Balkan connections

 

Although several of my forebears had connections with countries like Russia and the Netherlands and, through their business interests, with the East Indies and the Virginia Colony, I’d yet to find any links to SE Europe anywhere in my family history.

Given that my mother’s ‘official’ maiden name was Joan Thompson – even though her biological father was my grandmother’s then lover Eric Butler rather than her estranged husband Percy Thompson – it seemed possible there might be a connection, albeit a somewhat indirect one, via Frank Thompson, the British officer who liaised with Bulgarian partisans during the Second World War, was captured and executed by the Nazis, and has a Bulgarian village named after him. That Percy and Frank Thompson’s fathers both lived in Oxford at one time was suggestive, but if there is any ancestral relationship between the two Thompson families, I’ve yet to find it.

It was when I happened to follow up links to a number of academic papers about one of my Elizabethan ancestors, Thomas ‘Customer’ Smythe – of interest to historians as the chief collector of custom duties for Elizabeth I – that I discovered one of his grandsons was granted a hereditary peerage and made the first Viscount Strangford (a so-called ‘Irish peerage’). This grandson was the son of Sir Thomas Smythe, Customer’s most well-known son, and not my direct ancestor (my family line runs through Customer’s third surviving son, Henry Smythe, reputedly the family renegade), but, out of curiosity, I looked up the Viscounts Strangford online. The Viscountcy came to end in the nineteenth century, but the sixth Viscount’s brief online biography revealed that he’d worked in the British diplomatic mission to the Ottoman Empire in Constantinople and had an interest in Balkan languages. It was his younger son, Percy, the eighth Viscount Strangford (the seventh, his older brother having died without an heir), and, more importantly, his wife, Emily, daughter of Admiral Beaufort (of the famous Beaufort Scale) that provide direct links to both Bulgaria and Albania.

The two met in unusual circumstances. Emily (pictured) was an avid traveller and published a book about her travels in Egypt and Syria. Percy, newly returned from Constantinople owing to ill health, gave it a sneeringly negative review, but this resulted in a correspondence with the book’s author and, with surprising rapidity, their marriage. In 1863, Emily set out on her travels again. This time her journey took her to Albania, partially retracing Lord Byron’s steps to Ioannina (now in modern-day Greece) and then northwards to Butrint, Saranda, Durres and Shkodra. Her account of the journey, On the Eastern Shore of the Adriatic in 1863, was published soon after, with her husband – who’d not accompanied her – providing supplementary material of a rather drier historical nature about the parts of northern Albania she’d not visited herself. The book places Emily among the female pioneers of travel to this part of the Balkans – of which there were several – who serve as precursors to Edith Durham, the great champion of Albanian independence from the Ottoman Empire.

Like his brother, however, Percy Smythe died relatively young (and without an heir), and it was the now widowed Emily who turned her attention to Bulgaria at the time of the 1876 April Uprising against the Ottoman occupiers. Appalled by the brutal suppression of the uprising, she travelled to Bulgaria and engaged herself in humanitarian work, earning herself a reputation as a ‘friend of Bulgaria’ that is now memorialised in monuments and street-names in various parts of the country – most notably, a sculpture in Hisarya and a street-name in Plovdiv. The great Bulgarian poet Ivan Vazov even wrote a poem dedicated to her - 'На леди Странгфорд' - which is available online in Bulgarian here.

I’m no great believer in ‘destiny’ and Emily Strangford is not a direct ancestor of mine, but her husband Percy and I do share a common, if somewhat distant-in-time ancestor in the form of Thomas ‘Customer’ Smythe and it’s interesting that, of all the countries in the world, she had connections with two Balkans countries with which, more than 150 years later, I have developed deep and enduring connections.