Frederick Hamilton-Temple-Blackwood, 1st Marquess of Dufferin and Ava
Frederick Temple Hamilton-Temple-Blackwood, 1st Marquess of Dufferin and Ava, KP,GCB,GCSI,GCMG,GCIE,PC (21 June 1826 – 12 February 1902), was a British public servant and prominent member of Victorian society.[1] In his youth he was a popular figure in the court of Queen Victoria, and became well known to the public after publishing a best-selling account of his travels in the North Atlantic.
He is now best known as one of the most successful public servants of his time. His long career in public service began as a commissioner to Syria in 1860, where his skilful diplomacy maintained British interests while preventing France from instituting a client state in Lebanon. After his success in Syria, Dufferin served in the Government of the United Kingdom as the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster[2] and Under-Secretary of State for War. In 1872 he became Governor General of Canada, bolstering imperial ties in the early years of the Dominion, and in 1884 he reached the pinnacle of his official career as Viceroy of India.
He served as ambassador to France from 1891 to 1896. Following his retirement from the diplomatic service in 1896, his final years were marred by personal tragedy and a misguided attempt to secure his family's financial position. His eldest son was killed in the Second Boer War and another son was badly wounded. He was chairman of a mining firm that went bankrupt after swindling people, although he was ignorant of the matter. His biographer Davenport-Hines says he was "imaginative, sympathetic, warm-hearted, and gloriously versatile."[3] He was an effective leader in Lebanon, Canada and India, averted war with Russia, and annexed Burma. He was careless with money but charming in high society on three continents.
He was born Frederick Temple Blackwood into the Ascendancy, Ireland's Anglo-Irisharistocracy, the son of Price Blackwood, 4th Baron Dufferin and Claneboye. On his father's side, Dufferin was descended from Scottish settlers who had moved to County Down in the early 17th century. The Blackwood family became prominent landowners in Ulster over the following two hundred years, and were created baronets in 1763, entering the Peerage of Ireland in 1800 as Baron Dufferin. The family had influence in parliament because they controlled the return for the borough of Killyleagh. Marriages in the Blackwood family were often advantageous to their landowning and high-society ambitions. His mother, Helen Selina Sheridan, was the granddaughter of the playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan and through her, the family became connected to English literary and political circles.
Dufferin was born in 1826 in Florence, then the capital of the Grand Duchy of Tuscany in the Italian peninsula, with great advantages. He was educated at Eton and at Christ Church, Oxford, where he became president of the Oxford Union Society for debate, although he left Oxford after only two years without obtaining a degree. While still an Oxford undergraduate, he visited Skibbereen in County Cork to see the impact of the Irish Famine first-hand. He was appalled by what he saw, prompting him to raise money on behalf of the starving poor.[4] In 1841, while still at school, he succeeded his father as Baron Dufferin and Claneboye in the Peerage of Ireland and in 1849 was appointed a Lord-in-Waiting to Queen Victoria. In 1850 he was additionally created Baron Claneboye, of Clandeboye in the County of Down, in the Peerage of the United Kingdom.[2] He inherited 18,000 acres in County Down.[5]
In 1856, Dufferin commissioned the schoonerFoam and set off on a journey around the North Atlantic. He first made landfall on Iceland, where he visited the then very small Reykjavík, the plains of Þingvellir, and Geysir. Returning to Reykjavík, Foam was towed north by Prince Napoleon, who was on an expedition to the region in the steamer La Reine Hortense. Dufferin sailed close to Jan Mayen Island, but was unable to land there due to heavy ice and caught only a very brief glimpse of the island through the fog. From Jan Mayen, Foam sailed on to northern Norway, stopping at Hammerfest before sailing for Spitzbergen.
On his return, Dufferin published a book about his travels, Letters From High Latitudes. With its irreverent style and lively pace, it was extremely successful and can be regarded as the prototype of the comic travelogue. It remained in print for many years and was translated into French, German and Urdu. The letters were nominally written to his mother, with whom he had developed a very close relationship after the death of his father when he was 15.[6]
Despite the great success of Letters From High Latitudes, Dufferin did not pursue a career as an author, although he was known for his skilful writing throughout his career. Instead, he became a public servant, with his first major public appointment in 1860 as British representative on a commission to Syria to investigate the causes of a civil war earlier that year in which the MaroniteChristian population had been subject to massacres by the Muslim and Druze populations. In light of this work in June 1861 he was appointed Knight Commander of the Order of the Bath.[7] Working with French, Russian, Prussian and Turkish representatives on the commission, Dufferin proved remarkably successful in achieving the objectives of British policy in the area. He upheld Turkish rule in the area, and prevented the French from establishing a client state in Lebanon, later securing the removal of a French occupying force in Syria. He also defended the interests of the Druze community, with whom Britain had a long association. The other parties on the commission were inclined to repress the Druze population, but Dufferin argued that had the Christians won the war they would have been just as bloodthirsty. The long-term plan agreed by the commission for the governance of the region was largely that proposed by Dufferin — that Lebanon should be governed separately from the rest of Syria, by a Christian Ottoman who was not a native of Syria.[8] He was appointed a Knight of the Order of Saint Patrick on 28 January 1864.
