Cyril Rackett

Cyril Ignatius Rackett was the brother of author and dilettante Percy Rackett, and the second cousin of Juno Boyd. Rackett was known in South Africa as a high-ranking employee of De Beers Consolidated Mines, and a vocal political champion of the mining interests in Transvaal.

Rackett was born at the family seat of Ware Hall, Kent, in 1882. He was educated at Winchester College, where he studied Classics and briefly mentored a young Oswald Mosley, later the founder of the British Union of Fascists. Like his brother, Rackett chose to give up a place at Cambridge to join the British Army in the fall of 1882.

Rackett was stationed at the Kimberley garrison in the early days of the 2nd Boer War, where he made the acquaintance of diamond magnate and colonialist Cecil Rhodes, and was a part of the administrative staff of a British concentration camp for Boer women and children. Rackett served as a liaison between Rhodes and the British Army in Kimberley, and then upon finishing his service stayed in South Africa to work for Rhodes's De Beers Consolidated Mines. From 1903-1915, Rackett served as an aide to, and then a representative for, De Beers in the Transvaal Chamber of Mines. Afterwards, Rackett made a name for himself as a mine administrator and advocate for De Beers in the Parliament of the Union of South Africa.

After the passage of the Statute of Westminster, which abolished British control over South Africa, a discontented Rackett returned to Britain and settled in London, where he reconnected with Oswald Mosley. In 1932, he became a founding member of the British Union of Fascists.

In 1911, Rackett married Mary Breckenridge Walton, the daughter of a colleague at De Beers. They had two children, Albert Cecil Rackett, born 1911, and Christopher Eustace Rackett, born 1912. Both boys were educated at Cyril Rackett's alma mater of Winchester College, but only Albert went on to Cambridge; younger son Christopher returned to South Africa, where he stayed even after his parents returned to Britain in 1931.

Rackett's relationship with the rest of his family was tense. Estranged from his brother Percy after Percy's discharge from the army following the Battle of Spion Kop, Cyril Rackett remained in contact with his mother and father for several years after Percy's departure for Paris, but ultimately broke ties with them as well after his father asked him to give up his business in South Africa and return to Britain.

On 5 September 1939, following the British declaration of war against Nazi Germany, and the announcement of his son Christopher's clandestine marriage to Xhosa activist and intellectual Isabel Fundisa Makgomo, Rackett shot himself with a hunting rifle at his country house in Market Snodbury, Kent.