News about Cecil Rhodes

According to a Rhodes scholar, a well-known Oxford college advised an 18th century portrait to be 'racist and dehumanizing.' Dr. Alexander von Klemperer, a PhD student at Oriel College in 2018, wrote a paper in which he was 'personally worried' about Henry Somerset's portrait, the 3rd Duke of Beaufort'. The duke, who was a descendant of King Henry IV, was captured in the company of a black boy wearing a metal collar who is holding his coronet and was recently erased. The college has reported that it was deleted and loaned to the Duke of Beaufort's ancestral home, Badminton House, although major renovation work is underway in the Senior Library, where it used to hang from the walls. However, one source told The Telegraph that it was moved "in case it offended a student" and that it came after Dr. Klemperer raised his objections to the artwork.

Peter Lobengula (pictured left with fellow miners in 1901 and inset as a performer in 'Savage South Africa') was the 25-year-old grandson of King Matabele, whose forces were defeated in war in 1890s Zimbabwe. In Channel 4's Human Zoos, the tale of how he came to Britain and ended up marrying 23-year-old Kitty Jewell (right) was told. Kitty married in 1899, but when the union came to an end, she moved to America and Lobengula worked as a miner in Salford, Greater Manchester. In an archive video of miners leaving work at the Agecroft colliery in Pendlebury in 1901, the show named Lobengula. Lobengula appeared on 'Savage South Africa,' a drama that was designed to recreate the Matabele's defeat.

RICHARD LITTLEJOHN: Here's another one of those stories I'm not sure if you should file under Mind: How You Go or You Couldn't Make It Up. A Viking monument and a shopping center in Jarrow are under scrutiny by Northumbria Police after suspicion that they may be connected to 'Far-Right' extremism. Officers have been participating in a study of statues and other historic sites to see if any have links to slavery or oppressive conduct,' along with South Tyneside Council. The investigation was launched two and a half years ago in the aftermath of the Black Lives Matter demonstrations. Anybody's guess what the Vikings would have to do with the murder of a black man by a rogue police officer in a city four thousand miles away on the other side of the Atlantic.

The outgoing vice chancellor of Oxford University has cautioned that some students now believe in the right not to be offended.' Professor Louise Richardson (pictured), 64, said that expression of speech at the academy was 'pretty robust.' However, she said that certain undergraduates had a "unfortunate" belief that they cannot be upset by protesting opinions.

MICK HUME: Can anybody be safe from today's cancel culture and the modern statue-smashing, history-erasing thought police? First, the awakened culture warriors were known for their historical hate figures. The statue of Bristol merchant and Tory MP Edward Colston was erected in protest for his ties to the slave trade. Cecil Rhodes' statue was removed from an Oxford college as a symbol of British colonialism, according to the students. Evidently, they've scrapped a proposed statue of gay 1960s playwright Joe Orton, long a hero to liberal luvvies, due to his well-known sexual preference for teenage boys in Morocco and elsewhere.

The University of Warwick has issued a warning far from the Madding Crowd (inset), which depicts the brutal reality of Victorian rural life. Thomas Hardy's (19th Century work (right) explores Bathsheba Everdene's loves and marriages, as well as faithful shepherd Gabriel Oak (left), Carey Mulligan and Matthias Schoenaerts appear as the characters in the book's 2015 film version). Gabriel's two hundred pregnant ewes are chased by his dog and crash to their deaths off a cliff in one scene. He kills his inexperienced sheepdog and becomes penniless after this. Four of Bathsheba's sheep died after eating a field of clover in a separate chapter. The Warwick's English Department set the alarm off the novel in the midst of scenes in which students could be 'upset by' as the story depicts the 'cruelty of nature and the rural life'.