From: ian@spider.co.uk (Ian Heavens)
Newsgroups: rec.arts.books
Subject: Strange Characters (Was: Trebbitsch Lincoln)
Date: 20 Nov 92 15:00:44 GMT
Organization: Spider Systems Limited, Edinburgh, UK.

Here's another 'strange character':

In 1881, Edmund O'Donovan, special correspondent of the London Daily News,
arrived in Merv (in what is now the independent republic of Turkmenistan) 
to cover the fighting between the Russians and the Turcomans.

O'Donovan's colourful career already included 'Fenian agitation', for which
he spent a year in Dublin's Mountjoy prison, and ten months in Limerick gaol
for illegal possession of arms.  He only escaped fifteen year's penal
servitude for organising an underground Irish revolutionary movement in the
north of England by joining the French Foreign Legion.  He fought in the
Franco-Prussian war, was involved in the Carlist Wars in Spain, and arrived
in central Asia after covering the Bosnian and Montenegrin insurrections of 
1876 and the Russo-Turkish war if 1877.

The Merv Turcomans cautiously welcomed him, after some suspicion that he was a
spy.  In fact, after a while, their fear of Russian encroachment caused them 
to seek British protection, and despite his protestations that he had no 
official affiliation with the government, they made him Khan of Merv.

It was not a position he enjoyed, as he was mobbed from morning to night
by faithful subjects demanding food, drink, presents, and medical treatment 
(his small stock of medicine being soon exhausted, he was reduced to 
prescribing dandelion juice all round, and the whole oasis resounded with the 
rhythmic pounding of dandelions).

There were various misunderstandings.  Some time earlier, a large batch
of Russian rouble notes had been captured.  When it became apparent that
these were of value (the Turcomans not having seen paper money before),
they could not be persuaded that newspapers received by O'Donovan were
not gigantic and valuable banknotes.

These are his comments:

'These Merv Turcomans seem to have nothing to do but loafing about all day
from hut to hut to see if they cannot surprise some eatables.  They gorge
themselves to excess on every possible occasion with greasy food, and are
continually ill from indigestion.  Covetous rapacity seems to be their
leading characteristic.  To say that both temper and patience have been
severely tried during my stay at Merv would be to convey but a very
inadequate idea of the physical and moral annoyance I have undergone from
the crooked-mindedness and rudeness of these wretched Turcomans.  Their
craving after the smallest sums of money and their general greed surpass
my worst experiences in other parts of the world.  Their power to
inflict annoyance, and their obtuseness to any sense of delicacy, make them
a most undesirable race to live among.  No one who has not suffered as
I have among the Merv Turcomans by being constantly intruded upon and
psersecuted in every way by their abominable presence could appreciate the
luxury of being left in quiet solitude.  Relay after relay of these vile
beasts of Turcomans render life insupportable during the day and the night,
too.  One would imagined they derived intense pleasure from their uncouth,
unfeeling, treacherous presences.  The constancy of their intrusion passes
all belief.  They are like the pestilent flies who vie with them to render
life miserable.  Ten an hour is a minimum allowance.'

Despite his own negative feelings, it was with great difficulty that he
escaped to Persia on the pretext of representing them to the British
government, and letters and couriers followed asking his advice and
imploring him to return. 

He did not survive long, being killed in the Mahdist uprising in the Sudan
in the same year.

(from 'A Person from England' by Fitzroy MacLean)

The same book also mentions the extraordinary Yorkshire clergyman Joseph Wolff, 
who attempted to rescue Conolly and Stoddard from the Emir of Bokhara, and 
one of the most bizarre and sinister characters in history, a White Russian Baron
(whose name escapes me) turned Buddhist who terrorised Mongolia during the Russian 
Civil War.  

ian

---
	 Ian Heavens			ian@spider.co.uk                 
 	 Spider Software
 	 Spider Park, Stanwell Street		
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