Hesketh Hesketh-Prichard

Major Hesketh Vernon Prichard, later Hesketh-Prichard (17 November 1876 – 14 June 1922) was an explorer, adventurer, writer, big-game hunter, marksman and cricketer who made a significant contribution to sniping practice within the British Army during the First World War. Concerned not only with improving the quality of marksmanship, the measures he introduced to counter the threat of German snipers were credited by a contemporary with saving the lives of over 3,500 Allied soldiers.

During his lifetime, he also explored territory never seen before by a European, played cricket at first-class level, including on overseas tours, wrote short stories and novels (one of which was turned into a Douglas Fairbanks film) and was a successful newspaper correspondent and travel writer. His many activities brought him into the highest social and professional circles. Like other turn of the century hunters such as Teddy Roosevelt, he was an active campaigner for animal welfare and succeeded in seeing legal measures introduced for their protection.

Early life

Hesketh-Prichard was born an only child on 17 November 1876 in Jhansi, North-Western Provinces, India. His father Hesketh Brodrick Prichard, an officer in the King's Own Scottish Borderers, died from typhoid six weeks before he was born, leading him to be raised alone by his mother, Kate O'Brien Ryall Prichard. She herself had come from a military family, her father being Major-General Browne William Ryall.

Hesketh-Prichard and his mother returned to Great Britain soon after, and lived for a while at her parents' house, before moving to St Helier on Jersey for several years. His nickname was "Hex", which he would bear throughout his life. They returned to the mainland that the boy might be educated at a prep school in Rugby. In 1887 he won a scholarship to Fettes College, Edinburgh; his entrance paper was an essay on "Summer Sports". He excelled at sports there, particularly cricket, at which the school magazine described him as "The best bowler we have had for a long time. Fast right hand with a good break back on a bowler's wicket." He was invited to play for Scotland against South Africa, but declined as he would have been unavailable to play against Fettes' rival Loretto School. After school, he studied law privately in Horsham, West Sussex. He passed the preliminary exam, though he would never practise as a solicitor.

Writing and exploration

First publications

Hesketh-Prichard, then nineteen, wrote his first story "Tammer's Duel" in the summer of 1896, which his mother helped him refine, and was sold soon after to ''Pall Mall Magazine'' for a guinea. That year he abandoned a career in law and spent the summer travelling around southern Europe and North Africa. He spent the sea-time on the trip writing or planning plots. When back in London, he and his mother wrote together under the pseudonyms "H. Heron" and "E. Heron", and saw publication in several journals, including ''Cornhill Magazine''. Hesketh-Prichard's circle of literary friends widened and he became acquainted with the likes of Arthur Conan Doyle and J. M. Barrie. In 1897 Barrie introduced him to the press baron Cyril Arthur Pearson, who suggested he write a series of ghost stories for his monthly ''Pearson's Magazine''. Hesketh-Prichard and his mother created a series of stories around the character "Flaxman Low"', the first psychic detective of fiction, though they were disconcerted to find the tales promoted by Pearson as "real". The collected work was published as ''The Experiences of Flaxman Low'' in 1899.

In 1897, he and his mother worked on the plot of ''A Modern Mercenary'', the stories of Captain Rallywood, a dashing diplomat in Germany. It was published by Smith and Elder the following year. He travelled to South America in February 1898, seeing the construction work for the Panama Canal, but returned after developing malaria while in the Caribbean.

Commissioned trips

In 1899 Pearson chose Hesketh-Prichard to explore and report on the relatively unknown republic of Haiti, wanting something dramatic with which to launch his forthcoming '' Daily Express''. His mother accompanied him as far as Jamaica; in later years she would often travel with him to remote destinations in a time when it was uncommon for a woman of her age to do so. Hesketh-Prichard travelled extensively into the uncharted interior of Haiti, narrowly avoiding death on one occasion when someone tried to poison him. No white man was believed to have crossed the island since 1803, and his trip provided the first written description of some of the secret practices of "vaudoux" (voodoo). He later wrote a vivid account of his travels in the popular book ''Where Black Rules White: A Journey Across and About Hayti''.

Pearson welcomed his reports, and on his return immediately commissioned him to travel to Patagonia to investigate dramatic rumours of a hairy beast roaming the land. The animal was conjectured by Natural History Museum director Ray Lankester to be a living example of the long-extinct giant ground sloth. Hesketh-Prichard's talent for descriptive narration enthralled the readers of the '' Daily Express''. He explored the area surrounding Lake Argentino, finding one of its feeder lakes, naming it Lake Pearson after his patron, and their connecting river Caterina after his mother. Lake Pearson was subsequently renamed Lake Anita, but the Río Caterina, known for its salmon, retains the name Hesketh-Prichard gave it. The surrounding area is now part of Los Glaciares National Park.

Although he found no traces of the creature after a year overseas and of travel, he did provide compelling descriptions of unknown areas of the country, its fauna and inhabitants. He acquired the pelt of an unknown subspecies of puma, naming it ''Felis concolor pearsoni''. (The puma is now considered to be a variety of the southern South American cougar ''Puma concolor concolor''.) The grass species '' Poa prichardii'' was named after Hesketh-Prichard after he brought back a specimen. He compiled the story of his travels in the well-received ''Through the Heart of Patagonia''.

In 2000, on the hundredth anniversary of both Hesketh-Prichard's trip and the newspaper's founding, the ''Daily Express'' despatched his great-grandson Charlie Jacoby to retrace his footsteps.

Labrador

Hesketh-Prichard first visited Atlantic Canada in August 1903, travelling up the coasts of Labrador and Newfoundland, and donating the heads of stags he had shot to the Newfoundland Exhibition then in London. He returned in October 1904, this time with his mother, and the cricketer Teddy Wynyard.

His most ambitious trip to the region was however in July 1910, when he undertook to explore the interior of Labrador, saying "it seemed to us a pity that such a ''terra incognita'' should continue to exist under the British flag". This same territory had claimed the life of writer Leonidas Hubbard a few years earlier. He described his journey up the Fraser River to access Indian House Lake on George River in the popular ''Through Trackless Labrador'' in 1911.

His reputation was such that former president Theodore Roosevelt, a fellow writer, explorer and hunter, wrote to him, commending him on his latest book, which he described as the best that season, and asking to meet him.

Further writing

In 1904, the mother-and-son writing team produced ''The Chronicles of Don Q.'', a collection of short stories featuring the fictional rogue Don Quebranta Huesos, a Spanish Robin Hood-like figure who was fierce to the evil rich but kind-hearted to the virtuous poor. A second collection, ''The New Chronicles of Don Q.'' followed in 1906. The pair produced a full-length novel, ''Don Q.'s Love Story'', in 1909. ''Don Q.'' was brought to the stage in 1921 when it was performed at the Apollo Theatre, London. In 1925, the book was reworked as a Zorro vehicle by screenwriters Jack Cunningham and Lotta Woods; the United Artists silent film ''Don Q, Son of Zorro'' was produced by Douglas Fairbanks, who also starred as its lead character. The ''New York Times'' rated the film one of its top ten movies of the year.

In 1913, writing on his own, Hesketh-Prichard created the crime-fighting figure ''November Joe'', a hunter and backwoodsman from the Canadian wilderness. It was broadcast as a radio play by the BBC
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