Cecil Rhodes

Front matter

i

MAKERS ' OF • THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

DELANE OF « THE TIMES "

Preface

This book, first planned in 19 14, was interrupted by the war. The delay has enabled me to see many papers previously inaccessible. In the Bibliography at the end of the book I acknowledge my obligations to those who have been good enough to talk to me about Rhodes, and to the books that have been helpful. To Lord Charnwood I am grateful for some valuable suggestions on the proofs. My wife has helped me at every stage. I should also like to mention my special debt of gratitude to Lord Milner, a Trustee, to Mr. Geoffrey Dawson, Acting Secretary, and to the Staff of the Rhodes Trust ; to Mr. Wilson Fox, M.P., and Mr. D. Malcolm, Directors of the British South Africa Company ; and to Colonel Amery, M.P., for their readiness to let me see papers in their charge and the interest they have taken in my attempt to portray Rhodes.

Even if I have failed in this attempt, I trust that something of the love I have for the South African land and people may be found to breathe through these pages.

B. W.

Chelsea, Michaelmas Day^ 1920.

Contents

I. Introductory ....

II. Early Years ....

III. The Opening of the Diamond Fields

Chapter I Introductory

During the sittings of the South African Convention at Cape Town, some seven years after Rhodes's death, an EngHshwoman, recently landed, the daughter of an English statesman, was describing to some of us her first impressions of the Cape Peninsula. The charm of Cape Town and its surroundings, Rondebosch, Wynberg, Sea Point, Muizenberg, lovely even in their names ; the Mountain dominating them all ; the clear, clean South African air and its wonderful light — these she felt and saw as all must who have ever touched there ; but there was something more, a haunting sense of some dominating personaUty present but unseen everywhere. Table Mountain with the town and villages nestling in its kloofs seemed to have some great spirit brooding over it, and in men's talk there was always a reserve as of some idea too familiar yet too impressive to be much talked about. Then it had dawned upon her that the haunting personality was that of Rhodes ; and the mystery was explained. For everything appeared to call up associations with Rhodes. The statue of the old Dutch governor. Van Riebeeck, on the quay, to greet the stranger on his arrival in South Africa, was his gift ; the road round the Mountain was planned by him with the loving thought that " human beings would walk that road long after he had gone " ; the old Dutch block-house on the Mountain was preserved from destruction by him ; Groote Schuur at Rondebosch, with its ample grounds and its masses of hydrangeas, was his home, left for the pubhc seivice of a united South Africa ; in the tiny cottage by the sea at Muizenberg he breathed his last painful breath; the

I B monument on the Mountain side marks the seat where he ^used to sit musing and staring at the view of both oceans, or gazing towards his own country in the north,

Like stout Cortez . . .

Silent upon a peak in Darien.

The very work of Union, for which the chosen men of every state in South Africa were then assembled at Cape Town, was his constant preoccupation, and was now recaUing him at every turn. " Oh, if we only had Rhodes here ! " exclaimed a Dutchman from the Transvaal, when some almost fatal obstacle had presented itself in the Convention — a Dutchman, who in Rhodes's lifetime had been fighting him and his countrymen. " Let us not bother about these details, we are out for the big thing," said another delegate, this one a dear friend of Rhodes, unconsciously echoing almost the very words of his chief.

Nor were these experiences singular or confined to the period of the National Convention, when men's minds were all intent on one of Rhodes's great ideas. The German Colonial Secretary, Demburg, who visited South Africa a Uttle later, had the same vivid sense of his personaUty ; for what, he said, impressed him most in the country was the omnipresent glamour of Rhodes. Later still, on the eve of the war, the feeUng of his presence is as fresh and living. " The spirit of the man permeates the place," writes a visitor to Groote Schuur in 1914, an ancient . opponent of Rhodes, not merely because of the books, the old Dutch objects and furniture he collected there, the rare trees he planted and the animals he accHmatized in the grounds, and his favourite view from the stoep, still remembered, but for the passions he aroused and the ideas he stimulated.

