Captain Elliot and the Founding of Hong Kong

by Captain Elliot

  I must leave it to you, dearest Nina, to imagine the feeling with which I have read your book, judiciously and tenderly compacted in all aspects, according to my firm judgement … what my dearest father lacked will doubtlessly be diligently noted and solemnly and sternly rebuked by those whose nack or pleasure is to find the fault that is in men and things. What my father possessed in larger perspective than 99 men out of every hundred in the public service (military or civil) was a generous sense of duty, a head brim full of resource, courage to match, and an eye sure and swift to see the right moment for action, in all circumstances of crisis; and never more so than when those circumstances were perilous.36

  Several of the traits Charles most admired in his father were also part of his own character, and it was unsurprising that Henry Taylor agreed with Nina that Charles was the sibling who most resembled Hugh.37

  One of Charles Elliot’s characteristics was a persistent restlessness. At a relatively early point in most of his postings he had expressed a frustrated desire to be somewhere else. Such wishes were entirely unrealistic; but to his own and others’ benefit, his restlessness was more usually channelled into productive energy. That, along with kindness, courtesy and gentle manners, was said by a leading historian of St Helena to have won for him the respect and affection of the islanders.38 Another account says that he ‘continually endeavoured to advance the welfare of the island’, and that ‘He had to contend with many difficulties, especially with the diminishing revenue.’39

  That the revenue to the colonial government was diminishing was apparent most dramatically at the end of Elliot’s tenure. In January 1869 Elliot sent a note to Buckingham about revenue and expenditure for the previous year. He explained that

  The Revenue of this Island depends mainly on receipts at the Custom House – In other respects the receipts one year with another are liable to little fluctuation – It will be noted in the Abstract of the Customs Revenue for the years 1867 and 1868 that it has fallen off in the whole year 1868 compared with the previous year to the heavy extent of £3,576.14.4 that is to say between a fourth and a fifth of the Ordinary Customs Revenue on an average of some years past.40

  The failure of the Customs Revenue, Elliot said, was ‘owing probably to that general stagnation of business which seems to have prevailed in all parts of the world in the same period.’41 From the opening of the Suez Canal in November 1869, the position deteriorated still further with an acceleration of the reduction in the number of ships using the island begun with advent of steam some years earlier. In due course St Helena’s wider economy, of which servicing and supplying ships had been a major part, suffered a serious decline.

  The minutes of the meeting of the St Helena Council (also called the Board by Elliot) held on 24 January 1870 record a statement from the Governor:

  I have the honor to announce to the Board that the Queen has been graciously pleased to appoint Rear Admiral Charles G.E. Patey to succeed me as Governor of St Helena.

  He may be expected to arrive here on the 2nd or 3rd Proximo and desiring that his residence may be ready for him I propose to leave the Island by the Mail from the Cape of Good Hope due on the 27th or 28th Instant.

  In conformity with the Commission under the Great Seal providing for the Government of this Island, the administration thereof, after my departure and until Her Majesty’s further pleasure thereon shall be known, will devolve on the Honorable the Colonial Secretary.42

  The Grateful duty remains to me Honorable Gentlemen of the Council to tender to you collectively and individually my hearty thanks for the public spirited and judicious assistance I have always received from you at this Board and elsewhere in the discharge of the Queen’s service.

  May God continue to keep you and all the dwellers on this Island under His Merciful protection.43

  Despite the very short formal notice of their departure, Charles and Clara Elliot left their third island colony on the mail steamer Cambrian on 29 January. This time it really would be for retirement.

