End of Empire

Colonel Sir Henry Templeton Smyth

Born in Kenya in 1855, the only son of the famous explorer Sir William Henry Gladstone Templeton Smyth, Henry was orphaned at a very young age and returned to England in the company of his godmother Bunty Fortescue, who gave up her life of adventure to raise the young boy in the proper way, sending him to Plumpton School and on to St Oswald’s, Oxford. But despite this, adventure seemed drawn to Bunty, and the young Henry’s life was a catalogue of incidents, escapades, close scrapes and jolly jaunts.

Henry entered the army at the age of eighteen, and quickly scaled the heights of officerhood, making Colonel after the Gibraltar campaign of 1890, in which he and his trusty South Essex regiment fought off the villainous Count von Büler and his legion of masked automata. Sir Henry was badly injured in Gibraltar, and decided soon after to retire from the army lest their next campaign should see the end of him.

At the age of 37, then, Henry came home to England, taking up residence at the family pile, Tyle Hall in Althorne, along with his close friend Archie Cunningham, regimental sergeant major of the South Essex.

Henry’s retirement lasted a year, and then the itch struck. He had befriended a young toff called James Tewkesbury, who was going on a tour of India and Ceylon, and Henry decided to go along, expanding the itinerary to include China, which he had always longed to see. Much like his redoubtable godmother, Henry proved to be an adventure-magnet, and there was big trouble in China before our heroes prevailed and came back home with enough jade trinkets and statues of little fat fellows to shore up the personal fortunes of both their families.

James had discovered a run-down museum in Central London with a mass of unused floor space, and he and Henry decided to adopt it, renaming it the Imperial West London Museum, and cramming it full of exciting treasures. The museum was a hit, and both men became heroes of the antiquities-and-adventures set, with subsequent jaunts to South America and Africa drawing huge press coverage, and introducing the pair to a world of subterranean intrigue they had never imagined possible. They became agents for the Ministry of International Intrigue, or MI-1, and it was in this capacity that Henry was reunited with his old regiment, when his visit to the secret training camp on Foulness Island coincided with a refresher course for the South Essex. Of course, such a reunion could not go smoothly, and they ended up in a fight to the death with a mad French Colonel, trying to undo Waterloo and invade Britain via the Thames.

The next trip the two adventurers planned was to Egypt, but personal circumstances stopped James from going, and Henry was forced to take on some ‘baggage’, in the form of Lady Annabel Simpson Jones, a wild young thing with a taste for excitement, and she certainly proved herself useful in Cairo, when the evil Fez brothers resurrected a whole army of mummified bounders to drive the British out of Egypt.

A year later, Henry and Annabel were engaged, the Imperial Museum was going from strength to strength, with a new annexe opening to house the latest Egyptian finds, and Queen Victoria herself including the opening of the museum in her official diamond jubilee celebrations. What could possibly go wrong?

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