Jackie Loos on the Way We Were

Family researchers who imagine their ancestors were paragons of virtue are often startled when they come across evidence to the contrary. Crime, bankruptcy, alcoholism, illegitimacy and adultery occur in even the best regulated households.

Some upstanding families have spawned irresponsible black sheep who tested their relatives’ patience to the limit.

The pious Quaker missionary and botanist James Backhouse (1794-1869) set a fine example. He was the fourth of nine children born to a Quaker linen manufacturer and banker in Darlington, Yorkshire.

Backhouse contracted what appears to have been TB as a young man, a disease which was usually fatal at the time, but his far-sighted family encouraged him to study botany and take up an outdoor life, and he was cured.

In 1815 he and his brother opened a nursery in York where they cultivated alpine plants and introduced new species to the horticultural public. James was able to marry in 1822, but his wife, Deborah, died in 1827, leaving him with a son and a daughter.

Backhouse was a deeply committed member of the Society of Friends and was admitted as a Quaker minister in 1824.

In 1831 he felt called to leave his family and travel to Australia and Tasmania to minister to the convicts and settlers there, little knowing he would be away for more than nine years.

He and his friend George Washington Walker visited many parts of Australia and stopped at Mauritius and the Cape on their way back to Britain in 1838.

They spent two years visiting all the local missions by ox wagon and Backhouse afterwards wrote a ponderous but very reliable book about his experiences entitled A Narrative of a Visit to the Mauritius and South Africa(1844). It was illustrated with 30 important etchings and woodcuts of missionary villages, some of which had not been depicted before.

He returned to York on February 21, 1841 and recorded his joy at being restored to his children, “who were so much grown and altered that I could not have identified them”.

Backhouse was a strict but unpretentious Quaker who was tolerant of others and able to converse easily with officials, settlers and indigenous inhabitants alike. He dressed and spoke plainly and was in every way a credit to the Society of Friends.

Meanwhile, the family bank in Darlington was run by the missionary’s cousin, Jonathan Backhouse, and his son, Edmund, both staunch Quakers, but the next in line, Jonathan Edmund Backhouse, was brought up and married outside the Quaker fold.

He sold the Darlington business, became a director of Barclay’s Bank in 1896 and was made a baronet in 1902. His younger sons paid little attention to the Quaker principles of truth, pacifism and thrift and were no different to most upper-class Britons of their generation.

His eldest son, Edmund Backhouse (1873-1944), went further. He has been described as a liar, charlatan and scoundrel who fabricated an amazingly complex disguise to hide a life of deceit in England and China.

Young Backhouse was a highly intelligent and nervous student at Oxford who left in 1895 without taking his degree, leaving debts of £23 000 – a huge sum in those days.

He disappeared then re-surfaced in China at the age of 26, where his extraordinary proficiency as a linguist secured him a job as assistant to a newspaper correspondent during turbulent political times.

He began to study Chinese culture and soon established a reputation as a gifted sinologist (Chinese expert).

He pretended to be a poor and shy recluse and fooled several patrons who trusted him and vouched for his character, including a co-author whom he hoodwinked with a bogus Chinese diary purportedly written by Ching-shan, an official of the imperial Manchu court.

Backhouse donated several tons of “priceless” Chinese books and manuscripts to the Bodleian Library; hoping this would secure him the Chair of Chinese at Oxford University, but the consignment included numerous stolen and forged volumes, and disturbing rumours began to circulate.

He defrauded private companies who employed him as their agent and misled the British government during World War I by pretending to buy Chinese arms for the war effort.

His resentful relatives settled his debts and paid him to stay in China. Prior to his death, he wrote two volumes of obsessively obscene, but apparently imaginary, memoirs, which would have shocked his Quaker forebears to the core.

Sir Edmund’s scandalous behaviour became common knowledge when Hermit of Peking, a biting biography by Professor Hugh Trevor-Roper, appeared in 1976.

His reputation is once again on the line following the recent publication in Hong Kong of Decadence Mandchoue, his erotic memoir describing a steamy affair with the 69-year-old Dowager Empress Tz’u Hsi, who died in 1908.