Stanley: The Impossible Life of Africa's Greatest Explorer

by Tim Jeal

  `To live at all I must have the open air,' he wrote in his diary after being ill. A house in the country `with a few acres attached' now became his most cherished ambition. `It is imperative to possess one before it is too late,' he added, anxiously.'' In November 11898, he visited about twenty houses in the Home Counties, and the following month another thirty. Then, on 116 December, he was shown Furze Hill, a large Victorian mansion at Pirbright, Surrey, built in the Tudor half-timbered style. Dolly claimed she liked it - perhaps because it was only forty minutes from London by rail. Although let to a champion revolver shot, the fifty-six-acre grounds were overrun by rabbits, and the house itself was in poor repair. Nevertheless, Stanley liked the view, and was pleased with the mix of woodland and pasture. Although the house had too many small rooms, he was happy to contemplate refashioning the interior and adding a new wing.

  By r January, he had agreed a price of £ro,ooo, and a date, in the summer, for taking possession." Work on the house and grounds started in June, but this did not stop Henry staying there for days at a time from September onwards, occasionally with Dolly, but more often with Denzil and his nurse. Stanley installed an electric lighting plant, bought a small fire engine, and excavated the lake to a larger size. This was the very first house he considered to be his home. Furze Hill was also intended to be where Denzil would spend most of his school holidays. No detail was too insignificant to merit Stanley's attention. As well as monitoring the building work, he planned walks, threw bridges across streams, planted trees, and built a little farm to his own designs. Dorothy was struck by how happy he was as the house and grounds took shape. If she resented him calling his house ,the Bride', she did not show it.'

  In April r goo, Sir Alfred Lyall came to stay - perhaps making Dolly feel less upstaged - and a little later Mark Twain (whom Henry had first met in 11867) spent a few days there as their guest. Just before these visits the boat house had been finished and the carriage drive surfaced. In May, with the decorators close to completing their task, Dolly was urged to come and see it all.z" Henry relished the fact that Furze Hill was entirely his creation, and that Dolly was on his turf for a change whenever she came.21

  By now (1899) Henry was Sir Henry, and Dolly was Lady Stanley. Though Stanley had been a British subject since 189z, Lord Salisbury, the prime minister, in his letter offering Stanley the Grand Cross of the Bath, referred to his change of nationality as if it had only just been resolved.22 Yet Salisbury had known ever since 189z, when Stanley had first contested a parliamentary seat, that he was British. The truth was that only now - after almost a decade had elapsed - did Salisbury feel that the Rear Column scandals were remote enough to make rewarding Stanley uncontroversial. As well as keeping many letters of congratulation, Henry kept some insulting notes too, among them a scrap of paper from `one with you in Africa'- very likely a man he had sacked while working as the king's Chief Agent in the 188os - suggesting that his knighthood was the undeserved reward meted out to ,the Yankee Adventurer' for `years of lying, toadying & petty humbug and fraud'.23

  Stanley himself had long stopped hoping that he might receive official recognition. He was not being falsely modest when he told Sir Arthur Sullivan, the composer, that he had expected nothing.14 Writing about her husband's knighthood in the Autobiography, Dorothy did not, as she might have done, complain that the greatest explorer of the age had received the same reward as was doled out routinely to senior civil servants and military officers. It showed the modest side of Stanley's nature that he also seemed satisfied. The first person `he thought of when he read Lord Salisbury's letter, was his old grandfather, in the Welsh cottage, who used to call him his "Man of Men"'.25 In the same year, Major-General Kitchener was created Baron Kitchener and given £30,000 by parliament for destroying the Mahdist forces at Omdurman (killing about r ii,ooo and wounding r 6,ooo in a storm of mechanized slaughter) before re-taking Khartoum. Kitchener had used machine guns, and improvised dum-dum bullets, as well as the latest field artillery." Stanley's `massacre' of the islanders of Bumbireh pales into insignificance compared with this act of military overkill.

