Rhodes must fall

The day before yesterday thousands of people filled The High outside Oriel College to peacefully protest for the removal of the statue to Cecil Rhodes that adorns the frontage to the college. All this in the wake of the toppling of the statue of slave trader Edward Colston in an anti-racism demonstration in Bristol, one of many in the UK sparked by the death of George Floyd while he was under arrest in Minneapolis in the United States last month. The statue, which will probably end up in a museum, has since been retrieved from Bristol harbour early this morning - the absence of protesters that early in the day itself says something.

Cecil Rhodes statue, Oriel College

Quoting, the frontage ...displays a statue of Rhodes himself, under a shell canopy propped by barley-sugar columns. At his feet a relief inscription reads E[X]: LARGA: MVNIFICENTIA CAECILII:RHODES, ie 'Out of the splendid generosity of Cecil Rhodes', the raised letters (here in bold) forming the laborious chronogram LMVIICICILIID (ie, reshuffled, MDCCCLLVIIIIII, ie 1911). the date when the building was completed.

The Rhodes Building owes to the initiative and generosity of Cecil Rhodes, intermittently an Oriel undergraduate between 1873 and 1881, whose £100,000 legacy included £40,000 'for the extension to the High Street of the college buildings': £22,500 was to be for building, the rest to replace income from tenements to be destroyed.

Four years ago there was a similar hue-and-cry to have the statue removed, and then it was apparently quashed when furious donors threatened to withdraw gifts and bequests worth more than £100 million if it was taken down.

The whole business is ridiculous IMHO. Firstly, in order to be consistent, if the statue is to be removed the inscription must also be erased and, indeed, the whole building ought to be demolished as it was built with funds supplied by Cecil. Secondly my own education owes itself in part to Cecil's generosity - in my first year I lived in the Rhodes Building, I came up to Oriel on a scholarship, not the prestigious Rhodes scholarship but it was probably funded in part by the Rhodes' legacy. History is history and should ideally be presented as both truthful and unbiased - yes in retrospect slavery was wrong, yes the holocaust was evil, yes both black and white and any other colour of lives matter and yes I owe my wonderful Oxford experience and its positive effect on my life in some small part to the generosity of a historical figure who represented white supremacy and was steeped in colonialism and racism. Does this make me culpable?

Floreat Oriel!

Showers of blessing

In the house here and the attached courtyard buildings we have a total of seven showers, over which I have some jurisdiction as the default plumber. I will call them Showers of Blessing because I love having a hot shower (plumbers have to test their workmanship) and showers are one of the great inventions of the modern age along with duvets and smart phones. When I was a child there were none of these, least-ways not where I lived. I remember vividly the discovery of duvets and what a pleasurable difference it made to sleeping and in the making of one's bed the morning after. I remember, also vividly, my first smart phone - actually it was a PDA thanks to a small legacy that my Aunt Mary left me - the amazement of so much functionality within such a small space, and the wonder of GPS (I love maps).

Back to the subject - three are purpose built showers and the remainder are over baths. One of my first pleasurable shower experiences (thus discounting the communal shower at school) was at Oxford. The "bath room" was in the basement of my staircase in the Rhodes building - this open-plan room housed perhaps three full length baths (bliss) and several showers of what we would now call the "wet room" type. The floor and walls were raw cement rendered. Those of you surprised at the lack of modesty - in fact one hardly ever had to share the room with anyone else and, if one did, who cares? I should add that in those days Oriel took only male students. Both showers and baths were fed with large pipework with good water pressure so a bath would fill in minutes and the shower - 3/4" hot and cold feeds, separate valves on each (none of this namby-pamby mixer-valve nonsense), feeding an enormous "rain" shower head - what more need I say? Compared to those paltry devices called showers now-a-days it was heaven. Sadly, I am fairly sure this facility has been removed as part of the modernising process. But I may have said all this before.

Back at home, we have recently remodelled what has been somewhat tongue-in-cheek dubbed "The Best Shower in Europe" (or BSIE) so that instead of leaking into the room below in spite of its low pressure, it is now a power shower and hasn't leaked yet. Give it time, I hear you saying.

