The now well-known spy phrase of ‘Diamonds Are Forever’ was not exclusive to the arch British fictional spook, James Bond. It was also the eternal lifelong cry of a world-renowned geologist I met in East Africa in the early 1950s.

The name of this man was Dr John Thorburn Williamson, a Canadian by birth whose solitary aim in life was to enable every woman in the world to have a diamond on her ring finger at a price she could afford.
 
After graduating in 1933 from university in his native country, this very determined geologist sought the adventure of Africa, its wild animals, colourful tribal life and geological treasures still waiting to be unearthed from the continent’s rock strata and volcanic pipes hidden beneath the earth’s surface.

He first plied his professional trade at the famed De Beers’ diamond mine in South Africa owned by the well-established Oppenheimer family. Known as “The Big Hole,” the mine had been hand-excavated to a depth of 260 metres, representing the deepest and biggest source of diamonds in the world at the time.

This vast man-made indent into our globe’s outer crust is actually the surface end of an enormous volcanic pipe supposedly reaching into the very centre of our planet and its molten diamond-making magma. Williamson, however, was not so sure of the science behind this belief.

He was employed by the Oppenheimer’s for a number of years during the Great Depression but was still eager to activate his promise to all of womanhood. During this time, he miraculously worked out that the De Beers’ diamond pipe did not extend straight down into the earth, as was previously supposed, but was part of an ellipse which simply had to come out elsewhere in the world.

By using intricate mathematics and other scientific means he worked out that this point had to be near Africa’s great Lake Victoria in East Africa,  some 3,000 kilometres from the South African diamond mine. Enthused by this deduction and after a small stint at another De Beers’ diamond property, he launched himself on a one-man expedition to his remote target area known as the Mwanza district in Tanganyika.

With little money in his pocket, he resorted to prospecting on foot an area of about 600 square kilometres of unknown and largely wild country, all in the interests of realising his ambition to make diamonds more accessible in price to all levels of society.

In 1940, slowly but surely after many long months of arduous walking and digging, Williamson literally became a penniless and  homeless hobo wracked by malaria and was forced to live off whatever the African veld could provide. Desperate to obtain a loan for sheer survival, he approached the owner of the only hotel in the small Tanganyika settlement of Mwanza but was unceremoniously thrown off the front verandah as an unwanted vagrant. Picking himself up from the dust, Williamson challenged the owner and threatened to buy the hotel when he eventually found his “diamonds are forever” mine.

It was, however, only hours after this confrontation when our hardy geologist with only one thought in his mind came across an area where someone had previously been excavating, possibly in search of water. He instinctively put one hard-worn and calloused hand into the disturbed rubble — to magically find a sample of material he immediately identified as the blue ground found in a diamond pipe. After more digging, he finally came across a couple of rough diamond stones, proving to him that his original geological calculations were almost unbelievably correct.

Gripped by the exhilaration of at least finding evidence of his gemstone theory, Williamson immediately set foot back to Mwanza, more determined than ever to raise a loan, not for food but to register a mining claim.

One of the first people he approached in the small town was an Indian lawyer, Mr I.C.Chopra, who immediately offered him the equivalent of $200 in local shillings. In return, Williamson gave his benefactor one of 100 shares in a mining company he intended to start. Some years later, after the Williamson mine had been established and was working, that $200 gift made Mr Chopra a millionaire and assisted him to become a leading Tanganyika Legislative Council politician.

By finding the end of the Kimberley crescent diamond pipe, Williamson had created geological history and had totally demolished his many leading academic geological critics that he could mathematically determine where diamonds could be discovered.

My first meeting with “Dr Diamond,” as he became known in Tanganyika and throughout the geological world, was in 1950 when he publicly announced that he intended to sell his vast accumulation of mined diamonds at heavily reduced prices.

News of this was taken as an obvious threat to the International Diamond Cartel controlling all diamond markets and caused immediate explosions in the major diamond trading centres of London, New York, Amsterdam, Johannesburg and Brussels. Within hours, members of the Oppenheimer diamond family hurriedly arrived in Tanganyika by air to confront Williamson with dire warnings that his mine would be run out of business and that he would be deprived of all future diamond mine machinery, geologists, engineers and diamond trading markets if he persisted with his “unconventional ideas.”

I accompanied Sir Ernest Oppenheimer and his son, Harry, on their urgent visit to meet Williamson, their former star geologist. My idea was that I would report on what I correctly assumed would be rumbustious and heated meetings at Williamson’s mine in an area that soon became internationally known as Mwadui.

It was at this point in the 1950s that I first met Dr Williamson who I found to be a cheerful and friendly recluse not interested in any personal wealth and filled to the brim with the determination to enable even the most lowly paid people to own a diamond should they so wish. As a foreign correspondent and journalist, I soon became involved in documenting Williamson’s great and world first one-man struggle against the might of the vast international diamond industry.

Although he was later forced during heavy negotiations to drop his ideas of literally destroying the controlled price of gemstone diamonds, John Thorburn Williamson had the great satisfaction of beating the previous record depth of the Oppenheimer’s’ De Beers’ mine, of buying out the Mwanza Hotel and scientifically establishing important new geological knowledge on the formation of volcanic pipes carrying what may be regarded as a ‘girl’s best friend.’

His overall diamond discovery efforts also later earned him a place in Canada’s Geological Hall of Fame while geological students to this day are still referred to Williamson’s great African mining ‘diamonds are forever’ adventure on behalf of all women.