RETIRED AT 35

Waipa Post, Volume 51, Issue 3645, 19 July 1935, Page 3

RETIRED AT 35

THEN MADE ANOTHER

FORTUNE.

A man whose work has added sonifl £500,000,000 of potential wealth to tba Empire was honoured recently. He is Mr Alfred Chester Beatty, S sixty-years-old naturalised English-* man. He received a medal, which is thai highest honour of the Institution ofMining and Metallurgy. Starting at the age of 23 years a,l a mining engineer in America, Mt Beatty made such a large fortune fot himself that at the age of 35 years ha decided to retire. Then, 20 years ago, he came to England. He found it impossible to drop his interest in mining. He formed a mining company, but the war put a stop to any new big enterprises. Just after the war. reports were circulated of the discover/ of diamonds in the Gold Coast. The place was stricken with fever, and mining engineers considered that there were too many difficulties to Ba overcome to make diamond mining a profitable proposition. But the difficulties did not stop Mr Beatty. By 1922 he had already large interests in a diamond company at Akwatia. , By 1934 the Consolidated African Selection Trust, of which he is chairman, had paid gross dividends of over £1,000,000, a large proportion of which came from the Gold Coast fields. Sierra Leone came next. He bought the mining rights for diamonds for nearly the whole of the territory. The fields are recognised as among the richest in Africa, although the first diamond was not discovered until 1931. Mr Beatty heard of copper discoveries in Northern Rhodesia. He sent out his engineers. To-day the copper mines in Northern Rhodesia in which he is interested are known to contain about two hundred million tons of ore. Their development has been one of the chief factors in making the Empire independent of foreign' sources for her copper supplies. More than £9,000,000 has been spent on plant. And Mr Beatty is still going on.