Most
accounts agree that the putative pyramid builder Thomas Willson was born circa 1780. For most of his life he
seemed slightly unsure of his age, giving numbers that, worked backwards, give
possible dates of birth sometime between 1779 and 1785. His place of birth is
likewise uncertain, on the 1861 census he says is from Fulham, but in 1819 he
told the colonial office it was Chelsea. We don’t know the name of his parents
or their station in life or indeed anything else about his family background or
his childhood. The first documented fact we have about him is that he won the
Royal Academy Gold Medal for Architecture in 1801 for a projected National
Museum for Painting and Sculpture. It seems reasonable to assume from this that
he attended the Royal Academy as a student and he certainly continued to exhibit
there; in 1804 it was a 'Design for an
entrance front to the Bank of Ireland from Foster Place, Dublin'. We know he
married Mary Ann Ince on 13 August 1808 at St Botolph Aldgate; according to the
register he was a resident of the parish. The couple went on to have four
children; Percy, who was born in 1809, Mary Ann in 1811, Douglas in 1813 and
Thomas in 1815. By his own account the young husband and father worked as an
architect and land surveyor in the Horse Guards office of the commander in
chief of the British Army, the Duke of York and Albany, Prince Frederick (the
second son of George III) but by 1819 he may have been out of work as Britain
stepped down from being on a more or less permanent war footing with the
French.
After
the defeat of Napoleon and the demobilisation of thousands of military
personnel, unemployment and political unrest became a serious problem in
Britain. One of the proposed solutions was to encourage emigration to the
colonies and in 1819 Parliament allocated £50,000 pounds to the establishment
of a colony on the Eastern Section of the Cape of Good Hope. A plan was
circulated offering potential settlers one hundred acres of free land in South
Africa plus free passage and food whilst on the ship though a £10 deposit was
also required “to provide security for any advances which the Cape Government
might be compelled to make for protecting the settlers against starvation”. The
Government encouraged the formation of settler parties, the deposit to be
collected by the party leader but paid over to the colonial authorities. A
presumably unemployed and desperate Thomas Willson was one of the people
attracted by the idea of leading a settler party to South Africa. On the 19th
July 1819 from the family home of Bridge Cottage, Chelsea Water Works, he wrote
to his old superior Henry, Lord Bathurst, the Secretary of State for War and
the Colonies, soliciting employment in Cape Colony; “As your Lordship on a former occasion did me the honor to express a
desire to serve me, having devoted the early years of my Life under Government,
and possessing Testimonials highly honourable to my Character and professional
fame and presuming upon the means of taking out 100 families to the Cape of
Good Hope, may I in such a case be distinguished with an appointment as
Colonial Secretary, Surveyor or any other respectable office in your Lordships
gift or recommendation?” No offer of employment was forthcoming however and
in fact later on the Colonial Office sheepishly admitted that Willson’s
application to lead a party had been accepted in error and that they had
actually meant to endorse a rival application from the similarly named Edward
Webb Wilson who had applied to emigrate with the influential backing of Sir
John Kynaston Powell of Ellesmere, the member of Parliament for Shropshire.
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| Old Chelsea Water Works from the Thames, 1829 |
Willson’s
party consisted of 307 persons, 102 able bodied men and their dependants.
Jumping the gun somewhat Willson collected an initial £5 deposit from them
before the Colonial Office confirmed the success of his application. He went to
collect a further £10 from each of his settlers to pay the Government deposit,
the initial £5 would be used, he said, to buy ‘necessary stores’. He also decided
to levy a 5% surcharge on the total amount paid by his charges as a personal
fee for his efforts on their behalf. From the outset some of the potential
colonists recruited by Willson were suspicious of his methods and his motives.
A James Phillips of 3 Tann Street, Aldersgate, wrote to the Government wishing
to confirm Willson’s bona fides as “being
desirous of avoiding the possibility of becoming a dupe to an artifice, I
respectfully request to be informed if what he states is the fact, as the terms
proposed by him are that £5 be paid the first week of the current month into
his hands without any security for its proper appropriation, £5 in Octr &
£5 the last week in the same month, which last sum is for the purchase of
stores of him on landing at the colony.”
From
Chelsea Willson fired off a salvo of correspondence during July and August to
Lord Bathurst trying to clarify various details relating to return of the
settler’s deposits once they were in South Africa. By October he issued a
scheme for the governance of his party once they were settled in the Cape, his
suggestion being that the ten individuals in the party with some pretensions to
being gentlemen should form a 'Society', each contributing an equal amount of
capital and five labourers, and constitute themselves a Committee of Management
to oversee the building of houses and the cultivation of their land. In
addition he proposed that every ten settlers should select a Director to
represent them, who would assist Willson himself in 'the dispensation of
benefits'. In the distribution of land to the members of his party he would be
as generous as was consistent with 'the public good' and the preservation of
his 'own individual rights as Lord of the Manor'. He was willing to give a
written guarantee of his intention to grant land to any settler who was
entitled to a share, and who would 'pay a stipulated sum towards a Fund of
Indemnity' intended to go into his own pocket. This grandiose and rather
confusing scheme aroused the resentment of his party and as a result never got
off the ground.
