John Henry Lefroy

John Henry Lefroy, ca. 1880

John Henry Lefroy (January 28, 1817 – April 11, 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 Artillerie in 1834. When the British goverment 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. (embarked sept 25, 1839) 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 north-west 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 locate the Magnetic North Pole. They followed the MacKenzie River as far as Fort Good Hope and visited Fort Simpson in the west. On June 9, 1848, Lefroy was made a member of the Royal Society.

Lefroy remained in Toronto until 1853, continuing his observations and managing the observatory. On April 16, 1846, he married his first wife Emily Merry, a daughter of John Beverly Robinson; they would have two daugthers 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 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 September 12. When he retired from the army in 1870 with the honorary rank of Major General, he entered the Colonial Service 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 October 21, 1880, to December 7, 1881.

Trivia

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 5 million Canadian dollars 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 February 25, 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.

References

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

Further reading

• Stanley, G. F. G. (ed.): In search of the magnetic north: a soldier surveyor’s letters from the north-west, 1843–1844; Toronto, 1955. Contains also Lefroy's autobiography, published post-humously by his second wife "for private circulation only", of which an excerpt is available online.