John Hanning Speke
Born	(1827-05-04)4 May 1827 Bideford, Devon, England
Died	15 September 1864(1864-09-15) (aged 37) Neston Park, Wiltshire, England
Occupation	Officer and Explorer

John Hanning Speke (4 May 1827 – 15 September 1864) was an officer in the British Indian Army who made three exploratory expeditions to Africa and who is most associated with the search for the source of the Nile.

Life[link]

Speke was born on 4 May 1827 at Orleigh Court,^[1] Buckland Brewer near Bideford, North Devon.^[2] In 1844 he was commissioned into the British army and posted to India, where he served under Sir Colin Campbell during the First Anglo-Sikh War. He spent his leave exploring the Himalayan Mountains and Mount Everest and once crossed into Tibet.

In 1854 he made his first voyage to Africa, joining an expedition to Somalia led by the already famous Richard Burton. The expedition did not go well. The party was attacked and Burton and Speke were both severely wounded. Speke was captured and stabbed several times with spears before he was able to free himself and escape. Burton escaped with a javelin impaling both cheeks. Speke returned to England to recover and then served in the Crimean War.

In 1856, Speke and Burton went to East Africa to find the Great Lakes, which were rumoured to exist in the centre of the continent. It was hoped that the expedition would locate the source of the Nile. The journey was extremely strenuous and both men fell ill from a variety of tropical diseases. Speke suffered severely when he became temporarily deaf after a beetle crawled into his ear and he tried to remove it with a knife. He also later went temporarily blind. After an arduous journey, the two became the first Europeans to reach Lake Tanganyika (although Speke was still blind at this point and could not properly see the lake). They heard of a second lake in the area, but Burton was too sick to make the trip. Speke thus went alone, and found the lake, which he christened Lake Victoria. It was this lake that eventually proved to be the source of the River Nile. However, much of the expedition's survey equipment had been lost at this point and thus vital questions about the height and extent of the lake could not be answered.

Routes taken by the expeditions of Burton and Speke (1857-1858) and Speke and Grant (1863).

Speke returned to England before Burton, on 8 May 1859, and made their trip famous in a speech to the Royal Geographical Society, in which he claimed to have discovered the source of the Nile. When Burton returned on 21 May, he was angered by Speke's precipitous announcements, believing that they violated an agreement that the two men would speak to the society together. A further rift was caused when Speke was chosen to lead a subsequent expedition instead of Burton.^[3] The two presented joint papers concerning the expedition to the Royal Geographical Society on 13 June 1859.^[4]

Together with James Augustus Grant, Speke left from Zanzibar in October 1860. When they reached Uganda, Grant travelled north and Speke continued his journey towards the west. Speke reached Lake Victoria on 28 July 1862 and then travelled on the west side around Lake Victoria without actually seeing much of it; but on the north side of the lake, Speke found the Nile flowing out of it and discovered the Ripon Falls. Speke then sailed down the Nile and he was reunited with Grant. Next he travelled to Gondokoro in Southern Sudan, where he met Samuel Baker and his wife, continuing to Khartoum, from which he sent a celebrated telegram to London: "The Nile is settled."^[5]

An obelisk dedicated to Speke stands in Kensington Gardens, London

Speke's expedition did not resolve the issue, however. Burton claimed that because Speke had not followed the Nile from the place it flowed out of Lake Victoria to Gondokoro, he could not be sure they were the same river.^[6] A debate was planned between the two before the geographical section of the British Association in Bath on 18 September 1864, but Speke died that morning from a self-inflicted gunshot wound while hunting at Neston Park in Wiltshire.^[7] An inquest concluded that the death was accidental, a conclusion supported by his only biographer, though the idea of suicide has appealed to some. Bearing in mind, however, that the fatal wound was just below Speke's armpit, suicide seems most unlikely. Speke was buried in Dowlish Wake, Somerset, the ancestral home of the Speke family.^[3]

Film[link]

The film Mountains of the Moon (1990) (starring Scottish actor Iain Glen as Speke) related the story of the Burton-Speke controversy, portrayed as having been unjustifiably incited by Speke's publisher to stimulate book sales.^[8][9]

Speke was also portrayed in four of the six episodes of the 1971 BBC television mini-series “Search for the Nile.”

Mount Speke, Uganda[link]

Mount Speke in the Ruwenzori Range, Uganda was named in honour of John Speke, as an early European explorer of this region.

