VINDICATING A FATHER

Te Awamutu Courier, Volume 55, Issue 3930, 23 July 1937, Page 7

VINDICATING A FATHER

GOOD DONE BY STEALTH. ">• STORY OF DIAMOND MAGNATE. The son and daughter of a multimillionaire who was once accused of meanness came to London from South Africa recently on a mission of generosity. They were Sir Joseph Robinson and Countess Labia, children of the diamond magnate who died in 1929, leaving, it was stated, £12,000,000. In his will not a penny was left to charity or public institutions. Their story, tbld to a “Sunday Express” representative, was one vindicating the memory of their Sir Joseph said: “We have come to take back to South Africa the collection of paintings left us by our father. We have decided to give them on loan to the National GaWery at Cape Town.” The collection is reputed to be worth £700,000. It is one of the largest and finest private collections in the world. The 100 pictures include a dozen by Millais. It is believed that no other man owns so many. When the late Sir Joseph put up the collection to auction at Christies’ in 1923 he regretted his decision on seeing them again for the first time for ten years. He w uld not cancel the sale because bidders had assembled from all over the world. Instead he reduced the auction to a farce by doubling and trebling the reserves on his best pictures, remarking that he would protect his possessions with barbed wire. Even so, £210,619 was realised on only a few of the pictures. Cape Town, where bitter attacks on his will were made, will in the Robinson collection have the finest art gallery collection south of the The loan is to be for an indefinite period. Sir Joseph went on: “I can now tell you another secret which if known at the time would have saved us from the attacks on my father’s memory. “Shortly before he died he warned us that these attacks would come. He then handed to my sister and myself a document. That document contained a long list of people we were to help. “Charitable bequests were not in the will. They were in that secret list. He wanted to avoid jealousy and to protect people from writers of begging letters. I receive a hundred or more such letters a week. “That secret list is before us all thne. “Few people know it, but my sister and I have already given thousands of pounds to hospitals.” Sir Joseph said his father left five million pounds, not twelve, as stated at the time, and that during his lifetime he gave away at least a million pounds.