​

 

His upbringing appears to have been left to his kindly grandfather, Moses Parry, who was once a prosperous tradesman but had fallen on hard times. The family’s financial ruin in the eyes of the world had only been underlined by what would have been seen as Elizabeth’s arrant immorality, and there would have been many fingers pointed and things said. The illegitimacy rate in Denbighshire in the 1840s was no worse than average for England and Wales, but by then the old, bucolic days when one boy was to all purposes as good as another, as long as he could handle a plough and scythe, were gone.

 

It was an increasingly capitalist and organised society where people were expected to earn their keep, pay their way, and stick to the rules: and that included reproduction. Having illegitimate children was a challenge to public morality, a burden on the ratepayers, an anti-social act. Further, it was a society heavily influenced by Calvinism: ready to judge, quick to condemn, and convinced that the contagion of sin was hereditary. Being illegitimate was no fault of one’s own, but unless one had heavy financial support it effectively destroyed one’s chances of a respectable career and marriage.

 

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

 

 

​

​​

Despite this, all could have gone well for little John Rowlands had Moses Parry not died in 1846, leaving the child in the care of two uncles. Not wanting to raise him themselves, they paid carers half a crown a week to look after him, until they decided that he was too much of an embarrasment and a drain on their resources: so they stopped paying. His carers promptly placed him, aged six, in the St Asaph workhouse as an “abandoned bastard”, unwanted by anyone, and he stayed there nine years until he was 15 years old, when he had to leave and fend for himself.

​​

That abandonment at the workhouse was probably the formative experience of his life. He has been betrayed and cast off without warning by people he trusted, and confined to an institution which provided adequate food and clothing and some education, but no love. He quickly learnt that tears had no value there, and that to survive one had to be adept at strategems and tactics: be obedient to those in charge; virtuous to all appearances; lie; shift blame; bluff, and respond to any challenge or ragging by other boys with instant and frightening physical violence. Boys in the workhouse with him later remebered his ability as a stidwr, a ‘thrasher’; that he was academically gifted (as far as workhouse education went), and a very good mimic: talents which he would later employ to his advantage

 

He grew about himself a cold, prickly, protective shell of distrust and gruffness, especially towards strangers, for as long as he lived. His degree of alienation was compounded by the fact that he’d also been moved from a monoglot Welsh society to one where anyone and anything of any importance, including his education, such as it was, was in English only, and speaking Welsh was punishable, in schooltime at least: yet most workhouse inmates could speak no other language. More of that anon.

 

Even so, on his release he could have been absorbed back into ‘normal’ society, albeit scarred by his experiences: but he was not given that opportunity. His family still didn’t want him, and he was shuffled off to an aunt who kept a farm and pub in Tremeirchion, where he was happy tending cattle but always the butt of contempt. When he failed to get a job as a railway clerk in Mold, he was passed on to another aunt in Liverpool. She and her husband were kinder to him, but after six months of barely earning his keep his welcome there was wearing thin, so he shipped to America as a cabin boy and quickly found deskwork there. In June 1860 he was recorded in the US cenus as ‘John Rollins’, clerk, in New Orleans, and again in August that year at Cypress Bend, Arkansas under the name of ‘William Henry Stanley’, clerk. In those two months John Rowlands of Denbigh, the despised bastard workhouse brat, had gone; and William Henry Stanley, or Henry Morton Stanley as he later called himself, took great pains for the rest of his life that John Rowlands should not resurface.

 

By 1862 he was putting it about that he was an American. He adopted an American accent and mannerisms, though his north Welsh accent returned whevever he was excited or angry. Following a less than glorious career during the American Civil War, where he changed sides, and a disastrous adventure in Turkey, he returned to Denbigh in high style in 1866, driving a coach and two horses, dressed in a fake American naval overcoat and claiming to be a US naval officer, though still ready to acknowledge old aquaintances and speak his native tongue. On becoming a journalist and following further adventures in Ethiopia, he came to wordwide attention due to the success of an expedition to find Doctor Livingstone in 1872.

