William Boyd - Bamboo - Essays and Criticism

People like Beit and Wernher devoted their lives to making phenomenal amounts of money for themselves and after a while this process ceases to be interesting. I had expected that Wheatcroft’s book would fill in the gaps, particularly on Beit, but there is nothing about him in The Randlords that we cannot find elsewhere. This now seems to me not so much a deficiency in Wheatcroft’s research as a shallowness in Beit’s character. He was a timid, portly, extraordinarily hard-working man with superb financial acumen. He associated himself with Rhodes early on in his career and Rhodes came to rely heavily on his judgement. Perhaps there is nothing more to say. Others, such as Barney Barnato and J. B. Robinson, were more flamboyant — almost Gogolian — characters. Barnato was a Cockney Jew who arrived in the early days of the diamond fields with assets consisting of forty rather bad cigars. He became a multi-millionaire with — almost obligatory for the South African magnates — a Park Lane mansion. He never lost his accent and was never truly accepted by the high society of the day. Towards the end of his life he became afflicted by paranoias and depressions, and committed suicide by jumping overboard from an Atlantic liner. One story about Barney, which Wheatcroft doesn’t mention, occurred in his heyday. He bought a Millais called Joseph and the Sheep which he hung with due prominence in his Park Lane house. At a reception Barney was loudly asked by an aristocratic society grande dame (presumably to effect some social discomfiture) why he had bought the picture and what was it that made it appealing to him. Barney, goaded and irritated, replied with equal volume: “I bought it, madam, because one of the poor fuckin’ sheep looks just like me.”

Barney Barnato, sometimes accused of being a shady operator, was nevertheless a popular figure in the minefields. J. B. Robinson, on the other hand, inspired nothing but hate. After his death in 1929, the Cape Times published an obituary which must rank as one of the most vitriolic ever written. His will, the obituary said, was “scandalously repugnant … it stinks, too, against public decency.” What provoked the ire was the fact that Robinson’s will set up no trust funds nor benefited the country in any way. Robinson, the Cape Times went on, should serve as a warning: “those who in future may acquire great wealth in this country will shudder lest their memories should come within possible risk of rivalling the loathsomeness of the thing that is the memory of Sir Joseph Robinson.” It is ironic now to reflect that when Rhodes died he was regarded as a national hero. His funeral train passed through the solemn and mourning country as if he were some great monarch being laid to rest. Robinson’s legacy was one of personal bitterness and repugnance. Rhodes’s bequest to his adopted country was altogether more complex and damaging. Rhodes was not only a corrupt and ruthless capitalist who used his ostensible imperialist aims to win large fortunes for himself (he made at least a million pounds out of the creation of Rhodesia): he also laid the foundations of apartheid with his racial legislation when he was Prime Minister of the Cape; and he was directly responsible for the Boer War and all its repercussions, thanks to the fiasco of the Jameson Raid. It is harder to calculate the long-term effects of his actions on the Matabele tribe, and the results of his colonization north of the Zambezi. It is perhaps sufficient to observe that he and his agents (the good Dr Jameson again) adopted methods no less severe than the United States did in their wars against the Plains Indians in the 1870s: the smallpox weapon, the reservation policy, found an echo in Rhodesia.

And yet this man died an imperial hero. If ever there was a case for a revisionist biography, Rhodes positively cries out for one. Wheat-croft makes no attempt to rehabilitate, but holds back from attempting a full analysis. Speculating about the absence of a satisfactory “Life of Rhodes,” he asks: “Is it because, as hinted in Chapter Nine, and to borrow Gertrude Stein’s words in another context, ‘there is no there there’? The looming gap between his deeds and his unfathomable personality remains.” That “hinted in” is revealing, and I think that to preserve ideas of “mystery” and “unfathomableness” does Rhodes too great a favour and lends him an air of glamorous potency. There were, it is true, baffling sides to Rhodes, but in many crucial respects he seems to me entirely transparent.

Wheatcroft illuminates one significant fact early on. “Even in a rough age,” he observes, “standards of financial morality on the diamond fields were low.” This is almost a euphemism. The key to Rhodes’s character lies in the fact that his education — unusually for a boy of his class — was in the polyglot graft and corruption of the diggings. Rhodes left school at sixteen, moreover; unlike the other Englishmen of his class, he was not a public schoolboy. He did not possess that protective veneer which years in a single-sex boarding school provide. When he finally entered the English educational system — Oxford — it was as a mature young man with several years in the diggings behind him. He had, in fact, more in common with the working-class financiers — Barnato, Joel — than with the English “gents” he messed with. We are inclined to see Rhodes as typically middle class (father a vicar, brothers at Eton and Winchester, Oxford education), but it is more instructive to see him as an East End wide-boy in disguise. He was streetwise. The history of his career is of a man who gets what he wants by whatever means is most effective. Sometimes it was charm, sometimes guile, sometimes main force, sometimes bribery and corruption. “Tell me a man’s ambitions,” he said, “and I will tell you his price.”

Wheatcroft refers to a bribery case of 1876. The facts are more complex than he has space to make them. At that time, the diamond fields were in one of their slumps. Rhodes and his partner Rudd were very nearly broke, and they diversified into ancillary professions. The price of diamonds was low, mining was often impossible for months on end because of massive mud slides and cave-ins. Diggers were leaving Kimberley in their hundreds. Rhodes hung on, selling ice cream in the market square. Then he decided to attempt to gain pumping contracts from the various mining boards. First he needed a pump. He used charm. He spent a week persuading a Boer farmer to part with a new pump he had just installed on his farm. The man refused to sell, but through bull-headed persistence and by promising more and more money (which he did not have) Rhodes got his way. Again and again he was to persuade people into courses of action to which they were implacably opposed. It was his greatest skill.

Having secured his pump, he got a contract in one of the smaller mines. He then bribed a mining engineer in charge of the pumps in De Beer’s mine to damage them — thereby allowing Rhodes and Rudd to come to the rescue. This skulduggery came inadvertently to light during the deliberations of an official committee of inquiry into miners’ grievances. At the time it made a huge scandal, Rhodes effectively silenced it by suing the engineer (a Mauritian called Heuteau) for perjury. The case was called in court, then the charge was suddenly dropped. As Wheatcroft implies, this was achieved by collusion between Rhodes and the public prosecutor, Sidney Shippard — later, significantly, executor of Rhodes’s will. At the time of the trial, Rhodes and Shippard were living in the same mess. Heuteau’s allegation had been neutered by being transferred from a court of inquiry to a court of law. There, with Shippard conniving, the matter was swiftly settled. Rhodes dropped his case against the hapless Mauritian (who never raised the matter again). Shippard was well rewarded for his aid. Rhodes was tarnished, but free to operate, and, eventually, got the De Beers pumping contract. The same modus operandi appears again and again in his short but very busy life. To take an example not generally known: when Rhodes was negotiating with Lobengula, king of the Matabele, for a mining concession and the king was proving intractable, Rhodes drew up a contract with one Frank Johnson (an adventurer who was to lead the pioneer column to found Rhodesia) for the killing of Lobengula. Johnson revealed this in his autobiography, Great Days, and reproduced the contract. But the relevant chapter was withdrawn from the published manuscript, though the typescript still resides in a state archive in Harare. It is an astonishing document and reads like something from a CIA covert-operations file. (One has constantly to remember that this was the beginning of the British South Africa Company — lengthy negotiations with the Colonial Office eventually secured Rhodes a Royal Charter.) Johnson writes in the chapter: