[CTRL] Rhodes- S G Millin 2

J Taylor Sat, 22 Apr 2000 05:08:42 -0700

CHAPTER III

FROM KIMBERLEY TO OXFORD I

THERE is a photograph of Rhodes which shows him at the age of about twenty. In this photograph the face is thin and delicate, it is a face very different from the big, ruthless, powerful face of the later Rhodes. They say (it sounds well) that Rhodes brought to the Diamond Fields from his farm in Natal his digger’s tools, some volumes of the classics, and a Greek lexicon.

And this, they say, is how he looked : a tall, fair boy, blue-eyed, aquiline-featured, in ill-washed, shrunken white flannels ; a sullen, silent boy scraping at his pebbles, debris around him, windlasses turning, buckets crashing, natives picking, heaving, chanting as they worked in the quarry (diggers would call it the paddock) below him. From the mound on which he sat Kimberley displayed itself to him : the white tents of the diggers, the bars, the shops, the sheds of the diamond dealers -all of corrugated iron and shocking to the eyes in the glare of that bitter sun. . . .

‘ The silent, self-contained Cecil John Rhodes,’ writes a contemporary. . . .

‘ I have many times seen him in the Main Street, dressed in white flannels, leaning moodily with his hands in his pockets against a street wall. He hardly ever had a companion, seemingly took no interest in anything but his thoughts, and I do not believe if a flock of the most adorable women passed through the street he would go across the road to see them.’ It is probably true that Rhodes did not freely yield his

interest to women. When he arrived in Kimberley there indeed no women there-that is, no white women. came later. In those old Kimberley days he danced, h for exercise. If he danced as he walked, heavy, pigeon-toed, it was as well he was also little concerned his partners. It did not matter to him who they were they looked.

‘ I don’t want them always fussing about,’ he said of women, little knowing that his words were being noted in Olympus, and that a most preposterous woman was to be the last chagrin of a life heroically designed.

But it is strange that Rhodes should be so constantly reported as a solitary. He seems always to have had friends and to have loved and trusted them. There was the youth in Natal, the relation of the Provost of Oriel, with whom he read classics, and with whom he arranged to go to Oxford, though, in the end, he alone did so.

4 There were Rudd, Beit, Maguire, Jameson-the men who 1 were by him in his beginnings, his schemings, his fortunes, 1 his failure and his end. Jameson ruined him and was forgiven. ,T Beit served him in life and after death, and once, during the 1 great diamond amalgamation, when Beit faced trouble through in helping him, Rhodes gave him half a dozen promissory notes signed in blank, saying : ‘ Whatever I have got is yours, to 1 back you if you need it.’

There were the four he used to meet that they might debate Imperial problems and teach Disraeli his business-they wrote to do so.

There was Sidney Shippard, the Attorney-General of Griqualand West, destined to have power in a place and at a time when Rhodes needed someone to do a bit of queer work for him. To this Sidney Shippard, in conjunction with the British Colonial Secretary, Rhodes’ first will assigns all his possessions that they may use it to spread Britain over the world.

And there was the young Neville Pickering, secretary of FROM KIMBERLEY TO OXFORD 21 de Beers, to whom, in his second will, he leaves everything ,for the same purpose.

Pickering died young,and, to ease his dying, Rhodes abandoned his larger prospects on the goldfields and left Johannesburg for Kimberley. But it was a sacrifice, so he said, that he never regretted.

Though he never cared for another human being-not even Jameson- much as for Pickering, he continued to the end of his life making vehement friendships, always with men. He had something more than a political alliance with the Dutch leader, Jan Hendrik Hofmeyr, which the Raid broke. The confidant of his maturity was W. T. Stead. There was Grey, whom he spoke of as that finest of English products-an English gentleman.

Friends naturally came to him as his career blossomed out ; he was surrounded, of course, by seekers and toadies. And sometimes he treated them with impatience and contempt, but yet they were his intimates.

The loneliness of Rhodes, his spiritual solitude, is mere romanticism. Isolation seems to fit the character of a great man, that is all. With Rhodes the contrary was the truth. Apart from those phases of brooding and introspection natural to a man of temperament, he was dependent on company. He hated even a meal by himself. He loved to speak. So far was he from being the reserved Englishman of tradition and W. T. Stead, who said of him, among other absurdities, that he dwelt apart in the sanctuary of his mind into which the profane were not admitted-so far was he from this cloud-like loneliness that he was always explaining his feelings to people.