Biographies, books and articles about Speke[link]

• Speke by Alexander Maitland (1971) (the only full-length biography).
• Burton and Speke by William Harrison (St Martins/Marek & W.H. Allen 1984).
• A Walk Across Africa by J. A. Grant (London, 1864)
• The Travelling Naturalists by Clare Lloyd. (Study of 18th Century Natural History — Includes Charles Waterton, John Hanning Speke, Henry Seebohm and Mary Kingsley) Contains colour and black and white reproductions.^[10]
• Wisnicki, Adrian S. (2008). "Cartographical Quandaries: The Limits of Knowledge Production in Burton’s and Speke’s Search for the Source of the Nile". History in Africa 35: 455-79.
• Wisnicki, Adrian S. (2009). "Charting the Frontier: Indigenous Geography, Arab-Nyamwezi Caravans, and the East African Expedition of 1856-59". Victorian Studies 51.1 (Aut.): 103-37.
• Explorers of the Nile: The Triumph and Tragedy of a Great Victorian Adventure by Tim Jeal (Faber & Faber, London, 2011).

See also[link]

• Speke's gazelle

References[link]

External links[link]

• Burtoniana.org has facsimiles of all of Speke's books, pamphlets and journal articles freely available online, as well as his (corrected) DNB entry, obituary and inquest report from The Times, and several portraits and photographs, together with material on his companion James Grant and the complete works of his former friend, Richard Francis Burton.
• Works by John Hanning Speke at Project Gutenberg
  • The complete text of The Discovery Of The Source Of The Nile by John Hanning Speke (from Project Gutenberg).
  • The complete text of First Footsteps in East Africa by Richard Francis Burton (from Project Gutenberg).
• Selected Bibliography of Works by John Hanning Speke.
• Ibis Jubilee Supplement 1908

Coordinates: 53°20′27″N 2°50′28″W / 53.3409°N 2.8410°W / 53.3409; -2.8410

Speke
Speke Hall
Speke  Speke shown within Merseyside
OS grid reference	SJ441835
Metropolitan borough	Liverpool
Metropolitan county	Merseyside
Region	North West
Country	England
Sovereign state	United Kingdom
Post town	LIVERPOOL
Postcode district	L24
Dialling code	0151
Police	Merseyside
Fire	Merseyside
Ambulance	North West
EU Parliament	North West England
UK Parliament	Garston and Halewood
List of places: UK • England • Merseyside

Speke (pronounced Speak) is an area of Liverpool, Merseyside, England, close to the boundaries of the Metropolitan Borough of Knowsley. It is 7.7 miles (12.4 km) south east of the city centre and to the west of the town of Widnes.

Speke is bordered by a number of other areas; Garston, Hunts Cross, Halewood and Hale Village and is located near to the widest part of the River Mersey.

History[link]

The name derives from the Old English Spec, meaning 'brushwood'. It was known as Spec in the Domesday Book, which gave Speke Hall as one of the properties held by Uctred. (Today Speke Hall, now a Tudor wood-framed house, is open to the public.)

In the mid 14th century, the manors of Speke, Whiston, Skelmersdale, and Parr were held by William Dacre, 2nd Baron Dacre.^[1]

Until the 1930s, Speke was a small village with a population of 400; by the end of the 1950s more than 25,000 people were living in the area. The local All Saints Church was built by the last resident owner of Speke Hall, Miss Adelaide Watt.^[2]

From 1795 until 1921, the Speke estate had belonged to the Watt family; when the family died out, the estate was placed in trust.^[3] It was bought by the Liverpool Corporation in 1928 for £200,000; the Corporation's intention was to build a complete self-contained satellite town (this was at a time when the garden city movement was underway). The parish of Speke became part of the county borough of Liverpool in 1932, having previously belonged to the Whiston Rural District.^[4]

Constructed between 1930 and 1933, by the start of World War II, Speke Airport was the second busiest in the UK. Retention of control by the Ministry of Civil Aviation in London after the war meant that it had lost its leading position in the UK by the 1950s.

The industrial rise of Speke continued until the mid-1970s, when an equally rapid decline ensued. The closure of the Bryant and May match factory was a noted example of these problems, as was the closure of the Triumph car plant. The area has however retained a large pharmaceutical plant, currently owned by Novartis.

When the 2000 Index of Multiple Deprivation was published Speke was revealed to be the second most deprived ward in England and Wales (out of 8414). Only Benchill in Manchester had a higher level of deprivation.

Community[link]

Speke is known for Speke Hall, a Tudor wood-framed house now owned by the National Trust and open to the public. It is also notable as the location of Liverpool John Lennon Airport, known until 2001 as Liverpool Speke Airport. From the mid-1990s the re-development of the original airport site, enabled by the construction of the new airport complex and runway, had left land available for the construction of a business park. The completion of the A5001 road consolidated the rise of the airport and improved communications in the area. The Speke Liverpool local history website shows a lot of the developments that changed Speke the village into Speke the estate with photographs and documents from 1870's onwards.

