Stanley: The Impossible Life of Africa's Greatest Explorer Read online

  Stanley exaggerated and lied about the level of brutality at St Asaph - his most notorious false claim being that a boy had been beaten to death by James Francis, the schoolteacher. The workhouse records were kept with bureaucratic thoroughness, and they show that nothing of the kind took place when Stanley was there; as they do again, on the day on which Stanley claimed to have left for good, after having beaten his teacher insensible, following a brutal assault by the man. The only diary record of his early years is a brief and fragmentary affair, written by him four decades later in Swahili - as if, even then, he had still needed to distance himself as far as possible from the pain of those days. The entry for 5 January 11854 reads in translation: `He [Francis] hit me a lot today for no reason. I will never forget,"3 and this perhaps explains his need to console himself with fantasies about overcoming the man who had symbolized his captivity. There was no adult at St Asaph willing, or able, to comfort him. `It took me some time to learn the unimportance of tears in a workhouse. Hitherto tears had brought me relief in one shape or another ...'14 His inability to convey in words the extent of his mental suffering accounts in part for his exaggeration of the physical violence in the workhouse.

  The inspector's report on St Asaph in the year of Stanley's admission was very bad. The girls - there were nineteen of them - were said to have been corrupted by prostitutes and from them `had learnt the tricks of the trade'; the men had taken part in every possible vice, and the boys slept two in a bed, an older with a younger, `so that from the very start ... [they] were beginning to understand and practise things they should not'. The master, as distinct from the teacher, was censured for being drunk and `taking indecent liberties with the nurses'. In the words of the report, the teacher, James Francis, aged thirty-two, had `received no training, and speaks very broken English and appears to understand the language imperfectly'. Out of thirty boys, ten were learning to write but `only one copy-book was well-written'.s Yet Stanley would state a dozen years after leaving: `I had a pretty fair education during my ten years in St Asaph workhouse."6 And he was being serious - vice, brutality and low academic standards had also been prevalent in the country's most famous schools, such as Eton and Winchester. Nor was it disastrous that a teacher should speak poor English in a school where the first language of most children was Welsh. In fact the inspector's reports improved so much as the years passed, that a satisfactory situation was recorded by 11856, the year in which Stanley left. Francis even received an efficiency award and a rise in salary.'

  Stanley learned to read and write, and even to love books - though the only novels given him to read were pious morality tales." He was good at arithmetic and geography and could write remarkably neatly at an early age. From time to time he was even called in to help with the workhouse accounts." His teacher, James Francis, who had left the mines after losing his hand in a pit accident, asked Stanley, as head boy, to deputize for him when he was away, and rewarded him with small gifts. Stanley did not, however, escape all punishment, and he would never forget being beaten after an illicit blackberrying expedi- tion.zO On several occasions, Francis called on Stanley's uncle Moses and `urged him to do something for little John, since he was an excellent scholar and endowed with extraordinary talents'. But Moses always refused to help.Z"

  Why Stanley chose to represent Francis as a sadistic monster will never be known with certainty. Francis was a bachelor, and his many gifts to chosen boys would undoubtedly raise eyebrows in any school today.22 The fact that homosexual practices among the boys were remarked upon by the inspectors suggests a possible reason for Stanley's hatred. An unwanted sexual advance by his bachelor teacher may account for his violent antipathy. His mother's promiscuity meant that, as a young man, Stanley was disgusted by overt sexuality, and especially by prostitutes. In his letters to his first serious girlfriend, he insisted that he had remained `pure' in the workhouse." A sexual advance by his teacher would therefore have been an especially shocking betrayal. A simple withdrawal of favour hardly seems adequate motivation for Stanley's vilification of someone who had once rewarded and praised him.

  A momentous event occurred in December 1850. The boy was a month short of his tenth birthday. Without warning, during the dinner-hour, Francis took John aside and `pointing to a tall woman with an oval face, and a great coil of dark hair behind her head', asked him if he knew her.

