The Forger: J. M. Stuart-Young in Africa

‘I beg leave to advise you that I stand under sentence of Deportation’ begins the letter, written in Liberia in 1923 and addressed to the British chargé d’affaires. The writer is a representative of a trading house who has got into some kind of difficulty with the authorities.

So far, so par for the course in a file of Foreign Office correspondence. But he is also, according to his letterhead, author of such works as The Seductive Coast and Rose of the Old Dead Years, and has written lyrics for a host of composers of whom I have never heard. The author’s portrait, a crude drawing of a thin-faced man with unruly hair, crowns these various endorsements. Why such a figure, whose address is anyway given as Stockport, should be dealing in commodities in west Africa was something I felt I had to investigate.


J. M. Stuart-Young was a multi-faceted man: littérateur, self-reinventor, perhaps self-deceiver, fraudster, and, yes, tropical trader. As a young clerk in Manchester, his efforts to transform himself into a literary gentleman led him to forge his employer’s cheques. He was jailed for embezzlement but found a new position and a new life in Africa, where he rapidly became the richest palm-oil trader in Nigeria. Here, away from British society and increasingly a man of means, Stuart-Young achieved to an extent his own reincarnation. From 1904 he published a succession of sentimental novels and poems, as well as a memoir in which he claimed to have enjoyed a close friendship with Oscar Wilde, whose supposed letters to himself he unconvincingly forged.

Exactly why Stuart-Young was in Liberia is unclear from the FO file, though why he was deported is not. Among his writings during his sojourn was a pamphlet, ‘A Few Thoughts About the Future of Liberia and a Change of Government’, included in the file; since Liberia was a one-party state, it was presumably the second half of this title that distressed the authorities. Stuart-Young was asked to leave the country; he procrastinated; eventually he was dragged into court and told to go within two days. ‘IF I AM PUT TO ANY UNDESERVED INDIGNITY’, he informed the chargé, ‘I shall proceed to Monrovia in an open boat, and place myself under your protection’.


Indignity was forthcoming, though not from the government and perhaps not undeserved: according to the final papers in the file, more charges of embezzlement, again from his employer, followed him back to Stockport.

A 2006 biography of Stuart-Young is entitled The Forger – highly appropriate for such a man, a forger of cheques, of literature, of letters, of identities. The esteem with which he was held in his adopted country, however, was apparently straightforward. A prominent and well-loved figure, after he died in Port Harcourt, Nigeria, in 1939, ten thousand mourners attended his funeral.

This material, among many other files from the British Foreign Office and Colonial Office, can be found in our resource Confidential Print: Africa, 1834-1966.