Rhodes House and the Gogel Gardens: A Guide

This thirteenth-century French poem was written in two parts and describes a young man dreaming of his love for a beautiful flower trapped within a walled garden. It is an allegory of love. It was a very popular text in the medieval period and sections of it were translated into English by Geoffrey Chaucer as ‘The Romaunt [Romance] of the Rose’:

‘When I the age of twenty had attained –
The age when Love controls a young man’s heart –
As I was wont, one night I went to bed
And soundly slept. But there came a dream 
Which much delighted me, it was so sweet…’
                     – ‘Le Roman de la Rose’, lines 14ff.

The tapestry ‘Romaunt of the Rose (The Romance of the Rose): The Heart of the Rose’, based on a scene from the poem, was drawn from designs originally made by Edward Burne Jones in the 1870s, at a time when there was much discussion about whether or not it was Chaucer who had translated the original French text. The tapestry was woven in 1901 by Morris & Co.

The Southern Cross was the name given by fifteenth- and sixteenth-century European explorers to a constellation in the Milky Way galaxy consisting of four bright stars which they saw as forming a cross shape (Alpha Crucis or Acrux, Beta Crucis, Gamma Crucis and Delta Crucis. A faint fifth star, Epsilon Crucis, can also be seen). In southern Africa, the Venda people traditionally describe the Milky Way as a path along which ancestor spirits walk. The |Xam-ka !’e people said that it is a glowing pathway, created by a girl of the ancient race, meant to show the way home for travellers at night. European voyagers took the Southern Cross as a sign of divine blessings for their explorations and conquests and for many in the southern hemisphere, it came to symbolise conquest and colonialism. Versions of a design featuring the Southern Cross continue to appear on some national flags.

The original sculptures of the Zimbabwe bird, carved in soapstone, stood on the walls and monoliths of the ancient city of Great Zimbabwe which was built sometime between the 12th and 15th centuries by the ancestral forebears of the regionally-descended Shona people of Zimbabwe. The site of Great Zimbabwe stands in modern-day Zimbabwe and gives its name to the country. The Zimbabwe government’s website notes that ‘Zimbabwe birds represent sacred or totemic animals of the Shona – the bataleur eagle (Shona: chapungu), which was held to be a messenger from Mwari (God) and the ancestors, or the fish eagle (hungwe) which it has been suggested was the original totem of the Shona.’ In 1889 a German explorer and hunter, Willi Posselt, and a British explorer and archaeologist, James Theodore Bent, stole a number of the soapstone carvings from the ruined site of Great Zimbabwe (hacking them off from their pedestals) and sold one to Cecil Rhodes, who displayed it in Groote Schur, his mansion in the Cape of Good Hope which later became the official residence of colonial prime ministers of the Union of South Africa and apartheid South Africa. The sculptures remain there today, and Rhodes also had replicas made. The other four bird sculptures stolen by Posselt were returned from apartheid South Africa to Zimbabwe in 1981. Rhodes was himself interested in the site of Great Zimbabwe and captivated by its beauty, although he incorrectly concluded that the ruins there were evidence of an ancient Mediterranean/Phoenician civilisation because he did not believe that Africans would have been capable of constructing the buildings of the site or its intricate bird sculptures. His erroneous certainty that the site could not be the work of African development was of a piece with his wider view that European culture was superior to African culture. Later archaeological excavations made clear that Rhodes was entirely wrong in his assumptions about the origins of Great Zimbabwe. However, the erasure of Great Zimbabwe’s true history continued into the twentieth century, when the Rhodesian Front Party (led by colonial prime minister Ian Smith) instructed its employees that ‘no official publication may state unequivocally that Great Zimbabwe was an African creation’. On the Zimbabwe bird and Rhodes’s actions in relation to the site of Great Zimbabwe, see Professor Shadreck Chirikure, Edward Hall Professor of Archaeological Science at Oxford, on ‘Reclaiming Great Zimbabwe’s past to learn lessons for the future’ here.

An architect, Herbert Baker was born in Kent and grew up fascinated by the vernacular architecture and craftsmanship of that area. He worked as an architectural apprentice in London and for the practice of Ernest George and Harold Peto before opening his own office in Gravesend in 1890. In 1892, he travelled to southern Africa, where he met Cecil Rhodes, who became a key patron. Baker worked in southern Africa for 20 years where, among other projects, he worked on the Union Buildings in Pretoria (now the official seat of the South African government) and Groote Schuur, Cecil Rhodes’s mansion in the Cape of Good Hope, which later became the official residence of 11 Prime Ministers until 1994, including the architects and perpetrators of apartheid. When Nelson Mandela was elected president in 1994, he refused to live there. In 1912, Baker worked with Edwin Lutyens on the design of the government buildings in New Delhi. He went on to do work for the Imperial War Graves Commission, designing the cemetery at Tyne Cot in Belgium and, in France, the Delville Wood South African Memorial and Neuve Chapelle Indian Memorial. He designed a number of war memorials for schools, including the War Cloister at Winchester College in Hampshire, and was also responsible for the rebuilding of the Bank of England.

