Facebook post #039 (Oct 2020)
Edith Ostlere (post 38) had a brother known as Abdhullah Mansur! The 1911 census has him living with a sister in Sidmouth under his birth name of George Bury, but an “explorer” by profession! Later, I found that he published an important book that year – “The Land of Uz” (next on my reading list). Then I found that he was suffering from TB at the time, and that he married his nurse from Westminster Hospital a couple of years later… in El Hudayah, Yemen. These days, it’s an important port both for humanitarian aid and for coffee – including for Starbucks.
It turns out that after obtaining a commission into the Warwickshire regiment, George had joined a rebel tribe in Morocco! But like his cousin Henry Mousley in Canada (post 37), his interests were scientific: his ornithological specimens and descriptions are at the British Library. Apparently his looks, build and command of colloquial Arabic were such that he could be accepted as a local. It also helped him to an official position with the boundary commission in British Aden. When he fell from favour, he persuaded the Ottoman Turks to let him continue his exploits in their half of Yemen! Commentators suggest that his successive books give unique insights into the lands and life either side of the border just before WWI – even if his forecasts are not altogether accurate.
George’s father Henry Cox Bury had died in 1884. His will, held by the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, shows him a ‘coffee planter of Stratford, late of Ceylon’. A couple of years earlier he was quoted in the Tropical Agriculturalist “on a visit to his fine properties” (in Haputale). “There is far too much outcry over the falling-off in Ceylon coffee production… a turn in the tide must be approaching. It cannot, surely, be in the designs of Providence that the fungus [“Devastating Emily” coffee rust] should be permanent in Ceylon, any more than that the iniquity of slavery should continue to exist in Brazil. The latter is doomed, and so, we hope and believe, is the former.” Sadly, his forecast for Ceylon was no better than his son’s for Yemen later. Coffee was wiped out and Haputale has grown tea ever since.
