and the L.C.C.); confirmed that the 1851 commissioners had agreed to give the remainder of their estate to the new institution; announced the agreement of the Council of the City and Guilds of London Institute to enter the scheme; and set out detailed recommendations for the institution’s governing structure.²⁴ The following year the Imperial College of Science and Technology was formally incorporated, with characteristic Edwardian pomp and fanfare, its Charter declaring its prime object to be:

the establishment at South Kensington of an institution or group of associated Colleges, of Science and Technology, where the highest specialised instruction should be given, and where the fullest equipment for … training and research should be provided in various branches of sciences, especially in its application to industry for which no sufficient provision already exists elsewhere.²⁵

At the time Imperial College did not become part of the University of London. It was, effectively, a federation of three institutions within which the City and Guilds Institute fought hard to maintain a certain amount of autonomy in terms of finance and teaching.²⁶

Beit was not present at the 1907 inaugural ceremony. Always physically weak, he had died the previous year at his country home in Hertfordshire, unmarried, aged fifty-three. His immense wealth benefited three significant areas of his life. Towards the Imperial College project he bequeathed £50,000 plus 5,000 preference shares (valued at some £85,000) in De Beers Consolidated Mines Ltd. He was also generous to leading medical causes including the King Edward VII Hospital Fund. To his native city of Hamburg, with which he had remained involved, he left generous contributions towards social and philanthropic institutions. But the bulk of his huge legacy went to southern Africa where his heart lay: this included £200,000 divided among the newly founded university in Cape Town, funding for Rhodes University in Grahamstown, and other educational and charitable purposes. The lion’s share – £1.2 million – was designated for the expansion of communication networks throughout southern Africa. This became the Beit Trust.²⁷

The Beit-Wernher link with the new Imperial College of Science and Technology was continued through the involvement of Wernher and then, very actively, of Otto Beit (Alfred’s brother). Shortly after its establishment Wernher joined the Imperial College Mining and Metallurgy Committee and four years later was awarded the gold medal of the Institution of Mining and Metallurgy ‘for his personal services to the advancement of technical education’.²⁸ He died in 1912 and was generous to many of the same causes as his former friend and colleague, Alfred Beit – notably educational institutions. This included £250,000 to what became the University of Cape Town. To Imperial College Wernher left £150,000, plus part of his residuary estate, amounting to £45,000.²⁹

In 1909 the new rector of Imperial College proudly invited Otto Beit to call on the architect, Aston Webb, to inspect plans for what promised to be ‘one of the best buildings, if not the best building, in the world’.³⁰ It was the new R.S.M. complex, erected between 1909 and 1913 in Prince Consort Road. Built of Portland stone, the imposing facade sent out strong signals of the majesty of empire.³¹ Its vast, three-storey high semicircular central niche was flanked by imposing monuments on either side, designed by P. R. Montford, to commemorate Alfred Beit and Julius Wernher whose busts remain today atop Renaissance-style pedestals. It is hard to judge whether these statues were erected to honour the benefactions of these two individuals or, in addition, to celebrate what they represented in terms of colonialism and empire. What is certain is that their benefactions to the new institution, in particular, to the R.S.M., were extremely important in the project’s fruition. An interesting document in the Imperial College archives lists sources of non-recurrent funding for the new institution between 1909 and 1919 (including from government departments and the cost of land granted). This shows that the combination of individual private donations and legacies, dominated by those of Beit and Wernher, amounted to some 34 per cent of the total figure of £1,269,774.³²

