CECIL RHODES THE SCHOOLBOY

Lake Wakatip Mail, Issue 4330, 7 September 1937, Page 2

CECIL RHODES THE SCHOOLBOY

AH OLD SERVAHT'S IMPRESSIONS Recently there was broadcast from London, on the eighty-fourth anniversary of the birth of Cecil John Rhodes, an account of the great Empire builder by an old white-haired woman who looked after him when he was a boyShe was Mrs Emma Newman, of Bishop’s Stortford, who gave the 8.8.C. men much valuable information. For to her the dynamic man who planned British rule in Africa, who created Rhodesia, is still just “ Cecil, one of the boys from the vicarage.” Mrs Newman received me in her little cottage, perched on a hilltop, said a writer in the ‘ Sunday Chronicle.’ She is frail, but she talked freely of the days when she worked and sewed for “ Mr Cecil,” the schoolboy. 11 I was 16 when I went to serve at the parsonage for the Rev. Mr Rhodes, Mr Cecil’s father,” she said. “ They took me to look after the two girls, but it wasn’t long before I was looking after all the children. “ Let me see, there was one child by Mr Rhodes's first marriage. Then came Herbert, Frank, Ernest, Cecil, Elmer, Arthur, Bernard, and, of course, the two girls. That makes 10 “ Cecil w 7 as different form the others, yet I should never have believed that he would turn out to be such a forceful man. “ Reading, not games, was what he liked. I could go into his room while he was reading and go out again without him knowing that I’d been there. “ And yet he was a sport in another sense. Always took a cold bath every morning. “ Many is the time I’ve stood outside the door and laughed at the way he carried on when he first stepped into it.” . She smiled and pointed out of the window. “ Down the street there, where that house is, was the old barn where Cecil and his brothers taught themselves to smoke.” She smiled again at the memory of Cecil Rhodes—the schoolboy.