Eighteen-year-old Cecil Rhodes and his brother Herbert …

Years: 1871 - 1871

Eighteen-year-old Cecil Rhodes and his brother Herbert leave the Natal Colony for the diamond fields of Kimberley in October 1871.

Financed by N M Rothschild & Sons, Rhodes will succeed over the next seventeen years in buying up all the smaller diamond mining operations in the Kimberley area.

Cecil Rhodes was born in 1853 in Bishop's Stortford, Hertfordshire, England, the fifth son of the Reverend Francis William Rhodes and his wife Louisa Peacock Rhodes.

His father is a Church of England vicar who is proud of never having preached a sermon longer than ten minutes.

His siblings include Francis William Rhodes, who will become an army officer.

Rhodes had attended the Bishop's Stortford Grammar School from the age of nine, but, as a sickly, asthmatic adolescent, he had been taken out of grammar school in 1869 and, according to Basil Williams, had "continued his studies under his father's eye...His health was weak and there were even fears that he might be consumptive, a disease of which several of the family showed symptoms. His father therefore determined to send him abroad to try the effect of a sea voyage and a better climate. Herbert [Cecil's brother] had already set up as a planter in Natal, South Africa, so Cecil was despatched on a sailing vessel to join Herbert in Natal.The voyage to Durban took him seventy days, and on 1 September 1870 he first set foot on African soil, a tall, lanky, anaemic, fair vhaired boy, shy and reserved in bearing." (Cecil Rhodes, Makers of the 19th century, H. Holt & Company, 1921, retrieved from http://books.google.com/books?id=A1txHgXvlU4C on 8 November 2012)

His family expected he would help his older brother Herbert, who operates a cotton farm.

When he first came to Africa, Rhodes had lived on money lent by his aunt Sophia.

After a brief stay with the Surveyor-General of Natal, Dr. P.C.

Sutherland, in Pietermaritzburg, Rhodes had taken an interest in agriculture, and joined his brother Herbert on his cotton farm in the Umkomazi valley in Natal.

The land is unsuitable for cotton, and the venture had failed.

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