By 1891, De Beers had cornered 90% of the diamond market. Rhodes had pulled off a diamond-backed coup within three years and become one of the world’s wealthiest men.
The Breezer - the joyride for a curious mind: A weekly newsletter from Steve Winduss at the Batting the Breeze podcast. Spend a few minutes with me discovering historical snippets and fascinating facts related to the forthcoming week. Add to that updates relating to the podcast, a touch of humour and a dash of "lots more".7th September 2025.
Happy Sunday! Forty-three years ago in 1982, I was lucky enough to take part in a rugby tour to Zimbabwe. As a passionate 17-year-old, it was all about the rugby. The fact that the African nation was undergoing a political change of monumental proportions largely passed me by.
That is, until we arrived. Our candid hosts regaled us with stories of midnight curfews, roadblocks, land reforms and - somewhat unnervingly - dodging bullets instead of rugby balls.
Two years earlier, Zimbabwe had cast off 90 years of minority white rule. But by 1982, the honeymoon was over for President Robert Mugabe and his Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU).
This was going to be an illuminating four weeks.
Evidence of human habitation in the Zimbabwe region suggests that the San people (Bushmen) had lived there for up to 30,000 years.
Two thousand years ago, Bantu-speaking farmers migrated from the north. These were the ancestors of the Shona people, who had settled in the region as early as 200 CE. Today, they are the dominant ethic group in Zimbabwe, occupying Mashonaland in the north and much of the south.
In 1834, the Ndebele people were disengaging from Shaka Zulu and his rapidly expanding Zulu kingdom in the south of the continent. They headed north to carve out the kingdom of Mthwakazi, which Europeans would call Matabeleland, in the south and west of today’s Zimbabwe.
The Shona and the Ndebele would live a less-than-harmonious existence for the next 50 years. I'll return to that.
At the time of the 1980 elections, the Shona people comprised 75-80% of Zimbabwe’s population, with Mugabe winning 57 out of 80 seats. The opposition ZAPU party, led by Joshua Nkomo, won 20 seats, all from Matabeleland.
Map showing Zimbabwe in southern Africa; The capital, Harare, Mashonaland (orange), Bulawayo, Matabeleland (red).
A few months before our touring party arrived in the capital of Zimbabwe, Harare, Robert Mugabe had expelled Nkomo and his ZAPU colleagues, apparently for plotting a coup.
At the same time, Ian Smith’s exclusively white Republican Party was crumbling - unable to find its place in the new Zimbabwe.
By the time we arrived, the 'dissident problem' was in its infancy. ZIPRA, ZAPU’s military wing, had melted into the bush. Attacks on government property and officials were becoming an unwelcome daily occurrence. As I am writing this, I am wondering why we were even sent down there in the first place! I’m all for playing through an injury, but playing through an insurgency?
Mugabe’s answer to the dissident problem was his infamous Fifth Brigade, learning its trade in North Korea at the time. Luckily, for me at least, it wouldn’t be wreaking its particular brand of havoc until some time in 1983.
The Gukurahundi massacres, beginning in early 1983, constituted systematic state genocide that led to the slaughter of over 20,000 civilians in Matabeleland and Midlands over the following five years.
In the sleepy Hertfordshire village of Bishop’s Stortford on 5 July 1853, the local vicar, William Rhodes, and his wife announced the arrival of their son, Cecil.
Cecil was a sickly child.
Having received an education from the local grammar school, Cecil was armed with a battery of Latin and mathematics, fortified by an unshakeable sense of British superiority.
The 1850s were a period of British imperial expansion, when Britain had rather generously labelled herself as the ‘workshop of the world’. Christianity was the superior religion, British culture the finest example of civilisation and British government the most enlightened form of rule.
It was an entirely reasonable worldview… if you happened to be British.
As he reached 17 years old, Cecil’s continued poor health set him on a trajectory that would change his life. It would also change the course of South African history. He was sent to South Africa 155 years ago last Monday, 1 September 1870.
The young Cecil Rhodes, aged 16.
Cecil Rhodes would become a name that was cursed, celebrated or condemned, depending on who held the pen.
Having landed in Durban, Rhodes travelled to Natal with impeccable timing. Three years earlier, the young Erasmus Jacobs had stumbled upon the ‘Eureka’ diamond while fossicking along the Orange River near Hopetown.
