Abstract
Over the last two-thirds of a century, the Institution of Mining and Metallurgy (IMM) and its successor the Institute of Materials, Minerals and Mining have held a total of 33 public lectures to honour the memory of Sir Julius Wernher and to bring topics of importance in the mining industry to wider attention.
From the first lecture on silicosis by Dr Orenstein in 1947, the subjects chosen by contributors have ranged not only over issues of health, safety and the environment, from A. M. Gaudin on radioactivity in mineral processing to Sir Alan Cottrell on the age of scarcity, but also over fundamental technical issues, from A. M. Muir Wood on ground behaviour and support to D. G. Krige on geostatistics and the definition of uncertainty, or N. J. Themelis on transport phenomena in high-intensity smelting furnaces. Over the years, the lectures have been presented in conjunction with international conferences whose themes were drawn from the various fields covered by the Institution of Mining and Metallurgy: National and International Management of Mineral Resources; Future of Nonferrous Mining in Great Britain and Ireland; Finance and Exploration; the 4th International Geochemical Exploration Conference; the 1984 APCOM: Application of Computers in the Minerals Industry; Tunnelling and Underground Construction; the 5th and 10th International Mineral Processing Congress; Advances in Extractive Metallurgy; Hydrometallurgy; Pyrometallurgy; Refining of Nonferrous Metals; Minerals and the Environment; and others.
So who was Sir Julius Wernher, why was the Institution of Mining and Metallurgy so anxious to honour his memory, and what was the particular incentive, in 1947, for widening the scope of the IMM's activities to include a public lecture? More pertinently, does the lecture still have a role to play in drawing attention to key topics in today's industry?
During the Second World War, the IMM had carefully built up a reserve fund for its anticipated post-war expenses. Some of the business discussed by Council in the years 1945 to 1948 was mundane: cancelling the subscription arrears of members who had been prisoners of war or civilian internees; enquiring of other institutions their practice regarding admitting to membership enemy aliens who had been working in England during the war; discussing selling the library's wartime premises at Mill Close mine in Derbyshire; returning to monthly publication of the Bulletin only to have the ration of paper (inferior and wood-flecked though it was) cut again, so that members had to be exhorted to keep their technical papers brief; and gratefully accepting the Australasian IMM's offer of food parcels (which it was decided should be distributed to widows of deceased members). On the other hand, there were issues of major importance to be addressed in relation both to the professionalism of members and to the national and international minerals industry. The revision of the by-laws regarding conditions for membership could at last be undertaken. The Institute could contribute to government policy, as in its memorandum to the Secretary of State for the Colonies in February 1947 regarding the white paper on colonial mining policy. J. Allen Howe and Professor Truscott presented Council's representation to the Geological Survey Board, stressing that it should undertake borings to elucidate structure and stratigraphy as part of its normal functions. An anxious letter was received from Mond Nickel about the shortage of metallurgists, as a result of which the first two Mond Nickel Fellowships were awarded in January 1947. Following a proposal by then president Colonel Edgar Pam, concern for the health and welfare of underground workers led to a joint committee that included a representative from the Ministry of Fuel and Power being formed with the Institution of Mining Engineers, to arrange a two-day conference on silicosis, pneumoconiosis and dust suppression in mines; this was eventually held at the Royal Institution in April 1947.
Meanwhile, on 4th January 1945, the secretary of the IMM received a letter from past-president Dr Cullin proposing the establishment of two memorial lectures. Subsequent meetings of the IMM Council recorded the following laconic minutes:
143 b) Establishment of Memorial Lectures: It was decided to refer the proposal to the Awards Committee for consideration and report to Council.
247 d) That Dr. A.J. Orenstein be invited to deliver the first Sir Julius Wernher Memorial Lecture in London, on the occasion of the proposed Joint Meeting on Silicosis and Dust Control with the Institution of Mining Engineers; and that a contribution of five hundred guineas (£525) be made towards the expenses of Dr. Orenstein's journey from South Africa. e) That no further action be taken regarding Dr. Cullin's proposal for the establishment of other Memorial Lectures until the Sir Julius Wernher Memorial Lecture has been established.
