Colonel Harrison’s ‘Guests’

In 1905, an unusual group of visitors arrived at Brandesburton Hall, near Hornsea: six indigenous Africans from the Ituri forest in the eastern Congo.

The six – four men, Chief Bokane, Mongonga, Mafutiminga and Matuka, and two women, Princess Kuarke and Amuriape – were ‘guests’ of the owner of the Hall, Lieutenant Colonel James Jonathan Harrison.

A keen big game hunter, Harrison had returned from the Congo the previous year with many hunting trophies. Teased by friends that he hadn’t brought back some native ‘pygmies’, he returned to Africa for these human trophies.

Unsurprisingly, the six caused something of a sensation in Edwardian Britain. Harrison set them up as a sort of entertainment troupe, and they toured the country, performing tableaux of their home country, and singing traditional songs.

Between June 1905 and November 1907, they played at the Hippodrome in London for 14 weeks, and toured provincial cities. They also made guest appearances at Buckingham Palace, the House of Commons and various private homes, including Londesborough Park at Market Weighton where, according to the Scarborough Post, they ‘seemed to thoroughly enjoy themselves, mixing with the crowd when not seated on the platform’.

In between tours, the group rested at Brandesburton, where Harrison had a glass hothouse built to replicate the climate of the equatorial rain forest.

It’s been estimated that over a million people saw the visitors during their 18-month stay in this country – the estimated population of the country at the time being around 40 million.

Attitudes prevalent at that time saw them described by an advertisement in the  Liverpool’s Empire Theatre as ‘half-way between anthropoid apes and man’ with an opposing and more enlightened view in the Birmingham Daily Mail that stated: “Officially stated to be the missing link between the ape and man, the pygmies, by their appearance, certainly do not suggest the connection,”.

When Harrison died in 1923, his wife donated photo albums, along with many other items including stuffed animal trophies, glass plate negatives and documents to the then Scarborough Corporation.

For many years, items from the collection could be seen in Scarborough Library. They were moved in the 1950s to be on display in Woodend, then a museum of natural history, but formerly the seaside home of the Sitwell Family – fitting, as Osbert Sitwell had portrayed Harrison and his ‘pygmies’ in his poem Colonel Grindle:

“a posse of chattering manikins… quarelling [sic] or grinning on their way to be shown at some Church Fete.”

This article was originally submitted for publication in The Scarborough News, May 26th 2012, under the heading “Sensational Pygmies Made Big Impression” Link to original article