Treachery, a lynch mob murder, a beautiful slave girl and the
fascinating history of Boris’s hair
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Last updated at 14:07pm on 18.05.08
Back to his roots: Boris’s blond hair may be inherited from a slave girl
When the Queen was introduced to an urbane Turkish diplomat at a garden
party in the grounds of the British Embassy in Ankara last week, the
conversation turned to Boris Johnson’s election as the Mayor of London.
With pride, Selim Kuneralp, a diplomat born in Istanbul, told her he is
a cousin of the new Mayor.
He is also living proof of the most surprising aspect of Boris’s
electoral campaign, his boast that he could "out-ethnic" an Asian radio
presenter who questioned his record on race.
On face value, the blond-haired, blue-eyed Johnson may appear to come
from undiluted Anglo-Saxon stock – with, maybe, a dash of Old English
sheepdog and a smattering of haystack thrown in.
But Boris defused a tricky interview by revealing that his
great-grandfather was a devout Turkish Muslim who could recite the
Koran by heart.
He went on to suggest that his distinctive shock of unruly hair may be
a genetic legacy from another ancestor – a Circassian slave girl from
the Caucasus mountains of southern Russia.
Later this year, the BBC’s family history programme Who Do You Think
You Are? is to examine Boris’s colourful ancestry.
Last week The Mail on Sunday travelled to Istanbul and the mountains of
central Anatolia to discover the truth of the Mayor’s Ottoman roots – a
story of political intrigue, exile, treachery, murder and, ultimately,
redemption.
A whole branch of Boris’s family still lives in Turkey and it is clear
that despite his upper-class English bearing, many among the Turkish
elite in Istanbul still consider him one of their own.
In Istanbul, we discovered the rich and fascinating tale of Boris’s
great-grandfather Ali Kemal Bey, a campaigning journalist, poet and
author.
He briefly served as a government minister in the dying days of the
Ottoman empire and was brutally murdered in 1922 by a lynch mob after
backing the wrong side during the Turkish War of Independence.
We found Boris had an eminent great-uncle, Zeki Kuneralp, who became
the Turkish Ambassador to Britain and then Madrid. Tragically, he was
assassinated in 1978 by Armenian militants.
But it was in the rugged interior of Anatolia that we uncovered the
most intriguing Johnson family story – that the probable source of
Boris’s blond hair is his great-great grandmother, a slave who was
bought by his great-great-grandfather.
Boris’s father Stanley Johnson said: "I’m extremely interested in my
family history, not just in the Turkish side, but also the French,
English and Swiss sides. They’re all pretty interesting to me.
"I can only speculate about the origin of our blond hair. But I have
been told there is fair hair in the family genes and there is a
suggestion that it came from a remote Anatolian village where our
grandfather came from.
"I’ve never been there, but there may be a lot of blond Turks there,
though my father, like Ali Kemal, had light brown hair."
The roots of Boris’s Turkish family can indeed be traced to central
Anatolia – to Kalfat, a village 100 miles north-east of Ankara which,
appropriately, is best known for a particularly shaggy breed of
sheepdog.
It was here, in 1815, that Boris’s great-great-grandfather Ahmet Hamdi
Kemal was born.
Despite the arrival of electricity and cars, little has changed in
Kalfat since Ahmet Hamdi’s day. It has just over 2,500 inhabitants,
devout Muslims who make their living from dairy farming and cutting
local marble. There are few shops and no local school.
Like London, Kalfat has a mayor. He is Omer Karagac, 58, who said: "We
are very honoured that a descendant of a person from Kalfat is Mayor of
London.
"I do not know him but I will send him a telegram to congratulate him."
Ahmet Hamdi was a beeswax merchant and a devout Muslim.
But his wife died and, still a relatively young man, Ahmet bought a
feisty slave girl called Hanife Fered, from Russia’s Caucasus, as his
concubine. Hanife won her freedom by becoming his second wife.
No proper records exist so the exact date of their marriage is unknown.
However, in their day, Circassian women were regarded as unusually
beautiful, elegant and refined and were highly sought-after as slave
concubines for the sultans of the Ottoman Empire. Those with wavy
blonde hair and blue eyes were particularly prized.
Although the story of Boris’s Russian slave ancestor is astonishing,
the next chapters in his family history are equally compelling.
Ahmet was ambitious and in the 1860s he and his new bride moved to
Istanbul where their son Ali Kemal was born in 1869.
Ali was a precociously clever boy. He learnt religious poetry by heart
and published a literary review in his early teens.
By then, the family was very wealthy as Ahmet’s candle business thrived
in a city of 750,000 and an unreliable electricity supply. They lived
in a grand villa overlooking the Bosporus and the young Ali Kemal
travelled to Geneva and Paris with a private tutor.
In Europe, Ali became interested in Western politics. But while it was
not so unusual for a young man to be outspoken in France and
Switzerland in the 1880s, it was potentially dangerous to import
radical ideas back home.
On Ali’s return to Istanbul, he set up a students’ association similar
to those he had seen in Europe as a forum for his liberal, democratic
views.
The move outraged Sultan Abdul Hamid II and 20-year-old Ali was jailed
then exiled to Aleppo in modern-day Syria. After five years, he was
allowed to travel to Paris and took a degree in political science at
the Sorbonne, while writing political articles for newspapers in
Istanbul.
