Background
Wrathall was born in Lancaster, England and went to Lancaster Royal Grammar School.
Wrathall was born in Lancaster, England and went to Lancaster Royal Grammar School.
Having qualified as a chartered accountant in 1935, he emigrated to Southern Rhodesia the next year. He worked for the Southern Rhodesian government in its income tax department for the next ten years.
After emigrating to Rhodesia in September 1936 he worked in the Income Tax Department at Salisbury from 1936 to 1946. He left government service in 1946 to become a chartered accountant and then company secretary.
He had the nation braced for a make-or-break challenge from the outset of UDI. “We must be ready to endure a situation of real hardship for some time ahead”, he said. His call for “stern discipline” was underlined by stringent measures for controlling imports, introducing export controls and prohibiting the purchase of foreign securities. His clever use of economic and financial links with South Africa saved Rhodesia from bankruptcy. Largely because of this success, he was promoted to Deputy Prime Minister on September 7, 1966.
His economic cuts hit the Africans hardest. From 1964 to 1972 he allocated only £17 million in capital projects to tribal trust lands and African purchase areas and admitted that economic growth there has been “slight”. Yet Premier Smith used him as the man of moderation in his effort to put over the proposals for independence which were ultimately rejected in the Pearce Report of May 24, 1972, as unacceptable to the people of Rhodesia as a whole. Again Wrathall became a key figure with the responsibility of stimulating the economy after the Pearce Commission setback and finding more loopholes in the blockade.
His political career matured slowly after he became MP for Bulawayo. He was almost 50 when Premier Winston Field gave him his first cabinet appointment on December 19, 1962, as Minister for European Education and Health and Minister for African Education. He was promoted Finance Minister when Ian Smith took over as Premier on April 13, 1964. He went to London on September 29, 1965, with William Harper, then Interior Minister, to take last-minute soundings in the City about possible repercussions to UDI.
The quiet accountant who became the brains behind the sanctions-busting campaign. An outstanding tactician directing each countermove with skill to blunt the edge of the economic blockade mounted internationally against Rhodesia after UDI. In each of his budgets he has cleverly found financial outlets to ensure Rhodesia’s survival despite the tremendous external pressures to bankrupt the country.