Word travels fast when fortunes are to be made, and soon southern Africa found itself the object of considerable international attention.
In July 1871, diamonds were discovered at Colesberg Kopje. This was much bigger news than Erasmus Jacobs’ 1867 discovery. Jacobs’ diamond was an alluvial deposit, washed down the Orange River; exciting but commercially uninspiring.
By contrast, Colesberg Kopje would be the world’s first known kimberlite pipe, a volcanic chimney where diamonds are actually formed. It was a geological jackpot, a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, except this pot was about to be systematically plundered.
The settlement became known as Kimberley (hence the ‘kimberlite pipe’) and the subsequent mine, ‘The Big Hole’.
The discovery provoked a rush that would transform the entire region into a chaotic scramble of prospectors, swindlers and dreamers.
Rhodes understood the old adage about selling shovels during a gold rush. In his case, though, he cornered the market in water pumps, selling them to diamond miners who were constantly battling against groundwater. The venture provided a comfortable living and, more importantly, seed money for grander schemes.
As a result of the diamond discovery at Colesberg Kopje, the landowners, the De Beer brothers, felt compelled to sell. They had only purchased the land less than six months earlier, but had no means of protecting it - or themselves - from voracious intruders.
The Big Hole, Kimberley. It is the width of five football pitches, and as deep as 4/5ths of the height of the Eiffel Tower in Paris (you can only see 175 of the 240 metres due to the water table). 50,000 miners excavated the hole with picks and shovels between 1871 and 1914.
The De Beers sold the land to Alfred Johnson Ebden for £6,600. Ebden proceeded to sell off most of it in the form of small claims.
Rhodes used the proceeds of his pump sales to buy up many of these claims. When diamond mining faced a slump in 1874-75, Rhodes remained relentless. A decade later in 1888, with financial backing from the Rothschilds and a merger with a rival company, De Beers Consolidated Mines was founded.
By 1891, De Beers had cornered 90% of the diamond market. Rhodes had pulled off a diamond-backed coup within three years and become one of the world’s wealthiest men.
Men working 2000 ft. underground in Kimberley Diamond Mine, South Africa, c1890-1905.
But Rhodes’ appetite extended far beyond diamonds.
Backed with an unswerving belief in empire (of the British variety) and an inkling that further mineral wealth lay to the north, Rhodes secured a Royal Charter from the British government.
The British South Africa Company (BSAC) was founded in 1889.
The BSAC structure was based on the model of its forerunner, the British East India Company (formed in 1600), combining commercial exploitation with empire-building.
Convinced of gold deposits beyond a man’s wildest dreams in Mashonaland, Rhodes sent his ‘Pioneer Column’ north in June 1890 with settlers, police, supply wagons and a belief that fortune favours the well-armed.
For three months, the Pioneer Column progressed through the bush. They planted British flags and signed treaties with local chiefs who couldn’t read.
Having endured 400 miles of disease and hostile wildlife through unmapped territory, the Pioneer Column arrived at a spot they thought suitable for Rhodes’ first northern settlement.
One hundred and thirty-five years ago this Saturday, 13 September 1890, Lieutenant Edward Tyndale-Biscoe raised the British flag and declared the founding of Fort Salisbury (named after the British Prime Minister, Lord Salisbury - another Cecil as it turns out - Robert Gascoyne-Cecil).
Lieutenant Edward Tyndale-Biscoe hoisting the Union Jack on 13 September 1890, overlooking the site of the future capital, Salisbury.
Rhodes’ promises of gold beyond imagination turned out to be just that - imagination. Undaunted, he shifted the emphasis to farming and cattle ranching, presumably using the shovels he had acquired for gold mining. Fort Salisbury transformed itself from a mining settlement into the administrative hub of a new territory, ‘Rhodesia’.
The founding of Fort Salisbury marked the beginning of 90 years of white minority rule in Rhodesia. The Shona and Ndebele people were dispossessed and became labourers on their own land.
But their day would come… just as I was setting out on my rugby tour, as it happens.
Out of Curiosity In 1911, the British South Africa Company had formally amalgamated the two areas of Rhodesia north of the Zambezi River into a single state, Northen Rhodesia. In October 1964, Northern Rhodesia declared independence to become the Republic of Zambia under Kenneth Kaunda.
