Early Life :

Family :

Education & Career :

His school days, however, were less enjoyable. Senselessly thrashed at a Dame School, he eventually entered Radley, which he heartily disliked. He seems to have been a poor scholar and, by his own account , idle. He had always expressed a wish to make the Army his career and, after only two years at Radley, he was transferred to a succession of crammers, none of whom succeeded in getting him through the entrance examination to Sandhurst.

Service Life:

Campaigns:

• The First World War 1914-1918, World-wide.

Post War includes all operations in all theatres up to 31st August 1921. This excludes the campaign in Russia against the Bolsheviks. It also includes men who succombed to wounds post war and who died from various causes whilst still in the services but post war.

Detail :

STIGAND, Chauncy Hugh, Major, Egyptian Army (Governor of the Mongalla Province Sudan.) If Edgar Wallace chose a model for the hero of his book ?Sanders of the River? he may well have had Chauncey Stigand in mind. He seems to have had combined in him all the qualities required of the ideal British colonial administrator: patience, resource, courage, strength both physical and mental, integrity and, above all, self-reliance.He succeeded in mastering several languages including Somali, Swahili, Arabic and probably some Dinka. However, the unusual diversity of his character did not end there. From an early age he was obsessed with physical fitness and body-building; by the time he was commissioned he had developed the physique of a professional weight-lifter. More conventionally for his time he was a keen big-game hunter, but even by his day, the scale of ivory poaching had already aroused disquiet. Chauncey Hugh Stigand was born at Boulogne-sur-Mer, where his father was Her Majesty?s Consul, on 25th October 1877. Shortly after the birth of his younger brother, Ivan, his parents separated, his mother returning to England with the baby and an elder brother, Almar, while his father was transferred to Ragusa (Dubrovnik) taking Chauncey with him. A few years later this curious arrangement was partially reversed when the parents swapped Chauncey for Almar ! As a result of this remarkable transaction Chauncey was not to see his father again for over twenty years. Despite their apparent eccentricities, Chauncey seems to have born his parents no grudge and was moderately happy with both. He seems to have been a poor scholar and, by his own account, idle. He had always expressed a wish to make the Army his career and, after only two years at Radley, he was transferred to a succession of crammers, none of whom succeeded in getting him through the entrance examination to Sandhurst. Therefore he was obliged to achieve his ambition by what was known as the ?back-door? namely through the Militia (in his case the Warwickshire Yeomanry) whence, on 4th January 1899, he was commissioned into the Royal West Kent Regiment. However, he was to see little service with it as almost the whole of his military career was spent with African troops. He took no part in the Boer War but joined the 1st Battalion of his regiment in Burma whence it was soon transferred to Aden, then regarded as a punishment station. Here he wasted no time in setting off on that search for knowledge of wild and remote places which was to preoccupy him for the rest of his life. While his brother officers were making the most of the few sporting and social amenities which the bleak and inhospitable colony of Aden offered, Stigand would be exploring the hinterland of the South Arabian Peninsula on his camel, Tari, penetrating areas little known to the Aden authorities at that time. As a child the young Chauncey had met the great African explorers Richard Burton and Henry Stanley. His opportunity came with the emergence in what is now northern Somalia, then a British Protectorate, of that somewhat shadowy figure known to history as the Mad Mullah. In fact there was nothing mad about Mohamed Abdullah bin Hassan who, modeling himself on the Sudanese Mahdi, was to run the British ragged for the next twenty years, always evading capture and eventually dying of natural causes. With the Mullah?s appearance on the scene towards the end of 1900, the British launched the first of several expeditions against him and Stigand, to his delight, was ordered to join a force under Colonel Swayne, the local police commandant, consisting of a score of British officers and NCOs, a handful of Indian regulars and 1,500 Somali levies. Stigand earned a Mention in Dispatches, Colonel Swayne?s report reading?.?Lt Stigand?s company, which was on the extreme right, presently out-flanked the enemy and compelled him to retire. The Dervishes lost so heavily that the retirement became a rout?the leading company under Lt Stigand assisted in the pursuit, wheeling round from the right flank?. Later it was claimed that Stigand, accompanied by a single Somali scout, had forged ahead of his men and shot two of the Mullah?s bodyguards. Following leave and a course at the School of Musketry at Hythe, he was seconded to the 1st (Central Africa) Battalion King?s African Rifles in Nyassaland (Malawi). Here, although active in his regimental