“You have enemies? Good. That means you've stood up for something, sometime in your life”, is a saying attributed to Winston Churchill that has some resonance with a number of topical issues that had both national and local implications. Certainly anyone active in local or national politics might appreciate the aptness of that saying.
At the time of writing, among several controversial issues with wide ranging implications that risked any commentator making ‘enemies’, there was the “Rhodes must fall” campaign which has spread from S. Africa to the UK. Lord Chris Patten, Chancellor of Oxford University, gave his views on Radio 4 Today and in the Press following the recent student protests that resulted in the official removal of Bishop’s Stortford born Cecil Rhodes statute at Cape Town and calls for the same in Oxford: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/educationnews/12096928/Oxford-University-students-who-dont-like-Cecil-Rhodes-should-think-about-being-educated-elsewhere-says-chancellor.html.
I daresay articulating such an opinion did not put Lord Patten at the top of the protesters friends list. (Probably neither would Churchill himself be and some might even call from removal of his statue in Parliament Sq).
Patten, who perhaps now, if not before as a member of ’ the establishment’, may be caste by some campaigners as firmly in the ‘enemy’ camp, went on to question how far history revisionism and changing cultural/moral perspectives might go. The demolition of a College building perhaps; because it was founded with money now judged by some through a constantly evolving modernist moral hindsight and political correctness to be ‘tainted’? That would possible lead to wholesale demolition of many University buildings if we consider the reality of some monarchs etc who first endowed them.
Of course whilst Rhodes was born in Stortford we have no civic statute of him here, (though sometime a few decades ago one was controversially considered and I’m told vigorously opposed by someone now ironically a trustee of Rhodes Birthplace Trust). Cecil Rhodes did not spend more than his youthful years in the Town before leaving Stortford to eventually become the World’s richest man of his day. There is a bust and portrait of him in BS Museum maintained by The Rhodes Birthplace Trust. But from around the new millennium his name hasn’t featured as that of the Museum which was formed by merging his family home and related collection with that of the former BS Museum at Cemetery Lodge.
However, the Trust still maintains the Rhodes Theatre which bears his name and is principally funded but not controlled or run by the Town Council. Then of course we have a road named after Rhodes, Rhodes Avenue, and several others with direct links to his colonial legacy or related deeds judged in their time to be heroic eg, Mazoe, Shangani, Zambesi, Salisbury, Kimberley, Pretoria. The background to the connections of some of these may be found at www.stortfordhistory or, by Google searches for ‘Mazoe Patrol’ and ‘Shangani Patrol’.
Shangani Patrol
It is sobering to reflect on how ‘history’ is not so much fact but interpretation and the inclinations of the those recording events or, as we see with “Rhodes must fall”, the perspective of those looking back from a comfortable distance. Perhaps we may yet hear more of this locally as in addition to the exchanges in the local Press and at Council on the matter of funding I have been informed of a request from a local resident to retrieve the ‘fallen’ Rhodes statue from S.Africa and bring it ‘home’ to Stortford. I have passed that on to the Rhodes Birthplace Trust and the response and expression of local public opinion with interest.