Otto Beit’s connections, interests and racial prejudices strongly echo those of his brother to whom he was close. His fortune derived from his major shareholding in Wernher, Beit & Co. and its successor (from 1905), the Central Mining and Investment Corporation Ltd. He too was an admirer of Rhodes and his plans for colonial expansion, and he and Wernher were nominated trustees of the Beit Trust. While bound up with Rand society, partly through his marriage to the daughter of a local mining engineer, like Alfred he acquired British citizenship and settled in London, living a fashionable life in Mayfair, becoming a renowned picture collector and philanthropist. After the death of his brother he devoted his working life to administering the Beit Trust and its objectives.³³ Between 1909 and his death in 1930 he was closely associated with Imperial College, taking an interest in its activities and regularly providing financial support. Its whole ethos at that time would have chimed with his sympathies. The rector (1910–22), Sir Alfred Keogh, a near contemporary, had seen distinguished service in southern Africa as a senior army medical officer during the Boer War. The chairman of the governing body (of which Beit was a loyal member between 1912 and 1930, and, for a while, chair of its finance committee) was Lord Crewe, a Liberal cabinet minister with imperial experience in Asquith’s cabinet as colonial secretary and then secretary for India. Serving the ‘far corners of the Empire’, something dear to Beit’s heart in connection with southern Africa, had been part of the tradition of each of the three constituent colleges of Imperial College – particularly of the R.S.M. – and its governing body ‘saw it as its duty that this pattern be maintained’.³⁴ As a pillar of the Establishment, Otto Beit was rewarded with a knighthood in 1920 and a baronetcy in 1924. He too was extremely generous to Imperial College not only in his lifetime but through his legacy. Among other bequests he left £26,000 for the endowment of Beit Fellowships for Scientific Research, tenable at Imperial College and ‘open to men and women of European descent by both parents, but otherwise of any nationality whatever’.³⁵

Figure 4.1. Statues of Julius Wernher (L) and Alfred Beit (R), by Paul R Montford, erected 1910, at the entrance to the former Royal School of Mines, part of Imperial College of Science and Technology. It is conjectured that the strange allegorical figures under the busts – including the figure apparently digging – may commemorate the combination of imperialism and European mining interests of Cecil Rhodes and his two allies in southern Africa represented here. See George P. Landow, <www.victorianweb.org/sculpture/montford/7.html> [accessed 1 May 2018]. Photograph: Philippa Lewis.

So, how were those two figures atop their pedestals at the entry to the R.S.M. judged in their time as symbols of imperial wealth and power? Were Wernher and Beit colonial buccaneers who, having exploited people and resources in the British empire for their private gain, settled in its capital where they flaunted their wealth and pushed their way into high society through their philanthropy? Views of this kind emerged particularly during the 1897 parliamentary committee of inquiry into the Jameson Raid when Beit was vigorously attacked by Sir William Harcourt and Henry Labouchère. Radical public figures, including Hilaire Belloc, the labour leader John Burns and the political theorist J. A. Hobson were vociferous in their criticism of the ‘Randlords’ and their world. Hobson’s polemic against imperialism and the Boer War gave a vivid account of the iniquities of the labour policy of the Transvaal mine-owners, describing the so-called ‘location system’ which tied workers to the mines for life in semi-slavery conditions without any bargaining power over their wages.³⁶ (Yet Hobson made clear his own racist prejudices in denouncing the Boer War as ‘a Jewish war’.³⁷)

A counterview of these rich, foreign newcomers seems to have been more current: that they were creative and highly successful entrepreneurs, skilled in and passionate about their business and about the development of the part of the world in which they operated. They had settled in congenial London high society and engaged in a project that addressed their concern about England’s lack of technological skills – particularly in mining techniques. Both Wernher and the Beit brothers (and, indeed, Rhodes) all held a strong belief in the importance of education and used their wealth in many ways to promote educational institutions in South Africa and Germany as well as England. Wernher was allegedly ‘deeply concerned at the backwardness of his adopted country in practical science’.³⁸ Beit well understood the crying need for better-educated mining engineers particularly to go out and exploit colonial opportunities. The new Imperial College of Science and Technology, and in particular its Royal School of Mines, was a highly appropriate focus for their philanthropy. Between its formal opening and the outbreak of war in 1914 major developments were made in important new areas of applied science.³⁹ At the R.S.M., by 1911 the Bessemer Laboratory for metallurgy was in place as a critical element in its teaching and research. For Associates of the R.S.M. ‘the world was their oyster’ as a result of Europe’s expanding economies which needed ‘vast quantities of minerals’. Substantial numbers worked in North and South America, Africa, Australia and Asia, without doubt promoting ‘the pace and nature of colonial economic growth’.⁴⁰

