Dolly received hundreds of letters and telegrams from around the world following Stanley’s death. Most were sincere messages of condolence from people like Count de Brazza and others whose lives he had touched or those who felt they knew Stanley from his books, articles and lectures. Others were different.
One day a letter arrived bearing a Manchester postmark. On opening it, Dolly discovered it was from the former Katie Gough-Roberts, now Mrs Bradshaw, stating that she still possessed ‘certain letters’ written by her former fiancé in the 1870s. She said that a publisher, eager to capitalise on Stanley’s death, wanted to produce an exploitative biography, which promised to take the lid off his early life. They had approached Katie offering to purchase any correspondence she may have kept from the great man – and she was being urged by her husband to sell them and give Dolly first refusal.
Stanley had completed writing the story of his life up to the point when he had been released from Camp Douglas in 1862. Dorothy planned to finish the book, using her husband’s diaries, notes and articles to fill in the story of the rest of his life. The last thing she wanted was a scandalous, muck-raking book produced by a get-rich-quick outfit, ruining the lasting testimony to her husband she wanted to publish herself.
Dolly sought help from Henry Wellcome, who agreed to do everything in his power to obtain correspondence that might otherwise damage her husband’s reputation. After pressure from Wellcome, Katie finally surrendered Stanley’s correspondence, including the closely written fifteen-page ‘confessional’ letter, for the sum of £150.
Stanley’s former servant, William Hoffmann, was also making loud noises about writing an account of life with Stanley, including his experiences travelling with the Emin Pasha Relief Expedition. Dolly mistrusted Hoffmann and instructed Wellcome to talk him out of exploiting his association with Stanley. He was paid to remain silent but was in desperate straits and continued to pester Dolly and Wellcome for money with veiled threats of publishing a memoir. He finally produced a slim volume in the 1930s that did nothing more than present Stanley as a wonderful employer and himself as a model servant ever ready to serve his master. Wellcome stopped receiving begging letters when Hoffmann died in a hostel for London’s destitutes in 1936.
The most disturbing letter came from Lewis Noe, who informed Dolly that he possessed numerous correspondences and photographs from Stanley, which he might be prepared to surrender for $100. There was no suggestion of blackmail, but Dolly thought it best to obtain the material, particularly as Noe’s letter alluded to experiences ‘good and bad’ with Stanley on the ill-fated visit to Turkey with Harlow Cook in 1866. A member of Wellcome’s New York staff was sent to visit Noe and paid the asking price for the material.
Dolly could now get on with the job of finishing the story of her husband’s life. Using material Stanley had completed plus a thousand other fragments, she produced a credible but flawed book called The Autobiography of Henry Morton Stanley, Edited by his Wife, Dorothy Stanley. The early part was a frank admission – with embellishments – by Stanley of the true circumstances of his birth in Wales and life at the workhouse. Dorothy took over where Stanley had stopped, carefully avoiding any mention of Lewis Noe, Kalulu, Katie Gough-Roberts, Alice Pike, her husband’s first disastrous American lecture tour, disputes with the establishment over his discovery of Livingstone and methods used during his journey down the Congo and rescue of Emin Pasha. It was published by Sampson Low, Marston & Company in 1909 and in a letter to Dr Scott Keltie at the Royal Geographical Society, Dorothy predicted: ‘This book is going to live forever.’ The volume was politely received, but many had difficulty remembering exactly who Henry Morton Stanley was and what he had achieved. By this time, Dolly had remarried Dr Henry Curtis, a Harley Street practitioner and Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons and sixteen years her junior, who had been introduced to her by Wellcome. It was a marriage of convenience. Dolly wanted a father for Denzil and a companion for herself. They enjoyed each other’s company, but Dolly made it clear she had no intention of giving up her title of Lady Stanley or homes in London and Furze Hill.
Despite her second marriage, a small handwritten label penned in 1919 shows how much Dolly pined for Stanley fifteen years after his death. The label was attached to a Turkish-made cushion, which Stanley had used for a pillow on African expeditions. On it, Dolly wrote: ‘This old cushion was valued by Stanley. He twice carried it across Africa, always using it as his pillow. He had an affection for this old cushion. Dorothy Stanley, his wife – who hopes soon to rejoin him – April 1919.’