 

In the publicity storm following that, however, he denied that he was Welsh, or could speak or understand the language, though everyone in the Vale of Clwyd knew that he was and he could.

A bomb was put under his efforts to deny his roots when an unauthorised biography was published shortly thereafter, proving that he was indeed John Rowlands of Denbigh. He retorted in typical fashion:

 

‘I’ve never sung a Welsh song, as I can’t speak the

language … My name is not Thomas, Rowlands, Smith,

Jones or Robinson, but Henry M. Stanley only. Aged 16

I was in Missouri, 17 in Arkansas, 18 in New Orleans,

19 travelling Europe, 20 in the war, and so on.’

 

He claimed he was a true American, and had ten thousand friends in the United States to prove that. It was what would become a typically Stanleyesque mixture of lies and truths with a sprinkling of false dates by which he constantly attempted to throw any researcher off his trail.

 

His efforts at denial ruffled feathers in Denbigh, and earned him the contempt of many in the town and beyond. In the eyes of many Welsh people the label of Dic Siôn Dafydd, the archetypical anglophile turncoat and renegade, stuck to him thereafter. The Rhyl Journal laid into him for his lack of Welsh patriotism, and the local MP, Watkin Williams, circulated information on Stanley’s true background to the high and mighty of the land, including Queen Victoria: but if that was meant to stall Stanley’s career, it failed. The fame of the man who found Dr Livingstone (whether the doctor was actually ‘lost’ or not, or even wanted to be found at all) more than outshone his detractors, and he rode out the storm by muddying the waters of his past, obfuscating, and either ignoring any insinuations that he might not have been who he claimed to be, or facing them down with threats of legal action, and at least one dramatic, public display of fury.

 

It was typically American that he should change his name in order to better market himself; and had he been a true American, he would have openly revelled in his amazing ascent from the lowest depths of society to the height of international stardom by his own efforts. He wasn’t: he was a product of Victorian Wales, and he thought – with reason - that the taint of poverty and immorality clung to him like a bad smell which he could never shake off, try as he might.

 

He disliked his family, with perhaps the sole exception of his mother, of whom he saw little, and who seems never to have loved him in return. He wrote that he ‘hated all his relatives, every one of them’, but didn’t cut himself off entirely from them. He did avoid visiting them, and if they wanted so see him, they had to come to him by prior arrangement only. He regarded them – again, with reason - as drunks and spongers who had cast him away when he most needed them, but who were now pushing into his limelight in the hope of getting some money, so he shunned them: but would occasionally send them cash or other gifts, albeit discreetly and through third parties.

 

He even entertained his mother and half-sister with visits to London and Paris. Perhaps this was his way of seeking at least a shred of affection from them: but one cannot but suspect that this generosity also stemmed from a desire to bribe them into keeping quiet about him, for he never publicy acknowledged any relationship with them during his lifetime. Informed of his mother’s death in 1886, he did pay the doctor who attended her; for her burial at Bodelwyddan; and for the placing of a plate on her coffin declaring that she was ‘The Mother of H.M. Stanley the African Explorer’: but he did so through an underling, and did not attend the funeral, again much to the disgust of the editor of the Rhyl Journal. It was only by a gift in his will of £500 to a half-brother that he admitted the matter of his family once and for all, and that when he was safely dead.

 

He had no better opinion of his country and fellow-countrymen in general. North Wales, he wrote, was parochial and undeserving of admiration. The people there

 

‘… despised all foreigners, hated the Sassenach, and disparaged their neighbours … a small, untravelled community, which knew nothing of the broad, sunny lands beyond the fog-damp Vale. The North Welsh are a compound of opposites, - exclusive as Spaniards, vindictive as Corsicans, conservative as Osmanlis; sensible in business, but not enterprising; quarrelsome, but law-abiding; devout, but litigious; industrious and thrifty, but not rich; loyal, but discontented.’