  Chapter Nineteen

  The Final Chapter

  A few weeks after their departure from St Helena the press reported that Charles and Clara Elliot had sailed ‘for Madeira, en route to spend the rest of the winter there and in Switzerland’.1 It is not clear when precisely they returned to England, but by January 1871 they had taken up residence in Withycombe Raleigh, a south Devon village next to the coastal town of Exmouth.2 The house and grounds rented by the Elliots were large. When the property was put up for sale by its owner some years later, it was described by the auctioneer as

  situate about one mile and a half from the town of Exmouth … built a few years since by the present owner, standing high in its own grounds, and commanding extensive land and sea views, approached by a carriage drive and lodge entrance, containing:-Entrance Hall, 4 large and lofty reception rooms, 12 bedrooms, 2 dressing and 1 bath ditto … wine, beer and coal cellars, and all necessary domestic offices.3

  Outside there were ‘[a] large walled kitchen garden stocked with choice fruit trees, conservatory and greenhouse, large yard with good coach house, stable, harness room, cowsheds, piggeries &c &c, together with about 24 acres of orchard, arable and meadow land’.4

  By comparison with Plantation House, St Helena, this may have been technically downsizing, but it is clear that Charles Elliot had no intention of living out his remaining years in modest circumstances. The Elliots had no difficulty making full use of the accommodation, receiving frequent family visits and entertaining their grandchildren. The house became a periodic destination for Hope Pennell and his father George, who had left St Helena in 1871 and until 1876 was one of the clergy at the newly built St Jude’s Church, South Kensington. Their visits were a source of much happiness for Charles and especially Clara, who had now recovered from the depression and trauma of the St Helena years and was enjoying the opportunity to pursue her enthusiasms for music and gardening. On the date of the 1871 census, 2 April, the residents comprised Charles and Clara, seven servants including a footman and two cooks, and daughter Harriet Russell with her four children, Maud, Edward, Charles (all teenagers) and Katherine, aged 9.5 Correspondence between Clara and the Elliot’s son Freddy and daughter-in-law Marcia during the year following June 1871 shows that the house was visited by their four young children, who had remained behind in England when Freddy returned to India with his wife to resume his career in the Indian Civil Service.6

  For Charles the retirement years were few. He died on 9 September 1875, shortly after his seventy-fourth birthday and after an illness which, as implied by his brother Fred – now Sir Frederick – caused him much distress. Fred wrote to their niece Nina ten days later:

  I did not communicate with you at the time of poor Charles’ death, for I knew you must hear direct from Hatty. At the end it was a relief from a condition which no-one could desire to be prolonged. His characteristics were above all his gallant, generous spirit and the kindest of hearts. There is something remarkable in hearing, wherever one goes, the affection with which he is spoken of by persons of every degree.7

  Forty-eight hours later he felt the need to write again:

  Poor dear Charles’ death has, as you divine, depressed me much – not only for the loss of him, tho’ I do lament it most sincerely – but on account of the general reflections it cannot but awaken…

  Two things above all it has always seemed to me that a man should wish to find in a retrospect of his life, if he has time for a retrospect – first that in some way or other (and the ways are infinitely various) he should have earned the fruits of the earth he has consumed – this for his self-respect – next as to his enjoyment of the term granted to him, that he has felt (too happy if it has been requited) some true and thorough affection.

  I think that poor Charles might be conscious of both these things. He fulfilled the tasks that fell to him with all his strength and with a noble disregard of self-interest; what devotion he felt and showed to the companion of his lif
e we all know, and I do believe that although her mind was clouded for so many years and thus gave him a saddened close, she truly loved him, and that he found in her much happiness.8

  There is a hint here that though her final years with Charles were happy, Clara was not as mentally fit as she had once been. In her widowhood she went in due course to live with her nephew (Hugh) Maximilian, known as Maxey, the son of Charles’s brother Hugh Maximilian who had died in 1826 aged 24. Maxey, who was a retired post captain in the Royal Navy, his wife Mary, Clara and three servants were living in 1881 at 160 Castle Street, Reading.9

