Mr. Stanley, I Presume?

The Life and Explorations of Henry Morton Stanley

Alan Gallop

• Publisher: The History Press
• Year: 2004
• Print ISBN: 9780750930932
• eBook ISBN: 9780752494944
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historical Biographies
• Index: History

Famous for having found the great missionary and explorer Dr David Livingstone on the shores of Lake Tanganyika and immortalised as the utterer of perhaps the four most often quoted words of greeting of all time - 'Dr Livingstone, I presume?' - Henry Morton Stanley was himself a man who characterised the great wave of exploring fever that gripped the nineteenth century.

Chapter 1

JOHN ROWLANDS – BASTARD

The ancient market town of Denbigh is one of the most historic in North Wales. Denbigh, or Denbych, derives its name from the Welsh language and means ‘a fortified place’. Fortifications take the form of a ruined thirteenth-century castle, built in 1282 for Edward I, that look down on the town and rich pastures of the Vale of Clwyd.

Visitors in the vicinity of the High Street pass the fifteenth-century timber-framed archway of the Golden Lion Inn, the sixteenth-century County Hall and narrow cobbled alleys before arriving in front of No. 7 Highgate, a medieval stone gabled building which towers above the rest of the street. A steep path leads to Burgess Tower and the entrance to King Edward’s old walled town. Tower Hill passes St Hilary’s Terraces and an unusual medieval house with battlements along the top and the castle gatehouse, from which an unpaved track leads to the site where a tiny cottage known as Castle Row once stood. It was demolished long ago, but was where one of the Victorian world’s most controversial figures is understood to have been born.

There is speculation that the baby baptised ‘John Rowlands, Bastard’, who in later life took the name of Henry Morton Stanley, may have been born in London. He wrote: ‘One of the first things I remember is to have been gravely told that I had come from London in a band-box and to have been assured that all babies came from the same place. It satisfied my curiosity for several years as to the cause of my coming; but, later, I was informed that my mother had hastened to her parents from London to be delivered of me; and that, after recovery, she had gone back to the Metropolis, leaving me in the charge of my grandfather, Moses Parry, who lived within the precincts of Denbigh Castle.’

Old Moses Parry moved into the small, whitewashed cottage known as Castle Row in the shadow of the ruined castle in 1839 when the town had a population of some four thousand. He took the property because he was a butcher and needed a house with outbuildings that could double as a slaughterhouse for cattle bound for the meat market. Years later, Dr Evan Pierce, Denbigh’s local physician and bard, told the Denbighshire Free Press he had been present at the cottage when Moses Parry’s eighteen-year-old unmarried daughter, Elizabeth – known to many as Betsy – gave birth to a son on 28 January 1841. He claimed to have recited Welsh poetry to the mother while she was in labour. Less than a year before, Betsy had left home to enter service in London where, according to her son, she had ‘thereby grievously offended her family’. By ‘straying to London, in spite of family advice, Betsy had committed a capital offence’ – in other words, she had become pregnant outside marriage; a serious and shocking thing to happen to a small-town chapel-going girl from Victorian Wales.

Denbigh’s parish register confirms that John Rowlands’s baptism took place in St Hilary’s Chapel, Denbigh on 19 February 1841 and states he was ‘illegitimate’, with the parents named as ‘John Rowlands, farmer, Llys, Llanrhaiadr and Elizabeth Parry, Castle, Denbigh’. However, a census taken in June of the same year shows no sign of Betsy and her baby living in the cottage, the new unmarried mother having fled from Denbigh in shame and disgrace with her son to return to London and work as a domestic servant. Baby John, though, was soon brought back to Wales to be cared for by his eighty-year-old grandfather and a pair of bachelor uncles in their Welsh-speaking household.

Moses, described as ‘a stout old gentleman clad in corduroy breeches, dark stockings and long Melton coat, with a clean-shaven face, rather round, and lit up by humorous grey eyes’, occupied the upper floor of the cottage with baby John, while Young Moses and Uncle Thomas inhabited the lower rooms. Young Moses later married ‘a flaxen-haired, fair girl of a decided temper’ called Kitty and ‘after that event . . . [they] seldom descended to the lower apartments’.

