A telegram from Venezuela reached the family of the British Vice-Consul, James Lyall, in Vane Terrace, Darlington. It said his murderer had been sentenced to eleven years’ penal servitude, thus ending a diplomatic incident that had seen a British warship sent up the Orinoco River in South America.
James, a former pupil of Darlington Grammar School, became the British Vice-Consul in the town of Ciudad Bolivar, Venezuela, in October 1898. In a long letter home, he told how he had been paddled up the Orinoco by Native Indians wearing nothing but loincloths, and how he was dining on turtles’ eggs and roast monkey. But he concluded: ‘There is not a great deal of social life, families and friends being so disorganised by the revolutions which take place almost annually.’
In the following February’s revolution, James was ‘fatally stabbed to the body by a drunken villain’, dying in the arms of the British consul, Mr C.H. de Lomas, who said in his telegram that ‘the motive for the deed seemed to be political animosity’.
When the Venezuelan Government dragged its heels about arresting the assassin and paying compensation, the British Foreign Office sailed HMS Alert up the Orinoco. In response, the Venezuelans sent a telegram declaring that an unnamed murderer had been imprisoned – although no compensation was ever paid.
(‘Memories’, The Northern Echo, 2001)