Stanley Portal Hyatt (2 January 1877 – 30 June 1914) was an English explorer, hunter, and writer. Hyatt left his comfortable family home and struck out around the world c. 1896. He arrived in Africa to seek his fortune during 1898. In his written works, Hyatt describes his life and experiences in Australia, Rhodesia and the Philippines. He wrote fluently and skilfully about life on "The Road", and about his fellow-riders and his animals. Hyatt had a bitter contempt for commercially inspired progress, vehemently defending the "underdog" whenever he could, and was a savage critic of The Establishment. The Old Transport Road and The Diary of a Soldier of Fortune are his famous works.
Family
Stanley Portal Hyatt was born on 2 January 1877, at The Hawthorns, Mt. Ephraim Road, Streatham, Surrey, England and died on 30 June 1914, in Longton Grove, Sydenham, London. He married Margaret Annie Marston on 20 July 1908, in London, England. She was the daughter of John William Marston. After her death in 1912 he married Charlotte Caroline Key on 4 May 1914, in Newton Abbot, Devon, England. She was the daughter of Walter C. Key and Caroline Mcleod Godsell.
Hyatt's great-great-grandfather Abraham Portal was a goldsmith who later in life became bankrupt. Abraham was also the grandfather of the first Baron Hatherton. Stanley's Hyatt great-great-grandfather, John Hyatt, was a humble innkeeper in Dorset. His Hyatt great-grandfather began life as an apprenticed shoemaker. His great-grandfather, Richard Brinsley Sheridan Portal, was apprenticed to a grocer. His Hyatt grandfather, Charles Hyatt, was a dissenting minister preaching to the poor of the London slums. His Portal grandfather, Richard Brinsley Portal, was a fairly wealthy grocer and wine merchant in Northampton. His parents, Charles James Hyatt and Amy Portal, were both from now wealthy Victorian families, the various grandparents having prospered from preaching and trading.
Biography
Stanley Portal Hyatt rejected his family's great wealth (although he took a fair amount with him) to strike out on his own as one of the minor Victorian explorers. He was born in 1877, and educated at Dulwich College. He left school early in 1892 after studying engineering. He then spent two years in the workshops of a big firm of electrical engineers pioneering electric lighting, and then wanderlust gripped him.
Before his eighteenth birthday he watched, from the fo'cs'le of a windjammer, the silver crescent of the moon rising above Sydney Heads in Australia. After a voyage of a hundred days he arrived in New South Wales to find the colony practically bankrupt and with nothing to which he could turn his hand. He spent a fortnight in the New South Wales capital, which abounded then not only in larrikins but in fan-tan shops, where all day one heard "those gruesome, horrible claws," the long nails of the Chinese croupier, scratching over the matting as he raked in the lost money, or watched the concentrated spite on his face as he paid out to an unusually successful gambler.
Thereafter Stanley got a berth in a big sheep station some four hundred miles up-country, where a bottle of whiskey cost as much as two sheep. It was a magnificent place, splendidly maintained and splendidly stocked, but even so far from the coast he found little suggestion of the rolling pastoral countryside, and no hint at all of the Australia of this novelist. He was not sorry to cut loose and drift down again to Sydney, even though he reached the coast with two pounds in his pocket and little chance of earning more. He then turned to beachcombing around Sydney. A fortnight of loafing varied by daily visits to the cheapest of cheap eating-houses saw the end of his capital, whereupon his first dress suit, pride of its owner's heart, passed into the hands of a little Jew in Argyll Street for a recompense of ten shillings.
Then his luck turned, and somebody gave him an engineering job of sorts. Even that filtered out before long, and this young emigrant, not yet nineteen, cabled home for money, and shook the dust of Australia from his shoes in disgust.