Stanley never knew his father: ‘I was in my “teens” before I learned that he had died within a few weeks after my birth.’ This is the first of many untruths, inaccuracies or misleading statements the elderly Stanley made while relating the story of his colourful early life. ‘John Rowlands, farmer’, in fact, passed away thirteen years after his son’s birth. He is known to have been a drunkard and his burial entry in the Llanrhaiadr Parish Register states that he died in May 1854 of ‘delirium tremens’, a severe psychotic condition that affects alcoholics. Rowlands contributed nothing to his son’s welfare, upkeep or well-being. He showed no interest in the boy after his birth or, it would appear, in the young girl he is said to have impregnated in 1840.

A Denbigh legend, persistent since the mid-nineteenth century, suggests that James Vaughan Hall, a local solicitor, alderman and leading citizen may have been Stanley’s real father. In 1840 Betsy Parry worked in a bakery shop next to offices Vaughan Hall shared with another solicitor in Vale Street. Vaughan Hall, who had a second home in London where Pigott’s Directory states he was ‘a Master Extraordinary in Chancery and Commissioner in all the Courts at Westminster’, is said to have seduced the young baker’s girl and when she discovered she was pregnant with his child, in order to safeguard his marriage and position in Denbigh society, bribed John Rowlands into claiming he was the father.

Many affluent Victorian middle-class employers considered servants and working girls ‘fair game’, and Vaughan Hall’s frequent excursions to London to undertake official duties in Chancery while his wife remained in Denbigh, would have provided plenty of opportunity to seduce young women in his employ. Dr William Acton, who practised in London from 1840, noted in his book Prostitution: ‘Seduction of girls from the lower orders is a sport and a habit with vast numbers of men, married and single, placed above the ranks of labour.’

Another local story suggests Betsy Parry was a girl with loose morals, an amateur prostitute who was having simultaneous relationships with both John Rowlands and James Vaughan Hall – and when her pregnancy was discovered, had no idea which man was the true father of her unborn child. Betsy went on to have more illegitimate children by two other men, one of whom she subsequently married. Her second illegitimate child, a daughter called Emma born in 1842, was to a man called ‘John Evans, Liverpool, farmer, late of Ty’n’ y Pwll, Llanrhaiadr’. One may well speculate that if Betsy had been employed as a servant at Vaughan Hall’s London home, she could easily have been ‘fair game’ for the solicitor, resulting in the birth of one – possibly even two – children out of wedlock, with John Evans similarly bribed into falsely admitting he was father of the second offspring.

So, was young John Rowlands, born to Elizabeth ‘Betsy’ Parry in 1841, really John Vaughan Hall? It is unlikely the young man ever discovered the identity of his real father. The only thing certain was that the stigma of being born out of wedlock in a provincial Victorian Welsh market town was sufficient to leave a deep scar on the psyche of the strongest men – and something that pursued the man, later known to the world as Henry Morton Stanley, for the rest of his life.

Stanley was aged four when he accidentally dropped a glass jug he was carrying to collect water from the castle well. It smashed to pieces and on hearing the crash grandfather Moses came to the door and ‘lifted his forefinger menacingly and said, “Very well, Shonin, my lad, when I return, thou shalt have a sound whipping. You naughty boy!”’ With that, grandfather Moses left the cottage to attend to some business in a nearby field where he promptly fell down dead. A jury at the inquest returned the verdict he had died through ‘the visitation of God’, which was their way of explaining any sudden fatality of this kind.

The death of Moses Parry was just the excuse Young Moses, Uncle Thomas and Aunt Kitty needed to rid Castle Row of their tiny nephew. The boy was transferred to the care of an elderly Welsh-speaking couple, Richard and Jenny Price, caretakers of the local bowling green 400 yards from Castle Row. Their cottage was appropriately named Bowling Green House and the two uncles agreed to pay the couple half a crown a week for his board and lodgings.

At infant school in the crypt at St Hilary’s Church, the lad was never going to be tallest in the class, but the Prices’ dismay at his increasing appetite resulted in the elderly couple asking the uncles for extra money for his upkeep. By now they were both married and were expected to bring home decent wages to keep their spouses happy. The wives told the Prices that times were hard, they could no longer afford to pay for the up-keep of their nephew and there was no room for him at Castle Row – ‘so the old couple resolved to send me to the workhouse’.

