'Such a damned
odd fellow':
Sir Francis Bond 'Galloping' Head
Recently I was given a copy of
Michael Hardwick's 'A Literary Atlas & Gazetteer of
the British Isles', published in 1973. It is something of
a puzzle. There are no entries listed for Croydon as
such. Under Norwood it has, predictably enough, an entry
for Sir Arthur Conan Doyle because he lived at 12
Tennison Road. Also under Norwood are listed John Ruskin
and Sir Sidney Colvin. Inexplicably, as it gives only a
London address for 1915, there is no reference for D H
Lawrence under Addiscombe, let alone Croydon. Yet
Lawrence's literary career began while teaching at the
Davidson Boys' School from 1908, living first at 12 and
then, until 1912, at 16 Colworth Road writing, for
instance, the first draft of 'Sons and Lovers'. Sir
Alfred Comyn Lyall is listed under Coulsdon and John
Horne Tooke under Purley. The only other entry relevant
to Croydon is for Sir Francis Head, who is listed as
buried in Sanderstead churchyard. Why he should have been
included is a mystery, since his name and even more his
books are almost entirely forgotten.
His full name is Francis Bond Head
and he died on July 20, 1875 in his early eighties. Yet,
having included him, the author of this guide did not
know he lived and died at Duppas Hall overlooking Duppas
Hill, the healthiness of which had first attracted
Captain Head, as he then was, to live there in the late
1820s. Now Hillside House has replaced Duppas Hall on the
former Duppas Hill South. Perhaps he is not quite
forgotten as there was a biography published in 1958
entitled 'Galloping Head' by Sydney Jackson, but he also
makes no reference to Croydon but only to Sanderstead.
Sir Francis was well-known in his
time. He fought beside the Duke of Wellington at
Waterloo, and his own horse served as the model for the
equestrian statue of Wellington at Aldershot. He arranged
a demonstration of the art of lassooing for the Duke on
Duppas Hill. He was later to meet Napoleon's nephew, the
Emperor Napoleon III. He was a prolific writer, not least
because he had fallen foul of successive governments,
having apparently disgraced himself as
Lieutenant-Governor of Upper Canada, the English-speaking
province whose capital was Toronto, an inexplicable
appointment for which he had no political and little
administrative experience, and consequently had to earn
his livelihood outside government service. His one claim
to fame nowadays rests on his brief period of office in
Canada in the 1830s when William Lyon Mackenzie, a fiery
and radical Scot, led a rebellion against English rule in
December 1837, culminating in Sir Francis sending troops
to Niagara to destroy an American ship supplying the
rebels. The rebellion was easily suppressed but Sir
Francis was recalled and Lord Durham sent out to report
on the situation in Upper Canada and in French-speaking
Lower Canada for Lord Melbourne's Whig government.
Melbourne's own verdict on Sir Francis is probably not
far from the truth - 'Such a damned odd fellow.'
Sir Francis's period of office as
Lieutenant-Governor of Upper Canada at the time of the
rebellion ensures his fame among historians of Canada.
His fame as a writer is totally eclipsed but he was a
popular writer in his lifetime. He did not write fiction
but a variety of non-fiction genres such as narratives of
events in Canada; biographies, including one on the
explorer James Bruce; an account of the North-Western
Railway, of which he was a director; a polemical tract on
the defenceless state of the British Empire; travelogues
of brief tours in Ireland shortly after the famine and of
Paris in 1851; and essays both humorous and serious, some
for the Quarterly Review, later gathered
together to be published in book form. One essay was
about the new Poor Law, for he was briefly, before going
to Canada, an Assistant Poor Law Commissioner in East
Kent when Sir Edwin Chadwick was Secretary to the Poor
Law Commissioners. Probably it was because of this
connection that he was persuaded to write 'The Air We
Breathe', a review of Chadwick's famous 'Report of the
Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population of Great
Britain'. He was fond of pure air: he chose to live at
Duppas Hill because of the Atlantic breezes. Some of his
books are kept in the local authors collection at the
Croydon Local Studies Library.
The one book that may be still
worth reading is an account he wrote of his visit to
South America in the 1820s, for he went to Argentina to
make a report on the viability of a company mining gold
and silver in the Andes. On his return he wrote 'Rough
Notes taken during some rapid journeys across the Pampas
and among the Andes', first published in 1826, a title
that hardly conveys the exhilaration Captain Head felt
among the gauchos of the Pampas, sharing their life on
horseback and sleeping rough outside their dog
kennel-like huts because of the bugs within. The Pampas
had the advantages of a Mediterranean climate without the
malaria but reminded him of turnip fields. The gauchos
once served him a dish of roasted parrots while horses'
skulls served as chairs. Usually he and the Cornish
miners who accompanied him subsisted on beef and water.
Despite the Indians' pleasure in massacring Christians,
he even admired them for their free and unrestrained
life-style. They spent so much time in the saddle that
they could scarcely walk. Riding sixty miles a day was,
for Captain Head, the most delightful life possible.
Riding remained Sir Francis's chief
pleasure until he became an invalid in 1872, and indeed
he wrote a book about hunting, 'The Horse and His Rider'
in 1860. Not long afterwards he was at loggerheads with
the Croydon Board of Health which in 1865 placed
restrictions on horse-riding on its newly-acquired Duppas
Hill and proposed enclosing it with iron posts and
railings as if intending to turn it into a pampered park
rather than a recreation ground for rich and poor alike
to enjoy their sports and games freely. The issue for the
Board was 'horses or bipeds'. Some of the Board wanted to
ban horse-riding altogether on the public open space,
others to ban grooms exercising horses but not the
general public riding for pleasure. Sir Francis chaired a
large public meeting to prevent the enclosure of Duppas
Hill, wrote letters and memoranda to the press and headed
a memorial of 3,500 people protesting against enclosure.
He argued that the horse riders protected defenceless
ladies, but he was eventually satisfied with notices
forbidding people from exercising their horses. As for
the chastened Board, which had only secured seventeen
votes in favour of enclosure, they climbed down, and
Duppas Hill remains more of a recreation ground than a
park.
Brian
Lancaster
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