BIOGRAPHY

Stanley. But he was put off, largely by indications that the necessary source material was not all available. By one of those coincidences beloved of biographers, he was giving a lecture in 2002 when he met Maurits Wynants of Belgium’s Muséée Royal de l’Afrique Centrale, who was cataloguing Stanley’s entire personal archive (including 5,000 letters) and invited him to use it. Five years on, Jeal has produced as comprehensive and readable a life of Stanley as is likely to be written. He covers the ground from his subject’s inauspicious birth in 1841 as John Rowlands, an illegitimate child abandoned by his family to a workhouse in North Wales, to his death, sixty-three years later in London, a knight of the realm married to an ambitious artist who specialised in sentimental portraits of street urchins. In between, Rowlands had reinvented himself as the American Henry Stanley, the name of a New Orleans cotton broker who he claimed adopted him but whom he never actually met. He enjoyed a colourful Civil War. After enlisting in the Confederate army, he was captured at the battle of Shiloh. Imprisoned at Camp Douglas outside Chicago, he decided that, because he felt no particular enthusiasm for the Southern cause, he might do better to change sides. However he then deserted from the Unionist army to return to Europe, later rejoining the Unionist navy, from which he absconded again. Ever resourceful, he found a job reporting the frontier wars against the American Indians, before gaining his first foreign assignment covering a British campaign in Ethiopia. Eventually in 1869 James Gordon Bennett Jr, proprietor of the brash New York Herald, agreed to send him to find Livingstone. Although Stanley’s subsequent discovery of the errant Scotsman made headlines in both Britain and America, he was granted only ten minutes of Gordon Bennett’s time on his return to New York. He kicked his heels for a couple of years before adopting the mantle of his new (and now deceased) hero Livingstone and returning to Africa on a gruelling 7,000-mile expedition which not only explored the source of the Nile but pushed along the Congo River to the Atlantic Ocean. After a period as an administrator in the newly opened-up Congo on behalf of King Leopold II of Belgium, he returned to the region on one last expedition in 1887 to rescue Emin Pasha, governor of the Anglo-Egyptian province of Equatoria, who was threatened by Mahdist forces. Jeal’s achievement is on several levels. As a historian, he gives a fine sense of the interests jockeying in Africa in the

Stanley’s version

wake of Livingstone – from Arab slave-traders through would-be German and Belgian empire-builders to the British businessman Sir William MacKinnon, who hoped that free trade would follow the Bible as a civilising influence. As a chronicler, he keeps up the excitement in reporting the details of arduous, often repetitive treks over difficult terrain. And as a biographer, his feel for his subject allows him to interpret the more damning indictments in a sympathetic manner. So he thinks the explorer exaggerated the violence on his trips (a cause of outrage at the time) largely to win readers, and he finds no evidence that Stanley was aware of King Leopold’s plans to enslave the Congo. One of his most interesting observations is to show how strongly Stanley was affected by his encounter with the frail Livingstone, adopting him as a father figure and genuinely seeking to carry on his work. As for that meeting at Ujiji in November 1871, Jeal thinks Stanley made up the strange wording of his exchange with Livingstone because of his lifelong insecurities – adopting the clipped tone and understatement of the British officers he had accompanied in Ethiopia. While acknowledging her debt to Jeal for background, Pettitt’s approach is to tease out the meeting’s significance by interpreting its cultural representations. From the first US newspaper reports to Hollywood’s 1939 film Stanley and Livingstone starring Spencer Tracy, the Americans tended to show themselves as bounding to the rescue of the ineffectual British. But there was also a more subtle message of the coming together of Anglo-American interests after the tensions of the Civil War. (The transatlantic telegraph cables which allowed Stanley to transmit his account of meeting Livingstone to New York were an example of renewed Anglo-Saxon cooperation.) Ironies abound in this story. The New York Heraldwhich inevitably played up its discovery of Livingstone was known for its Confederate (and therefore pro-slavery) leanings. And while Stanley hoped that his work in the Congo would become like ‘a torch to those who sought to do good’, it only attracted the exploitative attentions of King Leopold. Niall Ferguson got it about right when, in his book Empire, he referred to the Ujiji meeting as being ‘between two generations’ – Livingstone’s, which believed in the moral rebirth of Africa, and Stanley’s, committed to the harsh realities of imperialism. Tim Jeal shows Stanley as the crucial transitional figure, while Clare Pettitt takes a useful step back to get the historical perspective. To order these books, see LR Bookshop on page 37

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LITERARY REVIEW August 2007 BIOGRAPHY