Today, the Aston Webb R.S.M. building in Prince Consort Road, with its imposing commemorative busts, is a period piece: the only remaining building of Imperial College that dates back to imperial days. There is no question that the two men commemorated there were significant in the founding of that institution. Whether they were honoured on an imperial building as symbols not just of generous donors but also as ‘imperialists’ – something that does not resonate well today – and therefore deserve to be considered for removal, is beyond the scope of this essay which aims to explain the origins of their wealth, the motives behind their benefactions and the context of the society in which they made those major donations.

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¹ The name was changed to ‘Imperial College of Science, Technology and Medicine’ in 1988 after a merger with St. Mary’s Hospital Medical School (and subsequently other London medical schools). Since the granting of its institutional autonomy in 2007, it has been known as ‘Imperial College, London’.

² H. C. G. Matthew, ‘Haldane, Richard Burdon, Viscount Haldane (1856–1928)’, in O.D.N.B. <https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/33643> [accessed 14 July 2017]. Later Haldane was to chair the Royal Commission on London University between 1909 and 1913.

³ E. Ashby and M. Anderson, Portrait of Haldane at Work on Education (1974), pp. 45, 49.

⁴ For more extensive background to the creation of an Imperial College of Science and Technology in South Kensington, see J. Pellew, ‘A Metropolitan University fit for Empire: the role of private benefaction in the early history of the London School of Economics and Political Science and Imperial College of Science and Technology, 1895–1930’, History of Universities, xxvi (2012), 217–31. See also A. R. Hall, Science for Industry: a Short History of the Imperial College of Science and Technology (1982).

⁵ Ashby and Anderson, Portrait of Haldane at Work, p. 51.

⁶ Ashby and Anderson, Portrait of Haldane at Work, p. 76. For further details, see C. H. Shinn, Paying the Piper: the Development of the University Grants Committee 1919–46 (Falmer, 1986), pp. 22ff.

⁷ I. D. Colvin, ‘Wernher, Sir Julius Charles, first baronet (1850–1912)’, rev. Maryna Fraser, in O.D.N.B. <https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/36834> [accessed 20 July 2017].

⁸ P. H. Emden, Jews of Britain: a Series of Biographies (1944), p. 409.

⁹ Colvin, ‘Wernher, Sir Julius Charles’.

¹⁰ C. W. Boyd, ‘Beit, Alfred (1853–1906)’, rev. Ian Phimister, in O.D.N.B. <https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/30676> [accessed 20 July 2017].

¹¹ G. Wheatcroft, The Randlords: the Men who Made South Africa (1985), p. 50.

¹² Colvin, ‘Wernher, Sir Julius Charles’.

¹³ R. Trevelyan, Grand Dukes and Diamonds: the Wernhers of Luton Hoo (1981), p. 87.

¹⁴ He allegedly drafted a will leaving £1 million to anyone who had suffered as a result of the Raid (Trevelyan, Grand Dukes and Diamonds, p. 93).

¹⁵ Wernher distrusted Rhodes, was much less close to him than Beit and was not closely implicated in the Jameson Raid.

¹⁶ D. Cannadine, Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy (New Haven, Conn. and London, 1990), p. 345f.

¹⁷ C. W. Boyd, ‘Beit, Alfred (1853–1906)’, in O.D.N.B. <https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/30676> [accessed 30 May 2018].

¹⁸ They supported his Hospital Fund, launched when he was still prince of Wales in 1897 to which Wernher eventually left a bequest of £390,000, and Alfred and Otto Beit over £125,000 (F. K. Prochaska, Philanthropy and the Hospitals of London: the King’s Fund, 1897– 1990 (Oxford, 1992), p. 30–1).

