George Grey

British imperialist

• Born: April 14, 1812
• Birthplace: Lisbon, Portugal
• Died: September 19, 1898
• Place of death: London, England

One of the great proconsuls of the British Empire, Grey fused the arrogant, autocratic, decisive man of action with eclectic, radical, and democratic beliefs. He had a particularly profound influence on settlement, political developments, native policy, and ethnography, on three colonial frontiers: South Africa, South Australia, and New Zealand.

Early Life

George Edward Grey was the son of George Grey, a British army lieutenant colonel who was killed at the storming of Badajoz a few days before Grey was born. Colonel Grey was a member of a family associated with the earls of Stamford, and his wife, Elizabeth Vignoles, was an Anglo-Irish woman from County Westmeath whose evangelical religious fervor had a powerful influence on her young son. Grey was educated at Guildford Boarding School but ran away and was then tutored by the Reverend Richard Whately, late archbishop of Dublin. He entered the Royal Military College, Sandhurst, in 1826 and as an ensign and lieutenant served in Ireland with the Eighty-third Regiment between 1830 and 1836.

Grey was sickened by his experiences in Ireland, where he was employed in collecting tithe payments from the destitute and miserable peasantry in the interests of Anglo-Irish landlords and the Church of England. Until the end of his life, he advocated the emigration of the industrious poor from Great Britain to the new colonies of white settlement, Jeffersonian democracy on the American model, and radical measures designed to prevent the aggregation of land by a few large proprietors. Although he obtained an excellent report following a postgraduate course at Sandhurst in 1836 and was promoted to captain, he sold his commission and left the army.

In 1838, under the auspices of the Royal Geographical Society, Grey made two journeys of exploration, one to Shark Bay on the central coast and the other to Hanover Bay on the northwest fringe of Western Australia . Both expeditions found little land of economic importance and resulted in great hardships. Grey displayed exceptional bravery and endurance and was the first to find unique Aboriginal rock carvings, but his bushcraft was poor and he suffered a deep Aboriginal spear wound in the thigh, which gave him severe pain until his death. After recovering his health, Grey was made resident magistrate at King George Sound, and on November 2, 1839, he was married to Elizabeth Lucy, daughter of Sir Richard Spencer. The marriage was a most unhappy one. Their only son died in 1841, and, after domestic agonies, the couple was formally separated in 1860, although they were partly reconciled in 1896. Grey’s solitary withdrawal and aloofness were reinforced by his tragic private life.

Grey’s star, however, was in the ascendant as his report on how to civilize native peoples attracted the favorable opinion of the Colonial Office. At only twenty-eight years of age, Grey was appointed governor of the struggling colony of South Australia in 1840.

Life’s Work

Grey immediately stabilized the economy of South Australia by financial retrenchments that offended private interests dependent on the state. He brought order and uniformity to the public service, facilitated the profitable occupation of pastoral land rather than urban speculation, and was lucky in presiding over the discovery of copper and the successful development of wheat growing for export. He ruled alone and successfully by misrepresenting Adelaide opinion to London authority, and London instructions to Adelaide gentry, and he was politically dexterous and astute in dividing and governing South Australia. He was a skillful writer of reports and memoranda and was “as amiable in private life as he was cold and unscrupulous in public affairs.” Grey’s achievement in setting the infant Australian colony on the road to prosperity was nevertheless considerable, and he gained a deserved reputation as an imperial troubleshooter who could be relied upon to rescue infant British colonies from a wide range of teething problems.

In 1845, Grey was appointed governor of New Zealand , a colony beset by Maori-European confrontation, land disputes, and financial shortfalls. Here he gained his greatest triumph—a knighthood in 1848. Seizing military command, he ended the Bay of Islands rebellion of Kawiti and Hone Heke by capturing their pah, or fort, Ruapekapeka (“the bat’s nest”), on a Sunday morning when the Maori defenders were at their devotions. By a variety of means he pacified the Maoris of the south, and he captured the savage chief Te Rauparaha, whom he detained without trial. He displayed his brilliant flair for being on the spot when successful military operations were being conducted, and, like a modern general, managed news, dispatches, and personnel with confidence and a talent for public relations. He was indifferent to money but, as William Pember Reeves suggests, greedy for credit. At this time he was a blue-eyed, quick, energetic young officer with a square jaw, a Roman nose, a firm yet mobile mouth, and a queer trick of half closing one eye when he looked at the person whom he was addressing.

Grey learned the Maori language and customs, and through flattery, force, and mana (prestige and “face”) secured the adherence of Maoris on the fringes of the European frontier. While he built hospitals and schools and encouraged Maori agriculture and their absorption into the European economy, land sales proceeded apace. The lasting merit of his racial policies is still the subject of much dispute. Before he left New Zealand in 1853, he introduced a scheme of representative government, based on elected Provincial Assemblies and a national House of Representatives. This quasi-federal system later proved unworkable, although Grey, when he entered New Zealand politics as an elected member of Parliament, continued to uphold it.