  In the year he was knighted, Stanley paid his last visit to Wales. His mother, Elizabeth Jones, his half-bother, Robert, and his half-sister, Emma, were all dead, and Robert Jones, his stepfather, would be gone by the end of the year. During his visit, he was taken in a closed carriage to Ffynnon Beuno, his aunt Mary Owen's former farmhouse and inn at Tremeirchion. He was surprised to find that Fynnon Benno was no longer a public house, but this did not stop him asking permission to visit the dairy, where he helped himself to a drink from a large earthenware jug of buttermilk, as he had done in boyhood.17 His aunt had died many years ago, and all his cousins, including his favourite, John Owen, were now dead. Nevertheless, at the Cross Foxes, Bodelwyddan, his twenty-five-year-old niece, Catherine Elizabeth Jones (his recently deceased half-brother Robert's daughter) was still in residence. Because Denzil was a blood member of his original Welsh family, Stanley's curiosity about his own origins had become more intense of late. His adopted son enabled him to reconnect with his past in a way that nobody else had ever made possible. His new interest in his family caused him, in 11898, to send William Hoffman to take photographs for him in St Asaph, Bodelwyddan, and Tremeirchion (Fynnon Beuno).28

  When William visited Furze Hill, he found that his master had called the lake Stanley Pool and the pinewoods the Aruwimi Forest. "`Come down to Stanley Pool, William," he would say to me, halfsadly, half-humorously, when I went down to Pirbright."9 In rgor, William lost his savings in a phonograph company that failed, and began working for a bakery that rarely allowed him enough time off to stay overnight at Furze Hill. Occasionally Stanley sent him money. On one of Hoffman's visits to Pirbright, the butler took him into the library to meet Stanley, only to be confronted by an empty room. At length, a voice boomed out hollowly: `Find me!' Stanley had concealed himself behind a hidden panel, as he did in his games with Denzil.i°

  Stanley felt that through his long service on the Congo, William had redeemed himself for his thefts and lies during the Emin Pasha Expedition, and though Dorothy disliked him, Stanley remained loyal to the former boot boy. Out of gratitude, Hoffman did whatever he could to be of service, such as warning his old master, after Bonny's death, that the hospital sergeant's diaries would probably be published, exposing Stanley, Hoffman said, to `the malicious spite he seems to have had against you'. Stanley was touched when Hoffman offered to state in public that he did not know of anything he (Stanley) had `done unbecoming ... as the commander of us all'.31 Forewarned, Stanley bought the diaries from Bonny's estate, and found that they would have revealed the keeping of sex slaves by the Rear Column's officers.

  Two upsetting deaths took place in Igor, that of his niece Catherine Jones, at the tragically early age of twenty-seven, and then, nine months later, that of Frederick Myers, Stanley's brother-in-law - his death posing for Stanley a problem about his own religious beliefs. This was because Fred was the author of a classic book, Human Personality and its Survival of Bodily Death, and a founder of the Society for Psychical Research.

  In 1189 z, when hearing Fred lecture at Toynbee Hall in the East End, Stanley had been utterly unconvinced by his claims that mediums made contact with the dead.3z When writing about the immortality of the soul in February 11903, Henry was perceptibly less sceptical: `We are all inclined to believe in it, but most of us, I fancy, secretly suspend judgment.'33 William James, the founding father of psychology, wrote an account of Fred's serene and fearless death, which would have been read by Dolly and Stanley. The deathbed scene, wrote James, `was in the grand style and something decidedly exceptional'. Myers had died in Rome, and Stanley's presence at his funeral marked his final trip abroad.34 In the r 8gos, possibly after William Mackinnon's death, Henry wrote of the `ever-living essence' which he believed survived death.

  Many years passed before I could get rid of that awful feeling which kept me as though spell-bound, or as though my soul had
fled into the void of the universe searching for its lost mate. I am not so free of it yet, that I can be indifferent to the bereavement and satisfied with my knowledge - or accept my loss as though it were natural.35

  Stanley brought his daily diary to a close at the end of r9or.36After that, his visits to London grew increasingly rare, and he turned down numerous invitations to dinners and meetings. In I9oz he was elected to membership of the Athenaeum Club, having been blackballed when his name had been put up nine years earlier.37

  His last journey to London for a national event was his attendance at Edward VII's coronation in Westminster Abbey on 9 August 119oz. He had complained a great deal about going, realizing that Dolly would make him stay on in the capital for four or five days, but the day itself impressed him, less for his proximity to `the most honoured sons and daughters of the British Empire' than for `the beauty of the music that filled aisle and nave ... and soared up to the heights'. The moment he thought `supremest [sic] of all was when the Westminster boys added their boyish voices, crying out: "Vivat, Vivat, Vivat, Regina, and Vivat, Vivat, Vivat King Edward the 7th" with clear, sharp insistence':.'Then I really felt I was glad I was there without reserve."' Youth had never lost its power to move him.

