Summary
The inquiry committee established by the Palestine government on 22 August 1945 to decide on the extent and mode of deregulation of the diamond industry, chaired by Geoffrey Walsh with John L. Fletcher and L. D. Watts, whose report of December 1945 recommended the industry’s eventual freedom from all control (Diamonds and War — State, Capital, and Labor in British-Ruled Palestine, PDF p.211, p.213-215).
Details
- The Diamond Control Board’s controllers — Walsh, Fletcher and Albert Ehrenfeld — advanced its establishment; its secretary was B. G. Bourdillon, assistant to the government’s chief secretary (Diamonds and War — State, Capital, and Labor in British-Ruled Palestine, PDF p.211, p.213).
- The committee wrote its report at the end of December 1945 on the basis of some sixty testimonies; most of its deliberations did not survive the fires at the offices of the controller of light industries in Tel Aviv in November 1945, and Walsh and Bourdillon were killed in the bombing of the King David Hotel in August 1946 (Diamonds and War — State, Capital, and Labor in British-Ruled Palestine, PDF p.213).
- The report held the industry grew in “extraordinarily favorable conditions due entirely to the war” and that “the aim of the Government should be the eventual freedom of the diamond industry from all control,” with the Palestine Diamond Manufacturers’ Association transformed from a compulsory association to a voluntary one, imports opened to importers outside the PDMA and new factories permitted, through a transition period of regulation (Diamonds and War — State, Capital, and Labor in British-Ruled Palestine, PDF p.213-215).
- The report was concluded in December 1945 but not made public; after Walsh’s investigative visit to Antwerp in spring 1946, the government decided in early June 1946 to make the committee’s recommendations public, making liberalization irreversible (Diamonds and War — State, Capital, and Labor in British-Ruled Palestine, PDF p.211, p.215-217).