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John Rex-Waller

Rhodesia & Hertford 1976

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Carlisle and John Rex-Waller at graduation.

John Rex-Waller being punted by Scott Knowlton (Carlisle’s brother).

John c 1975.

Rugby Eight Hertford rugby team for Eights week.

Sepia tinted wedding photo of group standing before a gazebo.

Wedding, 1978: John Rex-Waller, Seth Landefeld, Troy Brennan, Bill Cronon, Nan Cronon, Sue Borokoff.

Sepia tinted wedding photo of three men talking.

Wedding, 1978: Father Rex, Galen Jones, Seth Landefeld.

During John's army days: with his father on their smallholding in Nyanga, Eastern Highlands Zimbabwe c 1976.

Family photo (further context below).

Traditional Christmas day swim (Maine) Robert, Caroline, JRW, John

Parents Rex, Jean and JRW c1975.

LifeFlight Fundraising.

Islesboro 4th Local participation in the 4th parade.

Isles. Swim group – Early foggy morning training swim.

Antigua 2025.

Photo 8: Family photo: Carlisle, grandson Charlie, daughter Caroline, John Rex-Waller, son-in-law John Barkhausen, granddaughters Mabel and Ava, daughter-in-law Charlene, grandson John Kai, son Robert.

Born in Lusaka (then in Northern Rhodesia, now in Zambia) in 1953, John Rex-Waller studied engineering at the University of Cape Town and served as a conscript in the Rhodesian army before going to Oxford to study for a second undergraduate degree in PPE (philosophy, politics and economics). After Oxford, he moved to the US and worked in the engineering field then consulting before becoming involved in startups, first in computing and then in healthcare. The co-founder of National Surgical Centers and National Surgical Hospitals, Rex-Waller is now also active in philanthropic and support work in his local community of Islesboro, Maine. This narrative is excerpted from an interview with the Rhodes Trust on 6 June 2024.

‘Sport was everything to me’

I was born in a little house that my dad had built. It had no electricity and no indoor plumbing, and whenever we’d go to the metropolitan city of Salisbury (now Harare), the big joke was to hold me up to an electric light and ask me to blow it out, because my job at home was to blow out the hurricane lanterns that lit the house. On my father’s side, my ancestors had come to Africa in the late 1700s. My mother was Australian and had come to Zambia with her first husband, and that’s where she met my dad.

When I was about ten, my dad was transferred to Salisbury with his work, and that’s where I went to elementary school and high school. It was a great educational experience, and I was especially interested in sports. Sport was everything to me. I was a pretty good athlete all round, but swimming was my primary activity.

My dad and I went spearfishing together a lot, so as I was growing up, I thought I wanted to be a marine biologist. But then I visited a research station and saw someone doing actual research, working in muddy rivers and washing test tubes, and I wasn’t sure. I ended up studying civil engineering because that’s what a friend of mine was going to do and I thought, ‘Well, okay, let’s try that.’ I’d always been interested in building things, and once I got into the course at Cape Town, I loved it. That satisfaction you get from building something physical has really stuck with me.

On applying for the Rhodes Scholarship

I carried on with sports at university. In fact, I was on the 1972 Olympic water polo team for Rhodesia. But because international sanctions were applied against the white minority government of Rhodesia, the team didn’t travel to the Olympics in Munich. We were allowed to compete in a sort of consolation tour, in Switzerland and a number of other countries, and seeing Europe was a huge thing for me.

My university education had been paid for by Anglo American mining company, so I was required to work for them for a period after graduation. But that was delayed because at that time, what has come to be known as the Rhodesian Bush War was going on pretty actively, so I was conscripted into national service. Coming out of a fairly liberal college – as much as that could be the case in South Africa at that time – and going into the army was quite something. I’m not particularly proud of the fact that I was fighting on the side of a white minority government, but it was certainly an experience that helped me grow up.