A colonial financier and businessman, Alfred Beit was born in Hamburg, Germany and travelled to southern Africa in 1875. He was a close friend and business associate of Cecil Rhodes; together, they founded the mining company De Beers Ltd. Beit became a British subject in 1898. He was an art collector and supported a number of institutions during his lifetime, and he had a particular interest in developing the colonial railway system in southern Africa. His will established the Beit Railway Fund, later renamed the Beit Trust, which continues to fund buildings and infrastructure alongside educational and development projects. The Beit Trust also partners with leading educational institutions to provide postgraduate scholarships at British and South African universities.

A Polish-Israeli sculptor, Zeev Ben-Zvi studied at the Academy of Fine Art in Warsaw and the Bezalel School of Art in Jerusalem, later teaching at the New Bezalel School. In 1937, he travelled to Paris and London. He became known for his semi-abstract cubist techniques, displayed in portrait head sculptures made from bronze and copper. 

Artist Rachel Carter works from her garden studio on the Derbyshire/Nottinghamshire border in the UK, using hand processes and the ancient lost wax technique (weaving in wax to create bronze sculptures) to make large-scale public realm sculptures. As well as the three ball sculptures that she created for the Gogel Gardens at Rhodes House, Carter has also made the Pilgrim Women bronze sculptures to commemorate the 400th anniversary of the Mayflower sailing and her work has been exhibited at the RHS Chelsea Flower Show. She has a particular interest in working to represent shared and complex histories. Image by Howard Johnson.

The gardens at Rhodes House were first laid out in 1928 by Norah Lindsay, the pioneer garden designer who worked between the two World Wars and was influential in garden design and planting in Britain and in continental Europe. She is now less well-known than her contemporary Gertrude Jekyll – in large part because Jekyll wrote extensively about her work, whereas Lindsay did not. Similarly, Lindsay did not leave planting plans for her gardens, a deliberate tactic to ensure that her services would be retained by her patrons. Lindsay was from an aristocratic family and spent much of her time socialising with the upper echelons of society. Finding herself in dire financial straits after the collapse of her marriage, she began her career as a garden designer. Lindsay’s social connections led to many of her commissions, and her horticultural work included time in the gardens of her friends Vita Sackville-West (Sissinghurst) and Lawrence Johnston (Hidcote). It was while dining with Nancy and Waldorf Astor at Cliveden in 1927 that she was first introduced to Philip Kerr, Lord Lothian, the British diplomat and imperialist who was at that time Secretary of the Rhodes Trust. Her work at Rhodes House was her first real commercial venture, but she left no planting plan and the opulent planting she employed did not suit the north-facing long herbaceous border. Her signature plants included the tall, spiny leaved Cotton Thistle, Magnolias, Mulleins (Verbascum) with their silver foliage and spires of saucer-shaped flowers, and plentiful roses (especially Rosa ‘Zéphirine Drouhin’), along with bulbs planted within geometric box edging. In her own garden at Sutton Courtenay in Oxfordshire, Lindsay used topiarised evergreen shrubs planted within the borders and surrounded by billowing herbaceous flowers. This was considered radical and innovative at the time, but has gone on to influence modern designers like Tom Stuart-Smith, who uses this style in expansive landscape gardens at Trentham in Staffordshire, at the Royal Horticultural Society’s (RHS) garden at Wisley in Surrey and at RHS Bridgewater in Manchester. Lindsay’s garden at Sutton Courtenay no longer exists, but her use of colour in long borders can still be seen in the Parterre at Blickling in Norfolk (now owned by the National Trust) which she laid out in 1930. She also worked closely with Lawrence Johnston at Hidcote Manor (the first ‘Garden only’ property bequeathed to the National Trust. Johnstone had in fact left it to Norah Lindsay in his will, but she died before him).

