Waghorn of Suez

Just before I left New Zealand to come to Britain, more years ago now than I am prepared to acknowledge, my great aunt took me aside to give me two pieces of information which she thought might prove useful to me on my travels. The first concerned my great-great grandfather, a man by the name of Thomas Fletcher Waghorn, to whom family folklore attributed the honour of having been the driving force behind the construction of the Suez Canal.

That this was not true – or was at least true only in part, and then with qualifications – I was later to learn. But what my great aunt wished to impress upon me at the time was most of all the extent to which the British Government had failed, and History itself under-valued my heroic ancestor - so that it was going to be up to me now, as family representative travelling abroad, to disentangle noble truth from base misrepresentation, and try to gain for the the poor man the credit he deserved.

“When you pass through the Suez Canal” my great aunt told me; “You will see a handsome statue to Ferdinand de Lesseps; and to your great-great-grandfather something altogether humbler - it stands above a public lavatory now, I believe! But it bears an inscription from de Lesseps himself, in which he pays tribute to the part which your great-great-grandfather played in the Canal’s construction.“

I saw neither of these statues, as it turned out. The ship I sailed on was to have called at Aden, but there was a strike on in Aden that day which would have made it dangerous, and so we put down anchor at Port Said, in Yemen instead. I learned many years later that the Waghorn statue had in fact been demolished during the course of construction work in the area; but I have seen photographs of it in the National Geographic magazine and other publications, and have established that it was raised for him by de Lesseps on the occasion of the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, and that it did indeed bear an inscription which said, among other things, "Where he led, we followed."

The other thing my great-aunt wished to say to me was more a stern admonition than an item of family history. It concerned a second cousin of my father’s, a girl who had left New Zealand to go to England earlier in the century, and who, according to my aunt, had brought the family reputation into wilful disrepute. “Whatever you do, don’t do as she did!” I was warned. “Kathleen was a wicked girl – she spent all her father’s money and she broke her mother’s heart!”

The ‘Kathleen’ in question was in fact the writer Katherine Mansfield – and it has always seemed to me that if I wished for proof of the validity of the biblical quotation “A prophet is not without honour, save in his own country and in his own house”, I had only to remember my great aunt’s brusque dismissal of the achievements of my unfortunate cousin twice removed, Kathleen.

I had been in England many years before I found the time or inclination to try to trace either of these family connections to their roots. I had married, and raised a family; and although I had studied the life and work of Katherine Mansfield in some depth - being especially interested in her connection with those other favourites of mine, Virginia Woolf ( who was rather spiteful about her while she lived; though did pay fulsome enough tribute to her after she had died); and D.H.Lawrence... although I identified quite closely for a time with Katherine Mansfield, for poor old forgotten Thomas Waghorn, I scarcely spared a thought in more than twenty five years.

I literally stumbled, in the end, upon the full story of the man who is sometimes still referred to as ‘Waghorn of Suez’. I had happened to be planning a visit to the Medway towns, and in thumbing through a guidebook for Chatham and Rochester, came upon what was to me the magical phrase “Waghorn Memorial’. So there it was – he had been born in Chatham and they had honoured him there! The citizens of Chatham had put up a bronze statue to his memory; his grave is outside the vestry door at the church of All Saints, Snodland; and there is a memorial to him on the south wall of the nave.

I discovered too, that in the Encyclopaedia Britannica entry for Chatham, Kent, only two prominent former citizens are deemed worthy of mention – one is Charles Dickens, the other Thomas Waghorn. This was the sort of stuff to warm my great-great-granddaughterly heart - if only I had been able to phone New Zealand to tell my great aunt and my father! But alas, my discovery had come too late for that. My great-aunt was long dead by then; as were all my other great aunts and elderly cousins - and sadly, also my father, whose delight would have been greatest of all.

My father had earlier been over here on a visit, and had spent much time trying to locate the facts – any facts - about his great-grandfather Waghorn. He had gone about the country following all the slender leads he had, but had come up with nothing; not even the date, or place of his birth. All he found was a written tribute left by the novelist William Thackeray, which he discovered in an old book, in a library in Exeter........ Thackeray had been one of those Victorians intrepid enough to travel on Waghorn’s Overland Route from Cairo to Suez, and he had remembered the occasion, and the man, with these rather astonishingly ringing words:

“But what are his (Napoleon’s) wonders compared to Waghorn’s? Napoleon massacred the Mamelukes at the Pyramids; Waghorn has conquered the Pyramids themselves; dragged the unwieldy structures a month nearer England than they were, and brought the country with them..... Be ours, the trophies of peace! Oh my country! Oh Waghorn!”

The story of Thomas Waghorn is a short one, full of tremendous incident – but ending sadly. He gave his life, and every penny of his money to his dream of creating a shortcut between Britain and India; but in the end, events – and his own government – were against him, and he died, aged only fifty and virtually penniless, without ever seeing any of the fruits of his labours. There is a splendid account of his life and exploits in the National Dictionary of Biography, and I wish I were able to reproduce it here in full, for it tells his story in greater detail, and with considerably greater flair, than I am going to be able to do.

There is more to tell – lots more, and it’s rather thrilling, Boys’ Own stuff! There’s also the oddest little twist of history at the end – nothing is ever quite what it seems, I have learnt, when it comes to family folklore passed down by word of mouth through generations! I think I have probably said enough for one day and one post, however. But for anyone who might be interested in learning more, I shall try to come back again another day, to complete the tale.