Back to the subject - my most recent "fix" is to improve the electrically heated shower in the turquoise bathroom (EHSITB). Hitherto this has never been satisfactory due to low and varying water pressure, the water coming from a shallow-well pump with a pressure vessel. Anyone familiar with such a setup will understand. The rest of you don't need to, as the point I am making does not depend on it. The improvement has been to feed it with a preset mix of hot and cold from the pump that supplies the BSIE, thus increasing the pressure and giving the electric heating a sorely needed kick start.

I had naively assumed that anyone in the first world now-a-days would have used and be familiar with how an electrically heated shower operates. These horrible devices are typically not thermostatic and have two knobs - one has three positions selecting: neither, one or both heating elements, the other adjusts the water flow rate and thus, indirectly, the temperature. A knowledge of some rather basic Physics is implied in understanding this operation.

I had naively also assumed that anyone would realise that many shower heads (aka roses) have several spray settings e.g. fine spray, vigorous focused spray, etc.

I had naively assumed that folk would appreciate the difference between an electrically heated shower and a conventional shower control that is supplied with separate hot and cold feeds, and that the later is usually but not always thermostatic, and that "thermostatic" implies a device that tries to maintain a constant temperature.

Having told a certain person (well known to me) of my improvement to the EHSITB, she kindly volunteered to try it out. Her report was not negative but I quickly realised that she was in fact not at all familiar with electrically heated showers or their difference from conventional showers, and had no idea that most shower heads can be adjusted.

Which only goes to show that you should never assume anything.

Oxford

I must have done well in my entrance exams because I won a scholarship.  A small group of us traveled to Oxford for the interview.  It was very cold at the time, and the only form of heat in the room I had been billeted in was a one-bar electric fire set into the wall.  I remember huddling around the fire with many layers of clothing and still feeling cold.  The chairs were upholstered with some hard, coarse material which had as much give in them as coconut door matting. And the nearest toilet and wash-room was down a flight of stairs and across the quad.  I understand that Oriel College has now gone soft with en-suite showers and central heating.

In spite of these (literal) inconveniences I look back at my time in Oxford with great thankfulness.

On going up for my first year I was allocated a room in the north-west corner of the Rhodes building, with the same one-bar electric fire, and nearest loo outside in the quad arrangement. But bliss, oh bliss: in the basement at the foot of our stairwell a wash-room with a concrete floor, several baths long enough to lay down in, open-plan showers with huge shower-roses supplied by 3/4" pipe work, and lashings of hot water.  Everything in one room, open-plan style, but that didn't faze me. To this day this sort of arrangement has been my prototype for the ideal bathroom. Regrettably no one else agrees.

The Rhodes Building - my room was on the first floor to the left

My next door neighbour, Neil Mapley, was a self confessed pyromaniac. More to suppress the traffic noise than to create a warmer environment our windows had sliding "double" glazing panels on the inside.  I remember Neil putting bits of paper in the space between the window proper and this sliding panel and lighting them - I tried to stop him...  I enjoyed several walking holidays and one sailing holiday with him: he's the one with the generous mop of hair in my pictures below. Sadly Neil was killed in a motor-bike accident in Africa a number of years ago.

 Neil Mapley and Mike Attwood descending Helvellyn to the Striding Edge

Neil Mapley and Ranolph Poole on the Norfolk Broads

The 2011 edition of the Oriel College Record article "100 years of the Rhodes Building: its creation and a re-appraisal" reveals that the building was opened in 1911.  I had always assumed it was much older.

Recent picture of the front of the Rhodes Building - my room's window is highlighted

The building is famed for its statues with Cecil himself in South African garb taking the highest position. The inscription beneath his statue reads (when translated from the Latin) "From the great generosity of Cecil Rhodes".  The enlarged letters are a chronogram giving the date of construction, 1911, in roman numerals but involving a little "poetic" license as explained here.

The inscription below the statue of Cecil Rhodes