In 1847, the Prices’ son, Dick, was given the task of taking the boy to the St Asaph’s Poor Law Union Workhouse under the pretence they were going to visit an aunt called Mary in Ffynnon Beuno 6 miles away. Stanley recalls:

The way seemed interminable and tedious, but he did his best to relieve my feelings with false cajoling and treacherous endearments. At last Dick set me down from his shoulders before an immense stone building, and, passing through tall iron gates, he pulled at a bell, which I could hear clanging noisily in the distant interior. A sombre-faced stranger appeared at the door, who, despite my remonstrances, seized me by the hand, and drew me within, while Dick tried to soothe my fears with glib promises that he was only going to bring Aunt Mary to me. The door closed on him, and, with the echoing sound, I experienced for the first time the awful feeling of utter desolateness.

St Asaph’s Workhouse was an institution to which the aged poor and superfluous Welsh-speaking children of local parishes were taken ‘to relieve the respectabilities of the obnoxious sight of extreme poverty, because civilisation knows no better method of disposing of the infirm and helpless than by imprisoning them within its walls’.

St Asaph’s was created in 1837 and its operation ruled over by an elected board of 24 guardians representing 16 local parishes. The large red-brick workhouse was built between 1839 and 1840 at a cost of £5,499 16s 8d on a site 6 miles east of Denbigh and south of the village of St Asaph. It was intended to accommodate 200 inmates and for most of its early life its grey and dismal wings and dormitories were full to bursting. Its design followed the popular ‘cruciform’ layout with four separate accommodation wings, known as ‘wards’, for different types of inmate – male or female, young or old, infirm or able-bodied – radiating from an octagonal central house containing the institution’s offices and the residence of the schoolmaster, James Francis – ‘soured by misfortune, brutal of temper and callous of heart’.

Everyone entering the workhouse was subjected to a rigorous means test to assess ‘suitability’ for admission. Only ‘deserving’ cases were allowed in: the unemployed, the ill, the aged, orphaned families and individuals with nowhere else to go. Once inside, inmates were forced to undergo prison-like discipline, living in cheerless surroundings, eating plain and monotonous meals in silence. Visitors were not encouraged and occasional gifts left at the door by benefactors rarely found their way to inmates, being considered an unnecessary relaxation of workhouse regulations.

Inside the institution, young John Rowlands quickly found that the aged were subject to stern rules and assigned useless tasks, while children were chastised and disciplined in a manner that ignored the rules both of justice and charity. To the old, St Asaph’s was a house of slow death; to the young, it was a house of torture. Paupers were the failures of Victorian society and their fate was to eke out the rest of their miserable existence within workhouse walls, picking loose fibres out of discarded ropes to be re-threaded into new coils.

Male and female inmates were lodged in separate sections of the workhouse, enclosed by high walls with every door locked, barred and guarded to preserve the questionable ‘morality’, a practice which went on in hundreds of similar institutions across the British Isles. Each inmate was required to wear regulation clothing made from cheap fabric: men were clad in grey blanket trousers, matching jacket and collarless cotton shirt with hair shaved close to the skull, the women in striped cotton dresses, their short hair making one inmate indistinguishable from another.

At 6 a.m. sharp, inmates were roused from their sleep and by 8 p.m. they were locked in their wards. Bread, thin soup, rice and potatoes were the daily diet. On Saturdays inmates had to undergo a severe scrubbing in a tin bath and on Sundays were forced to sit through long services on hard bench pews in the chapel. The routine was designed to afflict minds and break spirits, which it successfully achieved within a short space of time.

Like John Rowlands, the majority of workhouse children spoke only Welsh and lessons in the St Asaph’s classroom were conducted entirely in that language, although religious instruction was given in English.

Meticulous records of daily life at the St Asaph’s workhouse are stored at Hawarden Records Office. They give the names of every arrival and departure, details of those who absconded – and were dragged back – of visitors and comments about activities and incidents. In 1847, weeks after John Rowlands entered St Asaph’s, a committee was formed to investigate conditions at the workhouse and report its findings to the Board of Education. It noted that young girls were brought into close association with prostitutes and ‘learned the tricks of the trade’. Inspectors observed that ‘the men took part in every possible vice’, children slept two in a bed, an older child with a younger, resulting in their starting ‘to practice and understand things they should not’. The inspectors’ findings were subsequently published as a report by the Commission of Education in Wales, 1849, but comments about sexual depravity at St Asaph’s were diluted.