390 d) …that a small dinner party for Dr. Orenstein should be arranged to follow his lecture (the costs to be borne by the Institution).
The Julius Wernher to be commemorated in this way, who had gone out to Kimberley as a clerk and had amassed a fortune of £11·5 million by his death in 1912, had been a far less colourful character than many of the Rand millionaires of his day with their palatial residences in Johannesburg, their London town houses in Park Lane or Piccadilly, their landholdings in the Cape and their country estates in England. Cautious and retiring, he is described by Arthur Wilson in his history of the IMM as overshadowed by his friend and partner Alfred Beit. However, like many of the mining millionaires whose ‘outstanding characteristic… was their generosity: they accepted the responsibilities of their wealth as seriously as they undertook their company and public duties’, he had a lifelong interest in both sciences and the arts, and had made substantial contributions to mining education and research. His was the inspiration, time and money behind the founding of the Witwatersrand University in South Africa; he had been a member of Lord Haldane's committee that had led to the foundation of Imperial College in London, had contributed largely to the Royal School of Mines building together with his partner Beit, and had been awarded the IMM Gold Medal for services to technological education. The £5000 he left to the IMM, together with even more substantial later contributions from his widow, helped to fund the purchase of the joint Institution of Mining and Metallurgy and Institution of Mining Engineers building in Finsbury Circus, London. At the end of the war, the IMM's accounts show investments to the value of £10 147 still in the Sir Julius Wernher Memorial Fund, so a further small-scale but long-term initiative in education or research could readily be undertaken.
The range of issues being tackled by the IMM Council and its committees in the immediate aftermath of the war, from the requirement for exploratory boreholes and metallurgical education to the question of colonial mining policy and the problem of dust control, suggests why Dr Cullin proposed founding one or more lecture series to focus attention on important questions connected with mining and metallurgy. On a more general level, there was certainly felt to be a need for the public to be more accurately informed about the nature of the mining industry, at least in the UK, and for the channels of communication to be improved. The Institution of Mining Engineers, in its standing committee's submission to the National Coal Board in May 1946, had viewed with grave concern ‘the serious falling-off in recruitment in the Industry’ and had complained: ‘Perhaps the most potent factor in bringing about the low regard in which the Industry is held both by those employed in it and by the public has been the constant propaganda directed against it from many quarters, including radio, press, films and literature. This propaganda, with its powerful impact on the mind of the public, has given a view of the industry which is largely false and much distorted.’ The committee had recommended as a matter of urgency that ‘the direction of public propaganda should at once be turned towards giving a truer picture of the Industry… its undoubted dangers, dirt and other discomforts should… be put in their proper place in the picture which, in broad outline, should present a view of an adventurous struggle with nature, giving the satisfaction of real and appreciated service to the community…’! It had, however, been admitted that ‘until a greater social conscience has been created within the community, this task may be an uphill one’.
At the Royal Institution, then, on 15th April 1947, the chief medical officer of the Central Mining-Rand Mines Group that Sir Julius Wernher had co-founded and a world expert in his field addressed an audience of more than 250 members and visitors on the history and prevention of silicosis, with special reference to the Witwatersrand where a system of preventive measures, detection and compensation had been developed since the first tentative beginnings in the period 1901–1910.
IMM Bulletin of May 1947, in the annual report of the Council, recorded that ‘It is intended that the lecture should be given biennially, and by its means the Council hope not only to recall the debt owed to Sir Julius Wernher by the Institution and the professions which it represents, but also to focus attention on important questions connected with mining and metallurgy.’ Accordingly, a second lecture followed in 1949, by C. D. Desch on the effects of impurities on the properties of metals, at the Refining of Nonferrous Metals conference, and a third in 1952, by A. M. Gaudin on radioactivity in mineral processing, at the inaugural conference on Recent Developments in Mineral Dressing.
