Alfred Beit

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Alfred Beit, 1905

Alfred Beit (born February 15, 1853 in Hamburg , † July 16, 1906 at the Tewin Waters country estate near Welwyn in the English county of Hertfordshire ) was a British-South African gold and diamond magnate of German descent. He was a patron and one of the richest men of his time. Politically, he was a supporter of Cecil Rhodes and his ideas of British imperialism . He was one of the fringe lords .

family

Mother of Alfred, Laura Beit ( Leopold von Kalckreuth )

Alfred Beit was born in Hamburg in 1853 as the second oldest child with five other siblings, including Otto Beit . The Beits were a well-known Hamburg family of Sephardic origin. The great-grandfather Marcus Salomon Beit (1734-1810) was the founder of the gold-silver separating company in I. Elbstrasse No. 43. One of his grandchildren, the chemist Ferdinand Beit (1817-1870), an uncle of Alfred Beit, founded the company in 1846 together with Johan Godeffroy the Hamburg “Elbkupferwerk”, forerunner of today's Aurubis AG ; Moreover, he was at the foundation of the Badische Anilin & Soda-Fabrik AG involved and had 1876 chemicals and paint factory Beit & Co founded.

Alfred's parents, Siegfried Beit (1818–1881) and Laura b. Hahn (1824–1918), converted from Jewish to Protestant in 1851 . Siegfried Beit was a cloth merchant and, also for health reasons, had little business success. Alfred Beit went to the private school Dr. Schleiden . His classmate Werner von Melle reported that Beit grew up in relatively simple circumstances . His cousin Ferdinand Beit the Younger was a son of Johanna Beit, the daughter of the Mannheim banker Seligmann Ladenburg . Another cousin was Eduard Beit von Speyer (1860–1933), from 1896 to 1928 owner of the leading Frankfurt bank “ Lazard Speyer-Ellissen ”.

Life

After finishing school in 1870, Beit did a two-year apprenticeship at the Hamburg import and export company David Lippert & Co. It was there that he first came into contact with the diamond trade. From April 1, 1873, he completed his military service as a one-year volunteer with the Infantry Regiment "Hamburg" (2nd Hanseatic) No. 76 . Then he also trained as a diamond cutter in a company with relatives in Amsterdam . In 1875, Beit traveled to the Cape Colony in the town of New Rush , which was to be renamed Kimberley in 1877 , to work as a diamond buyer there on behalf of David Lippert & Co. Beit was very successful and became an independent agent for David Lippert & Co. the following year. He worked for Lippert and Co. until 1879.

To raise the capital for his own business, Beit turned to a business friend of his father, Jules Porgès (1839-1921), who was also in New Rush in 1876. Beit then moved to Porgès & Cie and became a partner in 1880 together with Julius Wernher , who had been buying diamonds for Porgès & Cie in South Africa since 1873. When Porgès said goodbye to business in South Africa in 1889, Beit and Wernher founded the company Wernher, Beit & Co. as their successor.

Rhodes and Beit 1896

Via Porgès & Cie, Beit succeeded in acquiring a large number of shares in diamond mines not only around Kimberley and thus gaining influence in the beginning concentration process. It was in this context that he began working with his future friend Cecil Rhodes . As this 1888 with the help of Nathan Mayer Rothschild , the De Beers Consolidated Mines Limited founded Beit contributed its shares in diamond mines, was next to Barney Barnato one of four major shareholders of De Beers and director for life. From then on, Rhodes and Beits worked together in such a way that Rhodes took care of the political side and Beit took care of the financial side of the business. That Beit Rhodes was very devoted, can also be seen from the fact that he was involved in the planning and personal financing with 200,000 pounds for the failed Jameson Raid ; an attack from December 29, 1895 to January 2, 1896 on Paul Kruger's South African Republic - today's Transvaal .

In addition to diamond trading and production, from 1886 Beit was able to acquire large parts of the mining rights to newly discovered gold deposits in the Witwatersrand area and also to amass a considerable fortune there. In 1888, Beit together with Rhodes founded the British South Africa Society , which was dedicated to the exploitation of the Witwatersrand gold deposits and the conquest and development of land in Southern Rhodesia .

In 1888, Beit moved his main residence to the City of London and took British citizenship .

Beit Villa at Mittelweg 113 in Hamburg

In 1890/1891 he had a representative villa built in a park-like garden for his mother Laura in Hamburg-Harvestehude at Mittelweg 113, in which he resided during his stays in Hamburg.

The Lisbon tram and its entire network were sold to Lisbon Electric Tramways Ltd., which was founded in 1899, to raise capital . from Great Britain , a subsidiary of Wernher, Beit & Co. , leased for 99 years. In his later years, Beit also dealt with the purchase of art. He acquired an extensive collection, and asked Wilhelm von Bode , among others, for advice on purchases . In his magnificent property, newly built in 1895 on London's Hyde Park, there was also a painting room. Since 1902 his health was badly damaged, and he died in 1906 unmarried and childless.