  `No, sir,' I replied.

  `What, do you not know your own mother?'

  I started with a burning face, and directed a shy glance at her and perceived she was regarding me with a look of cool, critical scrutiny. I had expected to feel a gush of tenderness towards her, but her expression was so chilling that the valves of my heart closed as with a snap.14

  In reality, the boy's longing to be loved by his mother had not been turned off as if by some convenient tap. Elizabeth Parry had never before come to see John during his four years in the workhouse, and now she only came because she and two of her other children had been admitted as destitute paupers. But this did not stop him dreaming of winning this aloof woman's love. Despite his rage at being thrown away by a mother who kept her younger children with her, he would for many years persist with attempts to please her, even after humiliating setbacks. No photograph of Elizabeth Parry as a young woman survives, though Stanley once carried one with him everywhere. A photograph of her aged about fifty - the only one known to exist - is published for the first time as this book's Plate 3. The square shape of her head is very similar to her famous son's, as is her resolute and determined expression.z5

  People who are shut up in institutions often have fantasies of escape and freedom, of climbing over walls, living in woods, and walking for days towards far horizons. It is easy to see why Stanley's years in the workhouse would predispose him towards travel in a limitless continent. Stanley felt imprisoned and cut off. It was as if he and the others `were in another planet ... Year after year we noted the passing of the seasons, by the budding blossoms, the flight of bees, the corn which changed from green to gold.' Meanwhile, in his own words, he 'vegetated within the high walls surrounding our home of lowliness'.26 On rare occasions, when permitted to visit the small town of St Asaph, John, with his pale face and fustian garments, was amazed at the good fortune of the local boys who could eat raisins and sugar, and wear colourful neckties. The desire to escape was in him early. When he was ten, he ran away to Denbigh. But the outcome of this trip was so painful that he never wrote about it.

  Once over the wall, John had nowhere to go except to his neglectful relatives. So he headed for the house of his uncle Moses Parry, whose successful butchery business enabled him to live in Vale Street, the most desirable address in town. In 118 51, Moses and his wife, Kitty - who had played the leading role in forcing little John out of the house where he had been born - had two sons: a baby and a boy of three. They also had two servants.' In the 1188os Kitty told a journalist how she had woken one morning to find John at her door. She asked him in Welsh where he had come from.

  `With twinkling eyes, he replied: "Dw'i wedi dengid." ("I have escaped.") Since daybreak, he had walked eight miles ... I washed his face and hands and then gave him a good breakfast. During the rest of the day he played about the place with his cousins. That night I put him to bed with one of my boys. Late that night,' con tinued Mrs Parry, `his uncle Moses came home and I told him that his sister, Betsy's little boy was in bed upstairs. Moses was on bad terms with his sister, and he ordered me to send him back to St Asaph in the morning.'Zs

  Moses was a respectable tradesman, and the feckless Elizabeth with her four illegitimate children was not the kind of sister who would help anyone's business, but his mother's promiscuity was not John's fault. He had spent a happy day and night in an ordinary home and witnessed the natural affection between a mother and her sons. Yet his prosperous uncle sent him back to the workhouse in the name of respectability. Years later, a tugboat skipper who had been at St Asaph with Stanley wrote to him saying that he well recalled the m
orning when he came back from his cousins' house in a state of collapse. John Rowlands's prostration had been due to his forcible return to a loveless institution, after having been part, albeit briefly, of an ordinary family.'9

  So how did John finally get free of the workhouse? In the discharge book, it is stated that he left St Asaph on 113 May 118 56, and the entry reads: `Gone to his uncle at the National School, Holywell.'3° Although this was wrong - since he went to his cousin, who was the schoolmaster at nearby Brynford - the entry suggests that before he left the workhouse a plan had been made for him to become a trainee teacher. In his fantasy of escape from the workhouse after administering a beating to his master, Stanley claimed to have run away with a boy called Mose. In due course, Mose and John, in the fictitious account published in the Autobiography, arrive at the house of Mose's mother. Stanley's account of their welcome reveals his own keenest desire at the age of fifteen.