  Early in 11900, Mark Twain had introduced Stanley to a Swedish doctor called Kellgren who, by massaging his stomach during a bout of gastritis, managed to release the gases and accelerate his recovery. Kellgren insisted that, provided he always underwent massage, the milk and water diets, which had always left him so weak in the past, would be unnecessary.19 But though his gastritis had become more manageable, in March 11903 Henry complained of bouts of giddiness. When walking with Dolly near St James's Park, he swayed and almost fell.

  The final works that he managed to supervise at Furze Hill were the fitting out of a billiard room for the enjoyment of his guests (he himself had never learned to play), and the installation of a new marble mantelpiece in the drawing-room, decorated with sculptured cupids - a tribute to his love of babies.4° After Furze Hill's completion, Dolly had just eleven days to see how happy his country house had made her husband. Perhaps during this precious time, she wondered why she had forced him into politics and delayed this moment for so long. Almost ten years earlier, he had written: `If I could only persuade you to let me resign my candidacy, I should be so rejoiced. I am weak even to fragility.'41

  Dorothy came down from London on z April 11903. On the 11 3th he suffered a stroke in the night, with paralysis lasting for three minutes. Dorothy sent for Sir Victor Horsley, one of Britain's leading neurosurgeons, who said that no harm had been done and recommended massage and more nourishment. Four nights later, Stanley wakened his wife with a cry. A blood vessel had burst in the right side of his brain, paralysing the whole of his left side, giving him double vision and impairing his speech, but leaving his mind agonizingly clear. Horsley returned, and in due course his assistant, Dr Henry Curtis, arrived with two nurses and stayed in the house, along with the local doctor, Dr Templeton. In the Autobiography, Dorothy wrote of Stanley, by superhuman determination, shaving himself the very next morning. In letters to friends there was no such pretence. `He is utterly helpless,' she told one.

  He cannot sit up or turn in bed. I have two nurses and a doctor in the house ... The paralysis may pass ... He is very emotional by reason of this weakness, & at certain allusions to `work' for example, or any subject which awakens a sad train of thought, he breaks into an agony of tears, which I can hardly bear ... It is all such anguish ... I am anxious to keep the word Paralysis from the papers. No one knows but our immediate friends.

  Looking back, it agonized her to recall: `he had showed me with such pride the new billiard room ... all the drawing room hung with silk - exquisite tapestries in the hall - all done secretly to surprise mother & me'. 42,

  At this terrible time, Henry Wellcome, the American pharmaceutical tycoon, offered himself as a rock for Dorothy to lean on in all practical matters - one of which looked set to be making the arrangements for his funeral. Stanley had met Wellcome through Mrs Sheldon in 1884, and perhaps because of Stanley's fondness for May, and the rumours about her close relationship with Wellcome, the two men had never become intimate friends.43 Nevertheless, Wellcome idolized Stanley, and thirteen years earlier, at a rowdy and hostile meeting of the Aborigines' Protection Society, had defended him most trenchantly from allegations of brutal acts committed during the Emin Pasha Relief Expedition.44 Now, at another moment of need, the tycoon was ever ready to help and sympathize. `My beloved husband - My dear Stanley has been very ill,' Dolly wrote to him on z9 April, and then sent regular progress reports every few days. On 4 May, Stanley was too tired to sit in a chair and had to return to bed. On the 13th he managed to move his arm in the night, and by the zznd was able to sit in a chair in the garden for an hour or two. An attack of malaria then caused a setback; but by the end of May he could manage slight movements of his arm and his leg on his paralysed side. Dolly was pitched between hope and despair as signs of recovery were succeeded by setbacks and vice versa. In early June his `good' leg swelled up, indicat ing that his heart had been affected, but his eyes steadily improved and he was soon able to read to himself. Whenever he was able to spend several hours in the open air, he slept better.

