Frederick Marshman Bailey

Lieutenant Colonel Frederick Marshman Bailey (born February 3, 1882 in Lahore , British India , † April 17, 1967 in Stiffkey , Norfolk , United Kingdom ) was a British officer, explorer of Tibet and collector of butterflies and birds. As a political officer he was in Turkestan - at times in covert operation . Since childhood, Frederick Bailey's first name was "Eric" to distinguish him from his father, friends also called him "Hatter", his name is usually translated as "FM Bailey".

Life

Youth and beginning of military career

Frederick Bailey was the eldest son of a British officer of the same name who worked as a forestry specialist in British India . He attended school at Edinburgh Academy and Wellington College , Berkshire ; While on vacation in Belgium and East Prussia, he learned French and German. In 1899 he passed the entrance exam for the Royal Military Academy in Sandhurst . His first station was Wellington in the Nilgiri Mountains of India. Here he learned the command language Urdu, which is common in the Indian Army, and how to play polo . After a year he was transferred to Rawalpindi in the northern Punjab - at that time the largest British garrison in India - and attached to the 17th Bengal Lancers . However, Bailey pushed for the northern border and in 1903 he was pioneered in the 32nd Sikh Pioneers , who were relocated to Sikkim shortly after his arrival .

Participation in the British Tibet campaign

Younghusband with British soldiers 1904

The old town of Gyantse (1994)

As part of the Great Game for supremacy in Central Asia, the status of Tibet also came into the focus of the British rulers in India. In 1904 the Indian government invited Tibet and China to negotiate in the Tibetan border town of Khamba Dzong . The mission led by Francis Younghusband was accompanied by 200 soldiers, more soldiers were kept in reserve in Sikkim ( British Tibet campaign ). The negotiations dragged on for five months to no avail, a time Bailey used to learn Tibetan . In order to increase the military pressure, Bailey's unit moved over the Donkya La pass at an altitude of 5,500 meters into the Chumbi Valley in the winter of 1904/05 . In March there was the first fighting at Guru , in April Gyantse - the third largest city in Tibet - was stormed. Since there were no Tibetans willing to negotiate, the British mission fought its way with Maxim machine guns to the capital Lhasa , which was reached in August. On September 6, 1904, the Tibetan side signed an agreement recognizing the border with Sikkim, allowing British trade bases in Gyantse, Yatung and Gartok , and exempting a number of goods from India that were still to be agreed.

In 1905 Bailey applied for a transfer to the Political Department , which corresponded to the State Department of the Indian government (he retained his military rank). He became a commercial agent for the British government in Gyantse, Tibet, and later in the Chumbi Valley. His first assignment was to accompany the Penchen Lama Thubten Chökyi Nyima back to Tibet. The two men of the same age became friends, and Bailey often visited him with his gramophone to play records for him. In 1906, through his father's mediation, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society . In 1909 he returned to Scotland for an extended home leave.

Exploring the Tsangpo

For a long time it was unclear whether the Tibetan river Tsangpo (called "Yarlung Tsangpo" on the map) forms the upper reaches of the Brahmaputra , because the transition from the upper to the lower reaches is inaccessible through the Dihang gorges .

The Tsangpo, as the Brahmaputra is called in its Tibetan upper reaches

Since 1854 the Cartographic Office ( Survey of India ) had tried again and again to clear up the geographical mystery of which river the Tsangpo belongs to as its upper reaches. The Yangtze River , Mekong , Saluen , Lohit , Dibang and “Dihang” ( Brahmaputra ) came into question. In the 1880s, Captain Harman of the Survey of India argued that because of the amount of water it could only be the Dihang, but because of the Dihang Gorges , no one had followed the entire course of the river. Due to a translation error in a report by a previous scout for the Survey of India , the rumor about a large waterfall had emerged, which seemed plausible, because the Tsangpo flowed into the gorges at an altitude of over 2,700 meters and left them at an altitude of only 200 kilometers of 150 meters.