¹⁹ Ashby and Anderson, Portrait of Haldane at Work, p. 51.

²⁰ Extract from The Times, 10 July 1908, contained in Imperial College Archives, Bessemer Memorial Fund and Bessemer Laboratory, correspondence, 1903–15, HD/4/1.

²¹ A. R. Hall, Science for Industry: a Short History of the Imperial College of Science and Technology (1982), p. 31. See also The Diary of Beatrice Webb, ii: 1892–1905, ed. N. Mackenzie and J. Mackenzie (Cambridge, Mass, 1983 edn.), entry for 23 July 1903.

²² It is not entirely clear whether this pledge was directed specifically to the R.S.M. aspect of the new project, but this was where the bulk of their pledge went. Fundraising for the Bessemer Memorial Fund was publicly associated with the Wernher, Beit & Co. donation.

²³ The original chairman, Mowatt, had to stand down through illness. The official centenary historian of Imperial College challenges the importance given to Haldane (by Ashby and Andersen) in its original creation (H. Gay, History of Imperial College London 1907–2007: Higher Education and Research in Science, Technology and Medicine (2007), p. 64, n. 17). But there is no denying the facts of his membership of key bodies involved, of his ongoing involvement in the development of the University of London over several decades, nor of his relevant ideological thinking.

²⁴ Departmental Report on the Royal College of Science, Final Report (Parliamentary Papers 1906 [Cd.2872] xxxi), pp. 391–429.

²⁵ Charter of Imperial College of Science and Technology, 1907.,

²⁶ For further detail see Hall, Science for Industry, p. 36. It was not until 1929 that it formally became part of the University of London.

²⁷ H. Albrecht, Alfred Beit: the Hamburg Diamond King (Hamburg, 2007, English transl. 2012), p. 122. Otto Beit and Julius Wernher were two of the trustees of the Beit Trust. See also Trevelyan, Grand Dukes and Diamonds, p. 191.

²⁸ F. E. Douglas, Board of Education to Julius Wernher, 18 Oct. 1907; Julius Wernher to F. E. Douglas, 22 Oct. 1907 (Imperial College archives, Wernher Correspondence, 1907–14, B/WER/1, no. 79). See also Colvin, ‘Wernher, Sir Julius Charles’.

²⁹ The O.D.N.B. entry for Wernher states that he had endowed Imperial College with £250,000 at an earlier stage.

³⁰ Rector to Otto Beit, 9 Jul. 1909 (Imperial College archives, B/Beit/1/1).

³¹ Roy MacLeod points out that, in fact, Webb’s façade was ‘merely a front’ for ‘an assortment of poorly designed laboratories’ (R. Macleod, ‘“Instructed men” and mining engineers: the associates of the Royal School of Mines and British Imperial Science, 1851– 1920’, Minerva, xxxii (1994), 73).

³² ‘List of Donations, Legacies, etc., from the opening of the College to 31st December 1919’, undated document (Imperial College archives, Sir Otto Beit papers, B/Beit/1/1).

³³ It was Otto Beit who was largely responsible for a major bridge-building programme, part of which was the Beit Memorial Bridge (1929) over the Limpopo river, linking South Africa with what was then Rhodesia.

³⁴ Gay, History of Imperial College London, p. 202.

³⁵ Lord Buckmaster (chairman of the governing body of Imperial College of Science and Technology), letter to The Times, 11 December 1930, p. 12.

³⁶ J. A. Hobson, Imperialism: a Study (1902), p. 302.

³⁷ J. A. Hobson, The War in South Africa: its Causes and Effects (1900); D. Feldman, ‘Jews and the British empire c. 1900’, History Workshop Jour., lxiii (2007), 70–80, at p. 75ff.

³⁸ Colvin, ‘Wernher, Sir Julius Charles’.

³⁹ These included plant physiology, aeronautics, chemical technology, biochemistry and cytology (Hall, Science for Industry, pp. 44ff).

⁴⁰ MacLeod, ‘“Instructed men”’, pp. 432, 434.