William John Gill

Captain William John Gill (10 September 1843 – 11 August 1882) was an English explorer and British army officer. He was born in Bangalore, India, the second child and elder son of the army officer, artist and photographer Major Robert Gill (1804 - 1879) and his wife Frances Flowerdew Gill (née Rickerby) (1817 - 1887). Portrait of William Gill by T.B. Wirgman (1848-1925) with Gill's signature below

Biography

Early life and education William Gill's father, Robert Gill, served in the 44th Madras Native Infantry and married William's mother, Frances Rickerby, in 1841. Robert Gill was on furlough in Bangalore when William was born there on 10 September 1843. The following autumn, Robert Gill was appointed by the East India Company to copy the murals in the Buddhist rock-cut temples at Ajanta in the Aurangabad district, Maharashtra. This was in response to a petition by the Royal Asiatic Society to the Court of Directors of the East India Company to make copies of the frescoes before they were destroyed by decay and tourism.

The Gill family lived for some years in the Bara Duree, the local palace at Ajanta that had served as a field hospital and temporary residence for the Duke of Wellington during the battle of Assaye (1803). Mrs Gill was still there with the children in 1850, when William was seven years old, but by 1856 she had moved to Brighton, leaving William's father to his hunting, drawing, painting, photography and his first Indian mistress Paroo in Ajanta. Mrs Gill and the children lived adjacent to Brighton College, which William attended as a day boy. He left the school in June 1861 with the first prizes for mathematics and divinity.

After six months studying under a private tutor, William Gill, aged 19, was admitted to the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich. In June 1864, when not quite 21, he was commissioned in the Royal Engineers. Gill spent the following nine years as an officer in the Royal Engineers, mostly based in Britain but also serving 18 months in India, from September 1869 to March 1871. Shortly before his return from India, he inherited a considerable fortune from Frederick Heusch of Wimbledon. Heusch, a childless man of Dutch descent, was a distant relative of William Gill's mother. Gill decided to stay in the army and use his fortune to pursue his love of travel and exploration while at the same time gathering intelligence to serve British national interests.

Parliamentary ambition In April 1874, a few months after his return from Persia, William Gill stood as a parliamentary candidate for the Conservative party in a by-election at Hackney, a safe Liberal seat. He substantially raised the Tory vote but failed to get elected. He made a second attempt to become a Member of Parliament six years later in Nottingham but again failed. in London and Baron Ferdinand von Richtofen in Berlin. Cooper was the first European, other than French Roman Catholic missionaries, to penetrate the mountains west of Sichuan, whereas von Richtofen was widely considered the leading western expert on China. Gill travelled by train from Berlin to Marseille and thence by sea to Hong Kong, Shanghai and Tianjin, the main port for Beijing (Peking). He reached the British legation at Beijing on 21 September 1876 and four days later set off on a five-week journey with Mr Carles of the legation staff, a Chinese servant, a horse-boy, three baggage carts and a team of locally recruited porters. The party headed north-east, crossed the Great Wall and went as far as the border of Liaodong. They then turned back to the coast, reaching it where the wall meets the sea. For the second half of the tour, Gill and his party proceeded parallel to the coast as far as the Luan estuary before crossing the flat country back to Tianjin and Beijing. Gill described this “cycle of Cathay” as “a useful prelude and preparation for the more serious work to follow”.

On 23 January 1877, Gill set off from Shanghai with his servants. He was accompanied by Edward Colborne Baber, the British representative at Chongqing, which they reached via a succession of boats on the Yangtze river on 8 April. For his main expedition, Gill had arranged to travel with William Mesny as his guide and companion. Mesny was a Jersey-born Briton who had long worked for the Chinese and was knowledgeable about all aspects of Chinese culture and lifestyle. Knowing that Mesny would not arrive for some weeks, Gill journeyed to Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan. From there he made a month-long 400 mile circular journey in the mountains of northern Sichuan, becoming the first European to do so. Gill arrived back at Chengdu about 20 June 1877, just before Mesny's arrival.

Subsequently, at the behest of the British government, Gill wrote a paper on the Chinese army. He presented this on 30 April 1880 at a meeting chaired by Sir Rutherford Alcock. The paper was subsequently printed by the royal printers, Harrison and Sons, for private circulation.