 

A picture all the more stinging for containing grains of truth about a people who had suffered generations of poverty and powerlessness, not to say oppression. A people made poor and kept poor: small wonder that many emigrated. His depiction of the customers of his Aunt Mary’s tavern is no more flattering: raucous louts who spent their time and money smoking, gossiping and relating dirty stories, full of wind and bravado, and ever ready to remind him of his disreputable origins, but cowed into silence should she so much as lift a finger to them. Elsewhere he added that the Welsh are inordinately proud, judgemental and not overly given to personal grooming.

 

Much as he disliked them he could not avoid meeting them, for like his mother’s sin they seemed to follow him about wherever he went. At lectures and public appearances they’d call out to him in Welsh with an impudence suggesting friendship and familiarity, but he had no time for them, and ignored them. He much preferred the company of others, if only because they didn’t remind him of his traumatic boyhood.

 

I have mentioned that the Welsh were in two minds about him. He may have ignored them, but he was far too famous to be ignored by them, and a penny biography of him entitled Hanes Henry M. Stanley: Ei Daithiau a’i Ddarganfyddiadau yn Affrica, Ynghyd a’i Ymchwiliad Llwyddiannus am Dr. Livingstone praised him as one of the foremost men of the age, and a ‘Welshman by birth, even though he is reluctant (for reasons known to himself) to acknowledge this now.’ The anonymous author stated that, even though Stanley had made great mistakes, he deserved the thanks of everyone who loved the welfare and success of humanity, and was undeniably an instrument in the hand of God to bring the Gospel to the dark inhabitants of Central Africa. So although he had his faults, much could be forgiven him.

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

 

At the height of his fame in 1890, Thomas Gee published another biography entitled Bywyd a Gwaith H. M. Stanley, which had strangely little to say about the subject’s background, considering that Gee was based in Denbigh and would have been in a position to know the truth. The poet O. Evans of the town contributed a poem to Gee’s highly popular and influential newspaper, Baner ac Amserau Cymru praising Stanley to the skies and revelling in his Welshness, regardless of the subject’s own views on the matter. So too Eifion Wyn’s lengthy prizewinning ode in the Llangefni Eisteddfod of that year, where the barest mention of Stanley’s defects is utterly overwhelmed by a tsunami of adulation verging on the blasphemous.

 

Given that, it was no surprise that Stanley was invited to preside at the National Eisteddfod at Swansea in 1891. It was not a prospect he relished, as he wrote to his wife:

 

‘You press me to accept the invitation to preside at the Eisteddfod. I feel that we, the people of Wales generally, and I, are not in such close sympathy as to enable me to say anything sufficiently pleasing to their ears. How could it be otherwise? The Eisteddfod, as I understand it, is for the purpose of exciting interest in the Welsh nationality and language. My travels in various countries have ill-prepared me for sympathising with such a cause. If I were to speak truly my mind, I would recommend Welshmen to turn their attention to a closer study of the English language, literature and characteristics, for it is only by that training that they can hope to compete with their English brother for glory, honour, and prosperity. There is no harm in understanding the Welsh language, but they should be told by sensible men that every hour they devote to it, occupies time that might be better employed in furthering their own particular interests. But who will dare tell men, so devoted to their own people and country as the Welsh, the real truth? I am not that man! There is no object to be gained save the good of the Welsh people themselves, who, unfortunately, fail to see it in that light, and would accordingly resent whatever was said to them. So I am ignorant of the blessings attending these local studies, and my speech would be barren and halting. If I could only feel a portion of what a fervid Welshman feels, I might carry through the day a bearing as if I enjoyed it all, but I fear I shall hang my head in self-abasement.

 

Now if it were a British community that met to celebrate British glories, what themes and subjects! But how can I shout for Cambria? What is Cambria, alone? What has she done, what hope for her, separate and distinct from her big sister Britannia, or rather Anglia? United, they are great; but divided, neither is aught. Now do you understand to what a hard shift I am put? I shall be hooted out of the country, because my stubborn tongue cannot frame agreeable fictions!’