  When Mose crossed the threshold, he was received with a resounding kiss, and became the object of copious endearments. He was hugged convulsively in the maternal bosom, patted on the back, his hair was frizzled by maternal fingers, and I knew not whether the mother was weeping or laughing, for tears poured over smiles in streams. The exhibition of fond love was not without its effect on me, for I learned how a mother should behave to her boy.31

  At the time of this imagined homecoming, John's own mother was giving birth to her fifth illegitimate child, James - the second son fathered by Robert Jones, the local plasterer who would become her husband in 11860.31

  Given his mother's promiscuity, there is no certainty about the identity of Stanley's father. He himself believed him to have been John Rowlands, Junior, of Llys (son of John Rowlands, senior, of Llys, who owned a farm outside Denbigh). Indeed John, junior, is named in church records as the father of John, who is described as the bastard son of himself and Elizabeth Parry.33 In 11886, Stanley's mother, Elizabeth, would tell the Welsh journalist Owen `Morien' Morgan that John Rowlands, junior, had died at about the time of Stanley's birth - whereas in fact, as Elizabeth had known well, he survived for a further thirteen years.14 Despite this, she had also told her son John that his father had died in 118411.35 So why did Elizabeth Parry lie to her son? Plainly, she must have wanted to stop him seeing, or even contacting, his supposed father, as he would have done at once had he known that he was alive. But considering her desperate financial difficulties, and the fact that John Rowlands, senior, was prosperous, it is surely very surprising that Elizabeth did nothing to secure his financial help - if only to keep her firstborn out of the workhouse.

  Of course, if John Rowlands was not Stanley's father, it is at once apparent why Elizabeth should have told her son that his `father' had died years ago. Elizabeth's puzzling reticence about John Rowlands, junior, lends significant weight to a well-attested local belief that Stanley's father had really been a Denbigh solicitor, James Vaughan Horne. The Horne theory gains strength from the fact that it was, and is, believed in by the descendants of a tight-knit group of professional people - mainly fellow lawyers - ideally placed to have known the personal habits of the man. Logic suggests that Elizabeth's most potent reason for telling that lie to Stanley - about his father being dead when he was very much alive - would have been her fear that the drunken John Rowlands, junior, would have told her son John the truth about James Horne (who has been said to have paid John Rowlands, junior, to accept paternity). In my opinion the balance of probability favours James Horne as Stanley's father" [see this note for further evidence]. Unfortunately, Horne and his wife had no children within wedlock, and his only relation was a childless sister. So the paternity conundrum cannot be discussed with any descendants, and no daguerreotypes, miniatures, or even amateur drawings of the elusive Mr Horne have survived to show a possible resemblance to the adult Stanley.37

  To young John's immense relief, one member of his family was prepared to help him when he left the workhouse. Fortunately, this particular relation offered a better chance of self-improvement than John would have gained from living with any of the others. In 118 56, Moses Owen, the second son of Elizabeth Parry's widowed sister, Mary, stood out as a remarkable twenty-year-old.38 After taking an honours degree at University College, Bangor, he had at once been appointed headmaster of the National School at Brynford, near Holywell. A house went with the job, as did a housekeeper. Although Moses was a prim and didactic young man, he was generous too, and the fifteenyear-old John learned a great deal from him, particularly in mathematics and literature. Every day, Moses tutored his cousin for several hours after school.39 Thanks to Moses' small library, John learned how to use books for research purposes.4° Without these skills acquired at Brynford, he might never have possessed the confidence needed to seize his chances in journalism ten years later.