Dufferin's achievements in Syria launched his long and successful career in public service. In 1864 he became Under-Secretary of State for India, moving to Under-Secretary of War in 1866, and from 1868 he held the position of Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster in Prime MinisterGladstone's government. In 1871 he was raised in the Peerage as Earl of Dufferin, in the County of Down, and Viscount Claneboye, of Clandeboye in the County of Down.[8]
Archibald James Leofric Temple Hamilton-Temple-Blackwood, Earl of Ava (28 July 1863 – 11 January 1900), was a in the 17th Lancers and a fellow of the Royal Colonial Institute. He was a war correspondent in South Africa during the Second Boer War and was wounded at Wagon Hill during the Siege of Ladysmith. Lord Ava died a week later. He was unmarried.
(16 March 1866 – 7 February 1918). Married and had issue, three daughters.
Terence Hamilton-Temple-Blackwood, 2nd Marquess of Dufferin and Ava
Lady Hermione Catherine Helen Hamilton-Temple-Blackwood (1869–19 October 1960) trained as a nurse and qualified in 1901, serving in France during the . She was awarded the Médaille de la Reconnaissance française for her services. She died unmarried.
First World War
(4 November 1870 – 3 July 1917) was a barrister-at-law. He was at Balliol College, Oxford in 1891 and became part of the 'kindergarten' of Lord Milner. He was appointed Deputy Judge Advocate in South Africa in 1900, secretary to the High Commissioner to South Africa in 1902, Assistant Colonial Secretary in the Orange River Colony in 1903, Colonial Secretary in Barbados from 1907 to 1909 and Assistant Secretary to the Land Development Commission of England from 1910 to 1914. He was attached to the 9th Lancers and Intelligence Corps from 1914 to 1916 and then appointed Private Secretary to Ivor Churchill Guest, 1st Viscount Wimborne, the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, in 1916. He returned to active service as a lieutenant in the Grenadier Guards and was killed in action in 1917. His most prominent legacy is the corpus of drawings he did for Hilaire Belloc's books (over the signature `BTB'). He was unmarried.
Lord Ian Basil Gawaine Temple Hamilton-Temple-Blackwood
Frederick Hamilton-Temple-Blackwood, 3rd Marquess of Dufferin and Ava
Gravestone of Sydney Temple BlackwoodIn addition, they had a son, Sydney Temple Blackwood, who was born on 29 May 1867, but died the same day. His gravestone stands at St Katherine's Church, in Friern Barnet Lane, London:
Lord Dufferin took the name Hamilton by royal licence on 9 September 1862, shortly before his marriage to Hariot Georgina Rowan-Hamilton on 23 October 1862. He was distantly related to the Hamilton family by previous marriages, and the union was partly designed to eliminate some long-standing hostilities between the families. Dufferin also took the name of Temple, on 13 November 1872.[8] They had seven surviving children; the two youngest, a son and a daughter, were born in Canada:
Shortly after his marriage, he was deeply upset when his mother married his friend George Hay, Earl of Gifford, a man some 17 years her junior. The marriage scandalised society, but Lord Gifford died only weeks afterwards. Despite his disapproval of his mother's second marriage, Lord Dufferin was devastated by her death in 1867, and built Helen's Tower, a memorial to her, on the estate at Clandeboye. A nearby bay was also named Helen's Bay, and a railway station of that name was built there by him, seeding the growth of the modern Belfast commuter town of Helen's Bay.[9]
After leaving Ottawa in 1878 at the end of his term, Dufferin returned to Great Britain to continue his diplomatic career. He served as ambassador to Imperial Russia from 1879 to 1881 and to the Ottoman Empire from 1881 to 1884. Although he had previously served in Liberal governments, Dufferin had become increasingly alienated from William Ewart Gladstone over issues of home and Irish policy, particularly the Landlord and Tenant (Ireland) Act 1870 and the Land Law (Ireland) Act 1881, both of which tried to resolve issues surrounding the property rights of tenants and landlords. He accepted the appointment as ambassador to Russia from the Conservative Benjamin Disraeli, further alienating the Liberal leader.
Dufferin's time in Russia was quiet from a political and diplomatic point of view, and his papers from this time are concerned mainly with his social life. While in Russia, he began to set his sights on the ultimate diplomatic prize, the Viceroyalty of India. However, Lord Ripon succeeded Lord Lytton in 1880, largely because as a convert to Roman Catholicism, Ripon could not be accommodated in the Cabinet. Instead, Dufferin's next diplomatic posting was to Constantinople.