The New Mersey Shopping Park was re-developed in 1999 from an older retail site. It houses many large retail and textile outlets as well as mainstream restaurants.^[5] The New Mersey Retail Estate is situated between Speke and Garston, directly opposite to the Old Liverpool Airport main terminal building, which is now a hotel complex.

The area also features the Mersey Wave, officially opened on December 15 2003, a 200 ft (61 m) long and 100 ft (30 m) high illuminated sculpture comprising two sets of six aluminium fins.^[6] The sculpture, designed by Peter Fink, was removed for repairs within weeks of opening, a problem causing its fins to move dangerously in high winds having been discovered.^[7] It was rebuilt in June 2005 and the structure, 30 ft (9.1 m) taller than the Angel of the North at Gateshead is visible from as far as Winter Hill, Horwich, Greater Manchester.

Recent developments in Speke have seen a multi-million pound Morrisons superstore[^[8]], situated directly next to the A561 Speke Boulevard (locally known as 'The Ford Road'), which is located only metres away from the Mersey Wave.

Football Club:Speke South Liverpool, a local amateur football side, was originally founded at the Austin Rawlinson Sports Centre, Speke. However, late 2005 saw the club relocate a short distance away to Mossley Hill.

Economy[link]

Speke is the location of the headquarters of Shop Direct Group, which claims to be the UK's largest online retailer.^[9]

Notable residents[link]

• George Harrison
• Paul McCartney
• Les Dennis

References[link]

External links[link]

• Liverpool Street Gallery - Liverpool 24
• The Effect of Sir Ebenezer Howard and the Garden City Movement on Twentieth Century Town Planning

Marco Alexander Pallis (1895 – 5 June 1989) was a Greek -British-born author and mountaineer with close affiliations to the Traditionalist School. He wrote works on the religion and culture of Tibet.

Early life: Education, Travels, and Wartime Experiences[link]

Born in Liverpool on 19 June 1895, he was the youngest son of wealthy and cosmopolitan Greek parents.^[1] Pallis was educated at Harrow School and the University of Liverpool, where he studied entomology.^[2] In 1911 he traveled to British Guiana to study insects, and in 1912, he joined the Greek campaign against the Ottoman Empire during the first of the Balkan Wars. During the siege of Ioannina, the ancestral town of the Pallis family, he worked at a field hospital in Arta.

During the First World War, Pallis, initially aided the Salvation Army in the region along the Sava River in Serbia. In 1916 he enlisted in the British Army and received a commission as an army interpreter in Macedonia. Malaria and a severe inflammation of his right eye cut short his Macedonian service. After a lengthy convalescence in Malta, Pallis applied to and was accepted by the Grenadier Guards. He received basic training, then advanced training as a machine-gunner. In 1918, as a second lieutenant, he was sent to fight in the trenches of the Western Front. During the battle of Cambrai, in a charge that killed his captain and first lieutenant, Pallis was shot through the knee and was forced to retire from combat.

Mountaineering, the Himalayas, and Introduction to Buddhism[link]

Following the war, Pallis climbed and explored against doctor's orders for his injured knee.^[3] He went on expeditions to the Arctic, Switzerland, and the Dolomites, and the Snowdonia, the Peak District, and the Scottish Highlands when closer to home. In 1933 Pallis led a small mountaineering party to the area of Kinnaur, one of the Himalayan borderlands. Near the village of Nako, at the border with Tibet, Pallis and his team succeeded in making the first ascent of Leo Pargial (22,280 feet).^[4]

In 1936 Pallis returned to the Himalayas at the head of another expedition. His party traveled first to Sikkim, an “antechamber of Tibet”, where their failure to scale the summit of Simvu (22,360 feet) was, at least for Pallis, more than made up for by their encounter with the saintly abbot of Lachhen, in whom, according to Pallis, “intelligence, compassion, and initiatic authority were reflected in equal degree”.^[5]

From Sikkim Pallis had hoped to cross the border into Tibet proper, but due to political circumstances it was impossible to obtain the necessary permissions. Forced to alter his plans, he decided instead to make his way to Ladakh. He was accompanied by his close friend Richard Nicholson^[6] and one other member of their climbing party, Dr. Robert Roaf. Once in Ladakh, they discarded Western clothes in favor of the chuba,^[7] and assumed as much as possible a Tibetan manner of living. “It was our way of saying to our hosts: ‘We wish to be as one of you. Please make no unusual arrangements on our behalf. We love your tradition, and hope it will not be rashly changed. We have found means of attuning ourselves to its ways.’”^[8]

