Waynflete Henry Patten-Saunders

A carte-de-visite portrait of the man known at one point in his life as Waynflete Henry Patten-Saunders.

Born William Henry Saunders on 18 November 1832, and baptised on 18 November 1832 at St Sepulchre in Holborn, he was the son of William and Hannah Saunders. When William was born, his father was a hairdresser living in Red Cross Street, Holborn.

By the time the 1851 census was taken, his father had become a draper and eighteen-year-old William was an assistant in the business; the family were living at 25 Red Cross Street.

In 1856 William married Augusta Rolfe, daughter of Nicholas Rolfe, an organist and piano forte maker in London’s Cheapside. Their marriage produced two daughters: Marie Nikolaiewna Augusta Maud Patten Saunders, (born 25 May 1857; baptised 22 June 1857 at St Andrew’s, Holborn); and Olga Emily Gwendoline Patten Saunders (born 11 December 1858; baptised 12 January 1859). William and Augusta were living at 93 Hatton Garden. William had by now acquired another middle name, Patten, and somehow turned himself into a ‘Gentleman.’

When the census was taken in 1861 the family were living at Thavies Inn (a former Inn of Chancery) in Holborn. William now gave ‘Captain Imperial Guard of Russia’ as his profession.

Around this time he began calling himself Waynflete Henry Patten-Saunders, hyphenating the newly acquired name Patten with his surname Saunders. He also started to use the letters ‘K.C.G.’ after his name, though no report ever explained what these letters supposedly represented. According to a pencilled inscription in the family album, under a portrait showing him with the award, it was the 'Order of the George,' which doesn't actually exist. The Silvy daybooks record him as a ‘K.C.H.’ which is a Knight Commander of the Hanoverian Guelphic Order, an order of chivalry instated by George IV when he was Prince Regent. In the United Kingdom it has always been regarded as a foreign order.

Various reports in the press in the early 1860s refer to him as a pedestrian, a runner, a swimmer and even a bullfighter. He was clearly athletic, though whether he was ‘the European champion athlete’ as he claimed is debatable. In 1860 he won a pedestrian match at Aldershot and 1864 he defeated a champion swimmer from France in an outdoor race over a distance of five miles.

Other unsubstantiated reports in the press refer to him rather more fancifully as ‘a Russian gentlemen who is engaged in this country for his Government in arranging the plan for an overland Asiatic line of telegraph to America’(Cornish Telegraph, 16 August 1865). According to some sources he was an Equerry to Nicholas, 4th Duke of Leuchtenburg, but again this is unsubstantiated.

In 1862 it was widely reported that he had crossed a mastiff with a tame lioness he kept as a pet, though at least one reporter was sceptical when he saw the putative offspring.

On 1 July 1863 he was convicted of punching a policeman named Daniel Connor in the face at the Derby. According to a report in the Wexford Constitution (8 July 1863), ‘Captain Patten-Saunders, of pedestrian notoriety, and formerly in the Queen’s Bays’ [the 4th Dragoon Guards] was found ‘guilty of premeditated and unprovoked assault upon a policeman.’ He served three months with hard labour in Wandsworth Prison. The Calendar of Prisoners at Wandsworth gives his age as 30 and his profession as ‘Gentleman.’

In 1864 he published a novel titled Black and Gold, or, The Don! The Don! A Tale of the Circassian War. A review in the Morning Post (27 October 1864) gives an outline of the plot – it sounds like a turgid potboiler – but concludes ‘the absurd improbability of the entire plot makes it highly entertaining.’

The London Gazette of 21 December 1866 includes his name among the list of bankrupts. He was, apparently, ‘formerly a Captain of the 2nd Dragoons.’ I can find no record of him ever serving in either the 2nd or the 4th Dragoon Guards, nor in any other regiment of the British Army.

In 1870 various accounts appeared in the press that on a ‘special mission’ to Paris he had run the Prussian blockade of the city twice in five days (Evening Freeman, 7 October 1870).

On 9 December 1871 Bell’s Life reported that ‘Last week Miss Catherine Simpson and the Russian party who are at present her guests accompanied by Capt. Patten Saunders, K.C.B. [sic] succeeded in capturing on the beach between Folkestone and Sandgate a very fine specimen of the “Cock of the Rocks,” the most beautiful bird of South America. […] We know of no other instance of this rare species being taken in England.’

Born at Bobbing in Kent in 1842, Miss Catherine Elizabeth Simpson was the daughter of Catherine Dorothy Simpson. In 1871 she was unmarried and living with her widowed mother in Bexhill. By the time the census was taken in 1881 she was living at Gatehouse Farm at Buxted in Sussex and calling herself ‘Catherine E. Patten-Saunders,’ though no marriage had taken place. William was elsewhere on the night of the census but the household included his and Catherine’s three children: Gazella (aged 7); Nicholas (aged 6); and Harloven (aged 3). I can find no record of Gazella’s birth, so this was almost certainly not her real name. In 1901 she was a teacher in Edinburgh. Nicholas was born in 1875; his full name was Nicholas Gondonoff St Michael Rudolph Patten-Saunders. A gardener in 1939, he died at Hammersmith in 1946. Horloven is almost certainly the boy registered as Rurik Basily Gregory Mourza Simpson in 1877. In 1891 he was a pupil at Stonyhurst, the Roman Catholic boarding school in Lancashire. According to his own account, he joined the Coldstream Guards in 1898, fought in South Africa in 1899 and emigrated to Canada in 1906. In 1916 he was arrested in Minnesota for writing a series of fraudulent begging letters under the name Waynflete Henry Patten-Saunders to charitable individuals in Great Britain. The full story is in the British weekly journal Truth (29 March 1916).

In later life William was known as the owner of ‘some of the finest bulldogs in England’ (Folkestone Express, 1 September 1894). One bitch called ‘The Queen of Saxony’ was the holder of the silver Wellesley collar; she could ‘range, find, and stand with the best of pointers.’ She died on 19 June 1896.

William Henry Patten-Saunders of Russia House, Lancing in Sussex, died on 2 February 1899, leaving an estate valued at £6353. He was buried at Goring in Sussex on 7 February 1899. By a strange coincidence his real wife Augusta died in Wood Green that same week. She was buried in Norwood Cemetery on 16 February 1899.

At some point in his life William seems to have uncovered a lost painting of Peter the Great. More than half a century after his death, an article on this portrait in the Worthing Gazette (16 October 1957) referred to ‘Captain Patten Saunders’ as ‘a son of Prince Strogonett [sic], who married a sister of the famous Emperor Nicolas [sic], when Captain Saunders was acting as agent for the Russian royal family.’ I think there can be no doubt that this description would have delighted the former draper’s assistant from Holborn.

Photographed by Moira and Haigh of London.