Published in the Sunday Times
The Secret Society: Cecil John Rhodes’s Plan For A New World Order
Robin Brown (Penguin Random House)
What do you do when you unearth a story which history appears to have overlooked, buried under the carpet, derided as conspiracy theory, or just plain sidelined?
This is the situation I found myself confronting when, seven years ago, my best friend in South Africa presented me with a copy of The Life and Times of the Right Honourable Cecil John Rhodes, circa 1912, written by Rhodes’s banker, Sir Lewis Michell. It was a lovely, valuable first edition, but as readable as a plate of cold porridge and for a long time it sat in my bookcase unopened.
Curiosity of course eventually got the better of me – and turned me into a kind of Captain Ahab, condemned to hunt a great mystery.
Old Sir Michell soon convinced me (as I am certain my book will convince you) that I knew nothing worthwhile of Rhodes – not even the fabled tale of his fabulous diamond fortune. Rhodes died not particularly rich by comparison, say, with his pal Alfred Beit, and not particularly young, even though people have mourned his “early” death for as long as there has been a Rhodes legend.
But all this is as nothing to the great secret that ruled Rhodes’s life and the lives of other great men he enrolled in his secret society, or indeed of the aims of that secret society itself – men like Beit, who built not just a great diamond fortune but also a Rand gold one; Alfred Milner, the aesthetic proconsul who later ruled South Africa with a rod of iron and eventually resolved the Anglo-Boer War; Jan Smuts, youngest of the Boer generals, later an international statesman and helpmate of Winston Churchill; Abe Bailey the Randlord; WT Stead the British newspaper mogul; Lord Rosebery; and a British prime minister.
Rhodes set up his first tiny secret society in a tin shack in Kimberley in 1877. It met under a secret sign – the five points which make up a diamond. He wrote down the aims of the society in a document he called his Confession of Faith and which he published in a will he wrote shortly after going through some sort of mental breakdown in which he claimed he saw ghosts.
The aim of the society was to build so great a union of nations – including the reunion of Britain and America – that no nation would ever dare wage war with it.
Through a variety of intermediaries, including General Gordon of Khartoum, who was then serving in South Africa and with whom the young Rhodes is said to have fallen in love, Rhodes exported the secret society to Britain via WT Stead and a courtier who “had the Queen’s ear”, Reginald Baliol Brett, Lord Esher. They agreed to promote a “secret league of the English race”.
To learn how this league, less secret but not entirely transparent, is faring today, you’ll simply have to read my book.
Book details
- The Secret Society: Cecil John Rhodes’s Plan for a New World Order by Robin Brown
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EAN: 9781770229204
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