Pallis by now saw himself as a “pilgrim” of Tibetan Buddhism and in both Sikkim and Ladakh he received his religious education directly from qualified instructors within the living tradition. He dedicates his Peaks and Lamas to four teachers in particular, “the great contemplator, abbot of Lachhen, the venerable Dawa, bursar of Spituk, the venerable Konchhog Gyaltsan of P’hiyang, and the venerable Geshe Wangyal of Drepung, Lhasa who for my benefit and for the good of all creatures set in motion the Wheel of the Doctrine”.^[9][10]

The Second World War^[11] prevented further travels until 1947, when Pallis and Richard Nicholson were able to visit the Tibetan heartland before the coming Chinese invasion. They traveled widely throughout Tibet’s Tsang province, seeking to fulfill their shared desire to “absorb the spirit of the Tradition by direct experience”.^[12] Over the course of their stay they were able to make contact with each of the four major schools of Tibetan Buddhism (Gelugpa, Nyingmapa, Kagyudpa, and Sakyapa), visiting such holy sites as the ancient Pel Sakya monastery, seat of the Sakyapa and “a treasure-house of all the arts at their very best”,^[13] as well as the Tashilhunpo monastery, seat of the Panchen Lama and one of the four great monasteries of the Gelugpa.

After his departure from the Tibetan plateau, Pallis lived in Kalimpong, India, for nearly four years^[14] before returning to England in 1951.^[15] Kalimpong was then a center of literary and cultural activity, as well as a refuge for many of those who were being forced to leave Tibet. Pallis formed many lasting relationships during this time, including an acquaintance with the then queen of Bhutan and her family, whom he later visited in England, and with the Dalai Lama’s former tutor Heinrich Harrer, with whom Pallis later collaborated in exposing the fraudulent writer Cyril Hoskin, alias “Lobsang Rampa”.^[16] While in Kalimpong, Pallis also met with the Dalai Lama’s Great Royal Mother, and he developed a close relationship with the abbot of the nearby Tharpa Choling monastery.

After the political upheavals in Tibet in the 1950s, Pallis became active in the affairs of the Tibetan Society, the first Western support group created for the Tibetan people. Pallis also was able to house members of the Tibetan diaspora in his London flat. Pallis also formed a relationship with the young Chögyam Trungpa, who had just arrived in England.^[17] Trungpa asked Pallis to write the foreword to Trungpa’s first, autobiographical book, Born in Tibet. In his acknowledgment, Trungpa offers Pallis his “grateful thanks” for the “great help” that Pallis provided in bringing the book to completion. He goes on to say that “Mr. Pallis when consenting to write the foreword, devoted many weeks to the work of finally putting the book in order”.^[18]

Musical career[link]

Pallis studied music under Arnold Dolmetsch, the distinguished reviver of early English music, composer, and performer,^[19] and was considered “one of Dolmetsch's most devoted protégés”.^[20] Pallis soon discovered a love of early music—in particular chamber music of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries—and for the viola da gamba. Even while climbing in the region of the Satlej-Ganges watershed, he and his musically-minded friends did not fail to bring their instruments.

Pallis taught viol at the Royal Academy of Music, and reconstituted The English Consort of Viols, an ensemble he had first formed in the 1930s. It was one of the first professional performing groups dedicated to the preservation of early English music. They released three records^[21] and made several concert tours in England and two tours to the United States.^[22]

According to the New York Times review, their Town Hall concert of April 1962 “was a solid musical delight”, the players having possessed “a rhythmic fluidity that endowed the music with elegance and dignity”.^[23] Pallis also published several compositions, primarily for the viol,^[24] and wrote on the viol’s history and its place in early English music.^[25]

The Royal Academy of Music, in recognition of a lifetime of contribution to the field of early music, awarded Pallis an Honorary Fellowship. At age eighty-nine his Nocturne de l’Ephemere was performed at the Queen Elizabeth Hall in London; his niece writes that “he was able to go on stage to accept the applause which he did with his customary modesty.”^[26] When he died he left unfinished an opera based on the life of Milarepa.^[27]

Writings on Buddhism and Tradition[link]

Pallis described "tradition" as being the leitmotif of his writing. He wrote from the perspective of what has come to be called the traditionalist or perennialist school of comparative religion founded by René Guénon, Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, and Frithjof Schuon, each of whom he knew personally.^[28] As a traditionalist, Pallis assumed the "transcendent unity of religions" (the title of Schuon's landmark 1948 book) and it was in part this understanding that gave Pallis insight into the innermost nature of the spiritual tradition of Tibet, his chosen love. He was a frequent contributor to the journal Studies in Comparative Religion (along with Schuon, Guénon, and Coomaraswamy), writings on both the topics of Tibetan culture and religious practice as well as the Perennialist philosophy.