  Moses' ambitious mother, Mary Owen, believed he would spoil his marriage prospects by harbouring his feckless aunt's bastard son. Her nagging soon started to affect the young head teacher's treatment of his teenage cousin. Often young John went to bed in tears after being accused of being `good for nothing but to cobble pauper's boots 1.41 Then the pupils at the school mocked him for his `ignoble origins'. As Stanley recalled: `The effect of it was to drive me within my own shell,' to feel `forever banned by having been an inmate of the workhouse'.41 It is difficult to grasp today exactly how disgraceful illegitimacy and living in a workhouse were thought to be in the nineteenth century.

  One day, a teacher called Hughes found John reading Dr Johnson's short novel Rasselas.43 There is something terribly poignant about the workhouse boy reading this book with its theme of the vanity of all human wishes. Rasselas, mythical Prince of Abyssinia, has been reared in the `Happy Valley' where his every wish has been granted. So he becomes desperate to escape his boredom and find new pleasures in the outside world. Instead of happiness, he finds disappointment. Johnson suggests that it is our ability to imagine a richer, happier life that causes our unhappiness by making us long for what we have not got. Rasselas returns chastened to the `Happy Valley' to learn to be satisfied with his old life. Stanley could not have enjoyed this ending. If anywhere was going to offer him happiness, it was going to be the outside world rather than where he had come from.

  At the end of nine months, John's cousin Moses sent his young pupil teacher for a break to Fynnon Benno, the small farmhouse six miles north-east of Denbigh that was run by his mother, Mary Owen, who had some cows, sheep and pigs, and brewed beer for her own tavern. Stanley believed that Moses would never invite him to return, and he was right. But he knew and liked the farm, having worked there for a month on leaving the workhouse. This earlier stay had enabled him to earn enough money to pay for some new clothes to replace his workhouse uniform. His aunt Mary had arranged for him to be photographed in his new suit, and this picture - the first ever taken of him - is remarkable. The future Henry Stanley's expression is one that would remain characteristic for the rest of his life and combines extraordinary determination, with vulnerability and unhappiness - the mouth turned down, the lips compressed, the eyes unusually piercing, especially the left, and his whole posture awkward and yet at the same time somehow defiant in his ill-fitting Eton collar and tight waistcoat. In fact Stanley was a little podgy, a problem that would afflict him on and off over the years. The chairman of the workhouse board, Captain Leigh Thomas, had upset him once by suggesting, tongue in cheek, that `it would be of vast benefit' to him if he `were put under a garden roller'.44 A sense of humour was not yet among Stanley's attributes. But to date his life had given him little to laugh about.

  He had not been long at Fynnon Benno (St Beuno's Well), in the hamlet of Tremeirchion, when he realized that his recently widowed aunt Mary meant to get rid of him after a few months. If she had ever shown him any affection, he wrote later: `I should have become too home-loving ever to leave ... I would have served my aunt for years, for a mere smile, but she had not interest enough in me to study my disposition, or to suspect that the silent boy with a som
ewhat dogged look could be so touched by emotion.'45 John did not want to leave. He was content to mow, plough, shear sheep and mix pigswill, and he also became fond of the bleak surrounding hills and enjoyed driving out the cows to `Craig Fawr', a rocky outcrop affording views of Denbigh.

  While at Brynford, John had read Robert Browning's recently published poem `Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came' and had been overwhelmed by it. Out on `Craig Fawr', or wandering among the windswept hills, he imagined being Childe Roland, the legendary knight of Charlemagne, as he set out on an impossible quest. The Roland of the poem is, like John himself, depressed and fearful of the future. His old companions have let him down, and now everything is up to him, though his chances of success on his military mission are poor. He cannot go back, so he must let go of his past and press on into the unknown. He is a man whose great destiny may also be his doom. The poem's mix of pathos, self-dramatizing whistling in the wind and genuine nobility held great appeal for the troubled adolescent. It ends with Roland raising his famous horn to his lips and preparing to charge, though death looks sure to follow. A decade later, Stanley would write about the importance of this poem to his developing psyche in a series of letters to his first significant girlfriend. The fact that Roland was so close to his own surname, Rowlands, would have added to the mystique of the poem .41