 

This sums up his attitudes. Wales is small, insignificant, dependent. He can admit, patronisingly, that there’s no harm in knowing Welsh, but really, it’s a waste of time: the Welsh would be better off becoming Englishmen, because that’s how they’d have access to things of real importance like power, celebrity and money. Stanley was not alone in this, and sadly, he still isn’t: but this short passage shows how far he’d become estranged from his roots.

 

His Welsh admirers knew little and cared less about his attitudes. At the very same Eisteddfod (and Stanley knew very well what an Eisteddfod was: he’d been chosen to represent St Asaph workhouse at the Rhuddlan Eisteddfod of 1850), a prize was awarded to John John Roberts, ‘Iolo Carnarvon’, for another ode to H.M. Stanley, larded with the same hero-worship as inspired O. Evans of Denbigh and Eifion Wyn. Roberts produced, even by the standards of the day, a notably verbose, pretentious epic in praise of the great explorer and Christian apostle, conqueror, and golden boy of Dyffryn Clwyd.

 

Not everyone joined in the fan-worship. The following year Stanley came to Caernarfon on a lecture tour. He was mobbed by admirers on his arrival at the station, and his address on the subject of ‘Twenty-three Years in Africa’ attracted a large audience. However, a proposal before the borough council that he be given a public welcome elicited a counter-proposal that he should not, on account of his denial of his nationality. The matter was not put to a vote.The editor of the newspaper Y Genedl Gymreig commented that the person ‘known as Mr H. M. Stanley’:

 

‘… behaves very like many others we know who have gained fame and can live outside the Welsh nation – ignoring it and failing to see in it anything worth acknowledging or preserving; but when they come to us asking for something, they turn into the most patriotic Welshmen on earth … .’

 

It would surely have riled Stanley if he had known that a prominent advert for the lecture in the newspaper named him as ‘J. Rowlands alias Henry Morton Stanley’.

 

Yes, he had his detractors here, and in addition to his perceived lack of Welsh patriotism, they well knew that his actions in Africa were controversial, to say the least. As the fiery radical Doctor Evan Pan Jones of Mostyn wrote in his monthly magazine, Cwrs y Byd:

 

‘I’d rather be a kaffir [a native African] than of the same blood as this traitor: a man in whose life history there’s not a single line of virtue, goodness, or Christian gentility. It’d be as easy to prove that the kaffirs are all Welsh as to prove that this Stanley is a Welshman.’

 

‘It would be fully as reasonable’, wrote Jones, ‘to praise and admire Satan as to praise and admire Stanley.’

 

Strong stuff: but Jones’ remark about being a kaffir wasn’t entirely hyperbole. To understand why, we need to return to the Dyffryn Clwyd of Stanley’s childhood and before. There had been serious riots in Denbigh in 1795 and Ruabon in 1830, well within living memory of Stanley’s childhood days, followed by violent disturbances in Merthyr Tydfil in 1831, Newport in 1839 and the Rebecca Riots of 1839-43. Reports of this violent insurrection, and of witchcraft and fraud at Ffynnon Elian not twenty miles from Denbigh in 1818 and 1830, had received sensationalist coverage in the English press, where the Welsh were portrayed as dangerous, irrational heathens. White kaffirs, in short.

 

The English authorities couldn’t hold converse with these unruly masses, as they knew no Engish: and outright rebellion was feared. The remedy was not to provide more Welsh-medium education, make Welsh an official language, and so give its speakers a stake in maintaining the Establishment: that would haver been unthinkable. No, the solution to Welsh discontent was to turn them into Englishmen: as the Reverend H. L. Bellairs contended, ‘A regiment of effective schoolmasters is maintained at much less expense than a corps of policemen or soldiers.’ This led to the infamous Blue Books report of 1847 into Welsh education, which concluded that the Welsh were poor, immoral and ignorant, due in part to their use of their language. If they were to have part in British progress as productive, upright citizens, they had to be anglicised.

