Frere’s Life and Reputation
Fig. 9: Lock & Whitfield, Sir (Henry) Bartle Edward Frere, 1st Bt, published by Sampson Low, Marston, Searle and Rivington, woodburytype, published 1876, NPG Ax17498 (© National Portrait Gallery, London, CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).
(Fig. 9) Bartle Frere was a controversial figure, and provoked violent feeling even after his death. For most of his life he had been a highly respected administrator, graduating top of his year from the East India Company College at Hertford Heath, Hertfordshire, and proceeding into the Bombay Civil Service in 1834. He was sporty and authoritarian, but firmly in the tradition of the improving colonial scholar, a type first commemorated in St Paul’s in the statue of William Jones. Frere built harbours, devised revenue systems, restored ancient monuments, and learnt the languages, customs and history of Western India. He impressed enough to gain first a political residency in the Maratha state of Satara (1847), then the Commissionership of Sind (1851), recently and controversially annexed by Sir Charles Napier. In Karachi he carried out extensive agricultural and transport works, doubling the revenues through a new harbour and road and rail works. In 1859 he came to much greater prominence by suppressing local insurrections in the region during the Indian Mutiny. As the monument recalls, he twice received thanks from the British Parliament, and received a KCB for his efforts.
After becoming the so–called ‘saviour of Western India’, Frere moved into highest imperial government and a succession of honours, all recorded in protean detail on the monumental inscription. In 1859 he entered the Council of the Viceroy at Calcutta (now Kolkata), and in 1862 became Governor of Bombay (fig. 10).
Fig. 10: John Watkins, ‘Sir (Henry) Bartle Edward Frere, 1st Bt’, albumen carte-de-visite, 1872, NPG x28168 (© National Portrait Gallery, London, CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).
In Bombay (now Mumbai) he carried out another programme of transport works, trade improvements, and public building, including George Gilbert Scott’s university in tropical Gothic revival style (fig. 11–12). Sanitation works lowered death-rates enough for Florence Nightingale to commend Frere’s work.
Fig. 11–12: Unknown photographer, ‘Bombay University, Convocation Hall’ and ‘Bombay University Convocation Hall and Library’ from an album of 40 photographs, 1870s (Public Domain).
After he retired from India in 1867 many of the honours came which are mentioned in the inscription: a seat on the Indian Council in London, a Grand Knight Commander of the Star of India, the Honorary Doctorate from Oxford, and the role of guiding the Prince of Wales around India in 1875–76. His advice and scholarship were in demand, and he was President of the Royal Asiatic Society (founded by Jones), Fellow of the Royal Society, and President of the Royal Geographical Society (fig. 13–14).
Fig. 13: Thomas Woolner, Sir (Henry) Bartle Edward Frere, 1st Bt, plaster cast of bust, 1868, NPG 1670 (© National Portrait Gallery, London, CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).
Fig. 14: John Watkins, ‘Sir (Henry) Bartle Edward Frere, 1st Bt’, albumen carte-de-visite, 1872, NPG x28168 (© National Portrait Gallery, London, CC BY-NC-ND 3.0); Bourne & Shepherd, ‘H.R.H. the Prince of Wales, H.E. Sir John Strachey & Party, Agra’ from Prince of Wales Tour of India 1875–6 (vol.4), albumen print, 20.4 x 28.2 cm, RCIN 2701805 (© Royal Collection Enterprises Limited 2025 | Royal Collection Trust) – Frere is in the second row, fourth from the left.
After a mission to Zanzibar to curb the slave trade in 1873 he received many more honours, but also began his interest in the fast–developing African empire (fig. 15).
Fig. 15: Sir Leslie Ward, Sir (Henry) Bartle Edward Frere, 1st Bt (‘Men of the Day, No. 68.’), chromolithograph, published in Vanity Fair 20 September 1873, NPG D43606 (© National Portrait Gallery, London, CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).
In 1876 he was tempted out of retirement by the promise of a more powerful role than any previous Briton: High Commissioner for South Africa. Specifically tasked by the Colonial Secretary, Lord Caernarvon, with creating a confederation of the existing states, Frere set about solving its so–called ‘black problem’ – the existence of a militarised Zulu state on its borders. In 1879 he provoked a war against Cetshwayo, the king of the Zulu Kingdom (1873–1884), with the intention of crushing the threat but instead lost the opening battle at Isandlwana. Losing the confidence of the South African parliament, as well as Disraeli’s government at home, he was forced to share his position with Sir Garnet Wolseley, and was finally removed from Africa altogether by Gladstone in 1880.
The origins of this monument lie in the period after 1880 when Frere himself, and his family, set about defending his reputation against the storm ranged against it in Britain. Sir William Howard Russell, who met Frere in Capetown in 1880, said he ‘has as much real nobility of governing about him as anyone I ever met, but he is also bigoted in his belief that he can do no wrong’. From the moment Frere stepped off the Steamship Pretoria in Southampton he received firm support from colleagues in Imperial administration, who felt that he had not been given adequate time and support to implement the policy that he had been assigned, and had been let down by successive governments. In an address to supporters from the steamship, Frere stated his conviction that there was a simple series of misunderstandings of the policy and its application amongst the wider British public, which they would eventually understand through proper relaying of the facts. For the next three years, however, he failed to persuade, and apparently died still hoping that ‘they must understand’. Even in death, however, the vitriol did not stop. His political adversary Charles Bradlaugh wrote:
Sir Bartle Frere is dead, and by way of special honour his remains rest in St Paul’s Cathedral[…]. He did more than most men to bring about the trouble and dishonour in Zululand. To him the coloured pagan [sic] had small right to existence when the needs of the Christian conflicted. Sir Bartle Frere conscientiously enough thought himself very pious and very good, and no doubt quite as conscientiously described me as too impious and too bad to be a legislator. Yet on his memory must rest the stain of the lives lost at Isandlwana.
(Charles Bradlaugh, ‘Political Corner’, Our Corner, July 1884)
In 1881 he had his portrait painted by Sir George Reid, wearing the dress uniform of a colonial governor (fig. 16).
Fig. 16: Sir George Reid, Sir (Henry) Bartle Edward Frere, 1st Bt, oil on canvas, 1881, NPG 2669 (© National Portrait Gallery, London, CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).
The attempts of his supporters to save his reputation in death concentrated on the erection of a bronze statue of Frere by Thomas Brock. This was unveiled on the Embankment in 1887 by the Prince of Wales, and accompanied by published justifications of Frere as an enlightened interventionist, along with lamentations on the disappearance of ‘high–spirited’ men to extend the empire (fig. 17–19).
Fig. 17–19: Thomas Brock, Sir Henry Barlte Frere, bronze, 1887, Victoria Embankment, London (courtesy of and © Robert Freidus and George P. Landow, Victorian Web).
The family’s efforts centred upon the St Paul’s monument, and in collating the records of Bartle Frere’s life, his correspondence and papers, Mary Frere wrote a massive obituary of her father for the Journal of the Historical Society, and all the documents were subsequently joined together into a hagiography of Frere by John Martineau, published in 1895. The family initially sought to bury Frere in Westminster Abbey but received a polite rejection from the ‘ignorant’ Dean of Westminster, who doubted Frere’s greatness, and pleaded a shortage of space. St Paul’s was more receptive, as it began to establish an explicit role as the ‘very central point of the vast empire on whose seething and unquiet borders Frere’s life work had been done’, as John Martineau put it.