Bailey had seen and crossed the river for the first time on the Tibet campaign. In 1911 he used part of his home leave to clear up the riddle of the Tsangpos. He traveled to China via Russia, went up the Yangtze and finally entered Tibet from the southeast. Shortly before his destination, however, a Tibetan official refused to allow him to continue because of unrest. Bailey had to break off his private expedition and made his way through the settlement area of ​​the Mishmi to Assam . In 1912, Bailey reported again for duty and was assigned to a punitive expedition against the Abor as an intelligence officer . There he used the generously drafted marching orders to break away with Captain Henry Morshead and undertake his own expedition to the Tsangpo. The presumed waterfall turned out to be just a series of rapids at Pemaköchung. However, some river kilometers turned out to be impassable because of the Dihang gorges (the last section was only explored in 1998). Nevertheless it was now finally clear that the Tsangpo was identical to the "Dihang". Bailey was able to rule out the existence of a large waterfall with height measurements above the boiling point of the water. With that the Tibetan source of the Brahmaputra was clarified.

The Namcha Barwa from the west, as Bailey must have seen as the first European.

Bailey and Morshead explored the Tsangpo upstream and mapped some 380 miles of the river to Tsetang before turning south for India. The results also included the discovery of Gyala Peri (7,294 m) and Namcha Barwa with an altitude of 7,782 meters. Bailey was awarded the Royal Geographical Society's gold medal for his exploration of the Tsangpo . He described this expedition in the book No Passport to Tibet .

Although the expedition was not authorized in this form, it turned out to be useful upon return. On April 27, 1914, a convention was initialed between India, Tibet, and China recognizing the suzerainty of China over Tibet. The border between Tibet and Assam was also established in this convention, and the results of the expedition were taken into account. Although the convention was never ratified, the border line still applies today, and Great Britain secured a mountainous barrier some 100 miles wide in front of the Indian lowlands. As a person interested in natural history, Bailey had also made numerous contributions to the fauna of Tibet (see below). One of the consequences of Bailey's trips to Tibet was that he and Frederick O'Connor later standardized the spelling of Tibetan place names in English - and indirectly also in other Western languages. 1915 Bailey was founded by King George V with the CIE excellent.

Mission in Tashkent

During World War I, Bailey served as one of the few Urdu- speaking officers initially with the Indian Expeditionary Corps on the Western Front. Here he was wounded in the arm and sent to England to recover. He later fought in Gallipoli , where he was wounded for the second time. As one of the few Tibet experts in the Indian government, he was transferred to India's north-western border as a political officer in 1916/17. In 1917/18 he worked as a political officer in Persia, where he learned Farsi .

After the October Revolution , the Indian government was unaware of the conditions in Turkestan, which is why Bailey was sent on an official mission to Tashkent . With the new rulers of the Autonomous Socialist Soviet Republic of Turkestan he was supposed to ensure that the numerous, now released German and Austro-Hungarian prisoners of war did not reach Afghanistan and were used against British India. Second, no cotton should get to the Central Powers. Third, the religious propaganda of the Germans and Ottomans among Muslims should be stopped. Because British troops intervened in the civil war , Bailey was in such danger that he had to go into hiding in the uniform of an Austro-Hungarian prisoner of war and with changing identities. He succeeded in being employed, of all things, in counter-espionage by the Russian General Staff and sent as a Bolshevik agent to Bukhara , which was still independent at the time, from where he organized his escape to Persia. On this occasion he also met the Indian nationalist Mahendra Pratap . Bailey's officer in charge at the time was Sir John Shuckburgh . Bailey described this journey in 1924 in the book Mission to Tashkent , which by order of the government was not released for 20 years, but became a bestseller after its publication in 1946 (numerous identities were alienated and some sections deleted). It was last reprinted in 2002. In Soviet historiography, however, Bailey was portrayed as an imperialist agent who was responsible for almost all unrest in Turkestan during this period.