Aftermath of the Russo-Turkish war On his return to England from India, William Gill was formally appointed to the War Office's intelligence branch. In the Balkans, the Russo-Turkish war was coming to an end and peace negotiations were under way. Early in 1878, Gill was sent with a friend to the Balkans, the pair posing as tourists in an effort to gather intelligence about the situation in Romania and Bulgaria. The occupying Russians quickly saw through the cover story and sent Gill and his companion home.

In the spring of 1879, Gill was sent to Istanbul (then Constantinople) as assistant boundary commissioner for the new border between Turkey and Russia, as required by the Treaty of Berlin. He returned to England in the autumn.

After this mission, Gill was due some leave. He travelled by sea from Karachi in Sind (now part of Pakistan) to Bandar Abbas in southern Persia (now Iran). He then embarked on a solo journey to Tehran and Mashhad, in the hope ultimately of reaching Merv. However, Nicholas de Giers of the Russian foreign ministry complained to the British government about Gill's presence near the Russian frontier and Gill was recalled to London. He returned home via Moscow, arriving on 1 April 1882.

Egypt When William Gill arrived back in London, Thomas George Baring, Earl of Northbrook and First Lord of the Admiralty, was gathering intelligence about the Bedouin tribes in the Sinai desert. An anti-European rebellion in Egypt was becoming increasingly likely and Baring's aim was to secure the Suez Canal by enlisting the support of the local sheikhs. The leading authority on the Bedouin was Professor Edward Henry Palmer of the University of Cambridge. On behalf of the Admiralty, Gill visited Palmer, who volunteered to travel through the desert from Gaza to Suez to gauge the mood of the Bedouin. On 11 July 1882, the British fleet bombarded Alexandria. Palmer set off from Jaffa the following day, on his way to Gaza and Suez.

Gill was sent to Egypt, arriving in Alexandria on 27 July 1882. He joined the intelligence department run by Admiral Hoskins at Port Said. On 5 August, Hoskins instructed Gill to cut the telegraph line that linked Cairo to Constantinople, thus preventing its use by the Egyptian nationalists. The section of line to be cut ran from the coast at Al Arish (90 miles east of Port Said) to Al Qantarah, where it crossed the Suez Canal. It needed to be sabotaged at a location where the neutrality of the Suez Canal was not breached and where the break could not easily be located and repaired by the nationalists.

Captain William Gill, Professor Edward Palmer and Lieutenant Harold Charrington of the Royal Navy (the flag-lieutenant of Admiral Sir William Hewett, the commander of the operation) set off from Suez before sunrise on 9 August. They were dressed as Arabs and were accompanied by Khalîl Attîk (the guide Gill had employed in North Africa), Bâkhor Hassûn (a secretly Jewish cook), Meter abu Sofieh (who falsely claimed to be a head sheikh and was employed by Palmer as a guide), Salameh ibn Ayed (the false sheikh's nephew) and various camel-men. The plan was that the party would split in the desert, with Palmer and Charrington heading east for Nakhl to buy camels and Gill travelling north to cut the telegraph line. Palmer had in his possession £3,000 in English sovereigns. following a funeral service on 6 April 1883.

Commemoration Apart from a monument in the crypt of St Paul's, William Gill is commemorated by a stained glass window in Rochester Cathedral (which has close links with the Royal Engineers), by the Royal Geographical Society's Gill Memorial Award and by the Gill Scholarships at Brighton College. William Gill brought back to England samples of a number of plant species hitherto unknown in the west. Some of these were given Latin names honouring Gill. They include the evergreen oak Quercus gilliana.

Family William Gill never married and had no known children. He acted a bridge between his father, Major Robert Gill, who remained in India, and the rest of the family in England, including Robert's estranged wife (William's mother) Frances Gill. Robert Gill died in 1879, leaving two daughters by his second Indian mistress. These were Annie Gill (1864-1934) and Mildred Mary Gill (1866-1923). William Gill, a member and strong supporter of the Church of England, ensured that both his Anglo-Indian half-sisters were educated and well looked after at a Roman Catholic convent in Mumbai (Bombay). Both girls subsequently married Irish soldiers in the British army and ultimately moved to England.

William Gill was survived by his mother Frances Flowerdew Gill (1817-1887); his younger brother, the lawyer Robert Thomas Gill (1847-1927); his elder sister Frances Eliza Minchin Gill (1842-1930), who married James Francis Rea in 1891; and his younger sister Lucy Annie Gill (1849-1903) who married Willet Ram in 1874. William had another sister, Rose Matilda Gill, who was born in 1845 but died when less than three weeks old.

Footnotes