Stanley Portal Hyatt

Stanley Portal Hyatt
Stanley 1899 Rhodesia
Born	2 January 1877 Streatham, Surrey
Died	30 June 1914 Sydenham, Surrey
Nationality	English
Education	Dulwich College
Occupation	Engineer
Engineering career
Significant advance	Opening of Rhodesian trade routes

Stanley Portal Hyatt (2 January 1877 – 30 June 1914) was an English explorer, hunter, and writer. Stanley left his comfortable family home and struck out around the world around 1896. He soon arrived in Africa to seek his fortune during 1898. In his written works, Stanley describes his life and experiences in Australia, Rhodesia and the Philippines. He wrote fluently and skilfully about the life on “The Road”. He wrote about his fellow-riders and of his animals. Stanley had a bitter contempt for commercially inspired progress, vehemently defending the "underdog" whenever he could and was a savage critic of the establishment. The Old Transport Road and Dairy of a Soldier of Fortune are his famous works..

Family

Stanley Portal Hyatt was born 2 Jan 1877, in The Hawthorns, Mt. Ephraim Rd. Streatham, Surrey, England and died 30 Jun 1914, in Longton Grove Sydenham, Surrey, England. He married Margaret Annie Marston on 20 Jul 1908, in London, England. She was the daughter of John William Marston. After her death in 1912 he married Charlotte Caroline Key on 4 May 1914, in Newton Abbot, Devon, England. She was the daughter of Walter C Key and Caroline Mcleod Godsell.

Stanley Portal Hyatt's ancestry is both humble and distinguished. His great great Grandfather Abraham Portal began life as an apprentice Goldsmith who later in life became bankrupt, but he was also the Grandfather of the first Baron Hatherton. Stanley's Hyatt Great great Grandfather, John Hyatt, was a humble innkeeper in Dorset. His Hyatt great Grandfather began life as an apprenticed shoemaker. His great Grandfather Richard Brinsley sheridan Portal was apprenticed to a grocer. His Hyatt Grandfather, Charles Hyatt, was a dissenting minister preaching to the poor of the London slums. His Portal Grandfather, Richard Brinsley Portal was a fairly wealthy grocer and wine merchant in Northampton. His Parents, Charles James Hyatt and Amy Portal were both from now wealthy Victorian families, the various grandparents having done very nicely from Preaching and Trading.

Biography

Stanley Portal Hyatt rejected his family's great wealth (although he took a fair amount with him) to strike out on his own as one of the minor Victorian explorers. He was born in 1877, and educated at Dulwich College. He left school early in 1892 after studying engineering. He then spent two years in the workshops of a big firm of electrical engineers pioneering electric lighting, and then wanderlust gripped him.

Before his eighteenth birthday he watched, from the fo'cs'le of a windjammer, the silver crescent of the moon rising above Sydney Heads in Australia. He spent a fortnight in the New South Wales capital, which abounded then not only in larrikins but in fan-tan shops, where all day one heard "those gruesome, horrible claws," the long nails of the Chinese croupier, scratching over the matting as he raked in the lost money, or watched the concentrated spite on his face as he paid out to an unusually successful gambler.

Thereafter Stanley got a berth in a big sheep station some four hundred miles up-country. It was a magnificent place, splendidly maintained and splendidly stocked, but even so far from the coast he found little suggestion of the rolling pastoral countryside, and no hint at all of the Australia of this novelist. He was not sorry to cut loose and drift down again to Sydney, even though he reached the coast with two pounds in his pocket and little chance of earning more. A fortnight of loafing varied by daily visits to the cheapest of cheap eating-houses saw the end of his capital, whereupon his first dress suit, pride of its owner's heart, passed into the hands of a little Jew in Argyll Street for a recompense of ten shillings.

Then his luck turned, and somebody gave him an engineering job of sorts. Even that filtered out before long, and this young emigrant, not yet nineteen, cabled home for money, and shook the dust of Australia from his shoes in disgust.

Stanley was then to spend eighteen months at home in London, a period devoted mainly to a newly acquired craze for inventing things (mainly in order to raise funds for his further overseas expeditions). By the end of that time the nation was the richer to the extent of patents on five epoch-making inventions, to the value of which it displayed an utterly callous indifference. These included a new camera, a bicycle brake, a steam engine valve, an arrangement for glazing the windows of railway carriages, and, lastly, a paraffin lamp that could be used with the new incandescent mantle. He and his brother Malcolm worked on that together, and they had a company promoter ready to float it when it was ready. They grew quite used to fires during the experiments. They kept a box of sand at the end of the bench, and every time the lamp burst this would be emptied over the blaze. There was no denying that the apparatus worked. When the atmospheric conditions were right, or when the thing was in a good humour, the light would be far brighter than that obtainable from coal gas; but at other times it poured out volumes of thick, black smoke, or, in default, blew the mantle to pieces. They never succeeded in getting an automatic adjustment, and ultimately lost about a hundred pounds over the scheme.

Disillusioned, in 1897 Stanley left home for Bulawayo in Africa, to seek his fortune again, where he went on to Matabeleland. There, Stanley and his brother Malcolm signed contracts to stay in Matabeleland for two years. The end of the Second Matabele War was practically in sight, the dawn of prosperity seemed to be coming as the territories of Matabeleland and Mashonaland were to become Rhodesia under the Cecil Rhodes administration, and the country was being opened up in earnest. The Geelong mine, just outside Gwanda, whose engineering staff the two brothers were to join, was to be the first mine in Rhodesia actually to produce gold. After initial hardships enough to have sent the average raw youth running back to the fleshpots of civilisation without loss of time, they reached the mine itself. The difficulties before them were infinitely worse ...

