When you think of industry in the small West Yorkshire town of Halifax, factories churning out wool products is the first thing that would spring to mind. The very last thing would be cutting and polishing industrial diamonds, but one of the town’s engineering firms did exactly that during World War 2.
Photo by Hamim Fadillah
Phoney War Finished
It all started on Whitsun weekend 1940 when Germany showed that the ‘phoney war’ was over by invading Belgium and the Netherlands. Industrial diamonds are vital in the manufacture of aircraft parts and armaments and there were lots of the essential stones in those two countries. The Nazis naturally wanted to get their hands on them – Britain, however, wanted to make sure they did not. So when a daring plan to ‘rescue’ the diamonds was suggested, the authorities were happy to agree.
In essence, with all the ingredients of a Hollywood thriller, a raid was carried out on Amsterdam by just one military man and two civilian diamond experts. The British lent the three men an old First World War destroyer – their modern ones being needed for rather more urgent duties. This ship took them to Holland and back on Whit Monday 1940.
Bank Closed
One of the experts was Jan Smit, whose father was the head of a long-established diamond dealership in Amsterdam. He persuaded the heads of other important diamond companies to entrust their stock to the three men to be taken back to the safety of London (the Blitz hadn’t started yet). The two experts also tried to get into the Amsterdamdsche Bank with the intention of blowing open the time-locked vault to get to the diamond stocks kept there too; but it was locked over the Whitsun weekend and no matter how hard they tried they could not manage get in. Instead they just took the diamonds they had been given already and got them safely back to London. All this happened in just one day – a day trip with a difference!
Positive Attitude
There was no point in rescuing the diamonds only for them to sit doing nothing in London. They needed to be put to work helping Britain win the war. But before they could do that, they had to be cut and polished. There were very few craftsmen in the country qualified to do the job which, under normal circumstances, would require an apprenticeship of 5 or 6 years.
This is where William Asquith Ltd of Halifax came into the picture. This major machine tool manufacturing company had built up a formidable reputation during the course of its then 75-year existence. The company’s sales operations were run from offices in London by Bob Asquith, who heard about the problem and boasted that his company could design machines capable of doing what was required to bring the rough diamonds to a useable standard quicker than any craftsman could. The government was desperate and took the firm up on its claim.
“How to” Demonstrations
That same Jan Smit, who had helped get the stones from Holland to England, was brought in for a few weeks to explain the pitfalls involved and demonstrate how he would manually get a stone from its initial rough state to the quality needed for the end product.
A 20-year-old employee with the company when all this began wrote a very detailed booklet many years later when he was in his late 80s. In it he explained how, despite a number of setbacks, the team did indeed develop machines which enabled the rough stones to be honed to work-perfect in just six weeks. The system worked successfully for 7 years, the machinery being purchased post-war by De Beers for use in their Johannesburg premises.