This vivid remembrance of Rhodes was not confined to the Cape Peninsula, his home, if he can be said ever to have had one, for the last ten years of his Hfe. For many years after his death it was the same throughout South Africa. In Natal, where he was least known, the few men who knew or worked with Rhodes are pointed out to the stranger at the Club as among those specially to be noted

INTRODUCTORY 3

and talked to ; and sooner or later the visitor is bound to hear the story of Rhodes winning over their Prime Minister, Escombe, till then somewhat suspicious, by the invitation to Groote Schuur, to discuss South African Union, with its postscript : " besides, the hydrangeas are in full beauty : it would be a pity to miss them." In the Transvaal and the Free State, where he was once regarded by many besides old President Kruger as " Apollyon, a financier, and the foul fiend himself ... if Rhodes had not been bom . . . South Africa would have been little less than a paradise,'* his death has mellowed men's judgements, and it is remembered that with all his faults and in spite of the Raid he was a great South African, while in Johannesburg it is not forgotten that he was one of the founders of its prosperity. In the native territories of the Cape his creation, the Glen Grey system, has profoundly modified the condition and outlook of the black community. Among the Dutch of the Cape he is not only remembered for the betrayal of the Raid but as a farmer such as themselves, who loved the land as they do and felt with them in all their troubles. The Kimberley of to-day, for good or evil, is merely what he made it by the De Beers amalgamation ; and Bechuanaland, " the Suez Canal to the interior," might never have been British, but for Rhodes. For Rhodesia he is the one man ; Jameson indeed is remembered with affection ; Grey and Milton and all the directors of the Chartered Company had their good qualities ; but since he died it has never been quite the same there for white men or natives. The lame dogs among the whites he helped materially or cheered with brave words ; the stalwart felt that his curt approval was worth working for ; and all knew that, whatever might be the difficulties, he would surely be there to see the country through. By the natives he was trusted blindly for his just dealings and the respect he showed them ; to him alone among white men they gave the royal salute of their tribe. Here above all his memory is cherished, in the country he won and loved ; and here he rests on the hill called the View of the World, amid the grandeur and loveliness of the Matoppos.

Even South Africa's wide expanses were too narrow a field for Rhodes. He is the only colonial statesman who has to such extent struck the imagination and affected the thoughts of EngUshmen at home and throughout the world. The very suddenness with which he loomed upon the outer world helped to concentrate attention upon him. A few years before he became Prime Minister of the Cape he had hardly been heard of in England. During a debate of 1884 Lord Randolph Churchill spoke scornfully of " some cypher " appointed to supersede the missionary Mackenzie in Bechuanaland, a " cypher " whose appointment the Minister was hard put to it to defend as of "a gentleman of some distinction, who had always shown himself to be a great sympathizer with the native races." Less than six years later the " cypher's " name was on every tongue as the autocrat of one of the greatest industrial undertakings in the world, as Prime Minister of his colony and as the founder of what promised to be a vast new dominion for the Empire. At home, indeed, the quality of his eminence was never so incontestable as at one time it was in South Africa. To many he was a bugbear — the type of the dishonest and unscrupulous pohtician, who uses politics to rig the market and the wealth thus acquired to corrupt politics, a man who filched away an empire and slaughtered innocent savages or plotted against a friendly state to put money into his own and his fellow-conspirators* pockets. " Rank selfishness and an inextinguishable love of power and renown, of adulation and of praise are the prevalent characteristics which distinguish this eminent statesman and conqueror from the small fry," such is another, perhaps extreme, instance of the form of obloquy to which he was exposed. On the other hand, to many more he had soon become a national hero, on a par with a Clive or a Warren Hastings, and by the few who consorted familiarly with him he was treated as little short of infallible and impeccable. Since his death Oxford and its Rhodes scholars have helped to keep his memory green and to further his ideals even beyond the shores of England. At Oxford his statue looks proudly down upon The High, taking rank above the sovereigns of his day, as a Founder no less than William of Wykeham, Chichele, Waynflete or Wolsey.

INTRODUCTORY 5

In our law courts Rhodes's words of some thirty years ago still have weight in a decision on the fate of a vast territory in the heart of Africa ; and for long ardent young missionaries of Empire have been devoting themselves to the problems of Imperial government on principles which he initiated.

To-day, except in his own Rhodesia, the glamour of his great name is somewhat dulled. Many of the faithful friends, men like Jameson and Grey, jealous guardians of the reputation and tradition of Rhodes, which they themselves had helped to form, have passed away. The war, which raised so many new problems and brought forward so many new men, has for the time being obscured Rhodes and the Rhodes ideas. South Africa itself, where he played his chief part, no longer holds that prominent place in the world's eye which it held for ten years and more before his death and during the decade which succeeded it. Perhaps by very reason of this partial eclipse it is opportune to attempt another judgement on Rhodes. Hitherto most of the lives or sketches of him have been written under the attractive magnetism of his living personality. To-day it may be possible to take a more dispassionate view. Most of the written material ever likely to be available for his Ufe is now accessible, and so much has happened in the last eighteen years that his career can be judged not only by the passions which it raised but by the test of the effects which it has produced, On the other hand, it has still not been too late to gather living impressions of the man from those who saw him plain, who knew him and listened to his actual words, who can describe his gestures, the tone of his voice, and some of his unguarded moments. Such evidence is especially valuable in the case of a man like Rhodes, who wrote very few intimate letters and received few. For the account of such a man depends for its value not so much on what he did as on why and how he did it ; and that can only be obtained by close acquaintance with the man himself.