duties, he had both the leisure and the opportunity to pursue his passion for big-game hunting and the study of flora and fauna. In 1904, in collaboration with D.D. Lyell, he wrote his first book ?Central African Game and its Spoor? which was published two years later with a foreword by F.C. Selous, perhaps the most famous of all professional hunters. In 1905 Stigand came close to death when gored by a rhinoceros. Legend has it that when flung into the air by the infuriated beast, he landed on his feet and shot the animal dead. One version has him trekking forty miles before reaching medical assistance and another that he helped carry the medical orderly who had fainted at the sight of his wounds ! This was not the only occasion when the hunter was hunted. After his battalion was moved from Nyassaland to British East Africa (Kenya) at the end of 1905 he was mauled by a lion so seriously that he had to return to England for treatment. Here once again ?white hunter? mythology comes into play and we have Stigand battering his feline assailant to death with his huge fists. Perhaps it should be emphasized that Stigand himself was not the originator of these tales. With the outbreak of the First World War Stigand, in common with most of the British officers of the Egyptian Army, sought permission to return to his regiment but the Governor-General was adamant in his refusal of such requests. He argued with obvious justification that were the Egyptian Army and the Sudan administration to be stripped of most of their British officers the consequences would be dire. Thus Stigand?s active participation in the war was confined to various internal security operations within the Sudan for which he was twice Mentioned in Dispatches. At the end of the war he was awarded the OBE. The climax of his career came in February 1919 with his appointment as Governor of Mongalla Province, a promotion which was to lead to his death and the largest and most ferocious retaliatory expedition ever mounted by the Condominium Government. There is a sad irony here for, as he makes clear in ?Administration in Tropical Africa?, he disliked such operations and doubted their efficacy in that all too frequently they punished the innocent and allowed the guilty to go free. At the end of October 1919 a war-party of the Aliab Dinka attacked a police-post south of Bor on the White Nile, killing eight policemen. The trouble, the roots of which are obscure, spread and Stigand sought to stamp it out with a few companies of the Equatorial Battalion, a locally recruited unit of the Egyptian Army. Owing to a shortage of officers he accompanied one of the patrols himself. The column had already been attacked at night and a few casualties inflicted when on 8th December in the early morning it was ambushed in long grass by several hundred Aliab Dinka. Stigand, the OC Troops Kaimakam (Lt Col) White, Yuzbashi (Captain) Saad Osman and twenty four Other Ranks and carriers were killed. The four surviving British officers, all veterans of the Great War and accustomed to reacting swiftly in desperate circumstances, rallied their companies and drove off the enemy, thus averting even greater disaster. The senior survivor, Bimbashi (Major) Roberts VC, in a letter to Nancy Stigand wrote, ?Personally I was at the head of the left flank guard and did not see Stigand Bey fall, but Bimbashi Kent-Lemon, who was at the head of the right flank guard, saw him with his rifle to his shoulder firing as hard as he could?No one I can find in the battalion actually saw him killed but it must have been within the first few minutes?from the spear wound in his chest he must have died instantly and suffered no pain?.? How many widows have been given a similar assurance over the years ! The two Englishmen were buried on the bank of the White Nile at Tombe. A cairn of stones marked the spot and may be there to this day. The Dinka had no personal quarrel with their Governor nor he with them so we may hope that he and White have been allowed to rest in peace. So ended, at the age of only forty two, the remarkable life of a remarkable man; a sound, practical, no-nonsense man. ?At different times?, he wrote, ?I have had to act as carpenter, blacksmith, armourer, mason, doctor, mid-wife, gardener, policeman, shop-keeper, planter and surveyor?? His horizons may have been somewhat limited and we do not detect much evidence of great imagination or humour but we would undoubtedly like to have Chauncey Stigand on our side in a tight corner. His books are worth reading even to-day, particularly where he covers such subjects as game, agriculture and forestry. Sources; Chauncey Stigand: Soldier, Governor and Writer By Henry Keown-Boyd http://www.melik.org.uk/articles_stigand.htm

Masonic :

Source :

The project globally acknowledges the following as sources of information for research across the whole database:

• The Commonwealth War Graves Commission
• The (UK) National Archives
• Ancestry.co.uk - Genealogy, Family Trees & Family History online
• ugle.org.uk - The records of the United Grand Lodge of England including the Library and Museum of Freemasonry

Additional Source:

• Founder Researchers : Paul Masters & Mike McCarthy
• Researcher : Bruce Littley