His posting there saw Britain invade and occupy Egypt, then technically part of the Ottoman Empire, under the pretext of "restoring law and order" following anti-foreign riots in Alexandria which had left nearly 50 foreigners dead, and Dufferin was heavily involved in the events surrounding the occupation. Dufferin managed to ensure that the Ottoman Empire did not attain a military foothold in Egypt, and placated the population of Egypt by preventing the execution of Urabi Pasha, who had seized control of the Egyptian army. Urabi had led the resistance to foreign influence in Egypt, and after the occupation, many in the Cabinet were keen to see him hanged. Dufferin, believing this would only inspire further resistance, instead ensured that Urabi was exiled to Ceylon.
In 1882 Dufferin travelled to Egypt as British commissioner, to investigate the reorganization of the country. He wrote a report (known as the Dufferin Report) detailing how the occupation was to benefit Egypt, with plans for development which were to progressively re-involve Egyptians in running the country. Subsequent reforms proceeded largely along the lines he had proposed.[8] He was promoted to Knight Grand Cross of the Order of the Bath (civil division) on 15 June 1883.
Dufferin often told a tale of how he once saw a ghost which saved his life. Late one night in 1849, while staying in a house in Tullamore, County Offaly, Ireland, he heard a hearse draw up, and looked down and saw a man walking across the lawn carrying a coffin on his back. The man stopped and looked up at Dufferin and their eyes met for a moment, before he continued on into the shadows and disappeared. Dufferin thought the whole event might have been just a bad dream, but the next morning his hostess assured him that the next time he saw the apparition, he would die.
Some years later Dufferin – by this point, the British ambassador to France – recognised the lift operator at the Grand Hotel in Paris as the man he had seen in the garden in Ireland. He refused to get into the lift and a moment later it crashed, killing the occupants including the mysterious man, who had only begun work at the hotel that morning.[21][22]
French journalist Paul Heuzé demonstrated that up to the time of his research in 1922, only one person had been killed in a Grand Hotel lift accident, in 1878, years before Dufferin was in Paris.[23] A more recent investigation by BBC researcher Melvin Harris demonstrated that the story was an urban legend which Dufferin improved upon by telling as a personal anecdote.[24]
Davenport-Hines, Richard. "Blackwood, Frederick Temple Hamilton-Temple-, first marquess of Dufferin and Ava (1826–1902)", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/31914
online
Charles Edward Drummond Black (1903). . Vol. 1. Hutchinson.
The Marquess of Dufferin and Ava: diplomatist, viceroy, statesman
Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall (1905). . Vol. 2.
The life of the Marquis of Dufferin and Ava
Gailey, Andrew (2015). The Lost Imperialist: Lord Dufferin, Memory and Mythmaking in an Age of Celebrity. John Murray. 978-1444792430.
ISBN
James, Laurence (1994). The Rise and Fall of the British Empire. Abacus Books. 0-349-10667-3.
ISBN
Martin, Briton Jr. "The Viceroyalty of Lord Dufferin," History Today, (Dec 1960) 10#12 pp 821–830, and (Jan 1961) 11#1 pp 56–64
Stewart, George (2002). Canada Under The Administration Of Lord Dufferin. University Press of the Pacific. 1-4102-0319-0.
ISBN
Yasin, Madhavi (1994). India's Foreign Policy - The Dufferin Years. Raj Publications. 81-86208-01-1.
ISBN
and C.W. de Kiewiet, Eds. Duffering-Carnarvon Correspondence, 1874-1878. Toronto: Champlain Society Publications, 1955.
Underhill, Frank
Website of the Governor General of Canada. . Retrieved 1 January 2017
Journal of the journey of His Excellency the governor-general of Canada from Government House, Ottawa, to British Columbia and back Dufferin and Ava, Frederick Temple Hamilton-Temple-Blackwood, Marquess of, London, England: Webster & Larkin, 1877
Address of His Excellency the Governor-General of Canada on the subject of the relations between the Dominion government and British Columbia, in respect to the Canadian Pacific Railway : delivered at Government House, Victoria, Sept. 20th, 1876, to a deputation of the reception committee, publ. R. Wolfenden, Victoria B.C., 1876
Archived 4 March 2016 at the Wayback Machine, (sent to Senate and Commons) publ. Ottawa, Ontario: Maclean, Roger, 1875
Message relative to the terms of union with the Province of British Columbia
at Internet Archive
Irish emigration and the tenure of land in Ireland (1867)
Photograph: Lord Dufferin in 1878. McCord Museum
Photograph: Lord Dufferin in 1878. McCord Museum
Photograph: Lady Dufferin in 1878. McCord Museum
Edited compilation of the Duffering-Carnarvon Correspondences, 1874–1878, provided by the Champlain Society.
