art and formed a fine collection of pictures, principally of the Renaissance period. One of the best pictures in his collection, Watteau's ‘La Gage d'Amour’, he left by his will to the National Gallery. He was a man of deep culture and he read widely, even during his Kimberley days.
With strength of character was joined a tenderness which runs through all his letters, and possibly had its source in his deep affection for his mother. ‘I am your declared lover’, he told her in one of the first letters of a never-failing correspondence. When he became rich his philanthropy took the form of great and well-considered benefactions. To King Edward's hospital fund he made enormous gifts, and by his will it benefited to the extent of some £400,000, including a twelfth part of his residuary estate; he left a further £100,000 to be distributed among charities. He was deeply concerned at the backwardness of his adopted country in practical science, and he was a member of Lord Haldane's departmental committee (1904–1907) which recommended the establishment by royal charter of the Imperial College of Science and Technology in London; this institution Wernher endowed with £250,000, and by his will with a further sum of £150,000. Like Rhodes and Beit he was deeply interested in education, and he gave £250,000 towards the scheme for a university at Groote Schuur, the home of Cecil Rhodes. He took the reform side in the Transvaal, and when the South African War broke out his firm equipped the regiment of Imperial Light Horse. He declared himself in favour of tariff reform, but never threw himself into the politics of his adopted land or accepted any office of honour in his county. His self-effacement, indeed, amounted almost to a passion; with it went a notable loyalty to old friends and to the people who worked for him; his chief pride lay in the fact that he had made his wealth honestly, and that he had earned the complete and profound trust of the industry which he had done so much to establish. He was created a baronet in 1905. On his death, which took place in London 21 May 1912, the eldest of his three sons, Derrick Julius (born 1889), succeeded to the title.
A portrait of Wernher was painted by Sir Hubert von Herkomer in 1910; the original is at Luton Hoo, and there are replicas in the possession of his son, Major H. A. Wernher, and at the Johannesburg Art Gallery.
[Letters (unpublished) of Sir Julius Wernher; family papers; private information.]
WEST, Sir ALGERNON EDWARD (1832–1921), chairman of the Board of Inland Revenue, born in London 4 April 1832, was the third son of Martin John West, recorder of King's Lynn, by his wife, Lady Maria Walpole, third daughter of Horatio, second Earl of Orford, of the second creation, and great-granddaughter of the prime minister, Sir Robert Walpole. He was sent to Eton in 1843, where he made his mark as an oar, but experienced ‘an almost total neglect of any kind of education beyond a very superficial smattering of Latin and Greek’ [Recollections, i, 50]. After two years of travel and study, he matriculated in 1850 at Christ Church, Oxford, intending to take orders. The next year, having kept only two terms, he changed his plans and accepted a clerkship in the Inland Revenue department, but was transferred to the Admiralty a year later. At the end of 1854 official business took him to the seat of war in the Crimea, where he was disgusted by the ‘gross mismanagement’.
Tall, handsome, and a favourite in society, West earned advancement by tact, ability, and hard work. After service as private secretary in the India Office (1860–1866) to Sir Charles Wood (afterwards Viscount Halifax) and the Earl of Ripon, his great opportunity came in 1868, when Gladstone, then prime minister, appointed him to be his private secretary. ‘After nearly four years of delightful and confidential intercourse’ [Recollections, ii, 17], Gladstone rewarded him with a commissionership of inland revenue (1872), a post in which for twenty years he served in succession eight chancellors of the exchequer from Robert Lowe (afterwards Viscount Sherbrooke) to (Viscount) Goschen. His financial capacity endeared him to Gladstone, and the two men became devoted friends. It was on West's suggestion that Gladstone abolished the malt tax in 1880. In 1883 West cruised in the Pembroke Castle with Gladstone and Tennyson, and was entrusted with the negotiations which ended in Tennyson's acceptance of a peerage.
West, who had been chairman of the Inland Revenue Board since 1881, was created K.C.B. in 1886. In 1892 he retired from the civil service and offered his services as private secretary to Gladstone, who was forming his last administration. His Private Diaries (posthumously edited) provide a lively account of Gladstone's difficulties with his colleagues. In March 1894 West retired with his chief from party politics and was made a privy councillor. He was promoted G.C.B. in 1902. Almost
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