British South Africa Company rule ended in 1923 when Southern Rhodesia became a self-governing colony. In 1965, Ian Smith issued the Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI), stating that Southern Rhodesia would forthwith be independent of Britain, but maintain British guaranteed support of his white minority government. The only problem was that Smith had forgotten to tell the British. He was genuinely miffed when British Prime Minister Harold Wilson refused to recognise the breakaway colony and imposed punishing sanctions on Rhodesia instead. It was a spectacular miscalculation by Smith, rather like when your kids leave home and expect you to carry on doing their washing. For the next 15 years, the beleaguered Republican battled the growing insurgency from ZAPU and ZANU. The white population had seen which way the wind was blowing before Smith did... and headed for the exits. Rhodesia had become an international pariah. By 1979, Smith was spending an eye-watering 47% of GDP on defence. Eventually, he was dragged kicking and screaming to Lancaster House in London. The outcome triggered new elections in Rhodesia, with Robert Mugabe’s ZANU-PF party winning comfortably and the new state of Zimbabwe receiving international recognition in April 1980. Which brings me full circle to my rugby tour in 1982. We won all our matches, 7-0, and I met a wonderful young lady called Sarah. I never saw her again.
Apologies if you’ve seen something like this in a previous newsletter – I thought it was worth showing again: LEFT: Me at Victoria Falls, Zimbabwe, looking across to Zambia in 1982: RIGHT: the same spot in 2018.
Out of Curiosity As for Cecil Rhodes, not content with dominating the world diamond market and empire-building northward through Africa, he found time to become Prime Minister of the Cape Colony (ie the British-controlled territory of South Africa) from 1890 until 1896. His grand dream of creating a British corridor from Cape Town to Cairo remained a dream. His health deteriorated after 1897, and he died in March 1902 from heart failure, aged just 48.
This is the ‘Rhodes Colossus’, an editorial cartoon illustrated by Edward Linely Sambourne and printed in the satirical magazine Punch in 1892. Cecil Rhodes is straddling the continent of Africa, holding two ends of a telegraph line, signalling his desire for a ‘Cape to Cairo’ rail and communications network. It is a visual pun of one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, the Colossus at Rhodes. Sambourne was highlighting the hubris and overreach of Rhodes’ plans, and the dubious ethics of this territorial ambition.
Dates with History
Tuesday…
The Waverley Line, connecting Edinburgh and Carlisle through the Border region of Scotland, had been closed since 1969, when the savage cuts to British Railways enforced by Dr Richard Beeching took effect. Forty-six years later, part of the line was reopened as the Borders Railway, linking Edinburgh with Tweedbank. The opening ceremony was keenly anticipated, as it was to be officiated by Queen Elizabeth II, who marked the occasion by travelling the route and making a speech to commemorate the restoration of the region’s rail link.
Queen Elizabeth II opens the Borders Railway, 9 September 2015.
The ceremony duly completed, the Queen returned to Balmoral. At exactly 17:30 that evening, ten years ago this Tuesday, 9 September 2015, Queen Elizabeth II made history. With no fanfare or ceremony, she had surpassed her great-great-grandmother, Queen Victoria, as Britain’s longest-reigning monarch - 63 years, 7 months and 2 days. No fuss, just a private family dinner with the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge. Victoria had reigned from 1837 to 1901, presiding over an empire ‘where the sun never set’. Elizabeth inherited a very different world in 1952 - one where that empire was rapidly dissolving. Victoria is remembered as the gold standard for the monarchical playbook. However, she was a recluse for the last 40 years of her life, since her beloved Prince Albert died in 1861. Elizabeth, on the other hand, weathered so many crises without missing a beat: the Suez Crisis, Falklands War, Troubles in Northern Ireland, Princess Diana’s death, naughty Andrew and so on. She was impeccable. Queen Elizabeth survived a further seven years, reaching the glorious milestone of her Platinum Jubilee in 2022 before passing away on 8 September 2022, just three months after the jubilee celebrations. Elizabeth reigned for 70 years and 214 days. Only one other European monarch - or global for that matter - reigned for longer than Queen Elizabeth; King Louis XIV of France ruled for 72 years and 110 days from 1643 to 1715. Louis inherited the throne as a four-year-old, which gave him plenty of time to perfect the art of spending other people’s money. By the time he died in 1715, he had bankrupted France through his dedication to opulence and by perfecting social inequality as an art form. Louis had lit the fuse of the French Revolution, which would take 74 years to reach the powder keg.