  The freehold of the Elliot’s home was advertised for sale by auction in February 1876, along with many of its contents, including ‘the Handsome and Modern Household Furniture, china, glass, brilliant plate chimney glasses, Brussels carpets and rugs, plants, mowing machine, and various other effects, appertaining to a gentleman’s mansion’.10 The executors of Charles Elliot’s will, written in St Helena in 1866, were Sir Frederick Elliot, John Stilwell and William Ford. Summary details, as was normal practice for distinguished figures, were widely reported in the national and local press. The personal estate amounted to less than £8,000, according to the announcement.11 Charles bequeathed all his income to Clara. On her death £100 was to go to their daughter Harriet (Chachy/ Hatty) ‘to purchase some token of the tender regard of himself and his wife’.12 Of the majority of the estate, one third was left to grandson Hope and two thirds to sons Gibby and Freddy. In his letter to Nina Fred comments that ‘He [Charles] will not have left much more than £5,000 in money, but there is a pension of £120 to Clara as Admiral’s widow, or perhaps £130 in all on account of a pittance of a Naval annuity for which he subscribed’.13

  The bequest to Hope proved significant; it appears to have enabled him to live all his adult life – as a bachelor with his father until the latter’s death – without any other source of income.14 George Pennell died as vicar of Stadhampton, Oxfordshire, in 1912; Hope lived on in Oxfordshire and died, apparently intestate, in 1951. His was a long and perhaps at times lonely life. Charles and Clara’s three surviving children were similarly (for the time) long-lived. Harriet, whose husband had succeeded to the de Clifford barony and predeceased her in 1877, died in 1896 aged 67. Gibby had a long career in the Bombay Civil Service, spending some time in Australia. By 1891 he was back in England with his third wife Ann and his son by her Launceston Elliot, who was to become a champion weightlifter and Britain’s first Olympic gold medal winner.15 Gibby died in October 1910 at Mottingham, Kent, aged 77.16 Freddy served for thirty-six years in the Indian Civil Service, rising from Assistant Magistrate and becoming a District Judge in 1881.17 He retired in 1894, eventually settling with his wife Marcia in Exmouth, and died in 1916 at the age of 78.18

  Of Charles’s siblings, Emma, his elder sister and lifelong correspondent and confidante, died while Charles was in St Helena, in 1866. She was 72. His brother Gilbert, with whom he was at school in Reading and who had become ordained, served for more than forty years as Dean of Bristol. Ned (Edward Francis), who visited his brothers at school and appeared unexpectedly at Macao, entered the Indian Civil Service and became Chief Magistrate at Madras, returning to England and living in retirement in Harrow.19 Fred, Charles’s only other surviving brother, was 72 when he died in 1880.

  Charles’s body was buried in the churchyard of St John in the Wilderness at Withycombe on 15 September 1875.20 Clara moved with Maxey – now a rear admiral – and his wife to The Bury, Hemel Hempstead, where she died on 17 October 1885.21 Despite her frequent bouts of ill health and frailty towards the end, she had lived into her eightieth year.

  Epilogue

  Most of the judgements passed on Elliot have inevitably been based on the China years, since it was in that period that he was most in the public eye. The chorus of political, military and press disapproval which characterised the contemporary view of him, despite the influential support he also had, has served to shape the views of several commentators since. Many of the assessments by historians have focused on the question of Elliot’s instructions from Palmerston, whether he can be said to have followed them – in spirit if not to the letter – and if not, whether he was justified in that disregard. If it is the case that Secretaries of State for the Colonies ‘regularly claimed that the disadvantages of distance and imperfect local knowledge were more than offset by the Department’s command of superior wisdom, accumulated experience, and impartial, panoramic views’, the same was surely at least equally true of the Foreign Office.1 Despite Hong Kong’s subsequent conspicuous success, according to the commercial criterion of mid-Victorian Britain, Elliot’s pivotal role in its beginnings was never widely acknowledged. Napier suggested, Elliot acted, and Pottinger ratified – but it was Pottinger’s speedy and decisive use of force that most commended itself to the popular mood.

