Thomas Robson


The Very Revd Thomas Claude Robson was the first Anglican Dean of Kimberley, and Rector of St Cyprian's Cathedral, Kimberley, South Africa.

Background and prospects at St Cyprian’s in 1905

Canon Robson came to St Cyprian's Church in 1905, a Parish still worshiping in a wood and iron church in Jones Street, Kimberley, a structure imported as a prefabricated kit from England in 1879. Grand plans for a new church had been proposed in a public meeting in 1901, but little progress had been made towards their realisation. Archdeacon William Arthur Holbech, who had been Rector at the time, had gone on to become Dean of Bloemfontein. Robson's predecessor, Archdeacon H.A. Douglas-Hamilton, was appointed in 1903, encountering an impatient faction within the congregation who additionally were at odds with the Archdeacon's churchmanship – specifically with respect to liturgical practices. This faction removed itself from the parish, building its own brick church of St John the Evangelist in Woodley Street – a parish of decidedly low church persuasion. Prospects for the new rector could hardly have seemed less auspicious.

Robson’s achievement

And yet Thomas Claude Robson, presiding over the parish for very nearly three decades, would oversee perhaps the greatest transformation in the history of St Cyprian's: the design of a cathedral; the completion of the first two major phases of this long-term project; and the building up of a mother church for a new and vast diocese. St Cyprian's would no longer simply be a parish church. A newspaper feature in 1923, on ‘Men in the Public Eye’, pronounced: “He is the Dean of Kimberley and Kimberley loves its Dean.”

Milestones of Robson’s Kimberley career

The building up of the Cathedral as a unifying symbol of the diocese was part of Robson's vision: he believed, as he put it in the Cathedral News in 1916, that “if the Cathedral suffers the whole Diocese suffers, but if the Cathedral prospers the whole Diocese prospers.”