The Daily Mail gets it wrong on renaming Cecil Rhodes School, & Rhodes Avenue N22
The Black Lives Matter movement has inspired a long overdue effort to ‘decolonise’ street names and take down statues related to Britain’s imperial past.
Of course that doesn’t change material conditions and address issues of equality and discrimination directly. It does however make it clear that part of Britain’s past while it certainly should not be forgotten should not be memorialised either.
A petition and campaign to rename Rhodes Avenue Primary School N22 in Muswell Hill which came out of the Black Lives Matter movement has raised and addressed the issue of whether the school and indeed the road are named after Rhodes or other members of the Rhodes family who owned land in the area in earlier centuries.
Partly the answer is that the name is taken nowadays by many to refer to Cecil Rhodes whatever the original intention.
However the campaign has found interesting information about when the road name dates from. This appears to be 1935. Rhodes died in 1902 so surely by that time he was forgotten and it’s just the family name?
That however would be a mistaken view.
An article in the African Sociological Review (vol 6/1 2002) by Paul Maylam deals with the naming cult related to Rhodes. He argues that it ran for the first six decades of the twentieth century after which the anti-imperialist sentiment we are familiar with nowadays gained support.
Strikingly on the 100th anniversary of Rhodes birth in 1953 the Queen Mother opened a Centenary Exhibition in Bulawayo and 125,000 silver crowns carrying Rhodes head were struck by the Royal Mint.
It seems clear that the cult of Rhodes and naming things after him was still in full swing in the early 1950s. Indeed there is a block of flats in Camden in the 1940s that still has his name.
The petition to change the name of Rhodes Avenue Primary School (which has the support of local MP Catherine West) is here:
https://www.change.org/p/rhodes-avenue-school-haringey-rename-rhodes-avenue-school
The Daily Mail has published an article (2nd August) which is critical of the effort to rename the school, based on the point that the original name related to a relative of Cecil Rhodes.
The Mail is, like most papers, not very good at history and has managed to ignore the point about the cult of Rhodes naming that existed in Britain for decades and included the period when the school was built.
I attended the original Alexandra Park School which was on the same site in the first half of the 1970s and I don’t think anyone who was interested was in any doubt as to which Rhodes the name referred to.
A detail relating to the name of Rhodes Avenue from the campaign’s update
A map from 1912 shows the first time a road appears alongside the site however it was not named Rhodes Avenue at that time, but Hampton road. The next map, 1935, shows the school built and the road renamed. It looks most likely that the road
and school were named either at the same time or very close in succession. As was the naming of nearby Cecil Road. There are also other imperialist road names close by that we are looking into also.
The neighbouring school (that is now A.P.S) on the same complex as Rhodes Avenue was built in 1959 and called Cecil Rhodes secondary modern.
It seems likely that between 1925-1930, land developers would have known of the Rhodes link and wished to make the most of the imperial connection to Cecil Rhodes. By this time, Cecil Rhodes’ name was very much established and celebrated. Southern Rhodesia was named for him, and he had only recently died. It seems unlikely that a land developer would use the Rhodes name without the awareness of its link to Cecil.
All Rhodes lead to Cecil, it appears.
Sorry, but your argument is pure conjecture. The renaming of Hampton Road means v little – lots of MH roads were renamed as housing was built and it was called Rhodes Avenue by 1935, long before Cecil Rhodes Secondary Modern was even established. More likely is that the developers renamed the road after the family that lived there and owned all the neighbouring land – Thomas Rhodes. After all, the original portico from his family home still stands today on school property.
I attended the school and had been under the impression all these years that it was Cecil Rhodes who had a pad there , I am relieved to hear , in fact , that it wasn’t.
But there is no harm done in allowing the community to choose a name better reflecting the school’s makeup which is hopefully not now all white , even back in the day it was refreshingly multicultural, though I could have been beaten up by angry Greek Cypriot kids if I had said a good word in the playground about the Turks in the early 70s!
. No anger , no daubed slogans, just moving on. . This is how were were then, but now this is how we are and we are all better for it ..
Why not let the children decide?, they are usually wonderfully all playing together and are worthy of a say ?