It was actually getting the Rhodes Scholarship that allowed me to leave my military service early. My parents were the ones who had suggested I should apply, and at that time, there was an arrangement where there would be one Scholar elected from what was then Rhodesia, and two from Zambia. Then the next year, it would flip the other way around. Mine was one of the years where there was only one Scholar elected from Rhodesia, and luckily for me, I was that one.

‘Something completely different’

One of the first people I met at Oxford was Troy Brennan (Missouri & Hertford 1976). He lived next door to me in Hertford in a building that was built in around 1400. Our rooms each had a single-bar electric resistance heater at one end, and the walls were damp to the point of dripping. In the second term, he and I moved out of college and shared a place. I cooked, he washed up, and it worked very well.

What I loved about Oxford was meeting such a range of people, and the wonderful discussions we had. I remember my first economics tutorial, with two other students. One was from the US, one was a member of the British communist party, and then there was me, straight out of the army in central Africa. And studying politics, philosophy and economics was about as far from building dams and structures as you can possibly get. That was the really fun part of the Scholarship, doing something completely different.

The other truly life-changing thing that happened at Oxford was that I met my wife, Carlisle. She was from the US and was studying history. During my time in Oxford, I did a lot of travelling, especially in the US, and then after I’d finished my studies, we went back to the US together and got married.

‘There’s so much you can do locally’

My first job in the US was for a construction company in Illinois, and while I was doing that, I also took an MBA at the University of Chicago. After that, I got a job offer from a little computer consulting firm, talking to businesses about how they could use particular types of software. A few of us from that setup eventually left to start our own company. It was fun, but it was also a lesson in how not to start a company.

I went on to work as an investment banker, and that was what led me into working with venture capitalists. I helped a friend write a business plan for building and acquiring surgery centres and then worked with him to draw in the capital we needed, and that firm became National Surgery Centers. I left that and did another little startup that was so successful the primary competitor bought it out within about nine months, and then, a group of us built on the original idea of surgery centres and started National Surgical Hospitals. The idea was to offer a much more efficient, much better experience for both patients and physicians, away from the old-style hospital environment. I especially loved both going to see the construction work of building hospitals and also spending time with the teams of nurses in our hospitals to get real feedback about what we were doing well and what we could do better.

Now, I’m retired from that work, and my focus is on helping my local community, especially out on Islesboro, the island just off the coast of Maine where my family and I have built a house. Islesboro has a real neighbour-helping-neighbour ethos, and it’s such a rewarding community to live in. I’m currently the chair of our local community centre, where we offer an after-school programme for children, along with exercise programmes, and even grief counselling sessions. I do a lot of work with LifeFlight, a not-for-profit helicopter medical service, raising money through sponsored events, and am a volunteer ambulance driver and an EMT here on the island. Within the Rhodes community, I see people that are doing amazing things on a national and international level, and that is wonderful. But for me, there’s also so much you can do locally. Giving back in a small-scale way, helping where I can, inspires and motivates me.

‘Go experiment. Go open it up’

The impact of the Rhodes Scholarship on my life was huge. It was such an expansion of my worldview. I was a little white boy from a racist society in the middle of Africa. At Oxford, I had the chance to meet so many people from so many different cultures and countries. I can’t emphasise enough the importance of travelling outside your home country, not least so you can see how other people view you from the outside.

I think the great thing with the Scholarship is that it allows you to do something completely different. To today’s Rhodes Scholars I would say, take advantage of that. Just go out there as much as you can, and stretch yourself in fields you’re not comfortable in. Go experiment. Go open it up. My own life shows that you can have no idea where you’ll end up. Make good choices along the way, and don’t worry too much about it. Whatever you do, it’s going to take you someplace.

I’d also say, fighting the world’s fight can absolutely be about finding a battleground that is next to you. Don’t ignore your neighbourhood, the people next to you. Maybe you can make a huge difference to millions of people, and that’s great, but you can also make a huge difference to a few people on a local level, wherever you are. That’s incredibly important.

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