Rhodes had a passion for self-revelation. He talked (they sometimes say ‘ shyly ‘-it is the conventional thing to say about a big man) of what most human beings keep secret. He was as eager to confess-not as a child, for children do not tell, but as an adolescent, a traveler on a long voyage, sometimes a genius. If it was not to Jameson, Beit, Hofmeyr, Grey, Stead, his intimates, it was to General Gordon, it was to General Booth, it was to any little group of people, it was to any lack of group of people, it was to his settlers, his shareholders, his’ constituents, his fellow-undergraduates, his parliamentary : followers, his hosts, his guests ; to Britons, to South Africans, to whites, to blacks, to those for him, to those against him, anyone, in short, who would listen to what he had to say-which, when a man is Rhodes, means everyone. There his sayings are, treasured by his contemporaries. There his speeches are, reverently collected. There his Open Lett stands, which he asked Stead to publish. There his letter is that he wrote to Sir William Harcourt after the Raid-the i letter of someone forever nineteen. If posterity chooses to misunderstand Rhodes, it is not, because Rhodes lost an opportunity of explaining himself.

Not that he was, generally speaking, a great letter-writer, He wrote documents of letters to Alfred Beit, but, on the whole, he belonged to the category of those who send telegrams. His letters that remain are not many, and they have a business-like air-they are hardly what one would call heart-spillings. 1 Secretaries, in the days of his fame, answered the politicians, soldiers, sailors, missionaries, explorers, needy men and questing ladies who wrote to him. His early letters to 1 mother-the letters, after all, of a son sent out sick and very, young to a barbarous country, are more connected with the : activities around him than with family intimacies or the state of his own being. Rhodes’ confessionals are not paper.

He describes Kimberley to his mother much as Trollope describes it.

‘ Fancy,’ he writes, ‘ an immense plain with right in the centre a great mass of white tents and iron stores, and, on one side of it, all mixed up with the camp, mounds of lime like ant-hills ; the country round all flat with just thorn-trees here and

there : and you have some idea of Du Toits Pan, the first spot where dry digging for diamonds was begun. . . .’

It was, however, at another camp Herbert Rhodes was digging-at Colesberg Kopje on the farm appropriately named Vooruitzicht-Foresight-by the Boer who sold it with all its diamonds for six thousand pounds. Now the camp was known as de Beers New Rush to distinguish it from the earlier camp of Old de Beers. This became soon merely New Rush.

And, in the end, since Lord Kimberley, the Colonial Secretary of the day, deprecated the name Vooruitzicht because that was unpronounceable, and New Rush because that suggested wildness-in the end, and finally, it received the name of Kimberley. The camp grew to the town. Along the Vaal River, and in Griqualand West generally, one may yet meet old natives and Boers who, when they use the Dutch equivalent of the term New Rush, mean the town of Kimberley.

III

When Cecil Rhodes joined Herbert the camp was still called New Rush. And there, on a kopje, thirty feet above level country, one hundred and eighty yards broad, two hundred and twenty yards long-on this kopje, divided into six hundred claims, Herbert had his three claims. A claim was, by regula- tion, thirty-one feet square. It was divided into four sections. On each section several blacks and whites were working. In this small space, therefore, on the kopje, ten thousand people were assembled.

And they had to dispose of the debris, they had to sort and sieve. Rhodes writes how mules and carts, going along the narrow and unrailed roads, were always tumbling into the chasms below. At the same time he views with complacency his life at New Rush.. ‘ I average about EIOO a week,’ he tells his mother, and he signs his letter, without any affectional to-do, ‘ Yrs. C. Rhodes.’ 24 RHODES

He is eighteen, but he is not, like his elder brothers, Winchester or Eton. On the contrary, he averages a hundred a week. He is tubercular-a few years later a doctor gives hi not six months to live, yet in a strange world, among strang from all over the larger strange world, he is able to maintain himself. When his brother Frank joins Herbert at Durb and together they arrive at Kimberley, it is to find Cecil a lawyer measuring his ground to prove that a digger needs door is encroaching on his claim.

Rhodes had thus his reasons for saying later in life children should be given a sound education ‘ and then all the props away. If they are worth anything, the struggle will make them better men ; if they are not, the sooner go under, the better for the world.’

