Miscellany

Abd-ul-Hamid 11 (22 September 1842 - 10 February 1918). Variously spelt Abdul Hamid and Abdülhamid. 34th Sultan of the Ottoman Empire. An article in the Manchester Guardian on July 24 1905 reported an attempt on the Sultan’s life when he attended the Mosque. Titled ‘The Sultan’s Escape’, the Manchester Guardian commented, ‘Judging by the number killed (the majority of them soldiers lining the road near the Mosque) and by the material damage, the bomb used must have been a formidable engine... the Sultan preserved the most remarkable sang froid, although a wild panic ensued among the onlookers...’

In an Editorial Article the same day, the Manchester Guardian opined, ‘There is hardly a race in Turkey but has its grounds for vengeance, and few living creatures in all the Empire who would not rejoice in the Sultan’s death, unless, perhaps, the dogs in the Stamboul streets that owe their lives to his capricious and incalculable mercies...The whole Osmanli brood is tainted by its prison-palace life, degenerate, uneducated, and incapable of resisting the influence of the counter-spies who manage it.’

In the summer of 1908, the Young Turk Revolution broke out. On being told troops in Salonika were advancing on him, Abd-ul-Hamid capitulated. The last Sultan to exert autocratic control over the Ottoman Empire, he was deposed by the parliament on April 26 1909 and conveyed into captivity at Salonika (‘that city of vipery’, he had called it). In 1912, when Salonika fell to Greece, he was returned to captivity in Constantinople. Just as he (and Shelmerdine) had predicted, in World War One the Young Turks threw their lot in with Kaiser Wilhelm’s Germany. The 34th Sultan spent his last days studying, carpentering and writing his memoirs in custody at Beylerbeyi Palace in the Bosphorus, where he died on 10 February 1918, the year the Ottoman Empire collapsed. He was buried in a mausoleum along with Sultans Mahmud II and Abdülaziz near Sultanahmet Square. His obituary appeared in The Times.

Rahime Perestu Sultan (1830–1904) was the Circassian wife of Ottoman Sultan Abdülmecid I and Valide Sultan during the reign of Abd-ul-Hamid II. She was the last Valide Sultan of the Ottoman Empire. Her burial place is located at the tomb of Mihrişah Valide Sultan in Eyüp, a part of Istanbul. The name Perestu means peacock in Persian. She became the spiritual mother of Sultan Abd-ul-Hamid 11.

Valide Sultan, literally ‘mother sultan’, was the title held by the queen mother of a ruling Sultan of the Ottoman Empire, first used in the 16th century for Ayşe Hafsa Sultan, consort of Selim I and mother of Suleiman the Magnificent. As the mother to the sultan the Valide Sultan had a significant influence on the affairs of the empire.

Saliha Naciye (born circa 1882), a Georgian, thirteenth and last wife of Sultan Abd-ul-Hamid 11. He married her on 4 November 1904 at Yıldız Palace. Saliha Naciye accompanied Abd-ul-Hamid into exile and returned to Istanbul with him in 1912. She died on 4 December 1923 in a mansion located at Erenköy and was buried near the mausoleum of Sultan Mahmud II, located at Divan Yolu Street. She was about the age of forty-one.

Crown Prince Mehmed Abid Efendi, Abd-ul-Hamid’s son by Saliha Naciye, died in Beirut in 1973 and was buried in Damascus.

Sir Edward Grey. He continued to serve as Foreign Secretary until 1916, up to then the longest continuous tenure of any person in that office. Best remembered for his remark at the outbreak of the First World War: ‘The lamps are going out all over Europe. We shall not see them lit again in our life-time’. History knows the lamps flickered back on for a brief period after 1918, to be extinguished in 1939 by the murderous Adolph Hitler.

Sir Edward was ennobled as Viscount Grey of Fallodon in 1916. In 1919 he became Ambassador to the United States, and later Leader of the Liberal Party in the House of Lords. His interest in nature began early, on his father’s estate at Falloden. Probably inspired by his first wife Dorothy’s knowledge of bird-song, he joined the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds in 1893 and became a Vice-President in 1909.

In 1927, Hodder and Stoughton published Grey’s The Charm of Birds. It was an immediate popular success and still widely read and admired. Grey’s second wife Pamela’s contribution to The Charm of Birds can be seen in her description of the dawn chorus and of a goldfinch nesting among apple blossom.

In 1928 Grey was made Chancellor of Oxford University although his own academic background had been slight - ‘rusticated’ from Baliol though he returned to take a lowly Third in Jurisprudence.

He died in 1933.

Sir Peter Chalmers Mitchell CBE FRS DSc LLD (23 November 1864–2 July 1945), zoologist, was Secretary of the Zoological Society of London from 1903 to 1935. He directed the policy of the London Zoo, and created Whipsnade, the world’s first open zoological park. He died in July 1945 after being knocked down outside the north gate of London Zoo.

Henry Morton Stanley (28 January 1841-May 1904). Born John Rowlands, he was a Welsh journalist and explorer famous for his exploration of central Africa and his search for missionary and explorer David Livingstone. Upon finding Livingstone, Stanley later claimed he uttered the now-famous greeting, ‘Dr. Livingstone, I presume?’. Stanley is also known for his discoveries and development of the Congo region.

Major Percy Horace Gordan Powell-Cotton (1866-1940). Elephant hunter. The largest African elephant he shot carried tusks weighing 372lbs, one tusk being over 9 feet in length and more than two feet in circumference. The world may never see the like of such an elephant again, the more’s the pity, though most likely poachers would seek it out and kill it.