An American writer, philosopher, journalist, educator and patron of the arts, Alain LeRoy Locke (Pennsylvania & Hertford 1907) was born in Pennsylvania. As a Rhodes Scholar, he studied classics and philosophy and co-founded the African Union Society. Locke faced great prejudice in Oxford, where several colleges refused to admit him, and most other American Rhodes Scholars at that time refused to be in his company. When he ran into debt, he was ejected from the University and although he was able to submit his final thesis from abroad, it was returned to him and marked as unsatisfactory. He went on to study at the University of Berlin and later became an assistant professor at Howard University in the US, where Locke Hall is named in his honour. Locke was known as the ‘Father of the Harlem Renaissance’, a cultural movement of the 1920s and 1930s that proudly championed Black intellectual and artistic production. He was an important philosopher on race and culture, positing the idea of race as a matter of social and cultural construction, and contesting narrow ‘biological’ understandings of race. His highly distinguished subsequent career as a philosopher and leader of the Black cultural movement suggests that it was indeed the difficulties he laboured under at Oxford, rather than his character or his abilities, which had led to his academic challenges during his time studying at the University. In 2007, a group of Rhodes Scholars came together to discuss how Locke’s life could be commemorated. They arranged for Locke’s ashes (at that time held in Howard University) to be interred, and raised money for a plot in the Congressional Cemetery in the US. Rhodes Scholar George Keys (Maryland & Balliol 1970) commissioned a headstone for the plot which included symbols to represent Locke’s identity as a gay man and also his Bahá’i faith.

Nelson Mandela was a Black nationalist and the first Black President of South Africa (serving from 1994 to 1999). He studied and qualified as a lawyer. In 1944, he joined the African National Congress (ANC) and worked through the ANC to oppose South Africa’s apartheid system of racial segregation. He took a nonviolent stance until the Sharpeville massacre of unarmed Black South Africans by police forces in 1960 when he began to advocate acts of sabotage against the ruling regime. In 1964 he was arrested and sentenced to life imprisonment, subsequently refusing offers of release that were made on the condition that he renounce violence. He was released in 1990. He led the ANC’s negotiations with then president of South Africa F.W. de Klerk. In 1993, Mandela shared the Nobel Peace Prize with F.W. de Klerk in recognition of their efforts to end South Africa’s apartheid system. Mandela became President of South Africa in 1994 and established the country’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission which investigated human rights violations under apartheid. He also oversaw the establishment of a new democratic constitution for South Africa in 1996. He did not seek a second term as President. In 1999, he established the Nelson Mandela Foundation. In 2003, he set up the Mandela Rhodes Foundation in partnership with the Rhodes Trust, to offer support and development opportunities to young African leaders. In the same year, he participated in London in the celebration of the centenary of the Rhodes Scholarships. When visiting Rhodes House, Mandela sat for his portrait in a green chair with Cecil Rhodes’s initials (CJR) carved into the back. Mandela is said to have remarked, as he sat for his portrait, ‘Isn’t it an irony of history that I’m here, in Rhodes House, sitting on Cecil Rhodes’s chair?’

John McCall MacBain O.C. (Québec & Wadham 1980) studied at McGill University before going to Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar to read for a second undergraduate degree in law. From Oxford, he went to Harvard Business School. After buying AUTO Hebdo magazine in Montreal, Canada, McCall MacBain formed Trader Classified Media, the world’s leading classified advertising company. In 2007, John and Marcy McCall MacBain founded the McCall MacBain Foundation which has made philanthropic grants of approximately $500 million across the areas of education and scholarships, climate change and the environment, and youth mental health. Dr Marcy McCall MacBain is the founder and chair of the McCall MacBain Scholarships at McGill University and vice-chair of the McCall MacBain Foundation. She is also a senior research fellow at the Centre for Evidence-based Medicine and the Department of Primary Care Health Sciences at the University of Oxford. In 2013, the McCall MacBain Foundation donated $120 million to the Rhodes Trust, allowing the Trust to fund the Scholarships in perpetuity while also catalysing significant expansion of the Scholarship’s numbers and global reach. McCall MacBain is recognised as one of the Rhodes Trust’s Second Century Founders.

A German-born British statesman, Alfred Milner was educated in Germany and the UK. He studied classics at Balliol College, Oxford and became a fellow of New College before leaving Oxford to take up journalism. He then entered politics, beginning as a Liberal before joining the Conservative government, where he became private secretary to the chancellor of the Exchequer. Milner served as a colonial administrator in Egypt and went on to become British High Commissioner in South Africa and Governor of the Cape Colony after the failure of the Jameson Raid (the failed attempt to violently overthrow the Afrikaner government in southern Africa, which led Cecil Rhodes to resign as Prime Minister of the Cape Colony. The event was known as the ‘Jameson Raid’ after its leader Leander Starr Jameson, Trustee under the will of Cecil Rhodes and British colonial politician). Milner’s policies in the region led directly to the Second Boer War, in which he was responsible for the establishment of concentration camps to intern the Boers. After the Second Boer War, Milner established his so-called ‘Kindergarten’, a group of Oxford graduates and British civil servants with whom he worked to reshape and solidify the British Empire’s dominance in southern Africa. Milner returned to Britain in 1905. He was an advisor to British Prime Minister David Lloyd George during the First World War and a member of Lloyd George’s Cabinet, and he went on to serve as Secretary of State for the Colonies until 1921. He was also one of the original authors of the Balfour Declaration of 1917 that stated support for ‘the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people’. Milner worked closely with Cecil Rhodes in South Africa, and Rhodes appointed Milner one of the Trustees under his will. Milner remained a Trustee of the Rhodes Trust until his death in 1925.

