The British king who ruled an incredible 56 countries but only ever vi | World | News

He was a king who viewed the empire through the prism of his stamp collection. Of the 56 countries that made up the British Empire 100 years ago, its sovereign King George V visited just one of them. “How is the Empire?” he’d often ask his advisors – but their reports were enough. It’d be impossible for him to meet even the tiniest fraction of the 458 million subjects who made his domain the biggest the world had ever known.

And so, rather than favour one of his dominions over another, he stayed at home. Only India, the jewel in the crown, received a visit from him post-Coronation in 1911. Nevertheless, George lived for his many peoples and was deeply interested in the lives and fates of even the smallest of his nations. One such was the New Hebrides in the South Pacific. And when one day in 1929 he received an unexpected gift from King Ringapat, head of the Big Nambas tribe, he was intrigued.

Until then his knowledge of this remote archipelago was confined to the elegant stamps that nestled in his famous albums. Ringapat’s people were cannibals. But a breathtakingly brave entomologist, Evelyn Cheesman, had battled her way through the jungles of the volcanic island of Malekula to come face-to-face with its king – and brought by way of introduction a special gift, a photograph of King George on horseback. Given his tribe’s taste for human flesh, Miss Cheesman, a 45-year old spinster, could have ended up as the king’s breakfast. But such was the force of her personality that he accepted her present and offered one of his prized possessions in return.

What happened next could have changed the course of history – and not for the better. “Ringapat had 17 wives – six were dead but the surviving 11 were kept inside his compound,” writes Dr Sarah Lonsdale in her spellbinding new book, Wildly Different. “Evelyn spent several nights in his enclosure, discussing insects and white traders in a mixture of broken English and hand gestures. She taught him how to use a pocket magnifier.

In return Ringapat insisted on sending her away with a gift for King George from his own personal belongings. She chose a shell necklace and a 14-ft-long bamboo-handled spear.” The spear was dispatched via the P&O shipping line to Britain. Such a rare prize would have delighted King George – carved as it was with a terrifying double-sided head wrapped in leaves, and lashed to the spear shaft with a braided cord. But it never reached His Majesty.

“A letter of faint thanks from the King’s office at Sandringham duly arrived, requesting that the spear be thoroughly cleaned,” writes Dr Lonsdale. Clearly, the courtier behind the letter wasn’t prepared to hand over soiled goods to his sovereign before it’d been polished up – jungle vibe or no jungle vibe.

In fact, his snooty reserve saved the King’s life. Sent to the British Museum for a polish-up, the spear was discovered to have fatal properties – the tip was laced with deadly strychnine from the Nux Vomica tree. One touch of the king’s finger and he’d be dead. Which raises the fascinating possibility that, as a consequence, we might not have King Charles III on the throne today.

Why? In 1929, George V had become seriously ill with pneumonia and other respiratory complications. So weakened was he that he was forced to delegate his powers to a Council of State temporarily. A simple touch of that spear would have seen him off – and King Edward VIII would have found himself on the throne seven years earlier than history finally allowed. It was the year that Edward had started his affair with Thelma, Lady Furness, the American-born wife of a shipping magnate. But his attraction to her, according to biographer Rachel Trethewey, was superficial – “she never came near to understanding him” – and it’s clear that throughout the affair he was looking for someone else.

The prince didn’t meet that someone else – Wallis Simpson – until 1931. Had he become king in 1929, their paths would likely never have crossed. There’d have been no abdication, and the reign of King Edward VIII would have lasted until his death 40 years later.

That means no Queen Elizabeth II on the throne till her uncle died in 1972 – and maybe no Queen Elizabeth II at all, if Edward had done the right thing and found an acceptable wife, settled down and had children. No Queen Elizabeth means no King Charles – today our monarch would be no more than a fringe royal, like the Dukes of Kent and Gloucester. And all over a poisoned spear.

Meanwhile, what happened to that innocent bearer of fatal gifts, Evelyn Cheesman? Her achievements were astonishing. By the end of her adventurous, hazardous life, it was estimated she’d collected an astonishing 70,000 specimens of insects, plants and animals – truly a Sir David Attenborough of her day. With a tiny frame and slim build, she became known as “the woman who walked” – a tribute to her tireless onward push to find new and different things in the remoter parts of Planet Earth. As Dr Lonsdale’s new book on the subject reveals, she was a woman of exceptional courage, grit and determination.

Born one of five children in Kent in 1881, she was prevented from becoming a vet because the Royal Veterinary College refused to accept women. Fascinated by the natural world but hampered by her incomplete education and the masculine prejudices of the day, through sheer willpower she went on to study entomology, and, by the age of 39, had become the first woman curator at London Zoo. Remarkable enough, given the male-dominated world in which she moved.

But then she gave up her secure position to travel, alone and determined, through the Galapagos off South America and the Tuamotu Atolls and Society Islands in the South Pacific, collecting insects, plants, reptiles and amphibians as she went. Along the way she stumbled across deadly snakes and spiders and was forced to shrug off bouts of life-threatening tropical disease. She shaved her head to save herself from insect infestations – but could not resist “the urge”, as she called it, to travel and research, living alone, sometimes for months on end, on a handful of small sweet potatoes a day.

She once got so tangled up in low-hanging spider webs on Gorgona Island off Colombia that she had to spend several hours freeing herself with a nail-file – after that, she never travelled without a machete in her kit. But the forest, she confessed, had bewitched her and put her in a trance from which it was difficult to awake.

“She faced enormous, life-threatening, challenges in the wild places she travelled through,” says Dr Lonsdale. “But none was more difficult than the prejudices she faced from the men who controlled access to these worlds. She in turn challenged established thought. Through her insect-collecting, Evelyn worked out, in the days before [the discovery of tectonic plates], that some of the islands in the South Pacific must have moved, as if afloat, through vast spaces of the ocean.”

She did all this while remaining virtually penniless – living frugally, feverishly writing books which paid for her travels and research, if little more. This was a woman whose courage opened the door for women scientists who, at the turn of the 20th century, were largely non-existent.

Her example fostered a time when, says Dr Lonsdale, “More women – less well-connected, less well off, less able-bodied, asserted their right to be in the wild – to enjoy its beauty, to write about the feelings it provokes, to discover its fabulous plant and animal life and to help protect it.”

For the remarkable work she’d done and for her manifest self-denial and courage, this unwitting would-be assassin was rewarded with the Order of the British Empire by King George V’s grand-daughter, Queen Elizabeth II, in 1955. Evelyn was 74. At the time she was living on a South Sea island in a leaky wood-stilt and brush hut she’d named Red Crest.

“The specimens she’d collected literally emerged from the walls: creeping, stinging, biting, sliding from out of the dark infested hollows, sucking her blood and laying eggs in her food,” writes Dr Lonsdale. In reply to the Natural History Museum who’d informed her of the award, Evelyn wrote: “I am quite overwhelmed by the honour bestowed on me.”

But then she hurried on with the real reason for her letter: “By seamail I am despatching botanical material – specimens of plants and ferns…Hymenoptera, Lepidoptera, Diptera, etc,” wrote the septuagenarian excitedly. The gong was far less important than her work. Evelyn Cheesman died aged 87 in 1969 – though her poisoned spear lives on, stowed in a museum storage facility in East London.

• Wildly Different: How Five Women Reclaimed Nature In A Man’s World, by Dr Sarah Lonsdale (Manchester University Press, £20), is out now