Rhodes's Man

Prime Ministers of the British Commonwealth gathered in London last week for discussions trending toward a tighter Empire. Busiest of all was little, persistent Sir Godfrey Martin Huggins of Southern Rhodesia. He lunched with Winston Churchill, sat with the War Cabinet, shot the breeze with Canada's W. L. Mackenzie King, New Zealand's Peter Eraser, South Africa's Jan Christiaan Smuts. Inevitably, out of his pocket came Huggins' Plan No. 1, or Huggins' Plan No. 2, or both. He was a man with something to sell.

Plan No. 1. Sir Godfrey is a surgeon and still, at 60, one of Africa's sure-handed best. Between jobs of surgery, one day in 1922, he stopped before a statue of Empire Builder Cecil John Rhodes in Rhodesia's capital of Salisbury, noted reflectively the marble finger pointing north, the pedestal inscription: ''Your hinterland lies there." He became the busy-tongued champion of Huggins' Plan No. 1: to amalgamate the British protectorates of Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland with the self-governing colony of Southern Rhodesia, form one big (488,300 sq. mi.) Dominion in the British Commonwealth. That idea made him a Prime Minister.

Plan No. 2. Flying on surgical calls over Southern Rhodesia's 150.300 square miles of 4,000-ft.-high tableland, Sir Godfrey came to know more of his country than most Prime Ministers. Below him, on such trips, he saw a lush land which undulated like agricultural New Jersey, had the temperature of Southern California, produced grain, tobacco, oranges. It held gold, coal, chrome, asbestos. One-third of it was available to the right settlers.

Thought he: Southern Rhodesia (pop. 1,446,000; whites, 78,560) has not enough of the "right" (i.e., white, enterprising) people. In Britain's grimy, industrial Lancashire (pop. 5,039,455) an obscure district councilman named E. L. Leeming came up with a suggestion that 500,000 Lancastrians should be moved to the uncrowded Rhodesian spaces. Sir Godfrey embraced the idea, made in Plan No. 2.

Other Dominion Prime Ministers talked of such complex matters as unified foreign policy, Dominion spheres of influence, but Sir Godfrey's aim was simple. He wanted only the right people to exploit a virgin land.

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