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Updated: June 25, 2025
Had there existed any real intimacy between Groote Schuur and Government House at Cape Town, the whole course of South African politics might have been very different.
A few days later a rabid Rhodesian who happened to be staying at Groote Schuur approached me. "You have been trying to convert Mr. Rhodes to Sir Alfred," he remarked. "I have done nothing of the kind," I said. "I am not a preacher, but I have been telling Mr. Rhodes that he was mistaken if he thought that he had an enemy in the High Commissioner."
At Groote Schuur especially, no secret was made by the friends of Rhodes of their disgust at the state of things prevailing in concentration camps, and it was adroitly brought to the knowledge of all the partisans of the Boers that, had Rhodes been master of the situation, such an outrage on individual liberty would never have taken place.
All the same, it is a fact that members of the House of Assembly belonging to the Afrikander party visited Groote Schuur in the course of that last winter which Rhodes spent there, and were warmly welcomed. Rhodes showed himself unusually gracious. He hoped these forerunners would rally his former friends to his side once more. But Rhodes was expecting too much, considering ail the circumstances.
Groote Schuur has been described so much that it is not necessary for me to dwell upon its charm and atmosphere here. To see it is to get a fresh and intimate realization of the personality which made the establishment an unofficial Chancellery of the British Empire. Two details, however, have poignant and dramatic interest.
The winter which followed upon the relief of Kimberley Rhodes spent almost entirely at Groote Schuur, going to Rhodesia only in spring. During these months negotiations between him and certain leaders of the Bond party went on almost uninterruptedly. These were either conducted openly by people like Mr.
Being a guest at Groote Schuur endowed a man with a prestige such as no one who has not lived in South Africa can realise, and, furthermore, enabled him to catch here and there scraps of news respecting the money markets of the world, a proper understanding and use of which could be of considerable financial value.
For five months, the whole session of Parliament, he held his ground. Every night when he went to bed at Groote Schuur he did not know what disaster the morrow would bring forth. It was a constant juggle with conflicting interests, ambitions and prejudices. He was like a lion with a pack snapping on all sides. Now you can see why he sat in that front seat in the House morning, noon and night.
I knew the S.B. well enough by now to realise that, the moment my back was turned, he would want to do all these things, if merely to show that he could do them as well as anybody else, quite regardless of consequences. Mrs. Botha came to the rescue, and with extraordinary kindness, told me to send the S.B. to Groote Schuur, where she would undertake to look after him.
Such were the preoccupations, the intrigues and the emotions which, all through that monotonous winter of 1900-1901, agitated the inhabitants of and the visitors to Groote Schuur. Rhodes himself seemed to be the one man who thought the least about them.
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