Charles Dunell Rudd (22 October 1844 – 15 November 1916) was the main business associate of
Cecil Rhodes
Cecil John Rhodes (5 July 1853 – 26 March 1902) was a British mining magnate and politician in southern Africa who served as Prime Minister of the Cape Colony from 1890 to 1896.
An ardent believer in British imperialism, Rhodes and his Bri ...
.
Early life
He was born at Hamworth Hall, Northamptonshire, the son of Henry Rudd (1809–1884), who had a shipbuilding business in London, and his first wife Mary Stanbridge.
[
Rudd studied at ]Harrow School
Harrow School () is a Public school (United Kingdom), public school (English Independent school (United Kingdom), independent boarding school for boys) in Harrow on the Hill, Greater London, England. The school was founded in 1572 by John Lyon (sc ...
(1857–1862) and then entered Trinity College, Cambridge
Trinity College is a constituent college of the University of Cambridge. Founded in 1546 by King Henry VIII, Trinity is one of the largest Cambridge colleges, with the largest financial endowment of any college at either Cambridge or Oxford. ...
in 1863, where he excelled in playing rackets
Racket may refer to:
* Racket (crime), a systematised element of organized crime
** Protection racket, a scheme whereby a group provides protection to businesses or other groups through violence outside the sanction of the law
* Racket (sports equ ...
. He left for Cape Colony
The Cape Colony ( nl, Kaapkolonie), also known as the Cape of Good Hope, was a British colony in present-day South Africa named after the Cape of Good Hope, which existed from 1795 to 1802, and again from 1806 to 1910, when it united with ...
in 1865 before completing his degree, according to himself under medical advice.[ There he hunted with the likes of John Dunn and endeavored in various business enterprises. In the early 1870s, he worked for his brother Thomas' (1831–1902) ]Port Elizabeth
Gqeberha (), formerly Port Elizabeth and colloquially often referred to as P.E., is a major seaport and the most populous city in the Eastern Cape province of South Africa. It is the seat of the Nelson Mandela Bay Metropolitan Municipality, So ...
-based trading firm.
Partnership with Cecil Rhodes
In 1872/3 Rudd and Rhodes became friends and partners, working diamond claims in Kimberley, dealing in diamonds and operating pumping and ice-making machinery, amongst many other odds and ends.[ Between 1873 and 1881, while Rhodes intermittently attended college in England, Rudd managed their interests.][ By 1880 they had become rich and, with others, formed the ]De Beers Mining Company
De Beers Group is an international corporation that specializes in diamond mining, diamond exploitation, diamond retail, diamond trading and industrial diamond manufacturing sectors. The company is active in open-pit, large-scale alluvial and c ...
. Rudd was one of the directors and also held large interests in the main machinery supplier for the mining fields.
The Rudd Concession
In 1887 Rudd's interests had shifted to gold, the previous year discovered at the Witwatersrand
The Witwatersrand () (locally the Rand or, less commonly, the Reef) is a , north-facing scarp in South Africa. It consists of a hard, erosion-resistant quartzite metamorphic rock, over which several north-flowing rivers form waterfalls, which ...
. With Rhodes and him as directors, and his brother Thomas as chairman, they registered Gold Fields of South Africa Ltd in early 1887. The company was structured to enormously favor Rudd and Rhodes, with its London board unaware of most of their activities in southern Africa. On 30 October 1888 Rudd secured an agreement to the mineral rights of Matabeleland
Matabeleland is a region located in southwestern Zimbabwe that is divided into three provinces: Matabeleland North, Bulawayo, and Matabeleland South. These provinces are in the west and south-west of Zimbabwe, between the Limpopo and Zambe ...
and Mashonaland
Mashonaland is a region in northern Zimbabwe.
Currently, Mashonaland is divided into four provinces,
* Mashonaland West
* Mashonaland Central
* Mashonaland East
* Harare
The Zimbabwean capital of Harare, a province unto itself, lies entirely ...
from Lobengula
Lobengula Khumalo (c. 1845 – presumed January 1894) was the second and last official king of the Northern Ndebele people (historically called Matabele in English). Both names in the Ndebele language mean "the men of the long shields", a refer ...
, the King of Matabeleland. The agreement became known as the Rudd Concession
The Rudd Concession, a written concession for exclusive mining rights in Matabeleland, Mashonaland and other adjoining territories in what is today Zimbabwe, was granted by King Lobengula of Matabeleland to Charles Rudd, James Rochfort Magui ...
. Matabeleland and Mashonaland form the bulk of what is now known as Zimbabwe
Zimbabwe (), officially the Republic of Zimbabwe, is a landlocked country located in Southeast Africa, between the Zambezi and Limpopo Rivers, bordered by South Africa to the south, Botswana to the south-west, Zambia to the north, and ...
.
Rhodes and Rudd had duped the British government and the investing public into believing that the concession was vested in the public company and made millions of pounds when the British South Africa Company
The British South Africa Company (BSAC or BSACo) was chartered in 1889 following the amalgamation of Cecil Rhodes' Central Search Association and the London-based Exploring Company Ltd, which had originally competed to capitalize on the expect ...
bought the concession. Rudd had disagreements with Rhodes, in 1895 proclaiming that he would no longer work with Rhodes, and perhaps was unaware of the Gold Fields' conspiracy which culminated in the disastrous Jameson raid
The Jameson Raid (29 December 1895 – 2 January 1896) was a botched raid against the South African Republic (commonly known as the Transvaal) carried out by British colonial administrator Leander Starr Jameson, under the employment of Cecil ...
. Still, Rudd remained a friend of Rhodes and a director of Gold Fields until 1902, after which he retired to Scotland, "enjoying the life of an Edwardian plutocrat". In 1896, he bought the Ardnamurchan
Ardnamurchan (, gd, Àird nam Murchan: headland of the great seas) is a peninsula in the ward management area of Lochaber, Highland, Scotland, noted for being very unspoiled and undisturbed. Its remoteness is accentuated by the main access ...
estate in Argyll
Argyll (; archaically Argyle, in modern Gaelic, ), sometimes called Argyllshire, is a historic county and registration county of western Scotland.
Argyll is of ancient origin, and corresponds to most of the part of the ancient kingdom of ...
, where he built two "houses", one of which, Glenborrodale Castle, just for his guests. He died in 1916 after an unsuccessful prostate operation in a nursing home in London.[
]
Family
In the late 1860s in South Africa, Rudd married his first wife, Frances Georgina "Fanny" Leighton Chiappini (born 1846).[ Her great aunt was Maria Stella, Lady Newborough who claimed that she was not a member of the Chiappini family but had been exchanged at birth for a boy who became King Louis Philippe. Rudd and Fanny had a daughter, Evelyn, and three sons: Henry Percy, known as Percy; Franklyn Martin; and Charles John Lockhart, known as Jack. Percy's son, Bevil Rudd was an Olympic champion 400-metre runner.][Records of the Rudd Family, page 213: ''Rudd of Hartley, Westmorland'' family tree.] Frances died in 1896 of influenza or tuberculosis, and in 1898 Rudd married 24-year-old Corrie Maria Wallace, the daughter of his partner in the machinery company in Kimberley, with whom he had three more children.[
]
References
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{{DEFAULTSORT:Rudd, Charles
1844 births
1916 deaths
Alumni of Trinity College, Cambridge
Kimberley, Northern Cape
People educated at Harrow School
People from Kimberley, Northern Cape
19th-century British businesspeople