William Baillie Grohman


William Adolph Baillie Grohman was an Anglo-Austrian author of works on the Tyrol and the history of hunting, a big game sportsman, and a pioneer in the Kootenay region of British Columbia.

Biography

Early life

Grohmann was born in 1851 in Gmunden, the eldest son of Adolf Rheinhold Grohmann and Francis Margaret 'Fanny' Reade. He spent much of his youth in Tyrol in Austria, and could speak Tyrolese dialect like a native. His early years were spent at the Schloss von St. Wolfgang in the Salzkammergut, which had a famous garden. His father had mental breakdown and in 1861 had to be committed to an asylum. He was educated by private tutors and at Elizabeth College, Guernsey. In 1873 his mother bought the semi-derelict Schloss Matzen in the Tyrol, near the branch of the Zillertal and the Inn Valley. As a young man Grohmann roamed out from the family castle to hunt chamois and deer in the surrounding high alps, wandering for days through the still-remote Tyrolese mountain villages. His two earliest books, Tyrol & the Tyrolese and Gaddings with a Primitive People , provide a rare first-hand insight into Tyrolese folk customs and the austere, isolated existence of pre-industrial Alpine village communities.
He was an expert mountaineer and made the first winter ascent of the Großglockner, the highest mountain in Austria, on 2 January 1875, and was a member of the Alpine Club. He is credited as being one of the first to introduce skis to the Tyrol, having been sent four pairs by his father in law, the railway magnate Tom Nickalls, who had a hunting lodge in Norway – he started using them in 1893, as is related in an article in The Field in 1937, by his daughter Olga, who herself became an early member of the Innsbruck Ski club. The article in The Field includes photographs of WABG's wife Florence on skis in 1894 – the earliest known photograph of a woman on skis in the alps. Skis were also introduced to the Tyrol the same year at Kitzbuhl by Franz Reisch.

Travels in North America

A crack shot and a passionate big-game hunter, he travelled out to the American West many times the 1870s and 1880s to shoot big game when the Rockies and mountain states were opening up to sportsmen. His book Camps in the Rockies gives an account of his travels through Wyoming and Idaho, both as a "topshelfer" and later on – more to his boyhood taste of stalking with Tyrolean mountain huntsmen – roughing it with trappers and Native Americans. Although written in a style of detached amusement to entertain armchair Victorian readers, this work, like his earlier books about the Tyrolese, has careful and sympathetic passages on American Indian and local customs, and gives a valuable first-hand account of the American and Canadian West just before and after the arrival of the railway. He ranged widely over the Pacific Slope and the Central Rockies and explored unclimbed peaks in the Selkirks.
Baillie Grohman liked the new country he found so much that he returned to British Columbia in the 1880s as a pioneer, investing through the Kootenay Company Ltd, a London registered company which obtained a concession of to develop the Upper and Lower Kootenay valleys. The company was capitalised at £100,000.00 in 20,000 shares of £5 each, mostly raised in Ottawa. He wrote a number of articles for British magazines promoting the possibilities of British Columbia. In his youth he had seen how the embankment of the Inn River in the lower Inntal had turned unproductive flood land into profitable farmland and so envisaged that a similar control of the Kootenay River and a lowering of the water levels of the Kootenay Lake would create large areas of fertile farmland. This plan was thwarted by political pressure from the Canadian Pacific Railway and others, who managed ultimately to get the concession revoked and awarded to rival interests. Probably his restless and outspoken temperament and privileged background was not well suited to the political manoeuvring needed to mollify the Provincial Colonial Administration and counter the machinations of the CPR and other interests.
Before the concession was revoked, the Kootenay Company was held to one of the conditions of its grant – that it must build a canal to connect the Columbia River and Kootenay and William Adolph Baillie-Grohman. The canal, took a massive investment and because of the railway, was pointless and the project failed. It is now a historic site at Canal Flats, British Columbia.
Between 1883 and 1885 Grohmann lived some time in Victoria, British Columbia, negotiating the concession with the government of BC, and then moved the Kootenay to manage the project, opening the first steam sawmill in the region and the first steam boat on lake Kootenay; he was the first J.P and the first postmaster in Kootenay. His account of his time in BC Fifteen Years' Sport and Life in the Hunting Grounds of Western America and British Columbia describes some of his pioneering experiences, and also has accounts of hunting the rare white Rocky mountain "antelope goat", sometimes known then as "Haplocerus Montanus" but now assigned the Linnaean name of Oreamnos americanus, as well as the pursuit of many other types of game. Baillie Grohmans's scheme for reclamation was later successfully implemented by others.