After the First World War, Bailey married Irma, the only child of Lord Cozens-Hardy. From 1921 to 1928 he was a political officer in Sikkim . In this function he obtained permission for some British expeditions to climb Mount Everest from the Tibetan side. Because of the inconsiderate behavior of the climbers, diplomatic entanglements arose in which Bailey had to compensate. From 1930 to 1932 he was political agent in central India and resident in Baroda . In 1932/33 he served as a resident in Kashmir . From 1935 to 1938 he was envoy extraordinary and plenipotentiary at the court of Nepal . During this time he undertook natural history journeys through India with his old friend Richard Meinertzhagen , among others .

He retired in 1938, but was reactivated during World War II. In 1942/43 he was on the road as a courier ( King's Messenger ) in Central and South America for Sir William "Intrepid" Stephenson, that is, he was engaged in secret service activities. He spent his retirement in the Norfolk countryside, where he died in 1967.

Bailey as a naturalist

The red goral is one of the species that Bailey discovered.

In Tibet, monks brought Bailey's attention to a large, blue poppy, Meconopsis betonicifolia baileyi , which is now named after him.

As a result of Bailey's travels in Tibet, the Lhasa Apso dog breed came to Europe.

Frederick Bailey was an avid naturalist. In 1906, he first sent a selection of Tibetan snakes to the Bombay Natural History Society , including Tropidonotus baileyi , the first species to be named after him. He became an active member of this naturalist society.

The butterflies that Bailey first collected include Parnassus acco baileyi , Carterocephalus postnigra , Ypthima baileyi , Erebia innupta , Aporia baileyi , Halpe baileyi , Erebia baileyi , Erebia inconstans , Lethe baileyi , Lycaena standfussi subbratenaes, and Rapala caileyi . New mammals were the Brahma white-bellied rat ( Epimys brahma , today Niviventer brahma ), the shrew Soriculus baileyi , a new subspecies of hare Lepus oiostolus illuteus and the red goral Naemorhedus baileyi (many of the species names are no longer valid today). 2300 birds collected by Bailey with a total of 270 species from Nepal and Tibet are today in the Natural History Museum in London, the butterfly collection in the American Museum of Natural History in New York.

Bailey's name is best known among gardeners for a blue poppy, Meconopsis betonicifolia baileyi , which he brought back from his expedition to the Tsangpo in 1913 (seeds were first collected by Frank Kingdon-Ward in 1924 ).

literature

Bailey literature:

• FM Bailey: China - Tibet - Assam. A journey 1911 . Jonathan Cape, London 1945.
• FM Bailey: Mission to Tashkent . Jonathan Cape, London 1946.
• FM Bailey: No Passport to Tibet . The Travel Book Club, London 1957.

Literature on Bailey:

• Obituary: Lt.-Col. FM Bailey, CIE 1882-1967 . In: The Geographical Journal . Vol. 133, No. 3, 1967, pp. 427f.
• Obituaries: Lt.-Col. Frederick Marshman Bailey, CIE, 1882-1967 . In: The Ibis . Vol. 109, No. 4, 1967, pp. 615f.
• Arthur Swinson: Beyond the frontiers. The biography of Colonel FM Bailey explorer and special agent . Hutchinson, London 1971.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ A political officer in the British Empire was a civil administration officer who worked as an advisor or envoy abroad.
2. ↑ after the Mad Hatter in Alice in Wonderland
3. ↑ Official name: 17th Regiment of Bengal Cavalry
4. ↑ other spellings: Dongkha La or Donkia
5. ^ FM Bailey: Mission to Tashkent . Jonathan Cape, London 1946, pp. 42-46.
6. ^ Brian Garfield: The Meinertzhagen Mystery. The Life and Legend of a Colossal Fraud. Potomac Books, Washington, DC 2007, p. 161.