HUGHMASSINGBERD SWEET AND SOUR

PRINCESS MARGARET: A LIFEUNRAVELLED

★By Tim Heald (Weidenfeld & Nicolson 346pp £20)

I ONCESPENTa Sunday with Princess Margaret. It was not an unqualified success. I was supposed to be showing her round some houses and gardens, in which she took a lively interest, but because of my incompetent map-reading we found ourselves in the hall of an unplanned pile. The wretched chatelaine, roused from an afternoon nap to discover that the Queen’s sister was on the premises, dropped a very creditable curtsey in her nightdress on the stairs, but the Princess was not amused. Nonetheless, I was quite bowled over by Her Royal Highness. Far from the grotesquely caricatured demon drunken dwarf of popular mythology, the Princess was fun to be with and, in the flesh, extraordinarily alluring, with beautiful eyes and lovely skin. Even in her midfifties she still had an overpowering sex appeal. She was a witty, intelligent, stimulating companion with a genuine enthusiasm for the arts, as well as evidently having a religious, indeed spiritual, side to her personality. What especially struck me was her loyalty. When we eventually arrived at the right house, I confided in the Princess that I was hoping to feature it in an article. At just the right moment she tackled the initially reluctant owner: ‘Now, you will let him write it up, won’t you?’ Happily Tim Heald captures all these qualities in his admirably well-balanced biography. He also rightly stresses her much-underrated sense of duty, throws light on the largely unacknowledged hard work she undertook in the service of the Crown, and makes the excellent point that her children, ‘conspicuously not royal in the sense that their mother felt herself to be, won wide approval for their apparent normality and niceness’. He adds: ‘To some they seemed her greatest credit.’ Yet this is certainly no hagiography. As Heald himself, who knew and liked the Princess, says: ‘She could be inconsiderate, rude, insensitive and spoiled.’ Even close friends acknowledged she was contrary and contradictory. The veteran courtier, Lt-Col Sir ‘Johnny’ Johnston, who died last year, summed it up pretty well: ‘When she was nice, she was very very nice. When she was awkward she was very awkward.’ As he showed in his perceptive biography of Prince Philip, the affable Heald hits it off well with courtiers, understands what makes them tick and, as an experienced reporter, takes the trouble to explain how the ‘royal roadshow’ really works. Behind the bright and

Amusing, but not always amused

breezy faççade of his chatty, refreshingly irreverent text, there is a sound structure of solid research trawling through the Royal Archives, files of letters from ladies-in-waiting and exhaustively detailed records of long-forgotten royal tours. His journalistic eye for amusing detail, whether in Tuvalu or Swaziland (where the King, whom she was investing with an Order, towered above her), makes for an entertaining read. In Japan the Princess asked an imperial prince whether he enjoyed dancing. The Japanese prince, who had little English, replied: ‘No, I prefer my balls on ice.’ I also particularly enjoyed this extract from a letter to a circus from the Princess’s office: ‘You ask about the bouquet. I think it would be best if this were not to be presented by one of the clowns, or indeed an animal.’ With his sensible understanding of the stuffiness of the postwar Establishment, Heald finds the behaviour of Group Captain Peter Townsend in embarking on a relationship with his boss’s daughter (‘above all, his capacity for self-delusion’) ‘frankly bizarre’. But neither is he convinced by the Earl of Snowdon’s semi-rhetorical question, ‘I never really thought the Townsend business was all it was cracked up to be, did you?’ Heald shrewdly assesses their marriage ‘on the rebound’ and gives a sympathetic account of Princess Margaret’s gradual disappearance from centre stage, followed by a sad end. When this most enjoyable book is reprinted, it would be worth correcting a few slips. The nickname ‘Tugboat Annie’ (because she moved from peer to peer) was not bestowed upon Mrs Ian Fleming but the Countess of Rosse (also unkindly dubbed ‘Lady Roscommon’), Lord Snowdon’s mother. The Duke of Marlborough is not called ‘Sonny’ but ‘Sunny’ – short for Sunderland, his original courtesy title. John Wayne was hardly ‘diminutive’ (perhaps Heald was thinking of Alan Ladd?). ‘Debo’ Devonshire was not Mistress of the Robes; that was her mother-in-law, ‘Moucher’. The late Duke of Beaufort’s nickname of ‘Master’ did not allude to his Mastership of the Horse or of the Beaufort Hunt but – as he told me when I went to interview him about his memoirs, a work he had clearly not read, let alone written – went back to his boyhood, when he was given his own pack of harriers at the age of eight. And Billy Wallace was not an ‘Hon’. Such things mattered to HRH The Princess Margaret. To order this book at £16, see LR Bookshop on page 37

LITERARY REVIEW August 2007

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