This book is not intended to be an unrelieved panegyric ^of Rhodes or a tract for the imperialism he preached and worked for. But it frankly sets forth with the behef that -he was, with all his grievous faults, a great man, and that at the root of his imperiaHsm were quahties that have done good service to mankind. His character was cast in a large mould, with enormous defects corresponding with his eminent virtues. But, from the recital of these shortcomings no less than that of his achievements, help, we think, may be gained by those moved by the same spirit of devotion to what they beHeve best for England and the world. As to his creed of imperiahsm, a worthy spirit will be engendered if we look, not to the blatant and exaggerated manifestations of national arrogance it contained, but to its deep sense of public duty, the tenacity of purpose it implied, and above all to the underljdng S5mipathy and desire for co-operation even with opponents, without which it was meaningless.

Chapter II Early Years

Cecil John Rhodes, the fifth son of the Rev. F. W. Rhodes, Vicar of Bishop Stortford, was born on July 5, 1853. Since the seventeenth century his paternal ancestors had been farmers, first in the Midlands and in Cheshire, then on the outskirts of London near the Gray's Inn Road. His great-grandfather Samuel besides his farm had large brick and tile works at Dalston, on a property now built over and still owned by the Rhodes trustees. His grandfather William was a cowkeeper in a large way at IsHngton and also had property at Ley ton Grange in Essex. Rhodes, therefore, had good reason in after fife for his boast to the Dutch farmers that he was one with them, as he also came of farming stock. The father, F. W. Rhodes, who was bom in 1806, and educated at Harrow and Trinity, held the vicarage of Bishop Stortford for twenty-seven years, imtil two years before his death in 1878. Himself one of a large family, he also had many children, a daughter by a first wife and nine sons and two daughters by his second wife, Louisa Peacock, one of a Lincolnshire family, whom he married in 1844. Two of the nine sons died in infancy, leaving, besides the daughter of the first marriage, Edith and Louisa, Herbert, Frank, Cecil John, Ernest, Elmhirst, Arthur and Bernard, to be sent out into the world by the vicar and his wife Louisa.

The vicar, tall and spare in appearance, was a man of system and of strong prejudices. To his parishioners he gave good sound doctrine in his sermons, which always lasted ten minutes, no more and no less ; he saw to the education of their children, being a generous benefactor to the old grammar school of the place and estabUshing a training school for mistresses in elementary schools ; he was also noted for his charity and his courteous bearing to all, and is said to have had a horror of lawyers. He kept his large family in due respect of him and brought them up on strictly religious principles. They were all expected to take their turn teaching in the Sunday school, and received pious books as a reward for their pains. His hope was that all his sons should follow his own example by taking Orders and become, as he was wont to say, " the angels of the Seven Churches," a hope doomed to complete disappointment. The mother, who died when Cecil was twenty, is said to have been a woman of great charm and ease of manner, whose sympathy and tenderness gave some relief from the vicar's Spartan principles. Thanks to her sympathy, perhaps quite as much as to the father's pungent originahty, many of the children developed on unconventional Unes. It was not the custom for this crowd of brothers and sisters, so one of them records, to confide much in one another, and each grew up on his own Hues ; but at least they learned not only to hold their own with one another but also, in spite of passing quarrels, to stick together and face the world as no mean clan. Throughout life Cecil, though he may have passed disparaging remarks on the pursuits of some of his brothers and sisters, never left any of them in the lurch, but saw that they had the opportunities he was able to give them. The favourite brother of the clan was the second son, Frank, who inherited all his mother's charm but, though a gallant soldier, Httle of the father's force.

Herbert, the eldest son, went to Winchester and Frank to Eton, but when it came to Cecil, at the age of nine, he was put as a day-boy to the local grammar school. Here he gave no signs of great distinction. A school-fellow writing to him when he had become famous recalls that he gained the silver medal for elocution, an art in which he afterwards showed but httle proficiency, and he is stated to have taken interest in history, geography and classics ; but he must have been a good cricketer, for he attained the glory of the school XL at the age of thirteen. He was

EARLY YEARS 9

always rather a shy, reserved boy, with a dehcate appearance, though never wanting in spirit and power of concentration. The motto he chose at the age of thirteen for one of those quaint confessional albums, so dear to the Middle Victorians, was "to do or to die " ; even then he had decided that a single life was better than to be married ; and in one of Frank's early letters home he is already spoken of as " long-headed Cecil," as if this were a well-recognized trait in his character.