Introducing the second lecture, IMM President W. A. C. Newman, having emphasised Wernher's lasting influence on the gold and diamond industries and his great interest in education, pointed out two alternative approaches to the choosing of a lecturer that have between them shaped the series of memorial lectures ever since. ‘One was to select a subject which was important and pressing, and then invite a lecturer who was an authority on that subject… Those were the circumstances two years ago, when problems of silicosis and pneumokoniosis (sic) were uppermost in the minds of members… The other approach was… to honour someone who had become an authority on, and done outstanding work in, one or other of the directions in which the Institution was interested. Those were the circumstances that evening, for there was no one practising metallurgy in England today whom the Council of the Institution felt was worthier of the honour than Dr. Desch.’ In subsequent decades, lecture topics of major public concern such as metal scarcity or environmental degradation have continued to feature, as too have names of experts within their fields such as Dunham, Hoek, Brown, Krige or Sillitoe, or of industry-wide or national significance such as Sir Ian Wark or Sir Alan Cottrell.
Particularly in the earlier years, lecturers frequently sought to relate the specific theme of a technical conference to the industry and society at large, addressing issues of concern to a wider public such as the prevention of industrial disease or harmful radiation, the exploitation of minerals for mankind (Wark, 1960), the need for a viable contract between man and minerals (Fleming, 1973), or the possible advent of an age of scarcity (Cottrell, 1974). Alternatively, the aspects considered were economic and structural: vertical integration in the industry (Koenig, 1964), the growth and use of basic knowledge in extractive metallurgy (Richardson, 1967), the case for continuity in extractive metallurgy (Chesters, 1971), progress and expectations in mechanised tunnelling (Robbins, 1976) or conservation and metallurgical process design (Kellogg, 1977). In later decades, the focus shifted to important technical questions in the field of mining and metallurgy: ground behaviour (Muir Wood, 1979), geostatistics (Krige, 1984), interfaces in pyrometallurgical processes (Elliott, 1985) or extractive metallurgy of some rare and precious metals (Hoffmann, 1989).
In more recent decades, it has sometimes appeared as though the Memorial Lecture has been hijacked by one particular discipline, such as metallurgy (five out of nine lectures given in the decade 1985–1995), or even one conference series, notably the biennial Tunnelling/Underground Construction and Tunnelling (a total of 10 lectures between 1976 and 2003). The field of applied earth sciences has perhaps fared rather poorly over the years. In 1958, A. Gray discussed ‘The future of mineral exploration’ and in 1973 Marston Fleming chose as his topic ‘Man and minerals – a viable contract’; Sir Alan Cottrell considered ‘The age of scarcity’ in 1974 and J. Birks, ‘Oil and minerals: similarities and differences’ in 1980. On the more technical side, although E. Hoek lectured on ‘Geotechnical considerations in tunnel design and contract preparation’ and M. D. G. Salamon on ‘Developments in rock mechanics: a perspective of 25 years’ in 1988, there were otherwise only Kingsley Dunham's presentation in 1972 on ‘Basic and applied geochemists in search of ore’, at the 4th International Geochemical Exploration Symposium, and D. G. Krige's on ‘Geostatistics and the definition of uncertainty’, at APCOM ’84. It is therefore particularly welcome that the advent of the Finex conferences has given the opportunity for two successive Memorial Lectures set firmly within the field of geology: Sillitoe's ‘Epithermal and porphyry gold – science-driven exploration successes’ in 2008 and the most recent lecture, given by Neil Phillips, on ‘Adding value in gold exploration: beyond technology and drilling’.
Is there still a need for the Sir Julius Wernher Memorial Lecture in today's world of soundbites, PowerPoint presentations and web publications? Undoubtedly, there are still topics that are important and pressing connected with the fields of mining and metallurgy: potential resource shortages, environmental and social impacts, new technologies for recycling and waste treatment, and many more. Undoubtedly there are still those whose outstanding work in mining and metallurgical disciplines, not least applied earth sciences, the Institute of Materials, Minerals and Mining might wish to honour by asking them to lecture. Perhaps the memory of a financier who, having amassed his fortune, devoted it to the pursuit of technical education and research in his chosen industry is still worthy of commemoration, even a century after his death.
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