John Henry Lefroy

Sir John Henry Lefroy, ca. 1880

Sir John Henry Lefroy, KCMG, CB, FRS, (28 January 1817 – 11 April 1890) was a British military man and later colonial administrator who also distinguished himself with his scientific studies of the Earth's magnetism.

Biography

Lefroy entered the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich in London in 1831 and became a 2nd lieutenant of the Royal Artillery in 1834. When the British government launched a project under the direction of Edward Sabine to study terrestrial magnetism, he was chosen to set up and supervise the observatory on Saint Helena. He embarked on 25 September 1839, for Saint Helena, and carried out his task throughout the following year. In 1842, Lefroy was sent to Toronto as the superintendent of the new observatory built there as part of that project. He immediately began planning a field expedition to the Canadian northwest to measure magnetism there. With an assistant and a Hudson's Bay Company brigade, he travelled more than 5,000 miles in the Northwest from May 1843 to November 1844, taking measurements at over 300 stations in an attempt to map the geo-magnetic activity of British North America and locate the North Magnetic Pole. They followed the Mackenzie River as far as Fort Good Hope and visited Fort Simpson in the west. On 9 June 1848, Lefroy was made a member of the Royal Society.

Lefroy remained in Toronto until 1853, continuing his observations and managing the observatory. On 16 April 1846, he married his first wife Emily Merry, a daughter of John Beverley Robinson; they would have two daughters and two sons. Lefroy also helped found the Royal Canadian Institute, where he was the first vice-president in 1851/52 and then president in 1852/53. Before his return to London, he managed the transfer of the Toronto Magnetic and Meteorological Observatory to the provincial government.

Upon his return to London in April 1853, Lefroy held various office positions in the British Army. He became involved in the army reform, and in that function corresponded from 1855 to 1868 also with Florence Nightingale. Later, he became Inspector General of army schools and finally in 1868 director of the Ordnance Office. In 1859, his wife died, and the following year, he married his second wife Charlotte Anna Dundas on 12 September. When he retired from the army in 1870 with the honorary rank of Major General, he entered the Colonial Service (now the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and was appointed Governor of Bermuda from 1871 to 1877. He left this position due to illness and returned to England, but later served as Governor of Tasmania from 21 October 1880 to 7 December 1881.

Lefroy was not related to the 1881 railway murderer Percy Lefroy whose real last name was Mapleton.The Mapleton parents, without Lefroy's permission, christened their son Percy Lefroy Mapleton and when arrested, Mapleton gave his name as Lefroy.

John Henry Lefroy was made a Companion of the Order of the Bath (CB) in 1870, and knighted in 1877 (KCMG).

Legacy

Mount Lefroy in the Rocky Mountains named after John Henry Lefroy, although it appears unclear if James Hector of the Palliser Expedition named it in 1858, or if the name is due to George Mercer Dawson, 1884.

The Surveyor: Portrait of Captain John Henry Lefroy, ca. 1845, sold at a record price of more than C$5 million in 2002. The painting is sometimes also called Scene in the Northwest.

A rare painting of Paul Kane showing John Henry Lefroy, which had been in possession of the Lefroy family in England, garnered a record price at an auction at Sotheby's in Toronto on 25 February 2002, when Canadian billionaire Kenneth Thomson won the bid at C$5,062,500 including fees (US$3,172,567.50 at the time). Thomson subsequently donated the painting as part of his Thomson Collection to the Art Gallery of Ontario.

Selected publications

• Lefroy, J. H.: Magnetical and meteorological observations at Lake Athabasca and Fort Simpson by Captain J.H. Lefroy and at Fort Confidence in Great Bear Lake by Sir John Richardson; London: Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans, 1855.
• Lefroy, J. H.: Diary of a magnetic survey of a portion of the Dominion of Canada, chiefly in the North-Western Territories, executed in the years 1842-1844; London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1883.

External links

• Biography at the Dictionary of Canadian Biography Online URL last accessed 11 January 2006.
• Lefroy and the Bermudas. URL last accessed 11 January 2006.
• Mount Lefroy. URL last accessed 11 January 2006.
• Royal Society memberships. URL last accessed 11 January 2006.
• Maine Antique Digest, May 2002 on the auction of the Kane painting.
• Ontario Plaques - Sir John Henry Lefroy 1817-1890

Further reading

• Lefroy, J.H. In Search of the Magnetic North: A Soldier- Surveyor's Letters from the North-west, 1843-1955, edited by George F.G. Stanley, The MacMillan Company of Canada Limited, 1955.

• Lefroy, Autobiography of General Sir J.H. Lefroy published posthumously by his second wife "for private circulation only", London: Pardon and Sons Ltd, 1895, of which an excerpt is available online.

• Loffroy of Cambray, A Supplement, London: Privately printed by Ebenezer and Son, Ltd., 1961.

• Lefroy, J.H. Memorials of the Discovery and Early Settlement of the Bermuda or Somer Islands, 1515-1685, compiled from the colonial records and other original sources., The Bermuda Historical Society, the Bermuda national Trust, 1981.