 

So they were, by the Education Act of 1870. The long-term effect of the ‘Blue Books’ reports was to instill in us a ‘shame culture’: a deep self-loathing and inferiority complex concerning our own identity, coupled with a need to gain English approval in order to be confident of our intrinsic value, whilst at the same time accepting unquestioningly the precedence of English rule, language, culture and values. The reason why so many of his fellow-countrymen, including poets, basked and revelled in the reflected glory of Stanley’s name was that he showed that a Welshman, though he’d denied he was Welsh, could climb to the pinnacle of fame and honour under British rule. In many people’s minds that validated the political order and gave them a place in it, despised as they were. The same adulation given to Stanley was seen later in the hero-worship of Lloyd George. Wealth, power and fame still attract people like moths to a light, especially those in whose lives anything like wealth, power and fame are painfully absent.

 

In the event Stanley was spared having to go to the Swansea Eisteddfod by breaking a leg. He did receive the freedom of Swansea the following year, though: and whatever his fellow countrymen may have thought about him, for better or worse, he was unconcerned, and did not change his opinions about them or Wales. As he said:

 

‘Had I seen no other wondrous lands, met no other men and women with whom I could sympathise, it is probable that I should have retained the belief that Wales is the finest country in the world, and the Welsh people the best.’

 

But his travels had disabused him of that illusion. He had seen:

 

‘ … prettier scenery than the Vale of Clwyd, richer and more populous towns than Liverpool, and more advanced people than the Welsh!’

 

And who were these ‘more advanced people’? He didn’t have far to look, for when returning from his travels:

 

‘ … when we descend from the train, and we mix with our countrymen, and hear the pleasing accents of English, we are received with politeness as friends, Custom-house officials, and cabmen, a secret feeling of pleasure takes possession of us, and we rejoice that our native language is English, and that we belong to the big, broad-chested race round about us.’

 

His flight from poverty and disrepute had led him from Wales to America, where he claimed he was an American. He bolstered that fiction in 1885 when he formally took US citizenship in order to safeguard his royalties on book sales in the USA. That was risky, because it could have come out that he’d been a Confederate turncoat, and had also twice deserted the Union armed forces during the Civil War, and desertion was a capital offence: but he bluffed and lied his way through that obstacle.

 

Then, when his career had taken him to London, he’d taken British citizenship in 1892 in order to stand as an MP; and by the final decade of his life, as we’ve just read, he regarded himself as a native Englishman. There’s a Welsh proverb that says Cas gŵr nas caro’r wlad a’i maco, ‘It’s a vile man who doesn’t love his homeland’. Stanley didn’t, but was adept at latching onto any identity which would further his purposes, and claiming it as his own, convincing others and perhaps even himself.

 

You will have gathered by now that he had no sympathy for Welsh nationalism. As he wrote:

 

‘During my residence in Wales every English man or woman I saw left in my memory an amiable reminder.

The Bishop [of St Asaph] was an Englishman. Captain Thomas, the paternal, fair-minded, hospitable [workhouse] Guardian, was English. Her Majesty’s Inspector, learned, polite, benevolent, was English. Brynbella’s lessee [a local magnate], generous and kindly, was English. A chance visitor, a lady, who came to sketch in the neighbourhood, was English. I shall never forget her. She painted small water-colours, and gave us all cakes, oranges, and apples, also sixpences to the bigger boys and twopences to the lesser!’

 

It never occurred to him, more than most of his contemporaries, to question why anyone, yes almost everyone in authority in an almost monoglot Welsh area should be English. Or how a tourist could make such a deep and lasting impression by handing out fruit and small change. He goes on:

 

‘The best books, the beautiful stories, the novelettes, our geographies, spelling-books, histories, and school-readers, our prayer-books and Bibles, were English. Yet the Welsh hated the English, and the reason for it I have never been able to discover, even to this day.’

