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Program Title
Credits Executive Producer: Michael Wearing, Anthony Thomas Producer: Charles Salmon, Scott Meek Director: David Drury Intro RHODES/Episode 2/Intro by Russell Baker As we pick up our history of Cecil Rhodes -- the great British imperialist of the late nineteenth century -- Rhodes is trying to win control of South Africa's booming diamond business. He'd started out -- fresh from England, eighteen years old -- working in the new diamond field at Kimberley. This was a huge open pit cut up into hundreds of small claims, worked by thousands and thousands of men. The result was an immense human ant heap. At one time there were 50,000 men working in the pit. Rhodes saw the obvious: With so many claims producing diamonds, the market was being flooded, and miners were working for small change. The man who could buy them out, consolidate them into a single mine, and limit the flow of diamonds to the market could become rich as Croesus. This Rhodes set out to do, and with great success. When we resume tonight he has already created DeBeers, his own mine company, a name still synonymous with diamonds today. There is one man, however, whose holdings are even greater than Rhodes'. He's Barney Barnato -- a "buffoon," Rhodes calls him -- a crude unpolished man offensive to gentleman members of the Kimberley Club -- but more cunning than any of them -- except Rhodes. Rhodes fancies himself a dreamer of noble dreams. Dreams of bringing civilization to savage races. Dreams of a railroad the full length of Africa from Capetown to Cairo. Dreams of owning his own country -- a vast territory now inconveniently ruled by native Africans under King Lobengula. He also dreams of creating a monopoly in diamonds, but Barney Barnato's large holdings are blocking him. As for Barnato, he is a genial fun-loving shark of a businessman who dreams of destroying Rhodes. Episode Two, "The Place of the Killing." Extro RHODES/Episode 2/Extro by Russell Baker Rhodes's relationship with men is still something of a puzzle. His mother died when he was twenty and after that no woman ever mattered much to him. He had six brothers who lived long enough to marry, but only one did. Rhodes surrounded himself with men. There are things about this all-male circle that remind you of boys at play. They're a little like a bunch of adventurous schoolboys with a tree-house club in the back yard. No girls allowed. No boys either unless they know the secret handshake. Rhodes and his men are adventurers all right, but grown men bonded in this sort of arrangement are not easily explained. If you have a psychiatric turn of mind -- and these days, who doesn't? -- it's tempting to assume Rhodes was homosexual. Most of the men he was closest too, however -- men like Jameson and Johnston -- did not fit the pattern. Many married, had children and seem to have lived happy family lives. We've seen Rhodes's passion for young male secretaries. They were never chosen for competence. Rhodes needed their companionship, not their secretarial skills. He was shattered when they left him to get married or, as in Pickering's case, died. One biographer thinks Rhodes was at least an emotional, if not a practicing homosexual. Frank Harris, the famous Victorian gossip who knew absolutely everybody and talked freely about them all, thought it unlikely that Rhodes, whatever his inner nature, ever gratified it physically. To this day nobody knows. For Masterpiece Theatre, I'm Russell Baker. Goodnight.  Episode number: 1 2 3
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