  Elliot’s personality was such that he was able to live with the injustice, as he saw it, of the criticism of him over China. It never left him, but it did not prevent his fulfilling, on the whole effectively, his subsequent assignments in Texas and as a colonial governor. Most views of him as a person have been benign, though there have been exceptions which have been very wide of the mark – Hanes and Sanello’s description of him as ‘the typical myopic, uninformed foreigner’ is surely an example.2 As his niece Nina later implied, many of his character traits were inherited from his father – a streak of flamboyance, physical courage, wit – but Elliot was also a man of contrasts.3 He could be impetuous, yet appear vacillating; anxious yet sometimes insouciant; generally realistic but also capable of being swept along by idealism and grand strategy. His ambitious plan for Texas and Mexico, as the historian Ephraim Douglass Adams concluded, was ‘entirely in character; a dreaming intriguer, political theorist, and philanthropist … and he lacked the statesman’s poise’.4 On the other hand, Adams’s assertion that after being discredited by failure in China, Elliot ‘was sent to Texas merely to find a place for him – an excellent proof that Texas was not then considered an important post in diplomatic policy’ is questionable.5 Elliot’s letter of appointment as Charge d’Affaires clearly held out the possibility that his observing and reporting role might have to develop into something more active and, by implication, more important. Furthermore slavery and trade, both matters of major concern in Britain’s relations with the new Republic, were areas in which Elliot had had first hand operational experience.

  While the role of patronage in Elliot’s professional life should not be exaggerated, it should not be underestimated either. Joining the Royal Navy would have been a relatively straightforward matter for someone of his class, without the need for any special pleading, but it seems inescapable that background and connections (though not individual members of his family) played a major part in launching him on his post-naval career. Elliot demonstrated ability in British Guiana, but there was nevertheless caution about his suitability for higher things. Writing after the Elliots arrived in China, Sir James Stephen felt the need to explain to the Foreign Office that Elliot was ‘without a very systematic education’, but that ‘he had acquired a mass of knowledge respecting all the practical business of life’.6 There is no evidence that his leaving school aged 14 and not going to university affected Charles Elliot’s future – either his career itself or how he felt about it. Fourteen years in the Royal Navy encompassing a wide variety of deployments on five different stations was more than enough to give him confidence in his experience.

  That underlying self-assurance was to prove essential for Elliot’s subsequent assignments, and for the difficulties that many overseas civil servants faced. The discomfort of long sea voyages, recurring illness, and the heartache and worry of separation from close family were all hardships which Charles and Clara Elliot bore over many years, but for Charles, as for other senior officers of the Crown, the sense of duty to his country was paramount. As Hoe and Roebuck have shown, Charles and Clara sustained each other, she understanding his responsibili
ties and supporting him in their discharge.7 It is clear from the correspondence that Emma Hislop also played an important role. Charles’ elder sister was the sibling to whom he related most closely. According to Henry Taylor, whose admiration extended to Emma and who was for a period a frequent visitor to the Hislops at Charlton, she had some of her brother’s attributes. ‘She is ingenuous, impetuous, and vivacious in her talk and manner, and essentially discreet in her conduct’, he wrote. She had ‘the charm of a bright intelligence, not uninformed by books as well as by commerce with society, and especially, I think, foreign and diplomatic society, Lady Hislop had a faculty, rarely to be met with in lively women, of giving rest to the weary.’8

  Taylor’s autobiography was published in 1885, ten years after Charles Elliot’s death. The praises which were showered on Elliot as Earl Athulf in Taylor’s play Edwin the Fair (quoted in the autobiography with commentary), and in the poem Heroism in the Shade, are the most fulsome expressions of support for him to have appeared in writing. When the play first appeared in 1842 it was influential in presenting Elliot’s China activities in a more positive light. The character Wulfstan the Wise, whom Taylor based on his friend the poet Coleridge, describes Athulf:

  Earl Athulf’s disposition shall I then

  Duly develop; him shall I disclose

  As one whose courage high and humour gay

  Cover a vein of caution, his true heart,

  Intrepid though it be, not blind to danger,

  But through imagination’s optic glass

  Discerning, yea, and magnifying it may be,

  What he still dares: him in these colours dressed