IV What did Rhodes consider a sound education ? apparently, the sort of education that would please a or a Bertrand Russell. Not a scientific training, not a commercial training, not the sort of training that may be acqmr in what is called the school of life where the same less produce such incalculably varied results. Rhodes consider that education a sound education which his father, the Vita: of Bishop Stortford, would have considered a sound education His genius was a thing apart from his roots, but his tradition was not.

Right from the beginning of Rhodes’ life in Africa his drean was Oxford. In his first year in Natal he was speaking Oxford to his friend, the relation of the Provost He must have come to South Africa with that dream, o was he doing here with his classics and his Greek Why had he brought them across the seas, and cart by Scotch-cart and oxen all the slow, lumbering Natal to Griqualand West-just (let us believe these books and his digger’s tools ? It seems

the days when Rhodes’ brothers thought of Sandhurst, he thought of Oxford. It was his first love, and remained his ’ last.

The dream began to shape itself a year or two after his arrival at Kimberley.

He was now nineteen, and financially at ease ; he had had the first of those heart-attacks that were to be his undoing ; his brother Herbert, a restless man who could never stay long in any place or any activity, wanted to give up diamond-digging and try the new business of gold-digging. The two brothers bought an ox-waggon and started out for the Transvaal.

It takes a long time to travel by ox-waggon from Kimberley to Pilgrim’s Rest where Herbert was going to dig for gold. Time faints in the sun and forgets to rise again while one travels across Africa by ox-waggon. The oxen walk as if in sleep, chewing, with sideways-moving rhythmic jaws, and a Kaffir goes in front with a long whip which he lashes at them, crying their names : Blackboy or Whiteface or Scotchman or something like that, and they wake up for a moment and then fall again into their ruminative sleep-walking.

To journey by ox-waggon across the veld is a manner of existence incredibly monotonous, but in the end it lifts one into a sphere which is a thing in itself, a life somewhere between hell and heaven, yet hardly of earth.

And so, by the end of a day, fifteen miles are done, and the oxen are released to wander over the veld, and sticks are gathered to make a fire within a circle of stones, and wild flesh is roasted, and a burning stick is plunged into the coffee that sends into the soft air its friendly, innocent-seeming invitation.

And when the dark comes, the farthest nothingness is Punctured only by stars, like light shining through little holes in the worn material of a blue-black tent, and there is no ,

sound but that of a cricket or a frog or a distant hyacinth thin, faintly bitter scents rise from the earth like threads of memory or of longing.

In such nights, forgiving the hot, dull days, one dreams. In such nights, repeated over eight months, Rhodes dreamt. He thought, as he came to say, of the gold and diamonds and other precious stuff under the earth, of fertility and browsing cattle above it. How long had this bigness remained inviolate ? How much longer would it remain so ? Who, finally, would master it ? And why, he thought, not he, Cecil John Rhodes, in the name of England ? Why not, in the end, through this conception, all the world for England ?

When Rhodes returned to Kimberley from his long trek he knew what he wanted of life, he had his grail.

In Kimberley he replaced his brother Herbert with one C. D. Rudd, destined to be his partner in the largest of his enterprises, and, having thus arranged for his affairs to be watched on the Diamond Fields, he sailed with Frank for England.

Frank was going to take up his commission in the cavalry, and Cecil was going to Oxford.

Rhodes used in after-life to tell how he came to Oriel.E

1 One might have imagined his talks with his Natal friend who was related to the Provost of Oriel would have had somethingj J to do with it. But it appears not. The story is this : The college Rhodes wanted to enter was University. But the i Master would not take him when he heard he meant to read only for a pass degree. He had failed, too, his matriculation. 1’

He protested to the Master that he ought to be exempted : from ordinary rules. He explained his life in Kimberley : how hard it was for him to achieve what boys in England could carry on their way. ’ I am not what they are. I am the man.’

27 He was twenty.

But the best the Master could do for him was to write to the Provost of Oriel. ‘ They are less particular there,’ he said.

The Provost, says Rhodes, read the letter while he waited. He stared down at his table in hostile silence, and, afraid for his dream, Rhodes waited. ‘ All the colleges send me their failures,’ said the Provost at last.

In this way Rhodes was admitted to the college of Raleigh, the first Chartered Empire-Builder, and to Oxford. He did eventually matriculate.

[CTRL] Rhodes- S G Millin 2

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