George Parkin was the first Secretary of the Rhodes Trust, from 1903 until 1921. Parkin was born in Salisbury, New Brunswick and studied at the University of New Brunswick and at Oxford. He had been a successful school headmaster before he became the first organiser of the Rhodes Scholarships. After Cecil Rhodes’s death, Parkin travelled the world to establish the selection process for Rhodes Scholars. He also wrote and lectured extensively in support of the British empire and its ideology. A prominent speaker on behalf of the Imperial Federation League, he was also the author of Imperial Federation: The Problem of National Unity and a school textbook, Round the Empire, which was expressly written to propagate his imperial views.

A mining magnate and British imperialist, Cecil John Rhodes (sometimes known as ‘CJR’) was a figure who divided opinion even in his own lifetime. The Indian-born imperialist writer Rudyard Kipling – a Rhodes Trustee from 1917 to 1925 – thought him ‘the greatest of living men’, while to South African progressive author Oliver Schreiner he came to mean ‘so much of oppression, injustice, and moral degradation to South Africa’. Born in England, Rhodes travelled to southern Africa at the age of 17, and it was the wealth he extracted from the people and resources of that region – principally through mining diamonds and gold – that made him both immensely rich and extremely powerful. He was ruthless in his pursuit of concessions that would allow him to extend his mining activities. Perhaps most famously, his agents deliberately deceived King Lobengula of the Ndebele Kingdom regarding the extent of control they were proposing over the lands of the Ndebele people. The British South Africa Company (BSAC), founded by Rhodes, colonised the inland regions of southern Africa between the Limpopo River and Lake Tanganyika. In 1880, BSAC renamed the area north of the Zambezi River ‘Northern Rhodesia’ (this would become Zambia upon its independence in 1964) while the area to the south was initially named ‘Southern Rhodesia’ (becoming Zimbabwe upon its independence in 1980). Rhodes went on to become Prime Minister of the Cape Colony. In 1873, Rhodes had matriculated at Oriel College, Oxford to study law, though he attended only intermittently, travelling back and forth from southern Africa, and did not gain his degree until 1881. Rhodes was much taken by what he called Oxford’s ‘compelling influences, her wonderful charm’. He began to think early on about how he could use his money for ‘the extension of British rule throughout the world’ and concluded that Oxford’s residential college system would be the most fertile ground on which to bring young people together to achieve the ends he had in view. When he died, he left around £3.7 million (equivalent to over £650 million today) for the foundation of scholarships to bring young men from the British colonies and the USA and Germany to study in Oxford ‘for instilling into their minds the advantage to the Colonies as well as to the United Kingdom of the retention of the unity of the Empire’. These became the Rhodes Scholarships, the first international postgraduate scholarship programme.

Born in London, Archibald Primrose (usually known by his later title of Lord Rosebery) studied at Oxford but left without receiving a degree. He went into British politics, serving in various posts under Prime Minister William Gladstone in the 1880s. In 1894, when Gladstone resigned, Rosebery became Prime Minister, serving until 1895. Rosebery was a strong supporter of British imperialism in southern Africa, although his views about how imperialism should be implemented differed from those of Cecil Rhodes. Nonetheless, Rhodes appointed Rosebery one of the Trustees of his will, and Rosebery therefore became one of the first Trustees of the Rhodes Trust after Rhodes died in 1902. He served as Chair of the Rhodes Trust until 1917.

A carver, modeller, sculptor and designer of carving in the Arts and Crafts tradition, Laurence Turner was born in Gloucestershire and began his career as apprentice to the stone carver John McCulloch in Oxford. A member of the Art Workers’ Guild, he went on to carry out architectural carving for furniture and for domestic, commercial and ecclesiastical buildings. He worked with Herbert Baker on a number of projects. Along with his work in Rhodes House, Turner’s other commissions included: war memorials; carvings for Downing College, Cambridge; carvings for the department store Liberty of London; and the carving for William Morris’s gravestone (designed by Philip Webb) which can be seen in Kelmscott churchyard in Oxfordshire. 

An English sculptor and painter, Charles Wheeler worked mainly in bronze and stone. He began his working life modelling artificial limbs for war amputees during and after the First World War. Wheeler worked a number of times with Herbert Baker, the architect of Rhodes House, including on the external sculptures for the Bank of England in London. He was also the sculptor of the Jellicoe Fountain in Trafalgar Square in London. In 1956, Wheeler became the first sculptor to become president of the Royal Academy.