Jack Rumbold

Sir Jack Seddon Rumbold (5 March 1920 – 9 December 2001) was a New Zealand first-class cricketer, Royal Navy officer, barrister and colonial administrator. A great-nephew of Richard Seddon, the former Prime Minister of New Zealand, Rumbold was the youngest New Zealander to be awarded a Rhodes Scholarship to the University of Oxford. He served in the Royal New Zealand Naval Volunteer Reserve and after completing his officer training, the Royal Navy, in the service of which he was mentioned in dispatches.

He later had a legal career with the British Colonial Service in East Africa, advising the governments of Kenya and Zanzibar, surviving the 1962 revolution in the latter. After a brief academic career, which saw him become the first academic director of the British campus of Stanford University, he resumed his legal career with the Industrial Tribunals, for which he was knighted in 1984.

Early life and military service

Rumbold was born on the South Island at Reefton in March 1920. His father was a headmaster, while his mother was a piano teacher. Her uncle was the former Prime Minister of New Zealand Richard Seddon. Rumbold was educated at St Andrew's College, Christchurch where his interests included rugby, cricket and poetry. He was head choirboy at Christchurch Cathedral. From St Andrew's he read law at the University of Canterbury, graduating in 1940. He became the youngest New Zealander to be awarded a Rhodes Scholarship to the University of Oxford, but this was deferred due to a combination of his young age and the Second World War.

Rumbold enlisted in the Royal New Zealand Naval Volunteer Reserve and in 1941 he was accepted for officer training in England at the Royal Naval College, Greenwich. Upon graduating he joined the destroyer , serving as a sub-lieutenant in the Arctic convoys. He scored 175 runs in his eight matches as an opening batsman, at an average of 12.50 and a high score of 25. He gained a cricket blue and played rugby for Oxford University RFC, though the pressures of his studies limited his rugby appearances and so he did not gain a second blue. At that stage Zanzibar was a British protectorate on the verge of full independence, he was tasked with preparing a constitution for the soon to be independent state. However, his work was in vain as the Zanzibar Revolution took place in January 1964, overthrowing the Sultan Jamshid bin Abdullah, with Rumbold and his family fleeing aboard a yacht to Tanganyika. He retired in 1984 and in later life he divided his time between London and Tuscany with his second wife, Veronica, whom he had married in 1970, following his divorce from his first wife in 1969. Rumbold died in December 2001.