The Salon d’Hercule (Hercules Drawing Room) at the Palace of Versailles. Louis XIV undertook possibly the world’s most ambitious house extension of all time. He started extending the Palace of Versailles in 1661 and was still going 54 years later when he died. This magnificent room, dominated by the ceiling painting Apotheosis of Hercules by Francois Le Moyne, was completed after Louis’ death in 1715.
Saturday…
In 1711, Alexander Selkirk, a Scottish sailor, returned to London having been marooned on an uninhabited island for four years. Back in 1704, Selkirk had taken one look at his current ship, the Cinque Ports, decided she was hopelessly unseaworthy and demanded to be put ashore. Captain Thomas Stradling cheerfully obliged, expecting Selkirk to come crawling back within the hour. He didn’t. So, the captain left Selkirk on Más a Tierra island, 400 miles off the coast of Chile.
Daniel Defoe’s writing career had been underwhelming up to 1711. He’d been churning out political essays and the occasional poem, but remained perpetually broke. When Defoe heard about the story of Alexander Selkirk, he was moved to write his first novel, The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, published in 1719. The novelist had struck pay dirt. Robinson Crusoe became one of the first true best-sellers in English literature, deploying the distinctive and revolutionary style of narrating in the first person.
The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, 1st edition, 1719.
Following the time-honoured tradition of impoverished authors, Defoe had sold the copyright for £15 upfront, which meant the novel’s success did him precious little financial good. Robinson Crusoe has remained continuously in print since 1719 and is thought to have sold over 100 million copies worldwide. Daniel Defoe was born 365 years ago this Saturday, 13 September 1660. Footnote: While Alexander Selkirk was still marooned on Más a Tierra island, the ship that he had deserted due to his belief in its unseaworthiness, the Cinque Ports, broke apart and sank off the coast of Colombia. Most of the crew perished.
Question of the Week
Bertrand Barère de Vieuzac (1755-1841).
Bertrand Barère de Vieuzac, the French revolutionary, was born 270 years ago this Wednesday, 10 September 1755. He would become most widely remembered for his derogatory comment about the British:
Let Pitt then boast of his victory to his nation of shopkeepers
The comment referenced British Prime Minister William Pitt the Younger, and was in response to the British victory over the French at the Battle of the Glorious First of June in 1794. Paraphrasing an earlier use of the term, de Vieuzac was drawing on Scottish economist Adam Smith’s famous 1776 work, The Wealth of Nations. Smith had used the expression to highlight how merchant interests were working against the greater good of the empire, not as a pejorative term. There is a third historical figure who is widely quoted as mocking the British with his use of the same expression, “a nation of shopkeepers”. Who was he?
And Finally…
Harland David Sanders was born 135 years ago this Tuesday, 9 September 1890 a few miles east of Henryville, Indiana. At the age of five, Sanders’ father died, his mother took up work at a local tomato cannery and, by the age of seven, he was cooking meals for his younger siblings. Harland was learning the dark art of conjuring up palatable food from next to nothing. Little did those siblings realise, as they dutifully ate whatever their elder brother put in front of them, that they were the first unwitting guinea pigs for what would become a global empire. At sixteen, Sanders falsified his age and joined the army. He served briefly in Cuba before, three months later, receiving an honourable discharge for unspecified reasons. Twenty-five years of treading water followed. The drifter from Indiana worked as a railroad fireman, insurance salesman, steamboat pilot and even as a justice of the peace. Turning forty years old must have jolted the struggling Sanders. He had, at least, accumulated enough savings to open a service station in Corbin, Kentucky. To develop new income streams, he served travellers meals from a small table at the back of the station.
Harland Sanders (aged 7) stands next to his mother Margaret, with his brother Clarence (5) and sister Catherine (2), circa 1897.