Later life

His later books include successful works on the history of the Tyrol ; Tyrol, The Land in the Mountains and Tyrol as well as a guidebook to his own castle, published in German, Schloß Matzen im Unterinntal.
A passionate collector, he amassed a large collection of antique European furniture and of European sporting art, and in his later years he developed an erudite interest in the history and art of sport, building up an extensive library on hunting and game animals, including early ecological studies along with early treatises on hunting in many different European languages. Assisted by his wife, Florence, he produced a lavishly illustrated and authoritative edition of The Master of Game, the second oldest English book on hunting, a translation by Edward of Norwich, 2nd Duke of York. This has a foreword by his friend and later US president Teddy Roosevelt, also an avid big game hunter, who visited him in the Tyrol.
In his book on early depictions of hunting Sport in art, An iconography of sport, Baillie Grohman was able to bring together a lifetime's understanding of hunting in the field with an extensive historical knowledge of early sporting art gained through his own collecting and research. Baillie Grohmann's own collection included 56 drawings by the celebrated Flemish artist Johannes Stradanus, including the famous 'Allegory of America' now in the Metropolitan Museum, New York. An edition of Maximillian the first of Austria's Das Jagdbuch Kaiser Maximillians I with Dr Michael Mayr is also of interest as an early exploration of game ecology.
As well as writing authoring eleven books, he published numerous articles in contemporary British magazines on both historical and travel subjects.
His interest in wildlife and the depiction of animals in historic art was sufficient to merit an obituary in the scientific journal Nature that noted: "A man of striking physique, endowed with high courage and great mind, he possessed an intense affection for the wild and grand in Nature, coupled, remarkably enough, with an unflagging interest in much that is purely scholarly."
On the outbreak of the first world war, as British nationals, the Baillie Grohmans faced internment but were allowed to leave Austria after the intercession of Prince Auersperg. They returned after the war and started the Tyrolean Relief Fund to help Tyroleans through the famine that followed the war in the Tyrol. He died in 1921 in Schloss Matzen.

Family

In 1885 Baillie Grohman married Florence née Nickalls, daughter of Tom Nickalls and Emily née Quihampton, Tom was a London stockbroker known as the "Erie King" from his many coups in American railway shares, the champion rowers Guy Nickalls and Vivian Nickalls were Florence's brothers. Florence joined William Adolf pioneering in British Columbia and write about her experiences in an appendix to her husbands account
“Florence Baillie-Grohman – Her Unpublished Manuscript,” BC Historical News Vol 1, No 3, p 7-22. https://dx.doi.org/10.14288/1.0190740
Florence and William had a son and a daughter: their son, Vice-Admiral Harold Tom Baillie Grohman RN CB, DSO, OBE, had a distinguished career in the Royal Navy, commanding the battleship HMS Ramillies at the start of the Second World War; and their daughter, Olga Florence Baillie Grohman, who married secondly Oscar Ferris Watkins, became a pioneer in Kenya and the first female Member of the Kenya Legislative Council.

Legacy

near Nelson, British Columbia is named after him as are the Grohman Narrows of Grohman Narrows Provincial Park.

Books Authored by W A Baillie Grohman

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Books by W A Baillie Grohman and Florence Baillie Grohman

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Articles by W A Baillie Grohman


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