Scroll down for more
Relations: Ali Kemal and half-Swiss Winifred at their wedding, centre.
Also shown are her mother Margaret and sister Viva
While on holiday in Lucerne, Switzerland, he met Winifred Brun and her
sister Viva, the daughters of businessman Francis Julian Brun and his
English wife, Margaret Johnson.
Winifred and Ali became friends and possibly formed a relationship. But
there were always complications with Ali.
Stanley, who met Viva in 1976 when she was in a retirement home, said:
"Viva told me that Ali was very taken with Winifred. But he was always
a bit mysterious.
"He told her one day while they were walking on a medieval bridge in
Lucerne he had to go away and wouldn’t be in touch.
"He didn’t specify whether it was Turkey or not. But he said he would
return to the same bridge in exactly one year’s time and if she did the
same, he’d know she wanted to marry him. And this is what happened.
It’s a terribly romantic story."
He proposed and they were married in Paddington, Central London, in
1903. They could not live in England and had to settle in Cairo because
by then he was managing the farms of an Egyptian princess.
The couple had a daughter Celma who went on to marry an English vicar
Reginald Battersby. He had been the youngest commissioned officer in
the British Army in World War I and went on to become a clergyman near
Devizes in Wiltshire.
Celma’s son Anthony Battersby, who today lives in Bath and is a senior
consultant to the World Health Organisation, said: "My mother was born
in a village on the Nile delta while my grandfather was in exile.
"They went back to Turkey, but had to escape during the 1908 revolution
because the Turkish government came looking for him. As my grandmother
was English, they were evacuated by the Royal Navy."
Celma’s brother Osman Wilfred Ali Kemal, Boris’s grandfather, was born
in London in 1909 – but tragically Winifred died of fever after
childbirth.
Mr Battersby added: "Celma, Osman and their father all lived with
Winifred’s mother in Bernard Gardens, Wimbledon. Kemal went back to
Turkey in 1912 and the rest of the family moved to Bournemouth."
No one knows whether Kemal Ali ever saw their children again. They were
brought up by their maternal grandmother, Margaret Johnson, their
Turkish ancestry to all intents and purposes forgotten.
But then Margaret’s family became concerned about the children’s
Turkish surname because anti-foreign feeling on the eve of war was
riding high.
Stanley said: "In due course, letters were sent to the Home Office
suggesting that my father be given a ‘proper’ surname. So my father
Osman Ali became Wilfred Johnson."
He was educated in Cornwall and bought the farm on Exmoor which is
still the Johnson family home.
Ali Kemal, however, went on to establish a second family.
He married his second wife Sabiha Hanim, the daughter of an Ottoman
general, on January 1, 1914. He was 44, she was just 18. Their son Zeki
was born in October that year.
Despite his political leanings, Ali Kemal was a well-known figure and
was appointed Minister of Education in the government of the last
Sultan, Mehmid VI.
But he was to become dangerously out of step with the nationalist
sentiment sweeping the country.
At the end of the war, the Ottoman Empire – which fought alongside the
Germans and Austria-Hungary – was in ruins.
The conquering Allies proposed partitioning the empire, which further
fuelled the nationalist movement of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, founder of
modern Turkey.
Ali Kemal, meanwhile, stood by his view that Turkey should become a
British Protectorate, despite being urged by friends and family to join
Ataturk’s shadow government.
When the Nationalists triumphed in 1922, the Sultan was smuggled out in
a British ambulance to Malta, but Ali Kemal, perhaps wearied by years
of exile, remained. He had effectively signed his own death warrant.
He was seized while being shaved at a barber’s shop and bundled on a
train to Ankara to stand trial as a traitor.
But instead, Ali was taken off the train at the port of Izmit and
murdered by a lynch mob.
According to the New York Times of November 13, 1922: "He was taken
before General Nureddin Pasha who pronounced the death sentence
dramatically.
"’In the name of Islam, in the name of the Turkish nation, I condemn
you to death as a traitor.’"
"Ali Kemal remained passive, uttering no word of protest. His hands
tied, he was led to a scaffold.
"Before he reached the gibbet, however, an angry mob of women pounced
on him, attacking him with knives, stones, clubs, tearing at his
clothing and slashing at his body and head with cutlasses.
"After a few minutes of excruciating torture, the victim expired. His
body was dragged through the streets by the mob and exposed to public
gaze on the scaffold for several hours."
To this day Ali Kemal is a sensitive subject in Istanbul. Although he
was a liberal, a respected author and one of Turkey’s most enlightened
citizens, he is still considered a traitor by many.
His widow Sabiha and Zeki fled to Switzerland – but not before Sabiha
travelled to England to share Ali Kemal’s small inheritance with his
British family. Zeki’s two sons, Selim and Sinan, still live in
Istanbul.
Selim, 56, is acting Deputy Under Secretary of the Ministry of Foreign
Affairs while Sinan is a successful writer and founder of the Isis
Press.
Both are close to their English relatives and are hoping to join Boris
and Stanley in London next month to celebrate Boris’s appointment as
mayor.
Selim said: "I have known Boris his whole life. I was at his
christening. I was in London in January and had dinner with Stanley.
"As to the story of the slave girl Hanife Fered, who knows? But it’s
what we have been told.
"But wherever the hair colour is from, my brother and I are extremely
proud of Boris’s achievements."