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Legacy: Cecil Rhodes, The Rhodes Trust and Rhodes Scholarships

Linking Oxford with the world

Philip Ziegler
Yale, 371pp, £25,

Vernon Bogdanor

Wednesday, 21st May 2008

Vernon Bogdanor reviews Philip Ziegler's account of Rhodes scholarships

Cecil Rhodes hoped that the scholarships established through his will, would, by creating educational ties between the Empire and the Anglo-Saxon world, ‘render war impossible’. The scholars, he insisted, should not be weedy bookworms, but manly, robust types, Plato’s guardians, a society of the elect. The 20th century has not been kind to such ideals; yet the scholarships have proved of enormous value to Oxford, giving it that wider international perspective and connection with the world of public affairs which differentiate it so markedly from the Other Place.

In his will, Rhodes insisted that no candidate should be disqualified on account of race or religion. He almost certainly had in mind the Boers rather than the blacks, though he also called for ‘equal rights for every civilised man south of the Zambezi’. What Rhodes would have thought of the belated admission of female scholars in 1976 is, fortunately, not recorded.

Sadly, the trustees of the scholarships sometimes proved even more illiberal than the founder, and with less excuse. Sir Carleton Kemp Allen, a distinguished administrative lawyer, and Warden of Rhodes House between the wars, when faced with a Jamaican candidate, Levy, declared, ‘I do not know from the photograph whether Levy is black, white or coffee-coloured. As he is a Jew, I should imagine that he probably has no tar-brush about him’. Of Adolf Schlepengrell, a German scholar, one of whose grandmothers was Jewish, and therefore fell under Hitler’s Nuremberg Laws, Allen commented in 1934 that he was

unmistakably a self-seeker and something of a self-advertiser, and — definitely — conceited. It may be that Hitler is not so very far out after all and that the qualities which slightly jar are contributed by ancestry.

Turning down Schlepengrell’s attempt to seek work in Britain, Allen told him to ‘go back to his own country — and face the music’.

Some of Allen’s postwar successors were not much better. Oxford owes a great debt of gratitude to its black American Rhodes scholars. For it was they who, in the 1970s, pressed their elders and supposed betters to alter the terms of Rhodes’s will which provided for scholarships from four all-white schools in South Africa. The trustees responded evasively, and the Warden, Sir Edgar Williams, told the Americans that they were not ‘acting like one of the chaps’, to be met with the retort, ‘I suppose we didn’t feel like one of the chaps’. However, when the trustees finally agreed to approach the Education Secretary, Margaret Thatcher, she proved unwilling to override Rhodes’s intentions. It was left to two later Wardens, Anthony Kenny and John Rowett, to overcome the heritage of the past through the creation of the Mandela-Rhodes Foundation in 2003.

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Andrew Farrington

May 22nd, 2008 7:52pm

A technical point, unconnected with the Ziegler book on Rhodes (but I can't find any other way of contacting you via your website). The link/s to the Cherie Blair autobiography don't seem to be working (as of 22 May 08). I can get very close, but can't actually get at the review itself. With best wishes.