|
John Guille
Millais and his 3,000 dead birds
John Guille Millais, explorer,
naturalist and author, was the fourth son of the
famous painter Sir John Everett Millais, and for a
good part of his life he lived off Compton's Lane at a
house called Compton's Brow (now long demolished),
together with his private museum and a collection of
150 heads of deer and over 3,000 birds (either stuffed
or skinned). Before we take a closer look at this
remarkable man and the no less remarkable contents of
his house, a word or two about his illustrious father.
Sir John Everett Millais (1829-1896) came to London
from Jersey with his parents in 1837 and rapidly made
a name for himself as a painter. Together with Holman
Hunt and Dante Gabriel Rossetti he founded the
Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in 1848-49, and was
responsible for some of the movement's greatest
masterpieces, such as 'Lorenzo and Isabella',
'Mariana' and 'The Blind Girl'. John Ruskin gave the
group his seal of approval, and Millais later produced
more popular and overtly sentimental paintings such as
'The Boyhood of Raleigh' and 'Bubbles'. He also became
a fashionable society portrait painter, and counted
Gladstone, Tennyson and Carlyle among his sitters. His
enormous success brought considerable wealth, and in
the 1880s his income was estimated at £30,000 a year –
a huge sum for the times. He had the additional
distinction of being the first English artist to be
made a baronet.
His son was born in London on 24 March 1865, and was
educated at Marlborough and Trinity College,
Cambridge. He served as a Lieutenant in the Somerset
Light Infantry and the Seaforth Highlanders between
1883-1892, and after he resigned his commission he
went to South Africa for a while. He later rose to the
rank of Lieutenant Commander in the R.N.V.R., and was
not afraid to label himself 'a jack of all trades',
prepared to serve as soldier or sailor. He was clearly
a man of action, but also – in that very Victorian way
– a fine artist as well, (in his case with a strong
family tradition behind him, of course), and his
curriculum vitae had many strings to its bow: soldier,
explorer, hunter, wildlife artist, writer, naturalist,
plantsman, animal sculptor and even landscape artist.
If all that was not enough, he was also a keen tennis
player.
In his childhood he had spent much time on family
property in Scotland, and taught himself to be a sharp
observer of the natural world – as well as a sharp
shot. He was later to boast (in a way calculated to
make my birding friends shiver) 'in the course of
twenty-five years I killed every British bird it is
possible to obtain in our islands, beyond rare
visitors, with the exception of Curlew Sandpiper in
full breeding plumage'. This, then, was the source of
his 3,000 bird collection at Compton's Brow.
He was reckoned to be a dead shot with a catapult, and
claimed to have killed many of the specimens in his
collection this way, particularly small birds, and to
have stunned larger ones, from cormorants to Rocky
Mountain blue grouse. His museum collection was stored
in filing cabinets, with a glass top to each drawer.
Each skin was stuffed with a little cotton wool, and
the closed drawers protected them from fading in the
sunlight. I am told that Horsham Museum threw out a
number of specimens some years ago, and it might just
be that they were from the Millais collection. Let's
hope not - but whatever their source, they should of
course have been offered to the Rothschild museum at
Tring.
Millais travelled extensively in pursuit of his
interests, and the roll-call of the territories he
explored is equally long: Iceland, Newfoundland (in
1902 he was the first to explore and map 100 square
miles of the interior, and Millais Lake is named after
him), Norway, Canada, Alaska, the Carpathians, Western
America, and North East, South and Central Africa.
Without doubt a tough, energetic and restless man.
He also left a considerable legacy of fine books
behind him. His first was 'Game Birds and Shooting
Sketches' (1892), and others in the same vein included
'A Breath from the Veldt' (1895), based on his South
African sojourn, and 'Newfoundland and its Untrodden
Ways' (1907). All are desirable collectors' items
today, but none more so than his fine folio studies of
birds, animals and plants, which are among the best of
their kind. A set of the two volume 'British Diving
Ducks' (1913), for example, was recently on sale for
£6,200, and a copy of his limited edition 'Wild Life
in Africa (1928) for about £10,000. Prices of £1,000
and upwards are routine for volumes such as 'British
Deer and Their Horns' (1897).
It is said that no contemporary artist could equal him
for portraying animals and birds in action, and he was
much in demand as well, as an illustrator of books on
sport and natural history, such as the 'Badminton
Library'. He also collaborated with other well-known
artists, and had a fruitful partnership with the great
Archibald Thorburn in volumes such as 'The Natural
History of the British Surface-feeding Ducks' (1902),
and 'The Natural History of British Game Birds'
(1909).
He married Frances, the second daughter of P.G.
Skinwith, and they came to live in Horsham in the late
1890s, where their first address was 'Melwood' in
Rusper Road. This was no more than a stop-gap address,
for soon afterwards, in 1902, they moved to the
newly-built Compton's Brow, which was to remain his
family home for the rest of his life. His family name
is, of course, retained in today's naming of 'Millais'
as a Horsham road, and the many rhododendrons that
still grace that area are a reminder of how splendid
his gardens on the same site, which he developed with
care, must once have been. He also bought land in St
Leonard's Forest.
Between them John and Frances had three children, two
sons and one daughter. Of the sons, Geoffrey was
killed in the Great War in 1918, a Lieutenant in the
Bedfordshire Regiment, and Hesketh Raoul (known
generally as 'Raoul') was later to travel extensively
with his father, and collaborated with him on many of
his books.
A good way to get a flavour of the man is to accompany
him on one of his many expeditions, and we can do
this, of course, by digging into his travel books. But
thanks to an enterprising reporter from the West
Sussex County Times, who sat down with Millais one day
at Compton's Brow just after he had returned from a
trip to Alaska, we can learn about one of his
expeditions, as it were, hot off the press.