They say that from little acorns oak trees grow. News of some finger lickin' chicken from Kentucky had spread. Sanders’ fried chicken, cooked with a secret blend of herbs and spices, was proving irresistible. Accordingly, he opened a 142-seat restaurant across the road. The venture was a great success and Governor Ruby Laffoon awarded Sanders the title of ‘Colonel’ for his contribution to Kentucky’s cuisine. Life was rosy. However, in the early 1950s, a new interstate highway bypassed Corbin altogether. Bankruptcy was looming for Sanders. But the plucky 62-year-old ‘Colonel’ wasn’t finished. Legend has it that he loaded his car with a pressure cooker and secret recipe and started driving across America. His offer to restaurants: ‘I’ll cook my special chicken for you and you pay me 5 cents for every piece you sell.’ Apparently, one thousand rejections later, he secured his first partner. A more sober reflection of events suggests that Harland met a restaurateur from Salt Lake City at a convention in Chicago. The Colonel cooked his revered fried chicken for Pete Harman and his wife Arline. They were hooked. In 1952, Kentucky Fried Chicken had secured its first franchise, receiving 5 cents per chicken sold. So, the world’s first Kentucky Fried Chicken was actually served in a restaurant in Salt Lake City, Utah.
Out of Curiosity Colonel Sanders was born three days before Cecil Rhodes’ Pioneer Column founded Fort Salisbury.
By 1964, Kentucky Fried Chicken had franchised over 600 restaurants. Sanders was 73 years old, exhausted and needing help. So he sold his business for $2 million (equivalent to $20 million today), while maintaining a lifelong salary and specific franchise rights overseas. Within seven years, the new owners had sold KFC for $285 million (equivalent to $2.2 billion today). Ouch. Today, KFC has over 30,000 franchises in 147 countries with a market capitalisation of approximately $40 billion. The Colonel may have been outmanoeuvred financially, but he still had the satisfaction that his 11 secret herbs and spices had created one of the most successful food franchises in history.
Out of Curiosity In 2017, KFC’s marketing agency pulled off the social media scoop of the decade. They quietly unfollowed 35,000 Twitter accounts, to replace them with just 11 - five Spice Girls and six men named ‘Herb’. A month later, the penny finally dropped, and the Twitter world went viral.
As for Colonel Harland David Sanders, he died in 1980 at the ripe old age of 90. Perhaps those 11 herbs and spices had more magical properties than they are generally credited with. The chicken magnate was laid in state at the Kentucky State Capitol, an honour usually reserved for the grandest of statesmen. He was dressed in his trademark white suit, white shirt, black string tie and a walking cane under his right arm. On brand right to the end.
A portrait of Colonel Harland Sanders, painted by Norman Rockwell, 1973.
Talk to me...
I receive some wonderful feedback from readers who add colour to the historical snippets that I publish. If you have any thoughts to add to some of today’s topics, or from previous weeks, I’d love to hear from you. Drop me an email at steve@battingthebreeze.com.
The third person who is most commonly quoted as referring to Britain as ‘a nation of shopkeepers’ was Napoleon Bonaparte. Unfortunately, Napoleon almost certainly never said it; the attribution seems to have emerged from wartime propaganda. However, while Napoleon was in exile on St Helena from 1815 until his death in 1821 at His Majesty’s pleasure, his Irish surgeon, Barry O’Meara, noted a conversation with Napoleon;
Your meddling in continental affairs, and trying to make yourselves a great military power, instead of attending to the sea and commerce, will yet be your ruin as a nation. You were greatly offended with me for having called you a nation of shopkeepers. Had I meant by this, that you were a nation of cowards, you would have had reason to be displeased… I meant that you were a nation of merchants… no man of sense ought to be ashamed of being called a shopkeeper.
So much for Napoleon’s celebrated put-down.
La Mort de Napoleon, 1821, at St Helena. Engraved by Jean Pierre Marie Jazet.
Out of Curiosity
Future British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher repurposed Napoleon’s supposed slight in a press interview in 1975. She said…..
We used to be famous for two things - as a 'nation of shopkeepers' and as 'the workshop of the world'. One is trade, the other is industry. We must get back our reputation.
Like or loathe her, it’s a great line.
ATTRIBUTIONS
LEFT: Me at Victoria Falls, 1982: RIGHT: Same spot in 2018: Diego Delso, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
Queen Elizabeth II opens the Borders Railway, 9 September 2015: Scottish Government, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
The Salon d’Hercule, Palace of Versailles, Courtesy of Billy Wilson, CC BY-NC 2.0.
First edition of Robinson Crusoe, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
Bertrand Barère de Vieuzac: Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
Harland Sanders and family: Photographer unknown. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
A portrait of Colonel Harland Sanders: Norman Rockwell, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
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