Four decades after leaving St Asaph’s, Stanley’s resentment at how Dick Price had tricked him into the workhouse was still evident. ‘Dick’s guile was well meant, no doubt, but I then learned for the first time that one’s professed friend can smile while preparing to deal a mortal blow, and a man can mask evil with a show of goodness. It would have been far better for me if Dick, being stronger than I, had employed compulsion, instead of shattering my confidence and planting the first seeds of distrust in a child’s heart,’ he recollected.

Not that young John Rowlands received any special treatment from James Francis, a former collier from Mold who had lost his entire left hand in an industrial accident years before and wound up as workhouse schoolmaster. He won the job over other applicants because he could communicate in broken English. According to Stanley, Francis was a violent and brutal man. ‘The ready back-slap in the face, the stunning clout over the ear, the strong blow with the open palm on alternate cheeks, which knocked our senses into confusion, were so frequent it is a marvel we ever recovered them again,’ he recalled. ‘Whatever might be the nature of the offence, or merely because his irritable mood required vent, our poor heads were cuffed, and slapped, and pounded, until we lay speechless and streaming with blood.’

For young Rowlands and fellow youthful inmates, Francis’s cruel blows with his bony right fist were preferable to deliberate punishment with the birch, ruler, or cane ‘which, with cool malice, he inflicted’ from a selection of instruments never far from his reach. Even the smallest classroom error caused Francis to reach for ruler or cane. Woe betide any child who managed wrongly to answer several questions in a row for ‘then a vindictive scourging of the offender followed, until he was exhausted, or our lacerated bodies could bear no more’.

The boy’s own first flogging from Francis happened on a Sunday evening during the early part of 1849. The eight-year-old was sitting with other children listening to Francis reading aloud from Genesis 41, a passage referring to Joseph, sold as a slave by his brothers and elevated to high rank by the pharaoh. Francis suddenly looked up from his Bible and demanded to know from John Rowlands who in the story had interpreted the pharaoh’s dreams. The boy replied: ‘Jophes, sir.’

The master thundered: ‘Who?’

‘Jophes, sir.’

‘Joseph, you mean?’

‘Yes sir, Jophes.’

Francis reached for his birch and ordered the boy to ‘unbreech’, unaware he had merely mispronounced Joseph’s name. Stanley tells us that the master ‘rudely tore down my nether garments and administered a forceful shower of blows, with such thrilling effect that...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• 1. John Rowlands – Bastard
• 2. The Outcast
• 3. The Windermere
• 4. Meeting Mr Stanley
• 5. Life with ‘Father’
• 6. The Shopkeeper at Cypress Bend
• 7. Dixie Greys and Yankee Blues
• 8. Shiloh
• 9. A Prisoner at Camp Douglas
• 10. When Johnny Came Marching Home
• 11. Lewis Noe and Trouble in Turkey
• 12. Another Homecoming
• 13. Hancock, Hickok and the Wronged Children of the Soil
• 14. Mr Bennett and the New York Herald
• 15. Theodorus and Magdala
• 16. Romantic Interlude
• 17. The Good Doctor
• 18. ‘Find Livingstone!’
• 19. ‘Forward, March!’
• 20. ‘Mirambo is Coming!’
• 21. Life with Livingstone
• 22. ‘On Stanley, On!’
• 23. Mission Accomplished
• 24. ‘What Had I to Do with My Birth in Wales?’
• 25. ‘The Most Gigantic Hoax ever Attempted on the Credulity of Mankind’
• 26. New York Triumph and Disaster
• 27. Coomassie
• 28. A Living-stone
• 29. Lady Alice
• 30. Mtesa and Mirambo
• 31. Leopold II
• 32. Brazza
• 33. Dolly Tennant
• 34. Emin Pasha: Man of Mystery
• 35. The Rear Column
• 36. The Escape from Equatoria
• 37. Marriage and Controversy
• 38. The Member for North Lambeth
• 39. Furze Hill and Happiness
• 40. Loose Ends (1904–2002)
• Acknowledgements
• Bibliography