It went something like this. In mid-October 1908
Millais returned home from a four-month expedition to
Alaska, where he had been invited by the British
Columbian Government in order to report on the natural
resources of the north country, its scenery, wildlife
and flora, and its 'general suitability for
emigration'. They had been impressed by his earlier
work on Newfoundland, and so he set off on the 8th
July: next stop - Vancouver. His journey was to take
him a distance of some 8,000 miles, and he told the
local reporter that (apart from any obligatory survey
work for the government), he was particularly anxious
to bag 'the big moose of Alaska', as well as caribou,
that lived at a height of 6,000-8,000 feet among the
snow-covered mountains – and if he was very lucky, a
grizzly bear or two. This seemed to be where his main
focus lay.
When he got to Vancouver he had to wait a while for
the steamer to take him up the coast, and so - not to
miss a single opportunity - he spent a pleasant few
days with rod and line on Vancouver Island, where he
caught three fine salmon, each weighing over 50lbs.
One of these splendid fish, landed on 12th August, a
massive 59 pounder, now resides in a glass case in the
hallway of Horsham Museum - all the way from the clear
cold waters of the Campbell River, and in its case for
nearly 100 years. Eventually he got to Fort Wrangell
'in American Alaska', and then transferred to a small
river steamer that took him inland up the Stikine for
150 miles to an Indian post called Telegraph Creek.
At this point he fitted out his expedition with five
horses and two Indian guides, one a professional moose
hunter from the Liard River, and the other a native
from the Tahitan tribe. The journey was now overland,
and the party made slow progress for another 150 miles
to the south-east of Dease Lake in the Rockies, near
the head of the Yukon River. Here they spent two weeks
hunting in what Millais lightly described as 'bad
weather', and he was able to shoot two moose and two
caribou, which he was happy to claim were 'exceptional
specimens'.
He found himself back at Telegraph Creek around the
23rd September, and his next task was to find another
Indian guide who knew that part of the Stikine River
'where bears were to be found'. But this was no easy
task, as bear-hunting guides were few and far between.
The grizzlies' reputation was fearsome, and no
sensible local would want to put himself in the path
of such a natural aggressor. But eventually a man was
found – and he must have been a good one, because in
the space of four days they found three bears, and
killed two. One was nine feet in height, and needed
four shots from Millais, before 'falling to his
magazine'. But it seems that the hard work was only
just beginning, as they then took three days in
skinning and dissecting the bodies – 'a toilsome
task'.
A canoe took them and the bearskins swiftly back down
the Stikine; they managed to do 80 miles in one day,
but then had to wait a week on the coast for the
steamer to arrive to take Millais back to Vancouver.
He made particular comment on how bad the weather had
been, with lots of early snow – apparently
two-and-a-half feet of it on the mountains on the 10th
September. The year before a man had died there in
similar conditions.
Millais thought it had been the roughest trip he had
made in the last twenty years, and the worst bit had
been the stretch after leaving Telegraph Creek. All
along the way the Indian guides had had to break out a
trail for the horses, one of which, when they were
pushing for the Dease Lake Mountains, got trapped in a
bog, sinking so low that only its head was visible.
After a one-and-a-half hour's struggle they decided to
make a form of spade from a fir tree, and with the
help of this crude implement managed to clear away the
mud to one side of the horse, then fill the gap with
branches, and so by dint of strenuously rolling the
animal over, eventually managed to free it. Sounds
like a nightmare, does it not.
But to the intrepid Millais it was all worthwhile. He
had secured 'some splendid horns, the blue riband of
the woods', he had found his grizzlies, and he had
spent his time in 'what to him was most loveable on
earth, in the air and in the sea'.
He died suddenly, aged 66 and on his birthday, 24th
March 1931, and there was a simple family funeral at
Warnham, presided over by the Rev. F.S. Farebrother
from Horsham. So what, finally, should we make of that
most contentious issue - Millais' attitude to the
natural world, his concern for it, but destruction of
it? Men like Millais make today's conservationists
flutter their hands in alarm, of course, but autre
temps, autres moeurs, as the French would say.
Naturalists then operated by the maxim 'what's hit is
history; what's missed is mystery', and the Victorians
saw little distinction between a deep love of nature
on the one hand and the killing of animals, the
collecting of birds' eggs and the stuffing of birds on
the other. While this behaviour might well be alien to
us today, it was fine and dandy then, and that must be
the context within which we should view Millais and
his sporting activities. And we must not forget, of
course, that his legacy to us has been some of the
finest depictions of animals, birds and plants that
the world has ever seen.
Frances Millais remembered
One Horsham resident remembers, as a six year old
girl, visitng Compton's Brow and meeting Frances
Millais in the 1930s when the lady was a widow. In
contrast to Mrs Courage (from the brewing family), who
lived at nearby Compton's Lea and 'a more contrary
person it would have been hard to find', Mrs Millais
was 'a truly delightful lady'.
But she seemed to live in fairly straightened
circumstances, with just one elderly maid who had been
with her for years, and a man who came in to keep the
grass and shrubs, which her husband had brought back
from his travels, under control. (Those splendid
rhododendrons and azaleas are still a feature of the
area.)
One day, with a friend, the six year old was
collecting moss from beside a path which was within
sight of Mrs Millais' window, when the latter came out
to ask what they needed the moss for. The answer was
that the girls were keen on making miniature gardens,
and the moss was intended to represent the lawns. They
were invited in and given a tour of Mrs Millais' own
garden, and she sent them home with an enormous bunch
of flowers each. |