Though reserved at home, he appears to have blossomed out more in what was a second home to several of the Rhodes children in Lincolnshire. Mrs. Rhodes's sister, Sophia Peacock, Uved at Sleaford Manor in the Belvoir country, where she often had one or more of the vicar's children to stay, her special favourite being Frank, whom she practically adopted. Cecil was often there for the holidays, and found himself in a circle of relations and acquaintances. His aunt Sophy was always a good friend to him, and she was one of the few to whom in those early days he confided his plans and aspirations. Some Willson cousins lived two miles away at Ranceby ; the Finch Hattons at Haverholm close by, and the family of Mr. Yerburgh, rector of Sleaford, were close friends ; and Frank had Eton companions to stay there. In those days Cecil could put up a good fight with his fists, as one of his friends, a much bigger boy, whom Cecil had thought too " cheeky," had ruefully to admit. One of those who remembered him best at Sleaford was the rector's son, Robert, a lifelong friend. The two used to go riding about the country together, Cecil fond of the exercise but even then remarkable for his bad seat in the saddle, a fault of which practice in the Belvoir country itself never cured him. Though quite a young lad at the time, Cecil, Yerburgh used to say, showed a most precocious power of observation ; instead of gazing at the pretty girl looking over a gate, he was all eyes for the country he passed through, and always remembered which farm was well cultivated and which slackly managed. These early Lincolnshire friendships completed the good grounding for fife which he got from the give and take of the large family at the Vicarage and the rough and tumble of the Grammar School. Unconventional and original he always was, and his unconventionaUty was no doubt accentuated by the turbulent life on the Diamond Fields ; but he also always kept an air of good breeding and a dignity of bearing, sure passports to the most exclusive as to the roughest society ; and he very early learned the gift of appraising men at their true value to himself To this atmosphere of squire and parson in which he was reared at Bishop Stortford and Sleaford he owed, too, his reverence for the feudal traditions of the old squirearchy, with its high if limited sense of public duty, and his lifelong respect for the profession of a landowner.

In 1869, at the age of sixteen, Cecil left the Grammar School and continued his studies under his father's eye. Herbert and Frank had already disappointed the vicar's hope that they should take orders, Frank being bent on Sandhurst and Herbert having already taken to a roving life abroad. Ultimately four of the brothers joined the army. " My father," afterwards said Rhodes, '' was anxious that they should enter the Church as a preliminary step to becoming angels : they prefer being angels through the Army and I don't blame them " ; the other three all went to the Colonies. But at sixteen Cecil had not entirely rejected the idea of the Church as a profession, although his first choice lay elsewhere. " I cannot deny," he wrote to his Aunt Sophy, " for it would only be hypocrisy to say otherwise, that I still above everything would like to be a barrister ; but I agree with you it is a very precarious profession. Next to that I think a clergyman's life is the nicest ; and therefore I shall most earnestly try to go to College, because I have fully determined to be one of these two, and a College education is necessary for both. I think that as a barrister a man may be just as good a Christian as in any other profession " ; nor should the jolly ending of the letter be omitted, if only to show that even in those early years he was not too much of a prig : " How proud you must have been of Frankie's success [in the Eton and Harrow match] ! I can assure you we were in the highest state of excitement ... a great cricketer . . .

EARLY YEARS ii

said he preferred Frank's play to any on the field, because he had never seen anything equal to his defence."

However, neither College nor the Bar were yet to be approached by this determined young man. His health was weakly, and there were even fears that he might be consumptive, a disease of which several of the family showed symptoms. His father, therefore, determined to send him abroad to try the effect of a sea voyage and a better climate. Herbert had already set up as a planter in Natal, so to join Herbert in Natal Cecil was despatched on a saiUng vessel. The voyage to Durban took him seventy days, and on September i, 1870, he first set foot on African soil, a tall, lanky, anaemic, fairhaired boy, shy and reserved in bearing. Nelson boarding a man-of-war for the first time, when " nobody had been apprised of the boy's coming," could hardly have felt more solitary and forlorn than this seventeen-year-old boy on landing upon the scene of his hfe's work. For Herbert, the only soul he knew in South Africa, was away upon some expedition ; he had, however, left a message with his friend Dr. Sutherland, the Surveyor-General of the Colony, to befriend his brother. So to Dr. Sutherland's house at Pietermaritzburg Cecil found his way. There he was kindly entertained until his brother's return. He is said to have spent most of his time there reading, and still apparently used to talk of taking Orders to his host, who used to prophesy that he would end his days as a village parson in England.