Grey’s first New Zealand governorship, like his South Australian tenure, was viewed as a great success. The mess created by his predecessors was dramatically rectified. His assessment of his own achievements was generally accepted in London, and he was transferred in 1854 to another trouble spot in the British Empire. He was made governor of Cape Colony and high commissioner for South Africa and remained in that post until 1861. His task was to protect and pacify the eastern Cape frontier against unrest among the Southern Nguni people (known as “Kaffirs”) and to regulate the struggling white settlements. His formula, which he had developed as a result of his Australian Aboriginal and New Zealand Maori experiences, was applied on the frontier with the creation of a new buffer province of British Kaffraria.

Grey believed that while native customs were intrinsically interesting, they should be condemned as incompatible with European reason. As Christianity was a superior religion, all native peoples would eventually receive the Gospel, abandon superstition, and adopt more European modes of life. Through European-sponsored magistrates, schools, hospitals, and farms, backed by a powerful army of white frontiersmen, the native peoples would become absorbed into the processes of colonization and development. Multiracial harmony, based on settler superiority and eventual amalgamation, would then inevitably follow. Grey’s policies in South Africa, however, were disastrous for black Africans.

Grey miscalculated the amount of agricultural land available, and charismatic prophets persuaded the Xhosa people to kill all of their cattle and cease planting corn. Devastation (1856-1857) resulted. The Kaffraria and Transkei populations were reduced by two-thirds. The chiefs were arrested and ruined, thirty thousand refugees were deported, and white farmers filled the vacuum. For the first time, Grey ran foul of the Colonial Office by his overspending and disobedience of orders not to attempt to federate Cape Colony, Natal, and Kaffraria with the Afrikaner Orange Free State. He was recalled by Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton in 1859 but reinstated by the duke of Newcastle with a warning to obey orders. Grey seldom did. He had the man-on-the-spot mentality and always took authoritarian command, believing that success in the end justified all devious means used to attain it.

In 1861, Grey was sent to New Zealand again at his own request to prevent further fighting between Maoris and white settlers over land. This time his regime was a mixed one of success, military gain, confusion, betrayal, and failure. For the first time he had to deal with an elected Parliament and a responsible ministry. Grey played a lone, autocratic hand. He created policy and left his ministers to take the responsibility when things went wrong. He quarreled with the British general, Cameron, and pursued complicated and deceitful policies that, although militarily successful, resulted in major wars in the Waikato, West Coast, and Bay of Islands areas, the confiscation of hundreds of thousands of acres of Maori land, and the ruin of much of their society.

Grey was sacked by the Colonial Office in 1868 for disobeying instructions. He had retained British troops rather than sending them home, had increased expenditures, and was believed to have intensified the conflict by his forward military policy and huge land confiscations from the Maoris. His health broke, nervous problems appeared, his marriage disintegrated, and his self-control sometimes snapped. Increasingly isolated from his ministers and the Colonial Office, Grey was regarded as a dangerous, unscrupulous, and idiosyncratic autocrat. He retired to his retreat on Kawau Island in the Hauraki Gulf, where he devoted himself to literary, acclimatization, ethnographic, and scientific pursuits.

In 1874, Grey returned to politics, this time as the elected superintendent of Auckland Province. Two years later he became a member of the New Zealand House of Representatives and, between 1877 and 1879, led a radical ministry. His program of electoral reforms, the dismantling of big estates, labor regulation, and popular education was premature, but it was later carried out by Richard John Seddon . Grey proved a secretive, unstable, and autocratic leader who could not hold his disorderly group of followers together.

Grey consistently advocated British annexation and New Zealand control of Pacific islands. New Caledonia, the New Hebrides, Tonga, Samoa, and Fiji were all part of his grand vision to make Auckland the great mercantile capital of the Southwest Pacific and New Zealand the country “ordained by Nature to be the future Queen of the Pacific.” Grey opposed New Zealand’s entering the Australian Federation on the grounds that only colored labor could properly develop that continent. A prophet to the last, he looked forward to a grand confederation of all the English-speaking peoples of the British Empire and the United States.

Grey again retreated to Kawau but, in 1894, precipitately left New Zealand for London, where the queen made him a privy councillor. He died of senile decay in London on September 19, 1898, and, a rare honor for an Empire man, was buried in St. Paul’s Cathedral.

