The Magnificent Miner: Claude de Bernales

Description

Author: Hal Colebatch

Claude de Bernales was a vast, glittering, enigmatic presence: in the 1920s he saved the West Australian gold-mining industry and perhaps saved Western Australia itself from starvation in the Depression of the 1930s.

He built and lived in magnificent style in Western Australia and London and was great power in both. Suddenly he was commercially and financially annihilated.

Widely accused of misfeasance and fraud, he was never prosecuted or brought to trial.

This book tells the story of his strange life and times and, using previously- secret British documents, points to the previously hidden and unsuspected causes of his downfall.