Pallis published three books over a span of almost forty years. His first, Peaks and Lamas (1939),^[29] mentioned previously, tells the story “of how access was gained, across the varying episodes of Himalayan travel, to a traditional world, still complete and vigorous, that of Buddhism in its Tibetan branch”.^[30] This was followed by The Way and the Mountain (1960)^[31] and by A Buddhist Spectrum (1980),^[32] both collections of essays that attempt to deal “with a number of Buddhist themes of prime importance in such a fashion as to make up . . . a coherent view of the world and of a human destiny realizable in this world as seen through Buddhist eyes”^[33] Several of Pallis’ essays were also included in Jacob Needleman’s The Sword of Gnosis.^[34] After his final journey to Tibet, while living in Kalimpong, Pallis wrote a short book in the Tibetan language addressing the dangers posed to Tibet by the encroachment of modern culture.^[35] In addition to penning his own writings, Pallis translated Buddhist texts into Greek, and translated works of fellow traditionalist writers René Guénon and Frithjof Schuon from French into English. Some of Pallis’ own works have also been translated into Italian, French, Spanish, and Turkish.^[36]

Since the publication of his first book, sixty-six years ago, generations of scholars and students have turned to Pallis for insight into Buddhism and Tibet. His work is cited by such writers as Heinrich Harrer, Heinrich Zimmer, Joseph Campbell, Thomas Merton, Robert Aitken, and Huston Smith. Despite such scholarly acclaim, it is also true, as Harry Oldmeadow states, that “Pallis had no interest in research for its own sake, nor in any purely theoretical understanding of doctrine: his work was always attuned to the demands of the spiritual life itself. [His essays] should be of interest not only to those on the Buddhist path but to all spiritual wayfarers.”^[37] Huston Smith expresses a similar judgment when he declares: “Though Pallis respects scholarship, he doesn’t consider himself a Buddhist scholar. . . . What he does is focus on key Buddhist teachings and mine their essential and existential meaning. In the course of this project he regularly refers to other traditions, especially Christianity. . . . The result is completely satisfying. For insight, and the beauty insight requires if it is to be effective, I find no writer on Buddhism surpassing him.”^[38] Wendell Berry, Gary Snyder, and Robert Aitken gave encouragement to the reprinting of Pallis’ classic Peaks and Lamas, which Wendell Berry has called, “The best book, in my limited reading, in connecting a form of Buddhism with its sustaining culture. . . . [It is] useful to anybody interested in what a traditional culture is or might be, and how such a culture might preserve itself.”^[39]

Death[link]

Marco Pallis “retired to the Heavenly Fields” on 5 June 1989. Writing for The Independent, Peter Talbot Wilcox concludes the obituary of his friend with these words:

It remains to risk a brief comment: that he was and remains a great teacher . . . who made sense of life and of the life to come; in whose presence insuperable difficulties became less daunting; who took endless troubles to help those who brought their problems to him; someone to whom the spiritual quest in prayer was the one thing needful, who by his own life demonstrated the validity and truth of traditional teachings; and that, however emasculated by modernism, these remain the only valid criteria for those who, as he would put it, have ears to hear. His life was a celebration of “The Marriage of Wisdom and Method”: which is the title of one of his essays.^[40]

Bibliography[link]

• The Way and the Mountain: Tibet, Buddhism, and Tradition, (World Wisdom, 2008) ISBN 978-1-933316-53-6
• The Spiritual Ascent: A Compendium of the World's Wisdom, (Fons Vitae, 2008) ISBN 978-1-933316-53-6
• A Buddhist Spectrum: Contributions to the Christian-Buddhist Dialogue, (World Wisdom, 2004) ISBN 978-0-941532-40-2
• Peaks and Lamas: A Classic Book on Mountaineering, Buddhism and Tibet, (Shoemaker & Hoard, 2004) ISBN 978-1-59376-058-8
• Sikkim, (Cosmo, 2003) ISBN 978-81-7020-759-7
• Ladakh, (Cosmo, 2002) ISBN 978-81-7020-756-6
• A Treasury of Traditional Wisdom: An Encyclopedia of Humankind's Spiritual Truth, (Fons Vitae, 2000) ISBN 978-1-887752-33-6

Notes[link]

External links[link]

• Biography at World Wisdom

	Biography portal
	Buddhism portal