After two hard years Stanley's contract ended and with his savings he was able to set up as a merchant trader and supplier. By the age of 22 Stanley was the largest native trader in Eastern Mashonaland. He was a great traveller, opening up trade routes right across Africa, notably in Mozambique and Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) where he used ox carts to supply the trading posts of the Great White Hunters. He explored the centre part of Mozambique for the Portuguese, returning only to find his business ruined through the new cattle disease, Rinderpest. This outbreak in the 1890s killed 80 to 90 percent of all cattle in Southern Africa. Cecil John Rhodes had imported some diseased cattle from Australia. They landed at Beira in Mozambique and were allowed to mix with the local cattle, exposing them to the disease, which broke out as soon as Rhodes's herd reached Umtali. The Rhodesian Chartered Companys government was bombarded with requests and petitions to destroy any and every other beast that came into contact with the dead cattle, to stamp out the plague at the start.

These pleas fell on deaf ears, and, said Stanley, "The reason was obvious. Rhodes had just died and to admit the existence of a new cattle disease would have sent down Rhodesian shares." Some years later he wrote: "Bitter? I was literally savage then, and even now, I have not forgotten. I suppose that, in one way or another, we owned some 60‚000 pounds worth of property when the disease broke out. A few months later, we were only just able to pay our fares out of the miserable country."

Stanley had been driving supply waggons through the virgin veld for some ten years of unremitting toil and was rewarded, eventually, with little more than fond memories, financial ruin and ill-health.

He then struck out in search of rubber to trade, and failed to find any good sources in the area. During 1903 Stanley was responsible for building the first industrial food refrigeration plant in Umtali, a great coastal port in Rhodesia. Demand for meat had risen during the Boer war and the export of beef was now the mainstay of trade in the port. After this, he tried his hand at gold prospecting and then decided to leave and ride the tramp steamers around the world.

Stanley then travelled on to Singapore, the Philippines, China and America. He was involved in several wars, notably as a mercenary and not fighting for anyone in particular. Stanley was the only Englishman who fought through the 1904–05 campaign in the Philippine–American War for the American Army.

He returned home to England in his 30's (1905) and started writing boys story books of his adventures and books about his travels. The books are documented, and some are on line. By 1910 he was quite ill as a result of his travels and was addicted to Morphine. He slowly succumbed to this and malaria (hence his morphine addiction) and finally died of Tuberculosis in 1914.

In his own words, taken from his book 'The Diary of a Soldier of Fortune', he describes his experiences as "Engineer, Sheep Station Hand, Nigger Driver, Hunter, Trader, Transport Rider, Labour Agent, Cold Storage Engineer, Explorer, Lecturer, Pressman, American Soldier, Blockade Runner and Tramp"

Literary work

Stanley Portal Hyatt, 1909.

In most of his works, Hyatt describes his life and experiences in Australia, Rhodesia and the Philippines. When he had returned home to England he had a very hard struggle to make a success with his first novel, Marcus Hay, but soon following this he wrote the "Little Brown Brother" dealing with the Philippines, which made him well known in American literary circles. Other notable titles include: The Marriage of Hilary Carden; Black Sheep; The Law of the Bolo; The Land of Promises; Biffel, a Trek Ox; The Diary of a Soldier of Fortune; The Northward Trek; Off the Main Track. He also wrote a lot of short stories for the "Penny dreadful" story magazines of the time, and became a popular name with young boys of the early 20c.

Stanley writes fluently and knowledgeably about life on "The Road", about the unspoilt and sometimes savagely inhospitable countryside of early Rhodesia, about the skills and courage needed to get the waggons through. He writes lovingly of his fellow-riders, and of his animals. For contemporary society, and for commercially inspired "progress", however, he has nothing but bitter contempt. Although some find his writing racist and blunt, it portrays life in the African bush as it was, and not as a fanciful romantic dream. The Old Transport Road is an informative and absorbing book. It is also a tribute to those who braved the trackless wilderness by ox-waggon - men who can legitimately be compared to the 19th century pioneers of modern America.

Some of the best known books by Stanley Portal HYATT
(M: 1877 Jan 2 - 1914 Jun 30)
(17 distinct works, 2 posthumous)

Marcus Hay [1907]	The Little Brown Brother [1908]
The Marriage Of Hilary Carden [1909]	Biffel, a trek Ox [1909]
The Northward Trek [1909]	Black Sheep (aka: People Of Position (USA)) [1910]
The Diary Of A Soldier Of Fortune [1910]	The Law Of The Bolo [1910]
The Land Of Promises [1911]	The Literary Pageant (ed) [1911]
Off The Main Track [1911]	The Makers Of Mischief [1911]
Fallen Among Thieves (aka: The Markham Affair (USA)) [1913]	The Way Of The Cardines [1913]
The Old Transport Road [1914]	The Black Pearl Of Peihoo [1914]
A Man From The Past [1915]	The Mammoth [1916]

References

• "The Bookman" Gallery May 1911 by Ashley Gibson, pp. 65-66
• Read some more of his written works on line
• Stanley Portal Hyatt - NY Times Obituary

‘HYATT, Stanley Portal’, Who Was Who, A & C Black, 1920–2008; on line edn, Oxford University Press, Dec 2007

‘Born wanderer: the life of Stanley Portal Hyatt‘ Author Paul Frederic Cranefield ISBN 0879936010