to the League of Nations conference on disarmament in Geneva, along with Lieutenant-Colonel Christopher Dawnay and Brigadier Arthur Temperley. His father died on 12 February 1933, and he inherited the baronetcy. The disarmament conference was a failure; negotiations stalled, and on 14 October 1933, the new Chancellor of Germany, Adolf Hitler, announced that Germany was withdrawing from the League of Nations. Robertson's next posting was back to India as an instructor at the Staff College, Quetta, but he decided, in view of the dismal prospects for promotion in the Army, to retire on half pay and accept an offer from Eric Geddes to manage a Dunlop Rubber factory in South Africa. The officer sent in his place died in the 1935 Quetta earthquake. The tyre factory in Durban was a brand new one, opened by the Prime Minister of South Africa, General James Hertzog on 13 August 1935. Until 1937, Robertson was nominally the assistant to Malcolm Irving, the company's managing director in South Africa, but owing to Irving's poor health, Robertson ran the factory from the beginning. The business was successful, with the factory generating a 12.6 per cent profit in 1936. He became an influential member of the local business community, and was elected Chairman of the Rubber Growers' Association in 1936, and President of the Natal Chamber of Industry in 1938. Second World War East African Campaign The outbreak of the Second World War in Europe in September 1939 prompted Hertzog to resign rather than support the war. Robertson was a strong supporter, urging members of the Natal Chamber of Industries to release army reservists. In November 1939, he resigned to rejoin the British Army. He had long assumed that he could easily do so, but the War Office rejected his offer, on the grounds that he was too old. He therefore offered his services to the Union Defence Force (UDF), which accepted him, as it was short of trained staff officers. He was commissioned as a lieutenant-colonel in the South African Army on 1 February 1940, and was sent to the South African Staff College in May. He passed the course easily, and was ranked first in his class of 23. On 16 June, he embarked for Mombasa. Kenya was threatened by Italy's declaration of war on Britain on 10 June 1940, because Kenya was a British colony, and Italy occupied neighbouring Ethiopia and Somalia. In