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The topic was revisited during the Currency Conference of 1921. But it was the Kemmerer-Vissering Commission, which investigated, among other things, the feasibility of South Africa returning to the gold standard independent of Britain that swayed the Union government to reinstate the gold standard. In its 8 January 1925 report, the Commission recommended South Africa return to the gold standard “on a date not later than 1st July 1925.” (South African Reserve Bank, 1921−1971, p 27).
The Commission was named after Edwin Kemmerer, an economics professor at Princeton University, and Gerard Vissering, the President of the Nederlansche Bank, the Dutch central bank.
On 27 April 1925, Britain returned to the gold bullion standard ahead of South Africa. The Union resumed the gold specie standard on 18 May 1925. Six years later, and months before the Reserve Bank’s founding Governor, William Clegg, was to retire in 1931, Britain suspended the gold standard on 21 September in terms of the Gold Standard Act of 1925. Britain was “forced by a continuous and substantial drain on its gold reserve, due to large withdrawals of funds from the London money market,” reflects De Kock (1954, p 138).
The withdrawal of funds from London came as a result of a financial panic in Europe, which is generally taken to have been caused by depressed world conditions and, in particular, by the failure in May 1931 of one of the largest continental banks – the Austrian Kredit Anstalt, writes De Kock (1954, p 138).