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Program Title
Credits Executive Producer: Antony Thomas, Michael Wearing Producer: Charles Salmon, Scott Meek Director: David Drury Intro RHODES/Episode 1/Intro by Russell Baker The British empire reached the peak of its glory in the 1890s, and the greatest of the Empire builders -- the super-imperialist of the Victorian age -- was a clergyman's son named Cecil Rhodes. At the age of eighteen, Rhodes went to Africa to farm. Before he was forty, he controlled nearly a quarter of the entire continent…on behalf of the British Crown, of course. Even though, he'd also made a huge personal fortune in diamonds and gold and had named a country for himself -- Rhodesia. Today, just a hundred years later, the Empire is gone and almost everything about it seems hateful to the modern world. The people who ran it and profited from it thought of themselves as a sort of benevolent master race. Rhodes summed it up when he said he wanted to "bring the whole uncivilized world under British rule." For England in the 1890s, "uncivilized" meant virtually everybody who wasn't English. Rhodes himself dreamed of restoring the lost American colonies to Britain. However, it was the world's nonwhite people that the imperialists thought most in need of civilizing. At the time of our story, other European countries like Germany, Belgium and Portugal were threatening to move in on Southern Africa's mineral wealth… …And might have succeeded if Rhodes had not been so far-sighted, so devious, and so ruthless. Rhodes is probably best known in the United States because of the many distinguished Americans, President Clinton, for example, who attended Oxford as Rhodes scholars. Though Rhodes laid the foundation for apartheid in South Africa, his will specifies that no one can be denied a Rhodes scholarship on grounds of race. Our history of this complicated man was filmed entirely in South Africa. We're showing it in three installments, each two hours long. Now, Rhodes, First Episode: "All the World's Diamonds." Extro RHODES/Episode 1/Extro by Russell Baker In case you think Princess Radziwill is a fictional character, I assure you she is not. Why she thought she could charm her way into Rhodes's life is a mystery, but she did, and for awhile Rhodes was interested in her. Her father was a Polish count. When she was fifteen there was an arranged marriage to a Polish prince. He was well connected in Berlin social circles, but Princess Radziwill wasn't cut out for conventional society. She seems simply to have wanted her life to be more interesting than it was. She wrote a series of gossipy pieces about Berlin society, which were published in France. Berliners were furious. She moved to Russia – St. Petersburg – and created an elegant salon. Her husband left her. She moved west, lived in Paris and London as a journalist writing about political personalities. She comes across as that stock character of the romantic potboiler -- the international adventuress. A more sympathetic reading might be that she was a woman casting off the shackles of a stifling male society and struggling to create an identity... …To be a person of consequence. In any event, she was setting her sights impossibly high when she aimed at Rhodes. His interest in women was minimal, to say the least. It was the company of men that Rhodes enjoyed. Whatever the reasons for it, Rhodes's social world was an exclusive men's club. Women were not welcome. For Masterpiece Theatre, I'm Russell Baker. Goodnight.  Episode number: 1 2 3
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