Spent a while perusing old maps while digesting lots of Xmas goodies, and my eyes were drawn to the residence of Henry Morton Stanley, one of our local celebrity historical figures. Well known for his exploration of Africa and his famous search for Dr Livingstone ( I presume weve all heard of that?), he had a very hard childhood, born John Rowlands in 1841 in Denbighshire. He was abandoned by his mother as an infant, raised initially by a grandfather that died when he was 5, and after stays with various other family members was taken in at a Union workhouse, where he was treated very badly by the older boys and allegedly the headmaster too. HE received an education though and left for the US to start a new life. He met a man named Henry Hope Stanley while job hunting and became firm friends, eventually taking his friends name in his honour. He fought on both sides in the American Civil War, and eventually became a journalist working for the New York Herald, whose owner employed him to travel to Africa to search for David Livingstone. Later expeditions took him back to Africa, to firstly explore the Congo River, then (hired by Leopold III) to claim the Congo and other lands for the Belgians. In his later years he married Dorothy Tennant (picture below, painted by another fascinating local figure GF Watts from Compton) and they adopted a son Denzil. In 1898 the Stanleys began a long search for a country home, eventually finding a place deep in the Surrey countryside, Furze Hill, nr Pirbright. From his memoirs: Furze Hill is not more than thirty miles from London, but it is in wild and lovely country, wild and lovely because kept so, by the War Department, for manoeuvring grounds. The country around mostly consists of great stretches of furze and heather, which are golden and purple in summer, and rough pine woods. No one can buy land here, or build; and Furze Hill is planted in this beautiful wilderness, just a house, gardens, a few fields, a wood, and a quiet lake, fed by a little stream. They fell in love with the place, moved there in Sep 1899 and spent a great deal of time and effort on making it their own, building a small farm, erecting bridges over the stream, and lavishing gifts of orchards, rose gardens, pianos, well stocked libraries, and billiard tables, on the building they called the bride. A lasting change they made, and the one that really caught my eye was something that was originally a pice of fun by Dorothy, the naming of various areas of Furze Hill and its surrounds after her husbands travels... Our little wood I called the Aruwimi Forest. A stream was named the Congo. To the fields I gave such African names as “Wanyamwezi,” “Mazamboni,” “Katunzi,” “Luwamberri,” etc. One side of Stanley Pool is “Umfwa,” the other “Kinchassa,” and “Calino point.” Stanley was amused at my fancy, and adopted the names to designate the spots.--D. S. Some of these names became official, appearing on several iterations of the OS map, and indeed the Arawimi Woods are still noted on Google Maps. I looked up the names that appeared to see what they were named after, and found the following. The most obvious change, and possibly my favourite, was the renaming of the Hodge Brook, where it passed through their land, to the Congo stream! Manyuema was named after a tribe of cannibals in the Congo basin, Mazamboni (the original farm they built, later an equestrian centre) was the king of a warrior tribe in Uganda and Aruwimi is a tributary river of the mighty Congo. Ruwenzori Hill is named after the slightly larger range of mountains that was surveyed by Stanley on his last trip. Sir Henrys years at Furze Hill were happy, but sadly brief. He died at his London address (2 Richmond Terrace, Whitehall) in 1904, and as anyone who has visited will be aware, was buried at St Michaels churchyard, Pirbright, his grave marker an enormous slab of granite, bearing the name given to him by Congolese tribesman Bula Matari (translates as breaker of rocks, which is either an adoring nickname, or condescending pejorative, depending on the account you read!) His son Denzil was still living at Furze Hill on his death in 1959.
Posted on: Fri, 26 Dec 2014 23:33:17 +0000
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