Dolly was buried next to her Bula Matari in Pirbright churchyard when she died in October 1926. Dolly’s mother, Gertie Tennant, had died aged ninety-nine in 1918. Richmond Terrace passed to Dolly, who in turn left the property to her second husband. Ownership of Furze Hill was passed to Denzil Stanley.
Denzil grew into a fine young man, educated at Harrow before becoming a Sandhurst-trained officer-cadet, rising to the rank of captain. He served with the Guards in India and later retired from the army to manage the Furze Hill estate, where he died in 1959, aged sixty-four. His wife, Helen, and their own son, Richard Stanley who died in 1986, are buried in the same plot at Pirbright under the great granite headstone.
Emin Pasha recovered from his fall at Bagamoyo and threw in his lot with the German government who asked him to mount an expedition to equatorial Africa to secure territories along the southern shores of Lake Victoria to Lake Albert. Soon after the expedition started in 1890, an Anglo-German agreement was signed excluding Lake Albert from German influence. After difficulties with German authorities in Tanganyika, Emin – now almost blind – crossed into the Congo Free State in May 1891. On his journey to the western African coast, near Stanley Falls, and suffering hunger and illness, he was captured by Arab slave raiders. His throat was cut open, his head removed and sent to a slave chief. His body was never found. His daughter, Farida, who had remained at Bagamoyo, was sent to Germany where she was brought up as a well-born German girl.
Three of the four volunteers returning to England with Stanley following the Emin Pasha Relief Expedition, died before their commander. Lieutenant Stairs returned to the Congo Free State, where he died in 1892. Captain Robert Nelson joined the staff of Mackinnon’s British Imperial East Africa Company and died in what is today Kenya the same year. Dr Thomas Parke, the devoted physician who had taken care of Stanley’s health in Africa and London died in Argyllshire in 1893 and was buried with full military honours in his home town of Drumsna, Ireland. William Bonny, the former army sergeant and Zulu war veteran, died alone in a Fulham workhouse in 1899, his health ruined by drink and poverty. He was buried in London’s ‘fashionable’ Brompton Cemetery – in a pauper’s grave. Arthur Mounteney Jephson, the only volunteer to outlive his former commander, longed to return to Africa, but poor health put paid to his attempts. He became a Queen’s Messenger in 1895 and a King’s Messenger in 1901. He died in 1908.
James Gordon Bennett, proprietor of the New York Herald who had instructed Stanley to ‘Find Livingstone!’ was ostracised by smart New York society after he had sunk one too many drinks and used the fireplace of his fiancée’s parents’ smart Westchester County home as a urinal. It is said that women fainted and heroic men rushed Bennett from the house – and polite society – by the elbows. He moved to France, from where he continued to rule his newspaper empire with an iron fist via overseas cable. He established a Paris edition of the newspaper, which still exists today as the New York Herald Tribune and steered both papers through the difficult years of the First World War. He died in 1918 after milking tens of millions of dollars from the earnings of his newspapers to buy racing yachts, race-horses, mansions, and to have a darn good time. The New York Herald name finally disappeared in 1924 when the paper was taken over by new proprietors.
Alice Pike, Stanley’s young American fiancée who married another man while he was travelling down the Congo, became a Washington socialite and artist. Her marriage to Albert Barney ended in divorce after she had produced two daughters. In later years she reflected that she should have waited for her ‘Morton’ to have returned from Africa and set about writing the story of her association with Stanley in the form of a trashy novel which she entitled ‘Stanley’s Lady Alice by “One Who Knew”’. It was never published and this author located a copy in the Smithsonian Institution’s Washington archives. Alice died with Stanley’s photograph next to her bedside in 1931, leaving her large home and fortune to the National Museum for American Art.
Dr John Kirk, who had increasingly annoyed Stanley and went to some lengths to discredit his achievements, was knighted in 1881 after spending twenty years as British Consul in Zanzibar. He retired from public office in 1887 to live in Scotland where the National Library recently acquired a large collection of over three hundred photographs and papers belonging to Kirk, with help from a £55,000 Heritage Lottery Fund grant.