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| Setting sail from Deptford, 1820 |
For
some reason Willson left his 8 year old daughter Mary Ann in England with
relatives whilst the rest of the family, including his two youngest sons who
were just 6 and 4, joined the rest of the emigrating party in Deptford in early
January 1820. There they all boarded the Belle
Alliance for the voyage to the Cape only to find themselves miserably stuck
in the ice bound Thames for over a month waiting for the unusually fierce
winter frost to thaw. The ship finally struggled to the Kent Coast and set sail
from the Downs on 12 February taking just under 3 months to reach Table Bay on
2 May. Willson immediately wrote to Lord Bathurst to let him of the party’s
safe arrival:
We have made the
passage (without accident) in eleven weeks from the Downs, and except in
the cases of measles and small pox which
was brought on board by some of the settlers'
children, we have had excellent health, and it is my duty to say that in general the Settlers have
not only stated themselves to be
well satisfied but have expressed their gratitude for the excellent accommodation
and provisions which were furnished for them
by your Lordship's, direction,
and I believe in so large and varied a party it would be difficult
to select an
instance wherein greater
order has more generally prevailed, with the exception of
two juvenile thieves who, for example sake, I have found
it necessary to have punished, but careful to avoid the character of severity
on the passage, notwithstanding their
repeated depredations, for the
sake of example.
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| The 1820 settlers landing in Algoa Bay by Thomas Baines |
Very
few migrants on government transports in the 19th century felt that they were
excellently accommodated and provisioned. Willson’s party may not have been as
contented as he portrayed them to Lord Bathurst. Thomas Cock for one might have
had something to say about the ‘excellent health’ apparently enjoyed by
virtually everyone on board apart from his wife and three children, who all died
during the passage. One the settlers with pretensions to being a gentleman, a
Mr Wilmot, may also have taken issue with the statement having lost one of his
servants. Two of the excellently accommodated and provisioned settlers demanded
to be put ashore at Simon’s Town with their families and leave the party. On
the final leg of the voyage to Algoa Bay Willson issued a circular to his party
members demanding 'indemnification' for his efforts and expense on their
behalf, claiming the sole right as 'Lord of the Manor' to hunt, fish and cut
timber on the party's lands and to call on its members for labour. Almost the
first thing the settlers did on disembarking at Algoa bay was to present a
petition to Sir Rufane Donkin the acting governor of the colony asking him to
intervene on their behalf with their leader. The governor called a meeting with
Willson and his party and 'after explaining and exhorting, and deciding rather
against Mr W', he believed that 'union was restored' and he despatched the
squabbling settlers to their final destination on the Bush River.
Willson
had ambitious plans for the new settlement. On the voyage out he had written to
Lord Bathurst to explain his vision:
Taking all things
into consideration it has occurred to me from the great
influx of population in the district
I am to inhabit, foreseeing that a number
of Artificers and persons of mechanical genius who have entered themselves as farmers, will naturally fall into their former
occupations, and that
additional towns and villages
will most probably
grow out of such a
state of things, I have suggested a plan
for a Town which can be systematically and progressively acted upon: to express its
origin I have given it the name
of Angloville, which name I have also inserted
in my printed forms for sub-grants; it will in the beginning simply take the form
of a square, which with your Lordship's
permission, in token of my respect and from a grateful sense
of duty, I must beg leave to
call Bathurst Square, in the centre
of which it is proposed when our
funds will admit
of the expence,
to erect a Colossal Monument
of our
beloved Sovereign King
George the fourth, and as other
squares and streets
occur in the design, His majesty’s ministers will not be omitted in marking our gratitude for the present epoch of our lives, with the
natural feeling and spirit we
must ever have for our native and beloved Country.
Willson’s
dream of Angloville with its colossal monument to George IV in Bathurst Square
never materialised. Within a few days of arriving at the place that would
eventually come to be known as Beaufort Vale, a terrified Willson had abandoned
his settlers and returned to Cape Town because the ‘wretched minded classes’
amongst them had threatened to put a bullet in his head. The cause of the
discord, the non return of the deposit money, was exacerbated by Willson’s high
handed manner and by misinformation spread by colony officials. The settlers
had been told, incorrectly, that the deposit money had already been returned to
Willson and assuming that he was trying to cheat them, furious party members
threatened him and his family. In 1823, two years after his return to England,
Willson wrote to Lord Bathurst outlining the events that led to him abandoning
his charges:
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| The Donkin Memorial with the 1861 lighthouse in the background |
I was to be
reimbursed in Money on my arrival at the Cape! It was the money only that could
afford me the means of protecting myself from the petty debts of numerous
Individuals, whose chief aim was to incur debt, and to rob me: and the money
was the only means of reimbursing myself for monies advanced, in anticipation
of such repayment! This is a serious loss to me, my Lord, and a serious
grievance entailed upon me by His Majesty’s Government. And, from the blunders
of the Irish Commandant at Algoa Bay, who insisted upon it, and assured the Settlers
that I had received the whole of my Deposit money, my family were assailed with
midnight violence, and I was threatened with Assassination! Nothing but clamor
and discord followed, and I had afterwards to contend against no fewer than
Twenty-five Actions at Law! which I have been informed since my return, that
these several actions were secretly advised and supported at the expence of
General Donkin! and proof has been tendered to me to establish it as a truth!
