Thomas, Lucy and Alatau: The Atkinsons’ Adventures in Siberia and the Kazakh Steppe

407 Pages·2018·35.74 MB·English

by  John Massey Stewart

THOMAS, LUCY & ALATAU
The Atkinsons’ Adventures in Siberia and the
Kazakh Steppe
John Massey Stewart
Thomas Witlam Atkinson (1799–1861)
For Penelope (née Lynex),
cellist, 1936 – 2015,
my remarkable wife of fifty years
Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Prologue: England and Germany

One St Petersburg and First Travels
Two Into the Altai
Three Into the Kazakh Steppe
Four Life and Death in a Cossack Fort
Five The Mountains, the Steppe and the Chinese Border
Six Eastern Siberia
Seven Barnaul, Belukha and back to St Petersburg
Eight Return to England
Nine Lucy and Alatau
Epilogue

Appendix I
Appendix II
Catalogue Raisonné
Notes
Bibliography
Glossary
Acknowledgements
Index
Illustration credits
Copyright
Imaginary Greek landscape by T.W. Atkinson, probably painted
before his Russian travels.
Prologue
England and Germany
WOLVES AND SNOWSTORMS, camels and unbearable desert heat; bandits,
murder attempts and night raids by enemy tribes; precipices, dangerous
rapids; convicts, Cossacks, nomads – as well as balls and a fourteen-course
dinner party for an archbishop: all this (and far, far more) was experienced in
Thomas Witlam Atkinson’s seven years’ travels with wife and infant son by
foot, horse, sledge, carriage, boat and raft for nearly 40,000 miles in the
remoter parts of the Russian Empire, resulting in 560 watercolour sketches
and fame as ‘the Siberian traveller’.
It had all begun in the year 1846 when a forty-seven-year-old, humbly-
born Yorkshireman, stonemason and architect wrote the following letter:
To His Imperial Majesty Nicholas the First, Emperor of All the
Russias

Sire,

The encouragement which your Imperial Majesty has always
extended to Art and Science induces me to petition for your
gracious permission to visit a province of Your Imperial Majesty’s
Mighty Empire, The Pictorial features of which have not yet been
much developed.
It has been suggested to me by Baron Humboldt [the famous
scientist, explorer and geographer] that the Ural and Altai
mountains would supply numerous and most interesting subjects
for my pencil.
I am induced to hope that my great experience in sketching and
painting would enable me to bring back a vast mass of Materials
that would illustrate these portions of your Imperial Majesty’s
Empire. As I should be accompanied by a gentleman who has
devoted much time to Geology he would take notes of the
Geological features of the Country and thus I wish render our
united labours of great value.
Permit me Sire in profound deference to solicit permission to
lay before Your Imperial Majesty my drawings of India, Egypt,
Greece as a proof of my competence for such an undertaking.
With sentiments of Profound respect for your Imperial Majesty
I subscribe myself

Sire,
Your Imperial Majesty’s most devoted and most faithful servant
T.W. Atkinson St Petersburg 19 August 18461
This is the extraordinary story of a village lad born a little over two hundred
years ago who rose from nothing to being a successful architect, gave up all to
travel with a passport granted by Tsar Nicholas I for remote parts of the Urals,
Siberia and what is now Kazakhstan, returning with hundreds of watercolour
sketches now mostly lost, of the books he wrote and the fame he won and his
descent into near-oblivion today. It is a story too of his indomitable wife,
Lucy, and of what became of her and of their son, Alatau Tamchiboulac
Atkinson, born in a remote Cossack fort, and his own significant career in
Hawaii. It is a story of a talented and ambitious self-made man, of
determination, endurance, narrow escapes from death – and love. It is a story
that includes many famous people both in England and Russia, embracing
Queen Victoria and two Tsars, Palmerston, Charles Dickens, Livingstone and
the famous Decembrist exiles. But it is a story too of the conflicting demands
of artistry and reputation on the one side and fidelity on the other.
The village of Cawthorne, mentioned in Domesday Book, lies on a hillside in
the lee of the Pennines. At the end of the eighteenth century most of the
1,000-odd inhabitants were labourers working on the land or in some trade,
and the quiet, middle-class village of today (bypassed now but then on the
main turnpike road from Manchester to Barnsley) is bereft of those earlier
coal and ironstone mines, tanneries, mills and smithies and their bustle. Built
of the local grey stone, the village was basically part of the Cannon Hall estate
owned by the Spencer Stanhope family, and the eighteenth-century mansion
set in a rolling, landscaped parkland lies half a mile from the village. Head
mason on the estate then was a widower, William Atkinson, who fell in love
with and married a housemaid in the big house, Martha Witlam. To them was
born on 6 March 1799, in their ‘two-up two-down’ next to what was then the
Wesleyan chapel, a son, Thomas.
Thomas’s birthplace, Cawthorne
Thomas was born in one of these two end houses in 1799. Next door was a Wesleyan chapel,
but it is not known which was which.