Patronage

Alfred Beit ( Giovanni Boldini )

Beit set up foundations for various institutions during his lifetime. Since Beit Wilhelm Bode was connected, the Kaiser Friedrich-Museums-Verein was able to purchase the landscape with the shipwreck of Paul from Peter Paul Rubens before the museum opened in 1899 . The Gemäldegalerie (Berlin) was bequeathed the painting of Mr. John Wilkinson by Thomas Gainsborough in 1904 and a painting by Joshua Reynolds at another time . In 1907 , the Kaiser-Friedrich-Museum was bequeathed the statue of Hercules by Antonio del Pollaiuolo from Beit's legacy . Pictures were also given to the Hamburger Kunsthalle . Thus, Beit took over the costs for the picture of the Hamburg professors' convention suggested by Alfred Lichtwark and completed by Max Liebermann in 1906 . The Hamburg Scientific Foundation , the financial nucleus of the later University of Hamburg , was only made possible by the donation of the first 2 million gold marks from Alfred Beit.

Royal School of Mines , in the entrance area bust of Alfred Beit, right

In 1905 he founded a chair in colonial history at Oxford University ; today he is called the Beit Professor of Commonwealth History . In London, the Royal School of Mines at Imperial College London was bequeathed considerable funds. A bust of Beit adorns the entrance area of ​​the Royal School of Mines. In support of the establishment of a university in Johannesburg , the will of Beit provided for a sum of 200,000 pounds, but since this was not realized quickly enough, the funds were increased and a similar sum was used by Wernher to build the University of Cape Town . Most of his assets went to the Beit Trust, which has the task of supporting infrastructure and educational measures in southern Africa . For example, in 1929 the Trust built the Alfred Beit Bridge over the Limpopo , the only connection from Zimbabwe to South Africa. The town of Beitbridge was built next to this bridge . The Beit Trust is still active today in Malawi , Zambia and Zimbabwe .

In Hamburg, after Beit's death, the Alfred-and-Otto-Beit-Stift, named after him and his younger brother Otto, was built on the grounds of the Father City Foundation with 34 apartments, which were intended for people who “serve in the household Stands "belonged to or had belonged to. At the end of the 1920s the number of apartments was increased to 46 with money from Otto Beit.

literature

Web links

Commons : Alfred Beit  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Henning Albrecht: Alfred Beit. Hamburger and Diamantenkönig , page 21 (PDF; 4.5 MB)
  2. ↑ Whether the Beits descended from Sephardic or Akenasian Jews is disputed in research. Henning Albrecht writes about this in his biography of Alfred Beit: “Perhaps the assignment of the Beits to the Sephardi was born out of the wish of the biographers to surround the family with the esprit of 'noble origins' from an early age and to place their later economic success in a long tradition “And rather advocates ancestry from Ashkenazi Jews. See p. 12 there.
  3. ↑ Werner von Melle: Thirty Years of Hamburg Science: 1891–1921; Reviews and personal memories , 2 volumes, Hamburg 1923
  4. ↑ Eric Zinnow: The BeitChronik , Würzburg 1995, handwriting Hamburg State Archives
  5. ↑ Rothschild clients , rothschildarchive.org (accessed October 26, 2018)
  6. ↑ Alfred Beit. Hamburger and Diamantenkönig, page 96/97 (PDF; 4.5 MB)
  7. ↑ List of monuments of the FHH, as of November 21, 2012, monument list no. 1444 (accessed on February 8, 2013) ( Memento from June 27, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) (PDF; 915 kB)
  8. ↑ Marina Tavares Dias: História do Eléctrico da Carris - The History of the Lisbon Trams . Quimera, Carris : Lisbon 2001, ISBN 972-589-066-3 , pp. 73-75
  9. ^ Wilhelm Bode: My Life, Volume 2, Berlin 1997; P. 262
  10. ^ Wilhelm Bode: My Life, Volume 2, Berlin 1997; P. 228
  11. ↑ FAZ of December 23, 2006, p. 48 Art Market ( Memento of January 7, 2007 in the Internet Archive )
  12. ^ Wilhelm Bode: My Life, Volume 1, Berlin 1997; P. 248
  13. ↑ Pflugmacher, Birgit: Max Liebermann - his correspondence with Alfred Lichtwark, dissertation Hamburg 2001, p. 163, footnote 672. Full text access
  14. ↑ Internet presence of the chair
  15. ^ Residential pens in Eppendorf - some foundations are centuries old , in: Der Eppendorfer - Zeitschrift des Eppendorfer Bürgererverein from 1875, May 1962 edition.
  16. ^ Henning Albrecht: Albert Beit. Hamburger and diamond king . Published by the Hamburg Scientific Foundation, founded in 1907. Hamburg 2011. P. 131–132 (PDF; 4.5 MB)
personal data
SURNAME Beit, Alfred
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British-South African gold and diamond magnate, patron
DATE OF BIRTH February 15, 1853
PLACE OF BIRTH Hamburg
DATE OF DEATH July 16, 1906
Place of death Tewin Waters near Welwyn (Hertfordshire)