My Lord, I can scarcely credit the possibility that the Honorable General could
be guilty of such duplicity! which would be no less cruel and wicked than it
proved altogether futile, unnecessary, and derogatory to the Abettors. What, my
Lord, can compensate me for such unheard
of persecution? I was previously threatened by the rude Hibernian with ruin,
nothing but my ruin could satisfy his lust of authority, he pursued me with
still greater barbarity, at the very hour that my poor wife (whose education
and family connexion ought to have been her protection, she is the only sister
of Mrs. George Cowell of Fitzroy Square, a Lady who I believe is not unknown to
your Lordship), when she, unhappily, was in a perilous state of life, and
death, for 24 hours, at that critical time did this unfeeling Officer threaten,
in braggart terms, to toss both me, and my baggage, into the waggons which he
had planted before my door, and threatened to send us into the Interior under a
Military Escort.
 |
| Sir Rufane Donkin and his wife Elizabeth |
Willson
never returned to the settlement and his place as leader was taken by the
party’s clergyman William Boardman. For the next two years Willson and his
family were stuck at the new settlement at Algoa Bay, arguing, by long distance
correspondence, with the Colonial Office, for a grant of freehold land that he
felt was his due as leader of a group of colonists. During this time the
ramshackle harbour settlement started to grow in much the same way as Willson
had once probably imagined the growth of Angloville. The most important figure
in the colony was Sir Rufane Donkin, the Quarter Master General of the British
Army and acting Governor at the Cape, veteran of the Peninsular War, where he
had served under the Duke of Wellington, and of the campaign against the
Mahrattas in India under Hastings. It was in India that Donkin suffered a
devastating personal tragedy, the death of his young wife Elizabeth. Feeling unable
to continue with his responsibilities as a senior officer in the army Donkin requested
and was granted extended sick leave at the Cape. Whilst there he recuperated
sufficiently to be given the relatively light duties of supervising the nascent
East Cape colony. Although she was buried in India Donkin decided Cape colony
was the right place to commemorate his dead wife, firstly by naming the new
coastal settlement Port Elizabeth in her honour and secondly by commissioning
the building of a prominent memorial to her on the summit of the hill that
overlooked the town. Captain Moresby of the Royal Navy welcomed the building of
the Donkin cenotaph, a 10 metre high “pyramid, about to be erected as a private
memorial, half-a-mile to the South-East of Fort Frederick” as an aid to
navigation that “will stand conspicuous to ships approaching the land.” The
pyramid, built of local stone and bearing an inscription to “one of the most
perfect of human beings who has given her name to the town below”, was declared
a national monument in 1938. In her 1994 book Port Elizabeth: A social chronicle to the end of 1945 Margaret
Harradine mentions that “settler
draughtsman Thomas Willson made drawings for a pyramid similar to that of Caius
Cestius in Rome, and William Reed supplied the stone. The builders were soldiers
from the Fort”.
The
Donkin Memorial is Willson’s first recorded involvement with the design and
construction of a pyramid. In fact it is his only known involvement with a
finished building. Interestingly the design was based on the classical Cestius
pyramid in Rome which was exactly the model chosen for the Metropolitan
Sepulchre. As we shall see Willson’s sojourn in Africa had repercussions which
lasted the rest of his life and he continued to refer to his adventure at the
Cape as the source of the financial troubles that dogged him until the day he
died. The only topic which seemed to obsess him more than Africa was the Pyramids
and the proposal for the Metropolitan Sepulchre. But in his writings on the
subject and the constant self publicity about it he never once mentioned the
fact that he had been previously involved in the construction of a pyramid in
South Africa. If he had played a significant role in the designing of the
memorial surely he would have brought the subject up in later life? By the time
Willson was making the proposal for the colossal pyramid on Primrose Hill Sir
Rufane Donkin was also back in England, someone who would have known the true circumstances
concerning the memorial overlooking Port Elizabeth. Perhaps Willson was, as
Margaret Harradine says, purely the draughtsman but if so the production of the
drawings were the seed which generated a lifelong obsession with the idea of
pyramidal interment.
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