Mirambo, the notorious ‘Ruga-Ruga’ warlord and Stanley’s blood brother, ruled a powerful kingdom and was one of the few able to take strategic control of Tippu-Tib’s slave trade routes. In 1880, members of an expedition sponsored by King Leopold were killed by one of his chiefs, putting a price on his head. After Mirambo’s death in 1884, his kingdom disintegrated. Today he is revered in Central Africa, where streets and public buildings are named in his memory.
The notorious slaver, Tippu-Tib was never paid a penny for his ‘work’ as the Congo Free State’s Governor at Stanley Falls, where he had failed on almost every count to keep Arab traders under control. Arabs resented his alliance with Europeans and in April 1890 he left Stanley Falls and returned to Zanzibar with a large caravan carrying tons of ivory and lived in style in a large house. He died in 1905.
Stanley’s home town of Denbigh went into a frenzy of mourning after his death. The Bishop of St Asaph’s told his congregation: ‘The man, who, above all others, turned the eyes of Europe on Africa, was our own countryman, born at Denbigh and educated under the shadow of this cathedral . . . such a man, the greatest of Welshmen, will always stand out as great among the greatest English men of action.’ There was a suggestion in the Denbigh Free Press that the town might consider turning itself into a place of pilgrimage to Stanley’s birthplace in the same way as Stratford-upon-Avon had done in memory of William Shakespeare. The paper pointed out that although the house where Stanley was born had been demolished, other places connected with his boyhood existed, including Denbigh Castle, the Cross Foxes pub where his mother had been landlady, and St Asaph’s workhouse. It called for statues to be built in his memory and for a public subscription to be raised to fund the project, to be managed in the same way as a similar one devoted to African explorers in London’s Kensington Gardens, promoted by former Royal Geographical Society president Francis Galton. Nothing became of either statue project, although the building that was once St Asaph’s Poor Law Union Workhouse is today the H.M. Stanley Hospital.
Nearly a hundred years after his death, Denbighshire Council attempted to raise £100,000 to buy some of the 1,000 objects, furniture, gifts from kings and emperors, African weapons, rifles, pistols, knives, lantern slides, maps, books and photographs once owned by Stanley and stored in the huge dark attic at Furze Hill and its many other rooms. The majority of the relics were unearthed by specialists from London auctioneers Christie’s, who spent months examining the contents of boxes and cupboards, before members of Stanley’s surviving family sold the estate which had been owned by the explorer’s descendants for over a century. The council approached the National Lottery for a grant to enable the purchase of as many artefacts as possible and house them in part of their local museum to be devoted to Stanley’s private life and public explorations.
The auction took place in London on 24 September 2002, where Tom Lamb of Christie’s London Book Department remarked: ‘there has never before been such a large number of objects, books and artefacts relating to one explorer offered at auction’. Mr Lamb predicted that much of the collection would end up in institutions in America, Stanley’s erstwhile adopted homeland.
On the day of the auction, bidding was intense. The top-selling lot was the water-stained map carried by Stanley when he returned to Africa to complete Livingstone’s exploration work in 1874–8, complete with his pencil additions filling in the uncharted Congo as he descended the great river. It sold for a staggering £77,675 ($120,396) – more than twice the estimated price – and was purchased by a private buyer in the United States.
Travelling equipment used on Stanley’s 1871 search for Livingstone fetched strong prices including the Winchester rifle he was holding when he reached out and shook the doctor’s hand for the first time at Ujiji. It raised £19,120 ($29,636) and was bought by a private British buyer. Livingstone’s sextant, presented to Stanley by Agnes Livingstone, was bought by another private British buyer for £17,925 ($27,784). The entire collection raised £891,709, and Tom Lamb said the sales ‘reflected the rarity of the items offered and the extraordinary fascination that Stanley’s name generates throughout the world’.
Denbighshire Council’s attempt to buy items connected with Stanley’s Welsh childhood was a success. Representatives purchased a handwritten testimony Stanley had produced in memory of his grandfather, Moses Parry, plus a plaster cast of his hand, some photographs and wedding presents given to Dolly and Stanley by Welsh people. They are now housed in the Denbigh Library, Museum and Art Gallery. As Tom Lamb had predicted, the majority of items at auction are now in private ownership.
Denbigh’s undertaking to honour its most famous son with a collection of his artefacts for their museum was a modest attempt to celebrate a man who had little to thank Wales and the Welsh for in his lifetime. After all, Henry Morton Stanley was American born and bred . . . was he not?