 

Again, all his reading, his education, even his Bible, that cornerstone of culture, was English. Welsh had no place in government, justice or public administration: the 1536 and 1542 Acts of Union had seen to that. Small wonder, then, that he and others despised things Welsh as parochial and irrelevant, and those who clung to the language as being wilfully doomed to poverty. Even the least keen intelligence could sense, if only vaguely, that this state of affairs was anomalous and had something to do with being ruled by the English: so people responded in one of two ways. They could either become resentful, and harbour a ‘hatred for the Sassenach’, as Stanley put it: or they could agree with Matthew Arnold and the Liberal Utilitarians that Welsh was a language intrinsically unsuited to a modern industrial, scientifically informed society, and therefore best forgotten or relegated to fringe interests such as poetry and theology. Stanley, like the great majority of his countrymen and women, had no knowledge of his own nation’s history, of how this situation had come about. He only knew from experience, beginning in the workhouse, that it was important to know who had power, and to identify with them. All others could be disregarded: as he wrote:

 

‘We also detested the Paddies of the Square, because they were ragged, dirty and quarrelsome, foul of speech, and noisy. We saw a few French … they were too much despised to be hated. They belonged to that people who were beaten at Crecy, Agincourt, Blenheim and Waterloo.’

 

We can see what kind of education he’d been given, and he goes on, in mystic raptures:

 

‘But I am quite willing to admit that the Welsh are as good as any, and that they might surpass the majority of people if they tried, and that Wales contains within its limited areas as beautiful scenes as any. The result of my observations is that in Nature the large part of humanity is on a pretty even plane, but that some portion of it, thank Goodness! Has risen to a higher altitude, owing to the advantages of civilization. But there is a higher altitude still, which can only be reached by those nations who leave off brooding among traditions, and grasp firmly and gratefully the benefits offered to them by the progress of the age, and follow the precepts of the seers. “Wales for the Welsh” is as senseless as “Ireland for the Irish.” A common flag waves over these happy islands, uniting all in a brotherhood sealed by blood. Over what continents has it not streamed aloft? Who can count the victories inscribed on it?’

 

Small wonder that his obituary in The Times called him an ‘English man of action’ (as well as one who had ‘waded through slaughter to success’), and the Pall Mall Gazette an ‘English hero’. His entry in the Dictionary of National Biography stated that he was a ‘great Englishman’. There could be no higher accolade. Yet at the same time, Bishop A. G. Edwards of St Asaph called him ‘a true Welshman’, and ‘the greatest Welshman’. Edwards obviously hadn’t heard Cas dyn nas caro’r wlad a’i maco either.

 

We’ve already learnt Stanley’s opinion of his own folk and native country. As for Denbigh, he thought it ‘a small place with petty jealousies.’ The dislike was evidently reciprocated, for despite his being the town’s most famous son, no memorial or statue of him was raised there until more than a century after his death in 1904. It wasn’t until 1959 that the St Asaph Workhouse was renamed ‘H.M. Stanley Hospital’, and even then only through the determination of Huw T. Edwards (not a local man) and in the face of evidence then beginning to seep out that Stanley was, to a degree, a liar and charlatan with a hand in some very murky business, including facilitating the genocide perpetrated by King Leopold the Second in the Congo.

 

Stanley had many gifts, and one of them was an uncanny and lasting ability to set people against each other. Amidst much (and continuing) controversy, he did eventually get a statue – two, if you count the, er, unusual memorial in St Asaph – in 2011: but that wasn’t on account of his love of Denbigh, the Vale of Clwyd or Wales. He may have had roots here, but spent his life distancing himself as much as possible from them. No, the presence of those memorials has much more to do with the needs and perceptions of an early 21st century Britain stranded by the ebb of Empire than with the real life of Henry Morton Stanley or John Rowlands.

 

The philosopher Simone Weil wrote that in becoming uprooted, people are left with little option but to identify with the forces that uprooted them, and become instruments in that same process of uprooting elsewhere, and on a bigger and more devastating scale. For the present-day consequences of Stanley’s uprooting, his deracinization, one needs to look not at Denbigh or the Vale of Clwyd, but to the killing fields and slave-mines of the Congo basin, whose rare metals sit in your mobile phone as you read this.

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

 

For further reading, see:

 

Huws, H. Henry Morton Stanley: Y Cyfandir Tywyll. Llandysul: Gwasg Gomer, 2020. ISBN 9 781785 2324.

 

McLynn, F. Stanley, dark genius of African exploration. London: Pimlico, 2004.