  In late June Jephson came to see his old commanding officer, and though he was the more mobile of the two, he too looked doomed.45 For a time, in the early 118gos, he had been a Queen's Messenger carrying important diplomatic despatches all over Europe, but when he was found unconscious on a train, he had had no choice but to resign. In 1891, he had fallen in love with a Californian girl, Anna Head, whose rich father had thought him a penniless adventurer, and had vetoed any engagement. Stanley had written to Mr Head unsuccessfully urging him to reconsider. But Addison Head died at the end of 119 oz, and now the mortally sick Jephson was planning his marriage.46 Stanley had cared more for Jephson than for any other officer on the Emin Pasha expedition and it distressed him to see him in a state as parlous as his own. Someone else whose visits Henry encouraged was William Hoffman. When William first came, his master's face was drawn and stiff and he could neither speak intelligibly nor see properly. But when his old valet returned a few weeks later, Henry greeted him from his wheelchair in the garden: `One day you will find that the miracle has happened and I am walking once more.' For William, who had walked across the African continent with Stanley, it was heartbreaking to see him unable to take a single step.47

  Henry's heart condition now threatened to stop any further improvement. But after `all the known remedies, Digitalis, and keeping up both feet', as well as electric treatment, and massage, Stanley was able to be taken out in a pony trap. In September, he even managed to stand unsupported for a few moments. Months ago, in May, eight-year-old Denzil and Dolly's mother had returned to London - the boy for his school lessons - so Dolly was now left in the country with her husband for several months. It was a difficult time, she told George Bernard Shaw, whom she had known since the mid-r 8gos. `I want to see hansom cabs, omnibuses, and "extra specials" running, and handsome policemen, and the jostling multitude. I only put up with trees.'48

  At last, at the end of October, Henry was well enough to return to London, where Dolly had arranged for him to be seen by Professor James Risien Russell, another distinguished neurologist. The sick man's treatment was not changed. Wellcome called on Henry, at Richmond Terrace, every few days, and Dolly took him out in a carriage each afternoon. Until his bedtime at seven, he would sit in the morning room, reading and smoking. His serene acceptance disturbed Dolly. `At times,' she confessed, `I have wanted him to accept less calmly ... I have really at moments resented his submission.' By now Dolly had come to love Denzil and found him `indescribably charming and sympathetic' at this harrowing time.49 Against all the odds, by February 11904, Stanley could walk slowly, dragging his left leg, with a stick in his right hand. Dorothy summoned a photographer to take pictures of him, and with a shaky hand he signed a fe
w for friends. He sits very stiffly and sadly in his chair, looking like a man of eighty, but with a stern and determined expression, as if making a great effort to resemble the old public Stanley.s°

  Henry asked to return to Furze Hill for Easter, and even managed to walk part of the way along the station platform. But though he expressed pleasure to be back in his country home, in mid-April he became gravely ill with pleurisy and Dorothy took him back to London on the 27th in an `ambulance-carriage'. On r May 11904 she wrote despairingly to Henry Wellcome: `My darling husband may no longer be spared to me. His heart is rapidly failing. He is just conscious.' She asked Wellcome to write to Jephson for her. On 3 May, Denzil came into Stanley's room and kissed his hand, which woke him. As Henry touched the boy's cheek, Denzil said: `Father, are you happy?' `Always when I see you, dear,' he replied. It was this late relationship with a fatherless boy, rather than his undoubted greatness as an explorer, that brought him, in his declining years, the most intense happiness he had ever known.

  From the evening of Friday the 5th Henry drifted in and out of consciousness, only uttering occasional words. Once, in a moment of clarity, he cried out: `I want to be free! I want to go into the woods.' He also spoke brokenly of `his men' and `circumnavigation'. On the 7th Dorothy wrote to Henry Wellcome: `My darling is sinking, slowly and painlessly. His clear mind wanders at times, and his eyes look far away. The Great Change cannot be far off now.' William Hoffman came to Richmond Terrace, Whitehall, on the 9th, but Dorothy told him Stanley was too ill to see him and that he should come back the following day. At four o' clock on the morning of the Toth, Stanley opened his eyes as nearby Big Ben was striking. `How strange,' he murmured, `so that is time.' He died two hours later, soon after the great clock had struck six.s'