Significance

Sir George Grey was a complex, enigmatic colonial administrator whose life spanned almost the entire reign of Queen Victoria. Grey decisively influenced events in three major British colonies—New Zealand, South Australia, and Cape Colony. He was a peculiar mixture of autocrat and democrat, a visionary and political manipulator. He is still capable of arousing controversy among historians, repeating in death the passions, hatreds, and adulation that he engendered in life. Grey was a man with a tremendous variety of talents—an able soldier, an intrepid explorer, a man of letters, a mature scientist, and a talented administrator—but he never attained the great reputation that his initial brilliance and creative powers might have been expected to produce.

Grey’s published collection of Maori legends, Polynesian Mythology and Ancient Traditional History of the New Zealanders, as Furnished by Their Priests and Chiefs (1855), is a classic, and his other writings on African, Aboriginal, and Maori languages are still of use to scholars. His generous donations of two magnificent libraries to the cities of Auckland and Cape Town are still remembered. Grey never accepted defeat. As his biographer James Rutherford comments, “He combined romantic idealism with a fierce determination to carry his ideas into immediate practice… he never altered what he once said.”

Grey was a man of immense physical and moral courage, but his talents were flawed by his arrogance, disregard for orders, unscrupulous manipulation of evidence and events, and impetuosity. Above all, as his critics claimed, he never had the supreme courage—the courage to recognize at critical times that he was wrong. His virtues carried him through his halcyon days in Adelaide and Auckland, but as matters grew more complex, and he became more opportunistic and corrupted by office and his desire for a major place in imperial and democratic history, his judgment faltered. Contemporaries such as Seddon and Reeves saw much to admire in “good Governor Grey.” He retained the affection of many of the Maori chiefs, although his native policies have come increasingly under critical scrutiny. His marriage was a disaster but he took great delight in children. He wanted to play all the major roles on several colonial stages, but, in the end, his audiences had departed and the applause had ceased.

Bibliography

Bohan, Edmund. To Be a Hero: Sir George Grey, 1812-1898. Auckland, New Zealand: HarperCollins, 1998. Balanced and comprehensive biography. Bohan, a New Zealand historian, has used some new material to provide fresh insights into his subject’s political career and private life.

Dalton, Brian John. War and Politics in New Zealand, 1855-1870. Sydney: Sydney University Press, 1967. Like Ian Wards’s book (see below), Dalton’s study criticizes Grey’s often insolent behavior as a statesman.

Frame, Alex. Grey and Iwikau: A Journey into Custom. Wellington, New Zealand: Victoria University Press, 2002. In 1849-1850, Grey, the governor of New Zealand, and Iwakau Te Heu Heu, paramount chief of Towharetoa, made an overland journey from Auckland to Taupo. Frame traces the journey, focusing on the interaction between the British and Maori cultures before war erupted between the government and the tribes.

McLintock, Alexander H. Crown Colony Government in New Zealand. Wellington, New Zealand: Government Printer, 1958. The best work on the constitutional issues in the period before New Zealand was granted representative government in 1854. Grey’s role is clearly delineated.

Pike, Douglas Henry. Paradise of Dissent: South Australia, 1829-1857. London: Longmans, Green, 1957. An account of Grey’s successful governorship when the infant colony of South Australia was transformed from a group of disheartened settlers and parasitic land sharks into a progressive agricultural settlement.

Rees, William Lee, and Lily Rees. The Life and Times of Sir George Grey, K.C.B. 2 vols. London: Hutchinson, 1892. Rambling, highly flavored, and entertaining memoirs based on interviews and the selected and selective personal thoughts of Sir George Grey before he retired to die in England.

Reeves, William Pember. The Long White Cloud: Ao Tea Roa. 3d ed. London: Allen & Unwin, 1950. Chapter 12, “Good Governor Grey,” is a brilliant portrait by a younger New Zealand radical that frankly illustrates the enigma and contradiction that was Grey.

Rutherford, James. Sir George Grey: A Study in Colonial Government. London: Cassell, 1961. Excellent biography, based on a thorough mastery of a host of sources. Although he has not solved some of the challenging puzzles of Grey’s personal life and controversial public actions, Rutherford, an Empire historian, is essential reading.

Sinclair, Sir Keith. The Origins of the Maori Wars. Wellington: New Zealand University Press, 1957. The classic analysis of the New Zealand race wars, detailing Grey’s ambiguous motives and authoritative role in both major episodes.

Wards, Ian. The Shadow of the Land: A Study of British Policy and Racial Conflict in New Zealand, 1832-1852. Wellington, New Zealand: Government Printer, 1968. Wards’s book is a powerful indictment of Grey’s character and, particularly, his policy toward native people.

Wilson, Trevor G. The Grey Government. Auckland, New Zealand: Auckland University College, 1954. Critical, scholarly, and incisive, Professor Wilson takes a forensic look at a premature—and disastrous—radical New Zealand administration. Grey’s shortcomings as a practical representative politician are clearly exposed.