Towards the end of the year Herbert returned from his expedition, and the two brothers started off for the Umkomanzi Valley, south of Pietermaritzburg, where the elder had already taken a farm. It was in a settlement where a first attempt was being made to start cottonplanting in Natal ; their friends in town all warned them that the attempt would prove a dismal failure. However, they found that the pioneer of the settlement, one Conyngham, and Powys, the owner of a neighbouring farm specially noted for its beauty, had had some success. Their own farm had first to be cleared of the dense bush which grew luxuriantly in the hot steamy valley ; this they did with the help of their Kaffir labourers in time for a first year's crop. The crop proved a failure, as their friends had predicted ; the cotton, planted too closely in rows, had become tangled and matted, and fell a prey to the caterpillar and bore -worm. A few bales were picked, but not enough to pay expenses. Nothing daunted, they cleared off more bush for the second year's crop and planted the forty-five acres they now had for cotton on a new system, with much greater intervals between the plants, and at every 80 feet a small patch of meaUes, which attracted the grub from the cotton ; the numerous monkeys in the district were also attracted by the meaHes, but the brothers had no objection to their visits as long as they confined their depredations to the com cobs. On this second year's crop they made a good profit, and obtained a prize for their cotton at a local agricultural show. By the end of 1872 the Rhodes brothers expected to have 100 acres cleared for planting, and were already regarded as among the most successful planters of the settlement ; ^ their method of ploughing instead of hoeing between the rows being looked on as a specially commendable innovation.

The Ufe on the settlement was hard and simple, but had its attractions. Herbert and Cecil had built themselves two Uttle huts, one for sleeping, the other as a store and living room ; here they lived, waited on by a Kaffir servant. They had pleasant neighbours within riding distance, one, with whom Cecil formed a close friendship, being H. C. Hawkins, the son of a Natal magistrate, and a relation of the Provost of Oriel. With him Cecil kept up his classics, and formed plans for saving up enough money to go to Oxford, an ambition which only one of them fulfilled. Cecil, it is also recorded, no doubt as the scholar and the youngest member of the settlement, was chosen to respond to the toast of The Ladies at the banquet of the agricultural show at which his cotton samples were exhibited. Herbert, a restless and adventurous fellow, was more noted for his feats of daring, especially for an exploit in swimming into the Umkomanzi, when in raging flood, and cutting the traces of a team of oxen which were being helplessly swept

^ See Notes on Natal, by John Robinson. 1872.

EARLY YEARS 13

down with their wagon, and so enabhng them to swim ashore.

Though Cecil in the intervals of bush clearing and cotton planting studied his classics and dreamed of Oxford, he also gave early evidence of his practical eye for a business bargain, keeping a shrewd look out for investments and openings in the colony. At this stage he had no capital to spare, but during the year after he had left Natal, when he had scraped some together, he put his previous observation to good use. To his friend. Dr. Sutherland, who acted as his agent, he wrote several anxious letters on the placing of the few pounds he had available. Farms had been suggested to him, but he would have nothing to say to farms, unless he had seen them for himself and was assured of their accessibility and good water-supply; and finally, after much consideration, he pitches on the new railway under construction between Durban and The Point at the landing-stage, which this wise young man of nineteen quite rightly judged to be a profitable investment.

The little settlement on the Umkomanzi was shorthved. By the end of 1871 one neighbour of the Rhodes's, finding that the sluit, on which he depended for water, had dried up, was forced to leave ; Powys, the owner of the lovely farm, had all his cotton dried up and was burned out of his house. Others went to try their luck at the newly discovered diamond diggings, whither Herbert also went to prospect in May 1871. Cecil looked after the cotton by himself till October, when he followed Herbert to Griqualand West ; but the Natal plantation was not finally abandoned till the end of 1872, after Herbert had returned to put in one more crop., " It really seems an ill-fated valley,'' was Cecil's parting verdict, and he thought his brother wise not to drop any more money on it. " You would be surprised," he wrote to Dr. Sutherland, " if I told you what a sink it has been. I believe if one only kept on, it has a capacity to absorb any amount of capital." But though an expensive experiment, this plantation was a good training-ground for Rhodes. He learned here to understand something of the difficulties of South African farming and how to overcome them ; he gained his first experience of natives, improved in health, developed business capacity, and was enabled, before he was of age, to be self-reliant and fend for himself as few young Englishmen of his class are qualified to do. Above all, he acquired those habits of work, and that loathing of a loafer which he kept to the end. It is indeed amusing to find him writing home at this tender age to urge that his elder brother Frank should " come out here before he gets his commission, as it will be very good for him, so much better than the do-nothing life he is leading now/*